Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies
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Σ 6:2 2020 Jewish Theatres Edited by Piero Capelli Piero Capelli – Foreword Fabrizio Lelli – Italian Jews and Theatre in Early Modern Italy Michela Andreatta – Piety on Stage: Popular Drama and the Public Life of Early Modern Jewish Confraternities Chiara Carmen Scordari – Behind Multiple Masks: Leon Modena’s Diasporic Tragedy L’Ester in Seventeenth-Century Venice Zehavit Stern – The Archive, the Repertoire, and Jewish Theatre: Zygmunt Turkow Performs a National Dramatic Heritage Yair Lipshitz – Nocturnal Histories: Nighttime and the Jewish Temporal Imagination in Modern Hebrew Drama Diego Rotman – Language Politics, Memory, and Discourse: Yiddish Theatre in Israel (1948-2003) Miscellany David Lucking – Stony Limits and Envious Walls: Metamorphosing Ovid in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Cristina Consiglio – Hamlet Overseas. The Acting Technique of Edwin Booth Special Section Patrick Gray – Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: A Reply to Paul A. Cantor Elena Pellone – Will Tosh, Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London and New York: Bloomsbury (The Arden Shakespeare), 2019, pp. 264 Nicola Pasqualicchio – Andrew Filmer and Juliet Rufford (eds),Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies, London and New York: Methuen, 2018, pp. 235 Sally Blackburn-Daniels – A Theatrical Performance of Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies S K E N È Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 6:2 2020 Jewish Theatres Edited by Piero Capelli SKENÈ Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies Founded by Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi, and Alessandro Serpieri Executive Editor Guido Avezzù. General Editors Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi. Editorial Board Simona Brunetti, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Susan Payne, Gherardo Ugolini. Managing Editors Valentina Adami, Emanuel Stelzer. Assistant Managing Editor Roberta Zanoni. Book Review Editors Chiara Battisti, Sidia Fiorato. Staff Petra Bjelica, Francesco Dall’Olio, Bianca Del Villano, Marco Duranti, Luca Laranga, Antonietta Provenza, Savina Stevanato, Angelica Vedelago. Typesetter Lorenza Baglieri. Advisory Board Anna Maria Belardinelli, Anton Bierl, Enoch Brater, Richard Allen Cave, Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Rosy Colombo, Claudia Corti, Marco De Marinis, Tobias Döring, Pavel Drábek, Paul Edmondson, Keir Douglas Elam, Ewan Fernie, Patrick Finglass, Enrico Giaccherini, Mark Griffith, Stephen Halliwell, Robert Henke, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Eric Nicholson, Guido Paduano, Franco Perrelli, Didier Plassard, Donna Shalev, Susanne Wofford. Copyright © 2020 SKENÈ Published in December 2020 All rights reserved. ISSN 2421-4353 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher. SKENÈ Theatre and Drama Studies http://skenejournal.skeneproject.it [email protected] Dir. Resp. (aut. Trib. di Verona): Guido Avezzù P.O. Box 149 c/o Mail Boxes Etc. (MBE150) – Viale Col. Galliano, 51, 37138, Verona (I) Contents Jewish Theatres Edited by Piero Capelli Piero Capelli – Foreword 5 Fabrizio Lelli – Italian Jews and Theatre in Early Modern Italy 15 Michela Andreatta – Piety on Stage: Popular Drama 31 and the Public Life of Early Modern Jewish Confraternities Chiara Carmen Scordari – Behind Multiple Masks: Leon Modena’s 53 Diasporic Tragedy L’Ester in Seventeenth-Century Venice Zehavit Stern – The Archive, the Repertoire, and Jewish Theatre: 71 Zygmunt Turkow Performs a National Dramatic Heritage Yair Lipshitz – Nocturnal Histories: Nighttime and the Jewish Temporal 91 Imagination in Modern Hebrew Drama Diego Rotman – Language Politics, Memory, and Discourse: 115 Yiddish Theatre in Israel (1948-2003) Miscellany David Lucking – Stony Limits and Envious Walls: Metamorphosing Ovid 147 in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Cristina Consiglio – Hamlet Overseas. The Acting Technique of Edwin Booth 169 Special Section Patrick Gray – Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: A Reply 189 to Paul A. Cantor Elena Pellone – Will Tosh, Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama 205 in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London and New York: Bloomsbury (The Arden Shakespeare), 2019, pp. 264 Nicola Pasqualicchio – Andrew Filmer and Juliet Rufford, eds,Performing 213 Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies, London and New York: Methuen, 2018, pp. 235 Sally Blackburn-Daniels – A Theatrical Performance of Vernon Lee’s 225 The Ballet of the Nations Piero Capelli* Foreword If it wasn’t for Jews, fags, and gypsies, there would be no theater. Mel Brooks, To Be or Not To Be (1983) The essays collected in this issue of Skenè deal with Jewish theatre at large – that is, theatre written and staged by Jews, about Jews, mostly (but not only) for Jews, in Hebrew or in other languages used by Jews in history. They show how much Jewish theatre diversified throughout the history and the cultures of the Jews,1 yet maintaining a quite distinctive character of a tradition within a tradition. They also show several instances of how the tensions, polarities, and contradictions that have marked Jewish socie- ties and Jewish tradition since the Renaissance were referred to or openly denounced in Jewish theatre. As evidenced in these essays, the main question underlying the Jew- ish theatrical tradition was the quest for what Zehavit Stern defines a usa- ble Jewish theatrical past, and how to build one within a wider cultural and religious tradition that had inherited no ‘classic’ dramatic canon from its past, nor even any theatrical text at all – with the one possible exception of the lengthy sequence of dramatic dialogues included in the Biblical book of Job. In its post-Biblical period, Judaism has mainly been a tradition of reli- gious law and practice codified by the class of the rabbis. Right at the be- ginning of the formative period of rabbinic Judaism, the rabbis disavowed theatre as a despicable form of blasphemous admixture of their idea of Ju- daism with the surrounding dominant pagan cultures of the Hellenistic and 1 I here refer to the definition by Biale 2002. * Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia – [email protected] © SKENÈ Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 6:2 (2020), 5-14 http://www.skenejournal.it 6 Piero Capelli Roman period; or else, they only legitimated it when used as a farcical cel- ebration of the generally hostile confrontation between the Jews and their pagan neighbours and/or rulers (such is the case, for instance, of the en- actment of the Biblical story of Queen Esther, a specific theatrical genre which will later be named Purimshpil, as we will see further). In the Baby- lonian Talmud, the canonical compilation of rabbinic legal and intellectu- al tradition (fourth to seventh cent.), the following normative statement is found: “Our rabbis say: One must not go to theatres [tarteyaot] nor to cir- cuses, since in such places people entertain themselves with pagan enter- tainments” (tractate Avodah Zarah, 18b). The rabbinic paradigm of Judaism became mainstream in Jewish tradition until and even beyond the onset of secularisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the extent that it is commonly referred to as Judaism tout court. Theatre and theatres were thus formally and normatively considered as places, both symbolic and concrete, of cultural, possibly even religious promiscuity and hybridization with non-Jewish cultures, critically endangering the kind of Jewish identity that the rabbinic class meant to promote. Nevertheless, as shown in several of the essays collected here, starting from the Renaissance, rabbinic tradition and the literary and social prac- tice of theatre were mutually linked in a dialectical relationship by which, especially in Italy, several of the most important authors of Jewish theatre of the modern age emerged precisely from the ranks of the rabbinical class. Such are the cases of Leon Modena (1571-1648) (whose allegorical rewrit- ing of the Biblical story of Queen Esther is analysed in Chiara C. Scord- ari’s essay), Mosheh Zacuto (d. 1697), and possibly Mosheh Ḥayyim Luzza- tto (1707-1746). Leone de’ Sommi Portaleone’s (d. 1597 ca.) Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche (Four Dialogues on Scenic Perform- ances), composed in Mantua in the second half of the sixteenth century, were the first and definitely most influential attempts at formulating a spe- cifically Jewish theory of theatre. De’ Sommi established that theatre as a genre in Jewish literature should have moral instruction as its ultimate aim: he thus found a viable mediation between the normative ruling of the rab- bis, the deeply rooted ideology of Hebrew as the sacred tongue, and the new Renaissance taste for literature and theatre. As Fabrizio Lelli puts it in his essay, “if the play form was novel for Hebrew, its capacity for creat- ing parables and proverbs was well-known, and so could make it even more marvellous as a medium for theatrical entertainment”. Morally-focused al- legorical drama was thus established as the most important subgenre in Jewish theatre – and the most practiced one too, well into the twentieth century, as we will see here. Jewish intellectuals of the Renaissance such as de’ Sommi were well aware of the need to build a Jewish theatrical repertoire – or rather, draw- Foreword 7 ing on a distinction influentially proposed by Diana Taylor and referred to by Zehavit Stern in her essay, the need for a Jewish theatrical archive (Tay- lor 2003). Minority identity, historical memory of suffered persecutions,