1,720,982 research outputs found
Recensione di "Memoria, malinconia e autobiografia dello spirito: Dionys Fitzherbert e Hannah Allen", a cura di Lisanna Calvi
No full textRecensione al volume curato da Lisanna Calvi sulle opere di Dionys Fitzherbert e di Hannah Allen
"Dost thou hear?" On the Rhetoric of Narrative in The Tempest
No full textThe essay explores the rhetorical performance of story-telling and its disrupting effects on the theatrical space and the island's reality. By mapping out the narrative recurrence and by examining the discursive theatrical potential of the characters' rhetoric, it illustrates the intricate pattern of counterpoint and duplication of story-telling and its opening the play's world up to a number of possible other worlds, that challenge expectations and engage the audience, both on and off stage, in a game in inferences
"Introduction"
No full textThis introduction concentrates on how the play’s complexity and contradictions, its semantic, structural, stylistic, poetical and ideological density raise questions without offering final answers, thus making meaning opaque on several levels. The lack of soliloquies does not help make sense of what Prospero really thinks, and lack of narrative coherence does not clarify what is supposed to have truly happened in the past. Dramaturgically, the plot shows a dissonant interlacing of narrative and dramatic modes with a huge display of discursive rhetoric counterpointing massive spectacular effects: why such extreme exhibition of voco-visual possibilities? Does this opacity invest them with indirect signifying power? While offering an overview of recent criticism, this introduction points out how The Tempest's reticence and 'incompletness' allow for ever new ways to re-signify and re-mediated its own story
"Defiance and Denial: Paradigms of Civic Transgression and Transcendence in Romeo and Juliet"
No full textThe essay focuses upon the scapegoating pattern that the play claims to rely upon with the authority of the Prologue’s voice and that of the Prince in the recapitulation scene. Through an investigation of the relational paradigms of behaviour elicited by an intrinsically conflictual community destabilized by household feuding and weak and self-contradicting governance, the essay discusses the ambiguities at the core of the civic system of Verona, providing the actual ground for a reshaping of the tragic experience. Civility turns into its opposite precisely as legality shows its illegal face, while patterns of defiance and denial, transgression and transcendence of the communal system trigger the tragic outcome, prompting an interrogation of the potential and limits of free will in the face of a civic bond donning the guise of coercion. These two paradigms, together with a recasting of the elemental pattern of violence and sacrifice in a new complex civic dimension, define the space of subversion and communal redress of crime, revealing an emerging crisis in the Renaissance conception of the individual and in the blind power of a social system of hierarchy which creaks under the push of bourgeois unrest. The argument foregrounds the social agonism widespread in fair Verona, where strife, tinged with tribal connotations of violence, sexual aggression and legal repression, as well as household coercion push the two lovers to re-define the scope of their freedom to go beyond household and communal rules. Thus, if a sacrifice is eventually enacted, it occurs in a post-sacrificial dimension of civic and ‘commercial’ transaction which seals a radical revision of the scapegoating scheme and its intrinsic relation with the community
Classical paradigms of tragic choice in civic stories of love and death
No full textThis paper offers a full discussion of ancient Greek and Roman models of the intersection between private and civic spaces on the one hand, and on the other and social practices, with reference to the interaction of these in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In particular, among narrative patterns and stories circulating in Renaissance England, which are here examined in their basic structures and motifs, Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe epyllion provides the primary focus. This paper identifes (with John J. Munro) two main archetypical plots: the separation- and the potion-plot. While the former is increasingly infuenced by family and civic conditionings, the latter is dominated by the peripeteia of Thisbe’s (and Juliet’s) apparent death which eventually pushes Pyramus (and Romeo) to commit suicide. This paper explores both Greek and Roman sources in order to verify the presence of both plots and appreciate not only the great variety of treatments they underwent in the antiquity, but also the multiple hints that could direct their successive re-enactments. As suggested by Kenneth Muir (1954), this paper hypothesizes that Shakespeare could have relied on “multiple sources” mediated even by unsuspected or over-looked texts. This allows to clarify the critical equivocation at the basis of all interpretation of ‘source’ foregrounding exclusivity. Indeed, classicists and Shakespearean scholars alike have mainly concentrated on the potion(-and-error)-plot, neglecting the fact that Romeo and Juliet ’s conclusive action – indirectly inspired by Ovid – “does not exhaust the entire plot nor represents the unravelling of the play’s early announced contradictions” which more deeply involve the civic and political context of the story
"Introduction"
No full textChoosing to explore a play like Romeo and Juliet famous for its original recasting of an age-old love-and-death theme in ways that have survived the centuries, superseding in the collective memory all other competing stories (its narrative progenitors included), suggests an urge to look at it with an awareness of its irreducibility to mono-dimensional issues. It means claiming that the play exceeds its romanticized readings and its own intrinsic potential for sentimentality; it also means vindicating textual, conceptual, and performative complexity while acknowledging the play’s capacity to stretch beyond the boundaries of all hypertrophies of subjectivity to relocate the play within a wider context of social, political, and cultural dynamics, underscoring dialectics as the unavoidable core of its signifying power. This introduction tackles the notion of ‘civic Shakespeare’ through Romeo and Juliet as a more specific category than political, popular, historical, and cultural Shakespeare, while at the same time showing that it shares some of those features. By discussing the relation between theatre, performance and city space, and offering an overview of recent criticsim on the play, it lays the ground for a thorough discussion of civic theatre
"Producing a (R&)Jspace: Discursive and Social Practices in Verona"
No full textThe essay deals with the city of Verona as a deeply Shakespeare-related urban setting for cultural and tourist industry. Taking Montague at his word, Verona has been turned into the city of Juliet and while Romeo has been somehow left behind, the Shakespearean heroine has slowly been implanted not only in the city’s traditional spaces of the house and the tomb, which civic authorities subjected to a targeted makeover in the 1930s, but also in modern cultural practices and discourses. Dysneyland-like and hyperreal, although not avowedly fake, these ‘Juliet spaces’ are “replete with signs of remains deprived of an original referent”; they signify her myth of sacrificed faithfulness, but controversially occult the power discourses that traversed her story. Juliet is not only the titular owner of a house and a tomb, but also presides over mediaeval festivals, marathons, and civic awards as the tutelary deity of a whole town. Besides, tons of letters are famously written to her from people all over the world who have turned her into the icon of starry-eyed passion. Nonetheless, the essay suggests that this cultural and discursive arrangement ultimately seems to constrain Juliet and her story into a stilted, if golden, civic model of (feminine) love and sacrifice, producing discursive and social practices that encase a hyperreal (R&)Jspace within the larger city
"Silencing the Natural Body: Notes on the Monumental Body in Romeo and Juliet"
No full textThe essay examines the discursive strategies inherent in the conception and representation of death in Romeo and Juliet as a site of conflict. Eventually assumed as glamorous civic icons of peace, the natural bodies of the two lovers are transfigured into monumental bodies that rewrite their story. Compared to the novella tradition, mention of their tomb is revelatory of a communal appropriation of their bodies that foregrounds separateness, rather than unity, and economic and political interest, rather than familial memory. The effacement of their individuality through their civic immortalization does not come unexpected once a discursive undercurrent pivoting on the grave/monument opposition and the bed-bier metonymy is related to the process of hybridization the bedroom and the tomb undergo. A peculiar use of stage properties contributes to pointing out the relevance of dramaturgy as a practice of space construction underlying the mutual permeability of the private and the public and the potentially tragic dimension of liminal spheres
"'Into something rich and strange': Performing The Tempest and Its Pre-texts"
No full textLa Tempesta. Pre-testi, Dir. Yana Balkan and Isabella Caserta. Trans. by Silvia Bigliazzi and Lisanna Calvi. Camploy theatre, Verona. Teatro Scientifico company
"'Into something rich and strange': Performing The Tempest and Its Pre-texts", MULTICULTURAL SHAKESPEARE: TRANSLATION, APPROPRIATION AND PERFORMANCE
No full textTheatre review - La Tempesta. Pre-testi, Dir. Yana Balkan and Isabella Caserta. Trans. by Silvia Bigliazzi and Lisanna Calvi. Camploy theatre, Verona. Teatro Scientifico company
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