A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/130193 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications THE BRITISH LIBRARY BRITISH THESIS SERVICE SHAKESPEARE'S RECEPTION IN 18TH CENTURY TITLE ITALY: THE CASE OF HAMLET AUTHOR Gabriella PETRONE FRESCO DEGREE PhD AWARDING Warwick University BODY DATE 1991 THESIS DX177597 NUMBER THIS THESIS HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the original thesis submitted for microfilming. Every effort has been made to ensure the highest quality of reproduction. 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SHAKESPEARE'S RECEPTION IN 18TH CENTURY ITALY THE CASE OF HAMLET BY Gabriella Petrone Fresco Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement of the Degree of PhD in Comparative Literature University of Warwick Graduate School of Comparative Literary Theory and Literary Translation August 1991 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 - 3 PART I SHAKESPEARE AND ITALIAN LITERATURE IN THE 18TH CENTURY The Italian 18th Century Cultural Background 4 - 20 The Theatre Question 21 - 36 The Era of Translations 37 - 46 Milestones in the history of Shakespeare's Reception in 18th Century Italy in the Context of "Anglomania" 47 - 63 PART II ANTONIO CONTI, PAOLO ROLLI, VOLTAIRE, GUISEPPE BARETTI: THEIR RESPECTIVE ROLES IN SHAKESPEARE'S RECEPTION IN 18TH CENTURY ITALY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO HAMLET Conti and Rolli 64 - 70 V o lta ire 71 - 89 B a re tti 90 - 103 PART III FRENCH & ITALIAN TRANSLATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE THE FIRST ITALIAN AMLETO Dominico Valentini and Giustina Renier-Michiel 104 - 108 La Place - Ducis - Letourneur 109 - 118 Alessandro Verri's Unpublished Translation of H a m le t 119 - 159 Stage History of Ducis’ Italian Translation of H a m le t by F. Gritti 160 - 169 CONCLUSION 170 - 175 A ppendix I Saxo's Tale of Amlethus and its derivations in Apostolo Zeno's Ambleto and ShakesDeare's Hamlet - A Comoarison of the Treatment of their Common Source - Tables I, II, III, IV 176 - 189 Appendix II Unpublished Translation of the "To Be or not To Be" Monologue by G. Renier-Michiel 1 9 0 Appendix III The Verri Brothers' "Carteggio" on the Subject of Hamlet and of Shakespeare in General 191 Appendix IV The Verri Family Circle 200 BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION The history of Shakespeare’s reception in 18th century Italy is a very scanty and fragmentary one. The aim of the present study is to attempt to join the scattered fragments of this mosaic together in a historic perspective stretching through the whole century and to try and interpret the resulting picture in the light of contemporary theories of comparative literature. Most of the emphasis will be placed on the role of the very few Italian worshippers of Shakespeare (Conti, Rolli, Baretti, Valentini, Verri) who were able to have a first-hand knowledge of his works. They can be seen as isolated receivers of a literary communication which was at the same time quite in advance in respect of average popular taste, and strongly antithetic to received Italian ideas of the period, dominated as they were by the dictatorship of French classicism. This means that not only the single receivers, with their different personalities, sensibilities and outlooks will be examined, but that also the objective conditions in which they found themselves, as well as the possibilities of reception afforded by the society in which they lived (particularly with regard to the transgression of the Aristotelian dramatic rules) will be considered. As a result, the link between literature and society in the specific situation of 18th century Italy will be made clearer and the relationship between these isolated receivers and their literary object (i.e. Shakespeare's works) will be better explained by enlarging the scope of the study from the history of Shakespeare's reception to a wider perspective of aesthetics of reception. A symbolic example of the general ignorance about Shakespeare in 18th century Italy is Ambleto. a "dramma per musica” written in 1705 by Apostolo Zeno, based on the same source as Hamlet. The author, one of the most committed intellectuals of the age, did not know anything about Hamlet and manipulated the same material Shakespeare had used in the way which would be most likely to be successful. 1 From a comparative point of view Hamlet and Ambleto belong to a heterogeneous series of literary works being part of different literary systems, and being written in different historical periods. What they can be said to have in common, apart from having made use of the same source, is the fact that they were written in the most popular theatrical genre of their time in their respective countries: tragedy in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, "dramma per musica" in 18th century Italy. Lively, light-hearted, fluffy stories accompanied by beautiful music and obligatorily concluding with a happy ending were what the 18th century Italian audience wanted and expected. Dark, tormented stories with a tragic ending, even if freely mixed with comic scenes, was what Shakespeare's audience were usually given. Such a difference in the expectations and predilections of English and Italian audiences respectively may well have contributed to the reasons why the process of introducing Shakespeare into the Italian literary system met with so many difficulties and was so belated in time. From the viewpoint of the literary systems, the relationship between the source system, the English, and the target system, the Italian, (apart from very few cases) was wholly dependent on the intermediation of a third system, the French. This intermediation worked in two ways: one was the influence of Voltaire's ambiguous love-hate relationship with Shakespeare and the other, as the only available instrument for the knowledge of Shakespeare in Italy, the French translations of his works. A third channel might possibly be considered: the Italian translations of the French "comédies larmoyantes", incorporating elements which, although deformed, reflected a Shakespearian influence. An attempt will therefore be made to trace the intricate relationship linking the Shakespeare enthusiasts to Voltaire and French culture in general, along with the impact of French translations on Italian culture. Hamlet has been chosen as an exemplary case in Shakespearian production because it is associated with the first important milestones in the history of Shakespeare's reception in Italy. Moreover, Hamlet exemplifies Italy's cultural indebtedness towards France in the field of Shakespearian translation (the first 2 Shakespearian play staged in Italy being a Hamlet translated from a French adaptation), as well as the need for Northern European literary works in general to be profoundly modified in order to be assimilated and later be reproduced creatively. On the other hand, Hamlet is a particularly unfortunate case of a missed opportunity: the first complete translation into Italian by Alessandro Verri was never published nor staged, causing a further delay in the knowledge of Shakespeare in 18th century Italy. Verri will be given particular attention in this study: owing to the multiple roles he played in relation to Shakespeare, he can be seen as summing up the three different categories of readers defined by H.R. Jauss as follows: "le lecteur qui lit, le critique qui réfléchit et l'écrivain lui-même incité à écrire à son tour"1 In fact, besides being one of the very few Italian readers of the original text of Hamlet, he also meditated critically on it, as will be seen from his correspondence with his brother and from the comments added to the first version of his translation. Moreover, he transferred settings, specific terms, feelings, from Shakespeare into his own creative work, a typical example of creative reception through which new elements from a foreign culture made their way into Italian literature and finally contributed in an obscure, tortuous way to the birth of the Romantic movement in Italy.* * Cfr. H.R. Jauss, Pour une esthétique de la réception. Gallimard, Paris, 1978, p.48. 3 PARTI SHAKESPEARE AND ITALIAN LITERATURE IN THE 18TH CENTURY The Italian 18th Century Cultural Background The extent of the ignorance about Shakespeare at the beginning of the 18th century in Italy can be seen from the fact that a musical drama called Ambleto could be written in 1705 by such a cultivated Venetian writer as Apostelo Zeno, with no reference whatsoever to Shakespeare's Hamlet, because he simply did not know about it.^ When Zeno in 18th century Venice read the old legend in Saxo Grammaticus' Histórica Danica. he was so struck by that brilliant, exciting tale that he thought it might provide a less commonplace subject for a libretto than the usual ones and he transformed the ancient Scandinavian legend according to the standards of "dramma per música", or, as it is called in Italy today melodrama* 2 3, the only really popular form of theatre production (with Commedia dell'Arte) in 18th century Italy.