1,721,193 research outputs found
Reappropriating Romeo and Juliet : the Play restored to Italy
Full text linkThe story of Romeo and Juliet has been reinvented in a number of musical adaptations. One of the boldest and most sophisticated attempts is Giulietta e Romeo (2007), a two-act Italian production with the music of the French-Italian singer and composer Riccardo Cocciante and with a libretto by the poet Pasquale Panella. As Cristina Paravano argues in this article, the work offers a unique opportunity to rethink Shakespeare and Italy from a suggestive contemporary Italian perspective. What distinguished this production from other musical adaptations was its strong intertextuality on a musical and textual level. By embracing forms of re-creation and re -vision, it created a profoundly and intrinsically Italian version of the story, drawing on and combining Italian musical, literary, and cultural traditions. The result was a combination of Cocciante's pop-rock background, contemporary pop-electronic music, operatic conventions and techniques, and Italian musical tradition, all filtered through the memory of Nino Rota's tunes written for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, Panella's libretto taps into Shakespeare's Italian sources: while keeping to the Shakespearean plot line, the author adds interpolations from Luigi da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530) and Matteo Bandello's novella (1554, 2: IX). The present paper evaluates how this innovative rendition enacts a further exchange between England and Italy so that metaphorically Italy 'reappropriates'' its own story
Teaching Shakespeare through Dystopian Fiction: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium
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Roberta Mullini, Più del bronzo: Voci della poesia inglese della Grande Guerra
Full text linkRoberta Mullini, Più del bronzo: Voci della poesia inglese della Grande Guerra (Günzburg, Oakmond Publishing, 2018, 123 pp. ISBN 978-3-96207-070-0, ISBN kindle: 978-3-96207-071-7)
di Cristina Paravan
Real and metaphorical hunger: the case of The Divergent Trilogy
Full text linkThe present contribution investigates how the issue of hunger becomes a means of expressing and communicating personal and social identity in Veronica Roth’s best seller trilogy Divergent (2011-13). Roth portrays a dystopian future developing a multifaceted concept of hunger, both real and figurative, and using food as a cultural metaphor. The trilogy is set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago, whose population is divided into five allegorical factions, according to a number of personal and social characteristics. The life of each faction seems to be based on a form of metaphorical hunger: those who pursue selflessness and altruism belong to Abnegation, peace and harmony to Amity, honesty and truth to Candor, danger and adventure to Dauntless, and knowledge and power to Erudite. Those people who are excluded become factionless: they are outcasts who live their life in extreme poverty and experience real physical hunger. On the other hand, I will show how the numerous references to food and eating pervading the novels help to map the characters’ personalities and identities as single individuals and as groups
“The guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet”: Shakespeare and Young Adult fiction
Full text linkFor American teenagers, Shakespeare is much more than "the guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet", as Lena Haloway innocently defines him in the dystopian novel Delirium. In the US Shakespeare is still a constant fixture, "a mainstay in the curricula of America's schools and colleges, and the value of reading his work is still assumed" (Vaughan, Vaughan 2012:2); teenagers are required to engage not only with the works of the Bard but also with their modern adaptations at different stages of their education.
The present paper investigates three American YA novels, published between 1999 and 2012, in which teenagers engage with Shakespeare's works. For the characters, reading is a formative experience that alleviates their pain, enables them to externalize their feelings, and to develop emotionally, psychologically and socially: texts are related to the lives of the young protagonists, questioned, challenged, moralized and used as a lens through which one can examine the teen world
«Dormivo e sognavo che non ero al mondo» : risonanze shakespeariane nell’opera di Alda Merini
Full text linkThe paper investigates the Shakespearean resonances in Alda Merini’s works. Shakespeare was one of Merini’s favourite ‘fellow travellers’ in her literary journey, seemingly because he exploited the enormous dramatic potential of madness. His plays can be read as a projection and an amplification of the poet’s emotions, while providing them with names, bodies and voices. In her turn Merini perceived significant affinities with several Shakespearean characters, and tended to identify with some of them, superimposing her life onto theirs: during her stay in the mental hospital, peopled by horrible figures reminding her of Macbeth’s witches, Merini identified with Juliet, who embodied her love fancies and her romantic dreams. I will also discuss in detail the texts which refer to two famous couples, namely Othello and Desdemona, Hamlet and Ophelia, who are the most recurrent Shakespearean figures in Merini’s corpus. These are not only universal symbols but also mirror and give voice to the poet’s emotions. Indeed, as I will show, Merini read and appropriated their stories through the filter of her painful personal experience
The space of identity and the identity of space in The City Wit by Richard Brome
No full textMy paper is about The City Wit (1629-1632), a play by Richard Brome. This city comedy revolves around the trade world, where all the characters aim at social recognition, even trampling on feelings and moral values. Only the protagonist, the bankrupt jeweler Crasy, rejects this view. Like a comic Iago, he uses a series of successful disguises and tricks to regain what he has lost because of his excessive generosity. He succeeds in his objective thanks to his apprentice Jeremy, disguised as widow Tryman, and the servant boy Crack, with whom he revives the Jonsonian triumvirate of The Alchemist.
Firstly, I will show how the construction of gender and class relations is implicated in the conceptualizing of space, considering both the impact of space on the characters’ behavioral attitude and on the construction of their interrelations, and the mixture of social relations which concurs to define the
uniqueness of a place.
Secondly, I will investigate the manipulation of place for the re-fashioning of a new identity, as in the case of Widow Tryman who builds up a fictitious Cornish identity and a past.
Finally, as the subtitle of the play is the woman wears the breeches, I will discuss the transgression of limits of gender through the comic device of crossdressing, by analyzing a mannish woman and a man disguised as a widow. The play paves the way for further debates over who really wear the breeches at that time as well as nowadays
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