Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies

Introduction

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Troilus and Cressida: Classical Past and Medieval Heritage

2024-12-21T21:52:26+00:00

Among Shakespeare’s ‘classical’ plays, Troilus and Cressida occupies an especially problematic place. The play is, to sum it up in an approximate formula, suspended between Homer and Chaucer, two authors and two styles not easy to reconcile with each other. Two scenes in particular in the play are characterized by a conflict between sources which entirely changes both the classical and the medieval features of Troilus and Cressida. This brief essay offers a reading of Act III, scene ii and a handful of lines in Act V, scene ix, drawing on Piero Boitani’s lifelong work on the Troilus and Cressida story.

The Gauntlet of Mars, the Glove of Venus: A Reading of William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

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At the heart of this reading is an analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare structures the plot of Troilus and Cressida, and of how he treats the source material at his disposal. The omissions and additions that Shakespeare makes to the generic and confusing myths must be examined carefully: the essay newly considers the choices that the playwright made in order to select from the stories known to his time the material that would be useful for the composition of his plot.

A Magnus Amator in Illyria: Shakespeare and the Memory of Plautus

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It is well known that Shakespeare based his comedies about twins, Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, on Plautus’s Menaechmi. The link between the two is often understood as structural, and there is little doubt that the comic possibilities of (re)production that so animate the Roman play form the backbone of both of Shakespeare’s comedies based on the idea of twins. In this essay, however, I take a different perspective, arguing that Shakespeare was indebted to the Plautine play at a linguistic level as well as a thematic one. In particular, I suggest that the word “great” or “magnus” carries demonstrable lineage between the two plays, and that this points to an important dimension of the comedy of disorder.

Venus and Adonis (1593): Shakespeare’s Translation Memory

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Venus and Adonis, a narrative poem adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was Shakespeare’s first work to be printed with a dedication to a patron in which he claimed authorship. Although Venus and Adonis is not a translation in the stricter meaning of the term, and was not marketed as such, Elizabethan translation practices as originating in schoolroom exercises designed to improve mastery of Latin and reliant on memory techniques are crucial to understand how the poem was composed and how it was received. This article will argue that in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare alludes to schoolroom exercises, and more precisely to the method of “double translation” advocated by Roger Ascham: that he composed his poem thanks to memories of grammar-school translations of Ovid, and aimed to trigger similar memories in his readers.

A Wrinkle in Time: Shakespeare’s Anachronic Art

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This essay proposes that the vocabulary of the anachronic might usefully be brought to bear on the complex temporality (or temporalities) involved in classical reception, which necessarily ‘remembers’ the classical past in one form or another. Nagel and Wood’s (2010) definition of the anachronic work of art could almost have been formulated with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale in mind, a ‘late’ play in which an oracle projects the conditions for an idealised resolution, Time appears as the Chorus, and a statue apparently comes to life. In particular, the essay argues that both the oracle from Apollo and the ‘statue’ of the final scene can be viewed as operating anachronically, in ways which “fetch” or “create” (textual) memories of the classical past, projecting it into the future.

From Greece to Stratford, and Back. Teatro dell’Elfo: Half a Century with Shakespeare and the Classics

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Adaptations from classical texts have constantly intertwined with Shakespeare’s plays, for the past fifty years, in the history of an Italian theatre company: since 1973 the group of Teatro dell’Elfo (Milan) has always combined a rigorous and coherent scenic practice, a preliminary study of the original texts, a free attitude in adapting and directing ancient and modern plays. The members of the company share a collective approach to theatre, and they work together to this day, alongside their personal projects. This study focuses on Ferdinando Bruni (as a playwright, director, actor, translator, performer and painter, costume and set designer) and on Ida Marinelli, who has shared the stage with him since 1973. The paper explores a few productions among those based on classical and Shakespeare plays, with special attention to the different roles and functions which Bruni takes on simultaneously: in particular, as a director – or co-director, with other members of the company (Gabriele Salvatores, Elio de Capitani and Francesco Frongia) – of many productions where he and Marinelli share the stage with fellow actors (Corinna Agustoni, Cristina Crippa, Elena Russo Arman, Luca Toracca). Rather than aiming to identify causal links between the classical and Shakespearean adaptations, this essay focuses on the unifying aesthestic and theoretical premises of the theatre collective that have allowed it to breathe new life into its adaptations, by discussing the different phases of its activity.

Shakespeare e l’Antico tra A Midsummer Night’s Dream e Antony and Cleopatra

2024-12-21T22:13:51+00:00

This paper offers a reflection on a few words – or rather, on a few linguistic elements – which operate in two of the best-known plays by Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Antony and Cleopatra: the word ‘wall’, with its ghostly synonym ‘mural’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream); and the words ‘immortal’ and ‘falliable’ with their respective ghostly antonyms: ‘mortal’ and ‘unfalliable’ (Antony and Cleopatra). These two plays are chosen because one, the Dream, belongs to the beginning, and the other, Antony and Cleopatra, to the end, of a long exploration of the enigmatic experience called ‘love’. It is within this framework that this paper aims to reconsider the idea of ‘classical antiquity’, not primarily and not only as textual memory of the classical tradition, but as a presence which is found through and inside elements of language, through the spiral of word-play, pun, and lapsus, of linguistic error and of its ensuing comic effect.

Power, Royalty, Style: the Strange Case of Henry VII and Perkin Warbeck

2024-12-21T22:20:25+00:00

This essay offers a close reading of John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (“a history play about the end of history plays”, Taylor 2008) which re-proposes the (hi)story of a pretender to the throne, who challenges the legitimacy of Henry VII in a fully Stuart era. The essay considers issues of dramaturgy and historiography/history on stage, against the backdrop of the passage of the English throne from Elizabeth I to James I, which marked an epochal dynastic transition in English history and an overall change in the cultural climate that particularly affected the theatre.

Shakespeare’s Now

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This paper argues that the word now was for Shakespeare and fellow playwrights a precise as well as polyvalent linguistic tool which they used not only as a temporal adverb, but as what linguists call a pragmatic discourse marker to structure the spatio-temporal dramatic design as well as to represent the dynamics of interpersonal exchanges among characters, especially power relations. This is first illustrated by the work of two of Shakespeare’s contemporaries from whom he arguably learned much about the craft: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage. Close analysis follows of two early Shakesperean play texts: the comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the history 3 Henry 6, the Folio play text with the highest number of instances of now. Both plays are shown to anticipate the direction Shakespeare’s use of now will take. Specifically, the structuring function of now is withdrawn from male figures of authority who are thus denied the hold over history to which they aspire.

“I will not charm my tongue, I am bound to speak”: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona as an Expansion to the Interpretation of Othello

2024-12-21T22:28:40+00:00

Toni Morrison's Desdemona is a sort of prequel and sequel to Shakespeare's Othello, a drama which includes Rokia Traoré, a Malian singer, and stage director Peter Sellars, which aims at giving voice and prominence to the women in the play with particular emphasis on the barely mentioned Barbary in Shakespeare's work. The interest lies also in this hybrid reading which mixes adaptation, appropriation and intertextuality and lends itself to postcolonial studies and feminist criticism. The aim of this paper is to try to demonstrate how Morrison’s work sheds new light on Shakespeare’s tragedy amplifying possibilities of interpretation.

Selected Publications in Shakespeare Studies

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