1,721,001 research outputs found
“En mauldissant et despitant le Ciel, Soleil, Lune, Estoiles et Elements”: circolazione e intreccio di testi tra Italia, Francia e Inghilterra intorno alla storia di Giulietta e Romeo
No full textQuesto studio indaga alcune linee di trasmissione di testi che permettono di seguire la circolazione editoriale e la diffusione, anche sul suolo inglese, di scritti narrativi francesi, a loro volta spesso derivanti da composizioni italiane (in particolare Bandello e Giraldi Cinzio). L’attenzione sarà rivolta a riscritture/adattamenti operati in Francia all’interno del genere dell’histoire tragique cinquecentesca. Seguendo la filiazione che dalla novellistica italiana conduce alle riscritture francesi e, sullo sfondo, inglesi, si studieranno alcune varianti della vicenda di Giulietta e Romeo, dalla versione di Da Porto a quella di Boaistuau, passando per Bandello e per un intermediario poco noto, la narrazione di Adrian Sévin, che costituisce il primo adattamento francese della storia dei “due infelicissimi amanti”
Portraits in Early Modern English Drama. Visual Culture, Play-Texts, and Performances
No full textPortraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues. Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women’s portraits in a theatre without actresses? This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies
The Paradox of 'Making the Weaker Speech the Stronger': on Aristophanes' Clouds, 889-1114
No full textIn this paper, I deal with a much-discussed passage of Aristophanes’ Clouds, namely the contest between two dramatis personae of the play – the Stronger Speech and the Weaker Speech (889-1114). This part of the play contains paradoxical features since the aim of both contestants is to overturn the arguments of the other. The contest ends with the paradoxical triumph of the Weaker Speech and the defeat of the Stronger Speech: the Stronger Speech surrenders and switches over to the other side, that is, to the Weaker Speech. This switching over, or change in identity, has been perceived as paradoxical ever since antiquity: in his Apology, written decades after Aristophanes’ Clouds, Plato recalls this play as the comedy in which Socrates “made the worse argument the stronger” (Ap. 18a-c). Kenneth Dover demonstrated that the contest between the two speeches deals with two opposing models of education that are themselves paradoxical: old vs new education. Old education propounds the age-old value of temperance (sophrosyne), but its obsession with homosexual voyeurism makes it incapable of upholding this value. New education, on the other hand, differs strikingly from the ascetic education taught within Socrates’ school as it pleads for an unbridled life of pleasure. My essay attempts at making sense of the paradoxical features of the passage. I claim that the two speeches stand for different stages of Socratic education. Both represent ideas of education that are characteristic of fifth-century Athens. Whilst Socratic education is, on the one hand, the evolution of the educational system propounded by the Stronger Speech (i.e. the age-old education of the ‘Heroes of Marathon’), on the other, it forms the bedrock of the new education peculiar to the Weaker Speech (i.e. the education of the younger generation, such as that of Socrates’ most renowned pupil, Alcibiades)
“In the Backshop. Honesty as Paradox in _Othello_"
No full textThis article explores the paradox of honesty in Othello, arguing that the most interesting paradoxes are the barely visible ones that challenge not simply general consensus but the norm of sincerity itself. The article also delves into the relationship between lying and intention, with falsehood often being coupled with not-being: lying depends not only on the truth or falsehood of the things that are expressed but on the intention of the mind. While most of Iago’s paradoxes are similar to the liar’s paradox and therefore antinomies, the article discusses the use of paradoxes focusing especially on the Aristotelian concept of honesty as a virtue that consists of a mediocrity, whose two extreme violations are the boaster (Othello) and the dissembler (Iago). Iago thus creates a space of self-retreat, the arrière boutique (the backshop) of inwardness invoked by Montaigne as personal sanctuary and identity. The article also explores the concept of defamation and slander in early modern law and how it related to perjury, investigating the final paradox of (self-)posthumous slander. The article eventually argues that, by way of using the paradox of mediocrity, Iago brings into existence the non-being that was conventionally associated with lying
"A Mediterranean, women-centred rewriting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Roberta Torre’s Sud Side Stori"
No full textSud Side Stori – La storia vera di Romea e Giulietto (2000) is an unconventional cinematic version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by Italian director Roberta Torre. Blending neorealistic techniques with a non-realistic cinematic aesthetic and a Brechtian-inflected form, the film offers an oneiric and political rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy set in mafia-ruled contemporary Palermo. In the city, locals are shocked by the massive and unprecedented spike in African immigrants, who are essentially women. The tragic and impossible love at the centre of the film is indeed between an untalented Sicilian singer, Toni Giulietto, and a Nigerian victim of the international sex trade, Romea Wacoubo. This hopeless romance is representative of the wider social tension in the background due to the conflict between the worshippers of Palermo’s two main patron saints: the white Saint Rosalia and the black Saint Benedict the Moor. The article offers a feminist perspective attuned to both Torre’s take and the female-centred filmic interest. The protagonist of Sud Side Stori is a black immigrant woman and a prostitute who exemplifies the intersectionality of different sources of oppression, which Torre explores and exposes
Reimagining Friar Laurence: from Circum-Mediterranean Novellas to the Shakespearean Stage
No full textThis essay aims at shedding light on the circum-Mediterranean reshaping of Friar Laurence, a representative of the Franciscan order whose figure famously migrated into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet via Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Tragiques (1559), Matteo Bandello’s Romeo e Giulietta (1554), and Luigi Da Porto’s Historia de due nobili amanti (1530 ca.). Largely bearing upon recent debates on source study, specifically on the reconceptualisation of linear transmission as a dynamic process of intercultural, interdiscursive, and contextual influence, the essay re-examines Shakespeare’s portrayal of the friar in view of the stratified narrative renditions present in Romeo and Juliet’s source chain, situating its cross- cultural transformation within the historical, discursive, and literary framework of the early-sixteenth-century Mediterranean region. Such palimpsestic readings are analysed in the light of the authors’ biographies and cross-referenced with a relevant set of “‘imported’ foreign practices and ‘translated’ discourses” (Vitkus 2003, 13) that came to be intertwined with the Romeo and Juliet story during its circum-Mediterranean migration. The aim is to identify the different stages of Friar Laurence’s transformation from Da Porto’s self-serving hypocrite to Brooke’s ambivalent helper, shedding light on how, why, and under what circumstances such variations took place
Romeo and Juliet in Seventeenth-Century Spain:Between Comedy and Tragedy
No full textThis article aims to offer a contribution to the study of some re-writings of the story of Romeo and Juliet in seventeenth-centu-ry Spanish theatre. On the one hand, I will focus on the story of the two young lovers from a comedic perspective, as in the case of Lope de Vega’s Castelvines y Monteses and in Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla’s Los bandos de Verona, whose title reveals a strong link with the city of Verona. In both comedies, the protagonists survive and there is a happy ending. On the other hand, I will also con-sider a comedy with a tragic ending that testifies to the success in Spain of the story of the two Veronese lovers, showing a new taste and sensitivity on the part of Spanish audiences. A case in point is Cristóbal de Rozas’ Los amantes de Verona, where the tragic end of the two lovers, Aurisena and Clorisel, no longer reflects family conflicts between the Capulets and the Montagues, but, more gen-erally, political rivalry between the factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The three plays also reveal profound differences in the representation of the power exercised by the lord of Verona
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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