Transitions. For Alessandro Serpieri.

The title of this Special Issue of Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies (4.1 2018), Transitions, wants to suggest ideas of movement and exploration of texts, languages, modes and genres and the investigation of their connections across time. It also wishes to keep a dialogue alive with Alessandro Serpieri on some of the main fields of his research in drama and theatre studies: transitions from sources to texts and genres, from page to stage, from one language to another, from poetry to drama, or drama in poetry, from deep to surface structures, finally, from criticism to creative writing. It is divided into into three main sections: the first one contains two articles by the co-editors of the Journal, devoted to a discussion of Euripides’ Electra and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, respectively. The second section tackles questions of literary theory and cognitive studies through a comparative approach to transitions between Shakespeare and Philip H. Dick’s posthumanity (Angela Locatelli); an uncanny construction of femininity in The Duchess of Malfi and related cultural transitions from stage to Court (Clara Mucci); the reshaping of gender subjectivities in Felicia Hemans’s The Vespers of Palermo within national and transnational contexts (Lilla Maria Crisafulli); the survival of the figure of Ophelia in Italian male-chauvinist Fascist culture as a n“erased or grotesque figure” and Alba De Cespedes’ subsequent treatment of the Ophelia-subtext (Maria Del Sapio Garbero); Carmelo Bene’s rewritings and adaptations of Hamlet (Fernando Cioni); a contemporary ‘dark’ reinterpretation of The Merchant of Venice in the 2015 Globe production, with a focus on its added performative paratexts (Roberta Mullini); and, finally, Beckett’s challenging revision of the idea itself of tragedy – and the tragic – in Not I, and its raising radical questions for a rethinking of the Aristotelian precepts (Carla Locatelli). The Special Section opens with three contributions devoted to various aspects of generic, textual, rhetorical and philological transitions: the first one discusses Thomas Nashe’s move from drama to pamphlet writing on the occasion of the composition of Lenten Stuff (Valerio Viviani), while the following two deal with Hamlet, offering some reflections on the Prince’s textual encoding of a pretence of madness (Guido Paduano) and on the category of ‘origin’ from both a philological/textual perspective and an authorial one (Rosy Colombo). The next two articles shift the attention to Alessandro Serpieri’s work on Shakespeare as both editor and translator, focusing on his latest parallel edition of Re Lear (Claudia Corti) and on the performative potential of his translations of The Tempest and Richard II once brought on stage (Eric Nicholson). The final three pieces are translations of a critical chapter on Shakespeare and Eros co-authored by Alessandro Serpieri and Keir Elam, an imaginary interview with Prospero co-authored by Alessandro Serpieri and Pino Colizzi, and, to conclude, the translation of the closing page of Serpieri’s Mare Scritto novel: Ouverture. A last tribute of deep friendship and gratitude is Tomaso Kemeny’s final “Words for Sandro”.