Shakespeare and Popular Culture, As You Like It

Shakespeare and Popular Culture, as you like it The Eighth IASEMS Conference UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI FERRARA DIPARTIMENTO DI STUDI UMANISTICI Auditorium Santa Lucia, Via Ariosto 35 24-26 May 2017

Far from inviting an exclusive focus on the playtext, As You Like It suggests a broad framework for the eighth IASEMS conference, which aims to explore Shakespearean drama and popular culture from the early modern to the contemporary age. Topics include the rewriting and restaging of Shakespeare’s plays as or in television series, cinema, music, videogames, comics, advertisements, blogs, and Internet sites. The conference is also a tribute to Mariangela Tempera, who founded the Centro shakespeariano in 1982.

1 ABSTRACTS

Wednesday 24 May

14:30-15:30 SESSION I – MEDIATED Chair Paola Spinozzi, Università degli Studi di Ferrara

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 Shakespeare on Screen in France This will be a presentation of an on-going project entitled “Shakespeare on screen in Francophonia” that my colleague Patricia Dorval and myself have been co-leading for a few years now at the university Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. This project stemmed from a wider study initiated by our dear colleague Mariangela Tempera on Shakespeare on European screens. The team of Montpellier researchers, in partnership with other international scholars, is working at referencing and analysing Shakespeare adaptations and allusions on cinema and television screens in French-speaking countries. This presentation will provide a panorama of Shakespeare on screen in France and focus more specifically on what French Television did with Shakespeare in the anniversary year 1964.

15:30-16:45 SESSION II – AS YOU LIKE IT RESHAPED Chair Vita Fortunati, Università degli Studi di Bologna

Christy Desmet, University of Georgia As You Like It as Local Shakespeare There has long been a debate within Shakespeare studies about precisely where the Forest of Arden/Ardennes is located. As a pastoral, As You Like It is located in imaginary space, but its placement in a named place invites meditation on the relevance of specific mise-en-scènes. The tradition of making As You Like It as a local, even site- specific play is a long one, extending back to outdoor performances in England during the nineteenth century up through the 1912 silent film. That tradition has been continued by any number of well-known productions and films, including the 1978 BBC Shakespeare starring Helen Mirren and Kenneth Branagh’s reimagination of the play as taking place in nineteenth-century Japan. The tradition of placing As You Like It outdoors, in specific, detailed, and often recognizable places has been invigorated by cross-fertilization of stage and film Shakespeare with social media platforms, particularly YouTube. A home to amateur Shakespeare, youth-centred productions, and school projects since 2006, YouTube has developed its own set of generic markers for representing Shakespeare’s plays, which include suburban or middle class domestic settings, sprawling landscapes, and ecologically significant props. These markers have now found their way into a new, cross-platform kind of production that is truly amateur, but seeks a market as serious, legitimate Shakespeare through backchannels such as Amazon or YouTube itself. Some of these video productions are not only filmed in specific sites, but reflect self-consciously on the significance of setting to the play’s message and cultural significance. In this essay, I will examine the cultural politics of amateur As You Like Its through their disciplined transposition of the play into local settings with specific eco-critical significance.

Laura Tosi, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Rosalind and Celia as the Victorians Liked Them: Womanly Heroines in the Forest of Arden As has been established for some time (with critical studies such as Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare (1989) and the anthology Women Reading Shakespeare (1997), among others), popular dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays was never an-all male phenomenon. In the second half of the nineteenth century women studied and popularized Shakespeare’s plays through children’s and adults’ editions, actresses’ memoirs, critical articles in journals, and the establishment of reading groups for women. Gail Marshall, in her Shakespeare and Victorian Women (2009) has perceptively analysed the way Victorian women were interested in discussing the nature of Shakespeare’s hold over them and the necessity of his cultural inheritance – as if the difference and the distance between Shakespeare and the Victorians were recognized and then suspended, and the Bard, mediated and explained, could indeed instruct Victorian girls how best to be feminine (or “womanly”, a favourite adjective of the period) through his female characters. The hugely popular Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (1832), by Anna Jameson was one of the pioneering works to establish a tradition of female character criticism in the nineteenth century. Female critics of Shakespeare developed ways to discuss Shakespeare’s female characters as if they were idealized models of real human beings with which girl readers could identify - in the Victorian and Edwardian ages heroines acted as sites of

2 projection for different constructions of femininity. As You Like It, in particular, was a very popular play on the Victorian and Edwardian stages. For the Victorians, the play’s rustic evocation of a rural Arcadia may well have provided an idealization of English landscape at a time of urban and colonial expansion, and of course Rosalind, taking a dominant position in courtship, could evoke the New Woman’s aspirations to greater freedom (Foulkes 2003), not to speak of Rosalind’s male outfit which would have displayed her legs (which was customary, and apparently much appreciated, in burlesque and pantomime) (Jackson 1979). In my paper I shall examine a number of Victorian and Edwardian narrative adaptations of As You Like It which address a predominantly female implied reader. Speculating on the heroines’ past or future lives, supplying motivations according to the logic of realism that was characteristic of the novel, and releasing female characters from their pre-destined theatrical spaces, was the point of departure for imaginative journeys such as those undertaken by Mary Cowden Clarke in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-1), a collection of 15 novellas that “reconstruct” the childhood and teenage years of a number of Shakespeare’s female characters. In “Rosalind and Celia; the Friends” Cowden Clarke gives us a prequel to the play by generating a tale of female friendship that involves a newly invented female character (equally a victim of unchecked patriarchal power) in a series of successful practical jokes which involve crossdressing and condemnation of tyrannical attitudes. Other tales of the period, written in the short-story format made popular by the Lambs, such as Adelaide Gordon Sim’s Phoebe’s Shakespeare (1894), M. Surtees Townsend’s Stories from Shakespeare (1899), Ada Stidolph’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1902), and Thomas Carter’s Stories from Shakespeare (1910), emphasize the fairy-tale quality of the forest and the domesticity of life in the cottage for the two cousins; offer a clear-cut division between good and bad characters (again, a feature typical of folktale and fairy tale), and restrict the number of happy couples at the end to Rosalind-Orlando and Celia-Oliver (Jaques is occasionally cut). The Victorian ambivalence between female modesty in the private sphere and independent and vocal womanhood in the public sphere, which was worrying Victorian society to some degree, seems to have been projected and made more acceptable in these retellings, in which the domesticized space of a fairy tale forest is the ideal setting for a Rosalind who, for all her freedom of speech, is an example of a well-brought up Victorian lady. As Mrs Elliot wrote in her collection of Shakespeare’s portraits Shakespeare’s Garden of Girls (1885), “And yet with all this power of observation and capacity of expression, she [Rosalind] surrenders herself to the mastery of love with a self-abandonment that never oversteps the modesty of maidenhood” (98).

17:00-18:15 SESSION II – AS YOU LIKE IT RESHAPED – Part II Chair Richard Chapman, Università degli Studi di Ferrara

Alessandra Bassey, King’s College London As You Like It in Popular Nazi Culture While library shelves often groan under weighty volumes about Hitler’s political rule and the Second World War, a closer glance at the years between 1933 and 1945 makes it apparent that there is still a considerable lacuna of academic research on the topic of arts and culture under the Nazis. One of the most neglected aspects is the popular output of German theatres. While some attention may have sporadically been given to German playwrights, actors, and directors, one of the most consistently present playwrights within the theatre staples, has been the one to be relatively widely ignored – his name is William Shakespeare. There are a few exceptions in the field, they include Gerwin Strobl’s and Wilhelm Hortmann’s works on Shakespeare and the theatre under the Nazis, but the very popular and often-performed Shakespearean comedies are widely just mentioned in passing within academic publications. This paper investigates Nazi prescribed ‘popular’ culture, and gives due extended attention to Shakespeare performances under the Nazi regime, specifically to the 1934 production of As You Like It at the German Theatre in Berlin with Heinz Hilpert as director, the 1936 production of the play in Frankfurt directed by Richard Weichert, and the 1940 production of the same play directed by Gustaf Gründgens at the State Theater in Berlin. New archival material sourced from the archives of the Free University in Berlin and the Goethe University in Frankfurt form the base of this research, and the main questions of this paper are: What can be described as Nazi popular culture or popular theatre? In how far did Hilpert’s, Salzmann’s and Gründgens’ As You Like It productions fit into these prescribed theatrical norms? And in how far did any of the productions, if at all, go against the political grain? This paper thus aims at demonstrating how restrictive the notion of popular culture was under Adolf Hitler’s regime, how Shakespeare’s comedies were supposed to be ‘safe’ choices for directors, and in how far popular culture and theatre were not just used to entertain the masses, but that they also became tools for subtle, yet regime-critical statements.

Darlena Ciraulo, University of Central Missouri Susan Herbert’s Shakespeare Cats: As You Like It in Popular Book Art “If a cat will after kind, so be sure will Rosalind”--As You Like It

3 Susan Herbert’s paintings of “cats in costume” has become a well-known pleasure for connoisseurs of felines in contemporary culture. The author of nine books in her lifetime, published by Thames and Hudson, Herbert’s Shakespeare Cats (1996) finds a celebrated place in the artist’s oeuvre. This charming table book consists of thirty-one paintings of cats posed in iconic scenes from twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, ranging from Hamlet to Richard III to Taming of the Shrew. These witty vignettes of anthropomorphic cats offer poignantly humorous interpretations of Shakespearean moments. At times Herbert draws on famous artistic renderings to stage her paintings; in others, she freshly imagines with her paintbrush new expressions of character and setting. Although Shakespeare Cats carries a popular, if not cultish, reputation, its witty presentation of these beloved furry creatures--dressed largely in Renaissance garb--provides significant insight into the afterlife of Shakespeare in commercial art. This paper will focus on Herbert’s interpretation of Jaques’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech in As You Like It.

Thursday 25 May

9:30-11:15 SESSION I – MEDIATED – Part II Chair Maddalena Pennacchia, Università degli Studi Roma Tre

Maurizio Calbi, Università degli Studi di Salerno The Impurity of the ‘not-quite’: Chasing Shakespeare in Norry Niven’s From Above and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Romeo The paper focuses on Norry Niven’s film Chasing Shakespeare / From Above, a loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and Abbas Kiarostami’s short film Where Is My Romeo, which incorporates sections of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. It argues that these media products include a “Shakespeare” that is not quite Shakespeare, a spectral “entity” that does not properly reside and thus becomes the site of unceasing transactions (for instance, between an “outside” and an “inside,” between visibility and invisibility, between the “original” and its iteration) and multiple contaminations (as concerns media, characters, and plays). The two films, the paper concludes, bear witness to the survival of “Shakespeare” in contemporary media culture as a fluctuating network within which forms of afterlife situate themselves as variables that cannot be properly separated from one another.

Sara Soncini, Università degli Studi di Pisa ‘O O O O that Shakespeherian Rap’: Othello’s Afterlife in Contemporary Popular Music Music is pervasive in Othello. On the figurative level, it provides the tragedy’s central image of marital and psychic harmony and its tragic untuning at the hands of Iago. It is magisterially embodied in the verbal text of the play, through the poetic style of Shakespeare’s protagonist and his aria-like bravura speeches. In a more literal sense, it manifests itself as song or instrumental music in a series of interludes that are pivotal for the establishment of setting, the revelation of the characters’ states of mind and motivations, and plot development in general. Significantly for my line of argument, the original soundtrack featured in Shakespeare’s tragedy – from the drinking songs in Act Two, to the morning serenade misguidedly offered by Cassio to Othello and Desdemona at the opening of Act Three, down to the “willow song” sung by Desdemona in Act Four and then reprised by Emilia in her dying lament in Act Five – was entirely made up of contemporary popular music. As if bowing to Iago’s successful onslaught on the “Othello music” (according to J. Wilson Knight’s classic definition), the performance history of Shakespeare’s play has been marked by the systematic elision of its musical episodes: during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Desdemona’s moving lyric was generally cut, and even today Iago’s drunken songs and Cassio’s instrumental aubade are rarely included in productions. The demise of Shakespeare’s “pop” tracks from the play, however, has been more than offset by the very central position attained by popular music in Othello’s vibrant afterlife. This paper aims to engage with contemporary music as a major locus and focus of Shakespeare’s dialogue with the present day. I will look at a select corpus of performances, spin-offs and remediations of Othello in order to examine the cultural work they set out to perform by “musicalizing” Shakespeare’s characters and their language. Throughout my analysis, particular attention will be devoted to the frequent association of Othello with contemporary black music, a connection also evidenced by the (mis-)quotation that gives the title to my paper: by mashing Othello’s repeating O’s in Shakespeare’s tragedy with contemporary ragtime, the Eliot makes it clear that the sudden burst of Othello music we hear in The Waste Land is a symptomatic instance of “Shakespeare with a nigger twist”, to borrow the refrain from a popular 2006 single by British hip hop artist Akala. In keeping with pop’s commitment to contemporaneity and relevance, rap versions of Othello invariably engage with the discourse of “race” that has developed through and around Shakespeare’s play; but the implication of music in the performance of ethnic difference dates back to the minstrel shows and blackface burlesques of the nineteenth century, and the role and place of popular music in the history of racial (and racist) impersonation on the Shakespearean stage is often acknowledged in the appropriations I will explore. The connection between musicality and racial impersonation, for example, is a key albeit usually neglected aspect of Laurence Olivier’s self-conscious parade of Negritude in his

4 much-criticized 1963 Othello; in a number of subsequent performances, adaptations or rewrites of Shakespeare’s play, the decision to cast a black singer as Othello, or the refiguring of Shakespeare’s tragic hero as a black singer/musician, becomes a key move in addressing and destabilizing the historical elision or exclusion of black actors from the field of representation. While mainly concerned with a body of work produced within the Anglosphere, I will also partially test the broader cultural applicability of this form of intermedial dialogue by considering some Italian rewrites that are marked by a similar investment in popular music; this is notably the case with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Che cosa sono le nuvole, a puppet-theatre version of Othello in which Domenico Modugno’s theme song significantly contributes, among other tokens of “presentness”, to the film’s spotlighting of the politics of class.

Fernando Cioni, Università degli Studi di Firenze Remaking and Refashioning A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Puppets, Cartoons, and Manga Shakespeare’s plays have undergone radical transformations in the ways they have been produced and perceived over the centuries. In the 20th and 21st centuries the plays have been adapted, localized, appropriated by drama, cinema, music, comics, and cartoons. After a couple of centuries in which it was disregarded as “the most insipid ridiculous play” ever seen, or where its plots were treated as single plays to be performed, adapted, rewritten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was restored only in 1840 by Madame Vestris at the Royal Theatre in Covent Garden. Since then, the play has become, after Hamlet, the most performed, adapted and refashioned among Shakespeare’s plays. This paper will focus on the appropriation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in form of cartoons and comics, comparing different versions and different media, from the puppet version of Jiri Trnka to the animated tales, from the Disney Toon version to the 2008 manga version adapted by Richard Appignanesi and illustrated by Kate Brown. The first cartoon version, made by Jiri Trnka in Czechoslovakia in 1959, is a masterpiece of cartoon cinema. The characters are silent and the story is narrated through their mimicry and the voice of a narrator. Curiously, in 1961 a British version of the movie was not only dubbed as regards the narrator (Richard Burton), but it was, in a sense, localized and appropriated, making the character speak through the voice of the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Another cartoon version is directed by Robert McKimson for the series Mr Magoo’s Literary Classics. Here Mr Magoo, whose name is, curiously, Quincey, plays Puck. The story line follows the Dream until the fourth act, when Theseus forgives the lovers and Puck pronounces his epilogue. The most ambitious project for turning Shakespeare’s plays into cartoons was produced by Channel 4 and Soyuzmultfilm in 1992. The technique used by the different producers ranges from puppetry to the traditional cell animation, from the stained-glass to the various techniques used in As You Like It, alluding to comic strips and Elizabethan woodcut. The connection with the theatrical origin of the play is emphasized by the choice to give the characters the voice of the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is characterized by a narrator, possibly influenced by Jiri Trnka 1959 film. It maintains a good balance among the three plots of Shakespeare’s comedy. Oberon is depicted with satanic treats, Puck with Eastern features. The fairies in their entrances and exits recall the “special” effects of the 1936 film adaptation by Max Reinhardt; so Bottom’s transformation reminds that of James Cagney in the same film. In September 1999, Tony Craig and Robert Gannaway produced and directed for Toon Disney a reduced version of The Dream focusing on the lovers’ plot: Mickey Mouse is Lysander and Minnie Mouse is Hermia, Donald Duck is Demetrius and Daisy is Helen, Uncle Scrooge is Egeus, Goofy is Puck, and Ludwig von Drake is the duke Theseus. Another way of appropriating Shakespeare is through comics. Among the graphic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, the manga versions published by the British publishing house Self Made Hero represent a very good, and most recent, example of recreating the play. The manga versions reconstruct the complex poetic structures of Shakespeare’s plays through non-verbal structures, such as those of the iconotext, i.e. the comic strips.

11:30-12:45 SESSION III – CONFINED Chair Maurizio Calbi, Università degli Studi di Salerno

Mariacristina Cavecchi, Università degli Studi di Milano Shakespearean Tempests in Italian Prisons My paper will explore how Shakespeare is a pivotal and much staged playwright among theatrical companies of convicts in Italy. Many of our chronically overcrowded prisons, which the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has recently defined humiliating and unlawful, have become, against all odds, a breeding ground for actors and directors, who very frequently appropriate the work of the Elizabethan playwright. Indeed, in prison are to be found the most innovative and vital staging of The Tempest in Italy today. Undeniably, the practice of performing Shakespeare in prison seems to have reinvented and reinvigorated the staging of the Elizabethan playwright: on the one hand, it has offered and continues to offer a fuller and less predetermined Shakespearian experience; on the

5 other hand, it has restored his plays’ subversive and destabilizing nature and their capacity to articulate a wide variety of complementary/conflicting meanings, some of which challenge the establishment and the prison as institution.

Beatrice Montorfano, Università degli Studi di Pisa Shakespeare, a Basketball Field and Felicità. Collettivo Teatro Metropopolare in La Dogaia Prison, Prato In recent years, prison theatre has become highly popular in Italy. During the research for my Master Degree’s Thesis, I got in touch with five projects, chosen because of their theatrical experience with Shakespeare: Compagnia della Fortezza, Compagnia dei Liberi Artisti Associati, Artestudio, CETEC, Collettivo Metropopolare. In my paper I will focus on Collettivo Metropopolare, examining two key-points of the project: how they use artistic products (movies, dramatic works) that have already been taken from Shakespeare as primary sources; and their aim to build a dialogue among the various backgrounds of all the participants. Even if I could not attend their live performances, I had the possibility to watch some full video recordings and to talk with the director, Livia Gionfrida, and her assistant, Giulia Aiazzi. In La Dogaia prison in Prato, Collettivo Metropopolare – with a mixed cast of prisoners and artists - staged Hamlet’s Dream (2011), Macbetto (2012) e H20tello (2014). Between 2013 e 2014 they realized Un’acerba felicità, drawn from Romeo and Juliet, with the adolescent inmates of “Istituto penitenziario minorile” in Pontremoli (MS). Shakespeare has been chosen for the prison project due to the central, founding position he holds in western culture, but also for his connections with early modern popular culture. In the opinion of the director, these peculiarities make it possible for all the participants to set up a network among their different national, social and cultural backgrounds. On the basis of a research-based theatrical approach, Livia Gionfrida started her work in prison from tragedies afterlife, before going back to Shakespeare: Kaurismaki’s Hamlet Goes Business, Chabrol’s Ophelia, Testori’s Macbetto, to give a few examples. In Gionfrida’s opinion, these several, various pieces of work help to understand how Shakespeare can be performed on contemporary stages: the focus should not be on the plot, but on the way a well- known plot can be told. In prison, that can be made with an emphasis on three features of actors’ background culture: their various languages and dialects, popular music and sport. While the first is highlighted in a lot of prison theatre projects, Collettivo Metropopolare pieces are unique in their mixing of Shakespeare with a wide range of contemporary pop-culture products. A lot of famous songs are played or sung by the actors: Felicità by Albano, which is the soundtrack of Hamlet’s Dream final scene, Insieme a te by the neo-melodic singer Tony Colombo, sung by the teen-agers in Un’acerba felicità, Profumo di mare and Singing in the rain in H20thello. Besides, the strongly physical approach of all the final performances is partly due to the need to let the inmates re-gain awareness of their own body as a mean of communication, but also to their previous life experiences. Set in the prison basketball field, H2Othello stages actors dribbling and doing fitness exercises, while in Hamlet’s Dream the (external) actress playing Ophelia brings to the group of male inmates her passion for football, which is central in the gender-based approach of the piece. While describing and analyzing these characteristics, I will outline prisoners' active contribution to the never- ending story of Shakespearean performance. This attitude allows to explore the transformative potential of a process of dialogue and exchange that is not necessarily univocal - “Shakespeare contributes to a presumed salvation of the prison inmates”, but instead, contradictory and at times even conflictual.

14:30-16:30 YOUNG SCHOLARS’ WORKSHOP Chair and Respondent Robert Sawyer, East Tennessee State University

Eleonora Fois, Università degli Studi di Cagliari Shakespeare, Popular Media and Language: A New Challenge Few authors have crossed borders like Shakespeare, in early modern times and today, and few can equal his number of adaptations: normally, some features are preserved and others lost, usually displeasing critics and scholars. Shakespeare had a habit of mocking rigid divisions between high and low culture, his plays being infused with both worlds: the presence of Fools and clowns, the reference to popular and well-known stories. Shakespeare has, also undoubtedly, reached very high tones, skillfully mixed in fluid and versatile language: popular was also his challenge to write in such a way as to catch the audience’s attention: as F. R. Leavis declared, there were no ‘high-brows’ in Shakespeare’s time. Can the same be said today? Once entered the academic syllabus, the passage from low to high culture was finalized: language was Shakespeare’s most regarded feature. His style has been highly praised as paradigm of poetic elegance, but in the process the popular features of his language were reduced, if not neglected, as translators know very well: vulgarities are (often unconsciously) toned down, so as to meet such contemporary interpretation. In Italy, Quasimodo (a poet, nonetheless) was heavily criticized for having presented his own vision of Shakespeare’s language, more concrete and

6 theatrical, as was Montale, who suffered and fought heavily against the ‘controllo dei dotti’. Shakespeare’s language, as the result of Susan Bassnett’s debate concerning a ‘ linguistic modernization’, is not under discussion. This being said, does popular culture – comics, movies, videogames – claim a different ‘idea’ of Shakespeare? Answering this question is the aim of this contribution. If we see ‘popular’ as a simplified rendition of an artistic work (Shaughnessy 2007), if by ‘popular’ we mean ‘destined to mass consumption’, the answer could be obvious. However, recent and old-fashioned comics adaptations – Disney’s Duckleto in Italy, or the American Classics Illustrated series in the US – prove that, in different ways, even products for a younger audience cannot disregard Shakespeare’s words, nor can they avoid critical disapproval: some scholars lament them being left aside (along with everything else) in Kill Shakespeare, a daring but really innovative 2010 experiment. In film-making, philologically respectful adaptations are endless, from the extreme Branagh’s Hamlet to Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet which modernized everything but language. Only where Shakespeare is disguised, as in The Lion King, can there be total emancipation. If the link is neat and direct, the language is (must be?) there as well. Even high-ranking videogame productions like Final Fantasy gain authority by quoting Shakespeare; amateurish products, such as Elsinore, prefer instead a contemporary language, with scattered reprise of images, but without a wide diffusion on the market. Adapting Shakespeare for other media cannot apparently disregard language: in very few cases is the feeling of awe left aside, allowing to experiment and play on every level, as it happens in theatre (with different issues related, of course). Could it be that a conservative approach inspired by great devotion to the author has closed more doors than it opened, crystallizing Shakespeare in a limitative frame? The very core of Shakespeare’s profession, the approach which produced great results, even in language development terms, is forgotten: do not be afraid to dare and experiment, to please the audience, to be ‘popular’; this, even from a linguistic and translational point of view, might be the next great challenge.

Carlo Lorini, University of Birmingham Verdi’s Macbeth and the 1947 Premiere In 1847 Verdi’s Macbeth was premiered at the ‘Teatro della Pergola’ in Florence, and for the first time it was possible to label the adaptation of an Italian composer as truly ‘Shakespearean.’ Indeed, before Verdi Rossini had composed the ‘Otello,’ but this opera was Shakespearean only in its title, because far from considering Shakespeare important for his work, Rossini had chosen his play only because it was fashionable. Verdi’s admiration for Shakespeare was so high that he did the most of the job in composing the new opera; what he did not do was the versification of it. Verdi’s opera started therefore a new way of dealing with the English playwright and also established a canon for future composers and theatregoers; indeed, Verdi’s influence was so high that, as Maria Tempera pointed out, it is his Macbeth that is ‘likely to influence audience response to Shakespeare’s play.’ In this essay I will therefore analyse all the aspects of the Florentine premier in order to understand how could Verdi achieve such astonishing result.

Giorgia De Santis, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata” Hamlet in a Nutshell Allusions and retellings of Shakespearean plays are growing more common and frequent in contemporary literature and popular culture, some of them even commissioned to novelists, such as Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl or Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name. Due to its modernity, Hamlet is undeniably one of the most controversial and intertextually present subtexts in contemporary fiction. This paper looks at Ian McEwan’s modern rewriting of the tragedy of Prince Hamlet, Nutshell, published in September 2016, where an unborn child tells the story of how his mother Trudy and her brother-in-law and lover Claude are planning to murder his father, John, a poet. “So here I am, upside down in a woman. [...] I count myself an innocent, but it seems I’m party to a plot.” In this short novel, the narrator, though intellectually and emotionally mature, overhears life from his mother’s womb, reluctantly witnessing and experiencing a series of murderous and sexually promiscuous events which lead to the death of his father. Therefore, McEwan’s Hamlet, “bound in a nutshell” but still “king of infinite space”, struggles both physically and metaphorically to gain agency against his own mother and to define his own identity despite being bound by love and nature to her. “My health derives from Trudy, but she must preserve herself against me. So why would she worry about my feelings? If it’s in her interests and those of some unconceived squit that I should be undernourished, why trouble herself if a tryst with my uncle upsets me?”. The paper will explore the relationship between the original text and McEwan’s; the role of the setting, a decaying London house which stands for the rotten State of Denmark; the Shakespearean echoes within the novel, as well as on the new contemporary identity and attributes McEwan tailors for his Hamlet. Moreover, attention will be given to the fact that this modern retelling of the revenge tragedy is enriched by intertextual references to other plays and that it makes the characters of Trudy or “the owl poet” a complex juxtaposition of Gertrude, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia and Goneril. My emphasis will be on how Nutshell becomes a revenge tragedy sui generis, due to the reversal of the original themes and pattern that constitute Hamlet. The unborn version of the hero is effectively portrayed through an internalisation of action which McEwan inherits from Shakespeare himself, but the novelist further develops the complexity of Hamlet’s condition by placing him in a modern but still unfamiliar frame.

7 In addition, I will examine the theatricality of the novel, which makes its hybrid nature as both short novel and theatrical work stand out, pointing out the frequent use of metatheatrical terms and the meaningfulness of the metatheatrical moments within the text.

Fabio Ciambella, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata” ‘“When sorrows come”: Shakespearean echoes in the neo-gothic vampire-centric TV series The Originals This paper originates from a conversation I had with professor Tempera in May 2015, in the occasion of the AIA PhD conference held in Ferrara and dedicated to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. At that event, as she used to do, professor Tempera talked about Shakespearean intertextuality in what she smartly called “figurine” (stickers), meaning short extracts from films or TV series in which Shakespeare’s plays or poems were quoted. “Figurine” could be sent by the professor to anyone who provided her with other quotations from Shakespeare’s work in movies or series – as a sort of mutual exchange – and that was exactly what I did with her. Unfortunately, due to the sad course of events, we did not have enough time to explore the topic I had submitted to her more in detail, a part from a brief exchange of emails after the conference. Therefore, in this paper I will explore Shakespearean intertextuality in one of the most famous and watched TV series dedicated to vampires: The Originals. Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson, executive producers of the show, have acknowledged Shakespeare’s canon as one of their main sources of inspiration in more than one interview. However, a part from a couple of literal quotations such as Miranda’s “brave new world” (The Tempest, V.i.205), the two producers seemed to be somewhat reluctant to quote from the Bard’s work until the last episodes of the third season. This season, released in the USA from September 2015 to May 2016, sees the most ancient, powerful and cruel family of vampires, the Michaelsons, tied up with an antique prophecy meant to destroy them all by the hand of a mysterious enemy who, with the aid of a magical potion, will obtain a power that is even stronger than theirs. Surprisingly, the enemy chosen by the fate is Marcel Gérard, a vampire created by Klaus – the strongest among the Michaelsons – and considered as a member of the family by the six siblings. In the penultimate episode, when Marcel reveals himself to be the fatal enemy mentioned by the prophecy, Klaus bursts into his foe’s headquarter looking for some hints about his sinister intensions. However, all that he manages to find is – surprise surprise – a copy of Hamlet! “When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions.” (IV.v.52-3). This is the few lines Klaus reads from the book Marcel had left open at act IV, scene 5, when Claudius begins to fear about the course of events; in fact, Polonius was killed, Hamlet is a murderer who acts like a fool and Ophelia goes completely mad. At this point Klaus Michaelson adds: “Hamlet. We taught Marcel to read with this very copy”, regretting the past times when Marcel was their friend, follower and treated better than a brother. From this moment forward, Shakespearean echoes arise to the nth degree, mixing references to the trial in The Merchant of Venice and King Lear until an unexpected open-ended season finale.

Friday 26 May

11:00-12:00 SESSION IV – DISSEMINATED Chair Donatella Pallotti, Università degli Studi di Firenze

Clara Calvo, Universidad de Murcia Shakespeare and the Edwardian Turn of Mind: Textual Poaching and Mis-citation The appropriation of Shakespeare in advertising relies on complex mechanisms and has adopted varied forms and shapes, ranging from undisguised quotation to oblique allusion, rewriting and parody. In particular, the deployment of Shakespearean plays and characters, or of Shakespeare himself, to peddle the virtues of mass-produced products often leads to the ‘silent quotation’, which foregrounds Shakespeare (the genius, the source of authority and cultural capital) and erases his works (the literary nature of his wisdom and the theatrical origin of his fame). This is not a recent development, as it has been employed in advertising for a long time, but whereas Victorian advertising seems to have favoured the explicit reference to plays and characters, during the first decade of the twentieth-century there seems to be a trend towards the use of the “silent quotation”. In this paper, I will restrict my attention to how quotations from the works of Shakespeare have been detached from their original contexts and inlaid in Edwardian advertisements in a determined practice of “textual poaching” that shares much with other popular culture media – from t-shirts and tatoos to greetings cards and Pinterest – and which inevitably promotes mis-citation.

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