The success of William Shakespeare on the Italian stage is less than two hundred years old. We can trace it back to the nineteenth century when great actors, such as Adelaide Ristori, Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi brought the Bard’s plays to the attention of the public and made roles such as Hamlet, Lady Macbeth and Othello their pièces de résistance. Rossi, in particular, made his début as Romeo at the Teatro Re in Milan in 1864 and played the part until later in his career. The analysis of Rossi’s script – now at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence – proves particularly interesting. Not only did Rossi restore the Shakespearean finale that has Romeo die before Juliet’s awakening in the tomb, excising Neoclassic pathetic additions, but also added a few original changes of his own which on the one hand amended Carlo Rusconi’s Italian translation, bringing the playtext closer to the original, and on the other hand privileged the dramatization of love as the founding element of the play’s conceptual framework. The cuts and variations Rossi introduced owe much to contemporary concerns with censure and moral opportunity, but are also heavily indebted to Samuel T. Coleridge’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet as the staging of ideal love. Yet Rossi also imbued his own version of the play in the Italian cultural, artistic and literary atmosphere by referring to both Francesco De Sanctis' readings of Shakespeare and Antonio Canova’s artistry. Thus Romeo and Juliet become the incarnation of an ideal, an ever-blooming adolescent eroticism which attains the eternal through an everlasting anticipation of a yet-to-be-performed delight.

"Shakespeare in 19th-century Italy : Ernesto Rossi’s Romeo and Juliet."

CALVI, Lisanna
2014-01-01

Abstract

The success of William Shakespeare on the Italian stage is less than two hundred years old. We can trace it back to the nineteenth century when great actors, such as Adelaide Ristori, Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi brought the Bard’s plays to the attention of the public and made roles such as Hamlet, Lady Macbeth and Othello their pièces de résistance. Rossi, in particular, made his début as Romeo at the Teatro Re in Milan in 1864 and played the part until later in his career. The analysis of Rossi’s script – now at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence – proves particularly interesting. Not only did Rossi restore the Shakespearean finale that has Romeo die before Juliet’s awakening in the tomb, excising Neoclassic pathetic additions, but also added a few original changes of his own which on the one hand amended Carlo Rusconi’s Italian translation, bringing the playtext closer to the original, and on the other hand privileged the dramatization of love as the founding element of the play’s conceptual framework. The cuts and variations Rossi introduced owe much to contemporary concerns with censure and moral opportunity, but are also heavily indebted to Samuel T. Coleridge’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet as the staging of ideal love. Yet Rossi also imbued his own version of the play in the Italian cultural, artistic and literary atmosphere by referring to both Francesco De Sanctis' readings of Shakespeare and Antonio Canova’s artistry. Thus Romeo and Juliet become the incarnation of an ideal, an ever-blooming adolescent eroticism which attains the eternal through an everlasting anticipation of a yet-to-be-performed delight.
2014
Ernesto Rossi; William Shakespeare; Romeo and Juliet
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11562/917782
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