Shakespeare and Crisis: One hundred years of Italian narratives explores how Shakespeare intervened in the Italian socio-political and cultural scene between his third and fourth centenaries, at times which were manifestly perceived as ‘critical’. It asks which complex mythopoietic processes… read more
The essay explores selected examples of theatrical and philosophical Italian responses to Shakespeare in relation to a diffused sense of crisis of representation, entailing a crisis of the subject, from the early 1980s to 2016. It investigates how after about more than three decades that sense… read more
The essay argues that Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in 1916, following the peak of his popularity on the nineteenth-century Italian stages, coincided with a peculiar cultural and political transition in Italy due to Italy’s ‘embarrassing’ entry into the war alongside the Entente in 1915. By… read more
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was a play that Italian Fascism accurately exploited during various transitions in the history of its regime. Although in many respects a difficult play, full of thorny ambiguities for Fascist ideology, it offered good possibilities for propaganda, if appositely… read more
Against the backdrop of widespread topical readings of Richard III as post-war allegories of totalitarianisms ‘reconciling’ us with painful memories of trauma and monstrosity, this chapter discusses Carmelo Bene’s experiment in minoritisation as a form of political disengagement but also… read more
