Shakespeare in Italy Author(s): Agostino Lombardo Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 141, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 454-462 Published by: American Philosophical Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/987221 Accessed: 01-04-2020 11:03 UTC

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This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Shakespeare in Italy

AGOSTINO LOMBARDO Dipartimento di Anglistica, Universita di Roma, "La Sapienza"

it hacius, Spenns, Drayton, Shakespier ... ": in this list of confused and mangled names we find the first mention of Shakespeare in Italian writing. The author was probably that brilliant and versatile essayist, Lorenzo Magalotti, who wrote in 1667 the account of a journey to England. The account, indeed, gives such an interesting description of life in Restoration London as to make us regret the complete absence of any allusions to the Shakespearean performances Magalotti must have attended, as he did others of a more frivolous nature ("Wrestling, bull and bear baiting. . . "). But we have nothing except that poor name, and it is already a great deal if we consider that not even this can be found in the writings of other travelers and men of letters-think of Apostolo Zeno, whose melodrama Ambleto (1705) goes directly to the source of Saxo Gramaticus, in complete ignorance of the Shakespeare play. We must indeed wait half a century-when, that is, the Paduan abbe Antonio Conti, scientist, philosopher and scholar, wrote a tragedy, Cesare (1726), which seems to reflect a reading of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. At the same time, he repeats the English and French judgments that were to prevail in Italy for many decades, writing, as a good classicist, that "Sasper is the Corneille of the English, but much more irregular than Corneille, though like him pregnant with grand ideas and noble sentiments." Like Conti, and in the same period, another abbe, Paolo Rolli, is concerned with Shakespeare, revealing a deeper understanding, however, of his work, so that in 1729, introducing his celebrated translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, he says that Shakespeare "elevated the English theater to insuperable sublimity with his tragedies"; in 1739, moreover, he gives us what is certainly the first Italian translation of a passage from Shakespeare ("Essere o no, la gran questione e questa...."). Both this translation and these critical judgments also derive from

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 141, NO. 4, DECEMBER, 1997

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This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY 455 a desire to take issue with Voltaire. Voltaire, in fact, in Italy as in the rest of Europe, represents an essential stage in the "fortune" of the dramatist. On the one hand, with his influence and authority, Voltaire confirms the importance of Shakespeare's work; on the other hand, he lays down the limits within which criticism is to move until the advent of romanticism. Some of his comments are at the base of nearly all eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare: "[He] boasted of a strong, fruitful genius: he was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama.... there are beautiful, noble and dreadful scenes in this writer's monstrous farces, to which the name of tragedy is given." Voltaire, however, had discovered the greatness and at the same time the "monstrousness" of Shakespeare not only for the French, but also for the Italians, who follow in his footsteps and, in the wake of his judgments, begin to form their own. And I am thinking of reactionary critics such as Quadrio and Denina but also of an artist like Carlo Goldoni, who writes in 1754 that Shakespeare "has not observed in his works that scrupulous unity of time and place which confines the fantasy of Poets." Goldoni, as he himself admits, knows Shakespeare through the French translation of La Place, but the time was ripe for the first Italian versions-and so in 1756 we have the prose translation of Julius Caesar by Domenico Valentini, who also proves, in his introduction, to be an acute and courageous critic, especially when, discussing the "rules," he grasps the intrinsic necessity of Shakespeare's "irregularity." But neither the translation nor the critical comments of Valentini would have been enough to accelerate the progress of Shakespeare in Italy had it not been for the appearance in the critical arena of that vigorous and brilliant scholar, Giuseppe Baretti-an example of how a personality in many ways conservative can be brought, through the contact with Shakespeare, to positions of ardent innovation-the same had happened in England with Samuel Johnson, an authentic representative of Classicism and yet, in his Shakespearean criticism, a precursor of romantic interpretations. From Johnson, in fact-on whom, during his sojourn in London, Baretti called assiduously and whom he admired more than any other English writer of the time-derives much of the Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire (1778), which Baretti wrote after his return to England in 1777-78, and which is the first serious and extensive critical study of Shakespeare in Italy. Many of the ideas here expressed one can find in Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare of 1765, but the

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originality of the essay lies on one side in the discussion of certain characters (Othello, Caliban) and on the other side in Baretti's polemical stance, in his liveliness, his fantasy, the hearty vigor with which he defends his author and his "irregularity." On the whole, therefore the Discours represents a milestone for Shakespearean criticism in Italy, and the more so since from it also emerges that new concept of the liberty of art and the artist which is to be fully affirmed by the romantics and in which the "discovery" of Shakespeare plays an important part. In this sense, a central place is due to Alessandro Verri (who translated Othello and Hamlet) and to other literary figures, such as Vittorio Alfieri, Ippolito Pindemonte, and Vincenzo Monti. For Ugo Foscolo, Shakespeare is among the tragedians selected for attention and study, while the Ultime Lettere dijacopo Ortis (1808) show us a Jacopo in the steps of Werther with a romantic enthusiasm for Shakespeare: "Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, the masters of all superhuman minds, have possessed my imagination and inflamed my heart: I have bathed their verses with burning tears," while later he writes that Shakespeare's "genius infused into the shadows of his mind form and life and potent spirit and all the illusions of reality: and if one considers well his play The Tempest, it would seem that he even had the privilege of creating from nothing." Foscolo expressed these opinions in 1826, when the Italian debate over romanticism had already died down. But it is precisely to this debate that we must return, because in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, the romantic battle was fought largely in the name of Shakespeare. This was due, above all, to the identification of romantic poetry with Shakespearean drama brought about in Germany and France. Indeed, it would be impossible to carry this discussion further without reference to some foreign works that profoundly influenced Italian culture and its attitude toward Shakespeare. Of Goethe there is not only Werther but the first part of Wilhelm Meister (translated in 1809), where the interpretation of Hamlet offers to the romantic sensibility an image in which it recognizes many of its features. In addition to the writings of Lessing, Herder, and Friedrich Schlegel, one must remember the Course of Dramatic Literature by August Wilhelm Schlegel, which, translated by Gherardini in 1817, is at the base of all successive critical opinions. We should not neglect, among other works, De la litt&ature du midi de I'Europe (1813) by Sismondo de'Sismondi, and especially De la litterature (1800) and De I'Allemagne (1813) by Madame de Stael, and the more so

This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY 457 since the latter was the author of the article "On the Manner and Utility of Translations," which, in January 1816, appeared in the Biblioteca Italiana and opened the debate on romanticism. Her ideas were attacked by various conservative critics such as Carlo Botta, Londonio, and Gherardini, but strenuously defended by Berchet, Silvio Pellico, Ermes Visconti, and Niccolo Tommaseo-those literary figures, that is, who fought, in the name of Shakespeare, for romanticism. The battle's real protagonist, however, was Alessandro Manzoni, in whose dramatic works such as II Conte di Carmagnola (1820) and especially Adelchi (1822) Italian romanticism found the drama it had been seeking so eagerly. Moreover, these tragedies were born of an aesthetic and moral meditation in which the Shakespearean experience played a fundamental part. The relations between Manzoni and Shakespeare have been given due importance by many scholars, who have pointed out the many passages in the tragedies and also in the Promessi Sposi where the reading of Shakespeare has left its mark; they have stressed the open admiration of Manzoni for Shakespeare, and they have noted the importance of Shakespeare in directing Manzoni toward an art that is, on one hand, romantically free from the "rules" and, on the other, turned toward a representation that working through history arrives at the truth. What can and should be added here is that precisely because the connection with Shakespeare is deeply ingrained in the rich and complex nature of Manzoni's work, his observations not only have an independent critical value but constitute the climax of all preceding Italian critical research (even though he read Shakespeare in the translations of Le Tourneur). One could quote various passages from the famous "Lettre a M. Chauvet sur l'unite de temps et de lieu dans la tragedie" (1823) or from the Materiali Estetici (first published in 1887), where we find the concept of Shakespeare as a conscious artist, which underlies the whole of Manzoni's criticism and which, though learned from Schlegel, is one of his major contributions to the understanding of the dramatist: "One hears ... it said every day that Shakespeare is an unpolished and undisciplined genius, who, without rules and without premeditated intention, flows here and there, meeting occasionally with some extraordinary beauty. This oft-repeated opinion has been confuted expressly and at length by Herr Schlegel. This confutation seems to me to destroy the opinion totally." Manzoni's constant admiration for and understanding of Shakespeare and his assumption of the dramatist as a model and ideal of

This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 458 AGOSTINO LOMBARDO art are certainly among the causes of the extraordinary success Shakespeare finally met in Italy. The "victory" of romanticism and of Manzoni was also in fact the "victory" of Shakespeare. As a result we have the first complete prose translation by Carlo Rusconi (1839). The first complete verse translation was that of Giulio Carcano, who began in 1839 and completed his work in 1882. Another result of Manzoni's example is the increasing evidence of Shakespeare's influence on the dramatists of the period: Silvio Pellico, Cesare della Valle, Carlo Marenco, Giovanni Battista Niccolini. Shakespeare became increasingly staged in Italy, first in the adaptations of Ducis and even in the form of ballet (especially by the famous Vigan6), but later, as Italian translations gradually became available, in less approximative versions. From the tentative interpretations of Francesco Menichelli and Antonio Morrocchesi, the first Italian Hamlets, we come to the much more convincing efforts of Alemanno Morelli, who acted Hamlet in 1850, and particularly those of Ernesto Rossi and Tommaso Salvini, actors greatly admired abroad-by Henry James, for instance, and by Stanislavsky. Nor, of course, can we neglect the great contribution of Giuseppe Verdi. Shakespeare has indeed exercised a constant attraction on our operatic composers, from Rossini and Bellini to Zandonai, Malipiero, and Castelnuovo Tedesco; but in the case of Verdi there is a relationship not unlike that between Shakespeare and Manzoni; a contact, that is, that could not be more stimulating and creative. "Ah Shakespeare, Shakespeare, the great master of the human heart," we read in a letter; and elsewhere: "There may seem to be a contradiction in these three words: invent the truth, but ask Papa about it. Papa may perhaps have met with some Falstaff, but he will hardly have found a villain as villainous as Iago, and never, never, angels like Cordelia, Imogen, Desdemona, etc., etc. and yet they are so true." We need only read his correspondence with Somma and Arrigo Boito, librettists of his Shakespearean operas, to understand how the superb artistic result derives in part from a constant, admiring, and impassioned study of the dramatist. Shakespeare therefore penetrated the literary consciousness in many ways, and with Verdi, the popular consciousness as well. In this situation, given also the interest in English literature that accompanied the vast success of Scott and Byron, it is only natural that, besides Manzoni, other writers and critics should contribute to the critical understanding of Shakespeare. The great Leopardi unfortunately limits himself to occasional vague references; but less casual observations can be found not

This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY 459 only in the writers, dramatists, and translators already mentioned, but also in Guerrazzi, Gioberti, Carlo Cattaneo, Giovita Scalvini, and especially in one of the makers of our Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, author of an important essay of 1836, "Della Fatalita considerata come elemento drammatico," in which the comments on Shakespeare contain the finest insights of European romantic criticism: "He does not evoke; he creates. Shakespeare's men have life and motion as if they came out of the hand of God: a life both single and varied, complex and harmonious. And later on: "The characters of Shakespeare, like those of Aeschylus, are fated. .. . But in Aeschylus the individual is fated at birth. . . .In Shakespeare-and this is a real advance-liberty lives: a day perhaps, an hour, has subdued a life to necessity, but in that day, in that hour, the man was free and the arbiter of his future ... the creature is responsible for his own actions." And it is along the lines laid down by Mazzini and Manzoni as well as by Hegel and the German romantics, that we have the Shakespearean work of our greatest nineteenth-century critic, Francesco De Sanctis, who, although he did not know English (he read Shakespeare in the translations of Rusconi) and although he lacked a wide knowledge of English literature, nonetheless contributed in a decisive way to Italian (and European) criticism of the dramatist. This contribution is already clear from the lessons held in Naples in 184647 and published in 1919 and 1926 by Benedetto Croce, where the methodological basis is laid for a critical examination "free from so many futile questions, from so many judgments born of particular and arbitrary principles," liberated from neoclassical prejudices but also from romantic ones, and where we have the suggestion of a Shakespeare who "though feeling the sublimity of the ideal represents the whole of reality," who is the Hegelian poet of the "idea," but of an idea incarnate, rendered absolute reality. Coming at the beginning of his critical career, these Neapolitan lessons largely determined the later developments of De Sanctis: so much so that it does not seem mistaken to attribute to this Shakespearean study the passage of De Sanctis from what he called "the sickness of the ideal" to the fertile concept of the "ideal immersed in reality" and to observe, with Croce, that Shakespeare is from the start "the great poet of his critical ideal." If we look at the Saggi Critici of 1860, at the writings on Dante, at the great Storia della Letteratura Italiana (1870-71), we note that Shakespeare is always present in the mind of De Sanctis, and that he judges Italian authors and their characters in the light of the work and characters of

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Shakespeare, who completes the work begun by Dante: "These great figures ... await the artist who will take them by the hand and throw them into the tumult of life and make them dramatic beings. And the artist was Shakespeare." Between De Sanctis and the essay on Shakespeare by Benedetto Croce, which appeared in 1919, the reputation of Shakespeare in Italy certainly did not decline. On the contrary, performances became ever more frequent, and to the actors already mentioned must be added the names of Giovanni Emanuel, Ermete Novelli, Adelaide Ristori, the great Eleonora Duse, and, later on, Ermete Zacconi, Alessandro Moissi, Ruggero Ruggeri. The operas of Verdi made the dramatist and his characters (Othello, Macbeth, Falstaff) still more popular, and in 1858 there was even a play about Shakespeare by Gualtieri. At the same time, there was an increase in the number of translations. Besides the complete translations by Rusconi and Carcano, there were many versions of single plays; in 1911 there was a new and unsuccessful attempt at a complete verse translation by Diego Angeli. At the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth we have the first attempts at the sonnets by Oliveri (1890), De Marchi (1891), Sanfelice (1898), and Darchini (1908). These translations, together with an increasing knowledge of English, made Shakespeare part of the common heritage of Italian culture. From Dossi to Prati, from Carducci to Zanella, from Pascoli to D'Annunzio, there is not a writer who fails to allude to Shakespeare or to use his characters as already universally recognized symbols. One must note, however, that the interest of these writers, though general, is no longer animated by the direct creative adhesion to Shakespeare's art that characterized the romantics. For these reasons, perhaps, Shakespearean criticism did not progress with the energy one might have hoped. There was, of course, a considerable amount of work: discussions of single plays; discussions of biographical or pseudo- biographical problems; attempts to offer a general interpretation of the poet. Nevertheless, one can hardly disagree with Croce, when he remarks, in 1919, that a history of Italian criticism on Shakespeare in this period "could scarcely take any other form than that of a bibliography, of a catalog of volumes, memoirs and articles, of which very few have made any progress in the problems of Shakespearean interpretation." The progress, however, was made by Croce's essay, featured in 1919 in La Critica and then published in book form. Of importance here, first of all, is the long methodological

This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY 461 introduction in which Croce, following the lines laid down by De Sanctis, denounces the errors of "biographism," "sociologism," "exclamative," and "impressionistic" criticism. But important also are the detailed analysis of the most complex plays and especially the placement of Shakespeare at the heart of his time and culture: "Shakespeare is truly a man of the Renaissance.... But he does not belong to the happy, rejoicing, paganizing Renaissance, which is only one small aspect of the great movement, so much as to the other Renaissance, animated by new needs, by new religious urges, by the search for new philosophical tendencies, tormented by skepticism, shot through with intuitions of the future." A decisive passage, this one, decisive for the development of the concept, derived from Schlegel and Manzoni, of Shakespeare as a "conscious artist"-a concept that leads Croce to define him as a classic: "To consider Shakespeare as the representative of an art of furious and disordered outburst, as has been done so often, is to say the opposite of the truth." What one regrets in Croce's limpid and stimulating essay is the lack of a real study of Shakespeare's language or of the relations between Shakespeare and the general context of English literary and dramatic culture. These are precisely the limits that would be overcome by Italian Shakespearean criticism in the period following Croce's essay, and in particular after the Second World War. In the general revival of studies, connected in so many ways with Croce and his deprovincializing of our culture, Italian studies of English language and literature gradually lost all traces of casual and amateur work and through the university and personal research acquired an individual dignity and vitality. That process became even more intense and prolific when Mario Praz, in the thirties, began his tireless activity. Although Praz was less concerned with Shakespeare than with other writers and periods, not only is his direct contribution significant, but while his work on the seventeenth century illuminates both the language and the ideas of Shakespeare, the stimulus given by him to English studies makes his indirect contribution even more important. As a result of this stimulus Italian Shakespeare criticism can now rely not only on the scholarly, critical, and historical work of English-speaking nations, but also on the vast researches carried out in Italy on all periods of English literature. These researches, which naturally continue to develop in profundity and extent, also due to the extraordinary expansion of the study of English in the universities, have

This content downloaded from 94.161.168.118 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:03:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 462 AGOSTINO LOMBARDO allowed Italian criticism to approach all the various aspects of Shakespeare studies. There have been and there are philological and textual research, analysis of Shakespearean language and imagery and structures, and critical studies of particular periods and of single plays. This new critical seriousness and intensity has of course not failed to influence the whole relation between Shakespeare and Italian culture, helping, first of all, to raise the standard of translations, from the edition by various authors under the direction of Mario Praz (1943-47), to the complete prose translation of Gabriele Baldini (1964), from the translation in progress edited for Garzanti first by Nemi d'Agostino and then by Sergio Perosa, to the recently completed edition in nine volumes, by various authors, under the direction of Giorgio Melchiori. A new critical awareness appears also in the performances, which especially through the work of directors such as Strehler, Visconti, Squarzina, and Ronconi, have reached genuinely high standards of textual intelligence-in fact, a closer connection between the theater and Shakespeare criticism is probably the most interesting aspect of the present situation. But the maturity of Italian culture in its contact with Shakespeare is also witnessed and made possible by the interest in Shakespeare shown by our major writers and poets (one thinks of Riccardo Bacchelli, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo). One might also say that through the mediation of Brecht, Beckett, and especially Pirandello, Shakespeare offers new creative stimulus to dramatists (Eduardo is the greatest example) and to the theatrical avant-garde (one thinks first of all of Carmelo Bene). With this in mind, it does not seem too much to affirm that three centuries after Magalotti, at the end of a millennium and at the beginning of another, Shakespeare has become-as the romantics hoped, but more completely and profoundly than during romanticism-our "fellow- citizen," a living and active part of Italian culture.

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