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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Philosophical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 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 454 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 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 456 AGOSTINO LOMBARDO 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.