From Caesar to Brutus: A Note on Two Scripts of Ernesto Rossi’s Giulio Cesare

Ernesto Rossi, born in Leghorn in 1827, belonged to the generation of Italian grand’attori who dominated the national stage in the nineteenth century. Their fame and success, and Rossi’s in particular, were linked to the name of Shakespeare as they significantly contributed in bringing the Bard’s plays to the attention of Italian theatregoers. Yet it was not until 1888 that Rossi managed to stage Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play he had studied, translated, and almost become obsessed with since the early days of his career. In fact, theatre historians have often wondered why the actor was so keen on a play whose complex ‘multiprotagonistic’ arragemente made the great actor’s personalistic and ‘star-centred’ approach rather problematic. Fascinated by the Duke of Meiningen’s company famous production in May 1874, Rossi imagined a chorality of roles, a large number of walk-ons, and rich decorations. His struggle with the production, at which he started working by looking for funds since the early 1880s, may be interestingly reconstructed by analysing two original scripts of the play which present us with two intriguingly different perspectives. While one dwells on Julius Caesar as “the tragedy’s dominant force”, the other, heavily cut and significantly shortened, has Brutus emerge as the governing figure of the dramatic action, also by means of creative additions to the Shakespearean original. A comparison of the two documents may add not only to our understanding of Rossi’s theatrical artistry, but also of the history of Shakespearean mises en scène in nineteenth-century Italy.