Emanuel Stelzer
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Emanuel Stelzer Shakespeare Among Italian Criminologists and Psychiatrists, 1870s-1920s Σ Skenè Texts • 4 Skenè Texts • 4 Emanuel Stelzer Shakespeare Among Italian Criminologists and Psychiatrists, 1870s-1920s Σ S K E N È Theatre and Drama Studies Executive Editor Guido Avezzù. General Editors Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi. Editorial Board Simona Brunetti, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Susan Payne, Gherardo Ugolini. Managing Editors Bianca Del Villano, Savina Stevanato. Assistant Managing Valentina Adami, Emanuel Stelzer, Roberta Zanoni. Editors Communication Chiara Battisti, Sidia Fiorato. Editorial Staff Petra Bjelica, Francesco Dall’Olio, Marco Duranti, Carina Louise Fernandes, Leonardo Mancini, Antonietta Provenza, Angelica Vedelago. Typesetter Lorenza Baglieri. Advisory Board Anna Maria Belardinelli, Anton Bierl, Enoch Brater, Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Richard Allen Cave, Rosy Colombo, Claudia Corti, Marco De Marinis, Tobias Döring, Pavel Drábek, Paul Edmondson, Keir Douglas Elam, Ewan Fernie, Patrick Finglass, Enrico Giaccherini, Mark Griffith, Daniela Guardamagna, Stephen Halliwell, Robert Henke, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Eric Nicholson, Guido Paduano, Franco Perrelli, Didier Plassard, Donna Shalev, Susanne Wofford. Supplement to SKENÈ. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies Copyright © 2021 S K E N È All rights reserved. ISBN 979-12-200-6186-5 ISSN 2464-9295 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 https://textsandstudies.skeneproject.it/index.php/TS [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 Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 A Note on the Texts and Their Translation 41 Texts: 1. From Francesco Forlani, “Sull’amore e la pazzia 43 d’Amleto” (1871) 2. From Rocco De Zerbi, Amleto: Studio psicologico, 61 detto nell’istituto di belle arti a Napoli e con aggiunte e correzioni alla società filotecnica di Torino (1880) 3. Giuseppe Verdi’s Letter to Domenico Morelli 71 (24 September 1881) 4. From Ludovico Fulci, “Amleto” and “Otello” (1891) 74 5. From Cesare Lombroso’s works: 82 5a. L’uomo di genio, 6th edition (1894); 84 5b. “Il delinquente e il pazzo nel dramma e nel romanzo 88 moderno” (1899); 5c. “Otello epilettico”, Review of Federico Garlanda’s 94 Studi shakespeariani (1907) 6. From Antonio Renda’s works: 97 6a. “Le anomalie di Shakspeare” (1894); 98 6b. Il destino delle dinastie: L’eredità morbosa 110 nella storia (1904) 7. From Enrico Ferri, I delinquenti nell’arte (1896) 117 8. From Giuseppe Ziino, Shakespeare e la scienza moderna: 136 Studio medico-psicologico e giuridico (1897) 9. From Scipio Sighele’s works: 147 9a. La coppia criminale, 2nd edition (1897); 148 9b. “L’opera di Gabriele D’Annunzio davanti 150 alla psichiatria” (1906) 10. Fausto Squillace’s Review of Ziino’s Shakespeare 155 e la scienza moderna (1898) 11. From Nicolò D’Alfonso’s works: 166 11a. “Otello delinquente” (1910); 168 11b. “Guglielmo Shakespeare attore ed autore 170 (23 aprile 1916)” (1916); 11c. “Edmondo il Bastardo nel ‘Re Lear’” (1917) 174 12. From Francesco del Greco’s works: 179 12a. “Follia nelle donne dello Shakespeare e 180 psicologia femminile” (1914); 12b. “‘Emozioni’ e ‘follia’ in alcuni eroi di 186 Guglielmo Shakespeare” (1916) 13. Anonymous, “Shakespeare grande patologo”. 197 Review of Enrico Morselli, “La psicosi e la neurosi nei drammi di Guglielmo Shakespeare” (1916) 14. From Benedetto Croce, “Shakespeare e la 205 critica shakespeariana” (1919) 15. Piero Gobetti, “Il dottor Balanzon, docente di 211 antropologia criminale” (1923) 16. From Enrico Morselli’s preface to Luigi Lugiato, Pazzi, 219 squilibrati, Delinquenti, nelle opere dei letterati (primo volume su Amleto, Macbeth, Re Lear e Otello) (1926) 17. From Silvio Tissi, La psicanalisi, scienza dell’io 225 o del mistero-problema psichico: con saggi di analisi psichica su drammi di Pirandello, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Tolstoi e Shaw (1929) Works Cited 233 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the general editors of Skenè. Texts and Studies, Prof. Guido Avezzù and Prof. Silvia Bigliazzi, as well as the Skenè edi- torial board, for believing in this project. I am also grateful to the man- aging editors, Prof. Bianca del Villano and Dr Savina Stevanato, for their constant support. I am very grateful also for the comments of the two anonymous peer reviewers, for Prof. Susan Payne’s linguis- tic revision, and for Dr Martin Spies’ feedback. Especially considering the difficulties of archival research during the COVID-19 pandemic, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Luca Baratta, Prof. Daniele Borgogni, and Dr Camilla Caporicci for their bibliographic help, and the following libraries: those of the University of Verona and of the University of Trento, the Museo Casa Galimberti in Cuneo, the Adolfo Ferrara medical library (University of Pavia), the Library of Law and Criminal Procedure of the University of Macerata, and the library of the former psychiatric hospital of Pergine Valsugana. Introduction 1. A Forgotten Form of Shakespeare Criticism In 1871, German scholar Karl Elze contributed to the Shakespeare Jahr- buch a review of “Sull’amore e la pazzia di Amleto” [“On Hamlet’s Love and Madness”], an essay written by Francesco Forlani, an Italo-Dal- matian jurist and professor of law at the University of Innsbruck (see text no. 1 in this volume). Elze criticised Forlani’s ignorance of existing scholarship, but remarked: “Die Theilnahme für Shakespeare scheint nämlich in dem neuen Italien in einem sehr erfreulichen Aufschwunge begriffen zu sein” (364-5, “In the new-born Italy, an involvement with Shakespeare seems to have found indeed a most welcome impetus”).1 Political unification had just been achieved with the capture of Rome (laying aside the question of the terre irredente,2 where Forlani was from), and, according to Elze, political stability had created better con- ditions for Italian Shakespeare criticism. Elze emphasised that this phe- nomenon was an “involvement”, literally a “partaking”’, not a serious “Studium” (“study”), “denn dem Character des Volkes entsprechend nimmt sie keineswegs eine wissenschaftliche oder gelehrte Form an” (365, “because, in keeping with the character of that people, their in- volvement cannot take a scientific or learned form”). Elze exemplified his claim by praising instead the success of the Shakespearean grandi attori, Ernesto Rossi (1827-1896) and Tommaso Salvini (1829-1915). Lit- tle did Elze know that a few years later Italian Shakespeare criticism would swerve towards a form and method which exalted positivism, and embraced and promoted the doctrines of the newly-created crim- inal anthropological school of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), Raffaele Garofalo (1851-1934), and Enrico Ferri (1856-1929). 1 All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2 The ‘unredeemed lands’: Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, Istria, and parts of Dalmatia, which were annexed to Italy with the Treaties of Saint-Germain- en-Laye (1919) and Rapallo (1920). 10 Shakespeare Among Italian Psychiatrists and Criminologists Until then, Shakespeare had reached Italian mainstream culture through translation (often mediated via French), and through theat- rical productions of mainly three plays: Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth (Locatelli 2004, 147).3 On the other hand, Italy had found a different, but very successful formula for its reception of Shakespeare: opera (see Vittorini 2000 and Melchiori 2006). But as far as criticism is concerned, nothing of great significance had been written, apart from a few excep- tions, which had grown out of the context of the querelle des anciens et modernes, the struggle between Romanticism and Neoclassicism (see, for example, Giuseppe Baretti’s famousDiscours , 1777; the debate kick- started by Madame de Staël’s De l’esprit des traductions, 1816; Alessan- dro Manzoni’s Lettre à monsieur Chauvet, 1820). After the impetus of the first half of the nineteenth century, the reputation of Shakespeare, boosted by the spate of translations (by Giulio Carcano, Carlo Rusconi, Andrea Maffei, etc.) and opera adaptations, had established itself and placidly settled into the increasingly stereotyped portrayal of the Bard as the Romantic, modern genius, who gives voice to the human pas- sions. A new impulse came from a trend which had started in England and was finding much favour in France and Germany. Bardolatry had instituted Shakespeare as the universal genius at one with Nature, who was able to know and reveal the most intimate aspects of the human condition. Works such as Sir John Charles Bucknill’s The Psy- chology of Shakespeare (1859), The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare (1860), and The Mad Folk of Shakespeare (1867) portrayed Shakespeare as the ultimate physician and psychologist (see Salkeld 1993, 11-20). This interpretation went hand in hand with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century’s tendency to delve into the psychology of Shakespeare’s characters (think of S. T. Coleridge and William Hazlitt in England, or August Wilhelm Schlegel in Germany). The first book-length study here was Bucknill’s The Psychology of Shakespeare (1859), previously serialized in the Journal of Mental Science during 1858-59. By October 1859, Canadian alienist A. O. Kellogg started to publish his nine-part series of articles on “Wil- 3 On Shakespeare’s reception in eighteenth-century Italy, see Crinò 1950 and Nigri 2019; on Shakespeare in Italian Romanticism,