In:Shakespeare and Crisis: One hundred years of Italian narratives
Edited by Silvia Bigliazzi
[Shakespeare in European Culture 2] 2020
► pp. 25–49
Chapter 11916
Italian narratives of the Tercentenary crisis
Published online: 22 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/sec.2.01big
https://doi.org/10.1075/sec.2.01big
Abstract
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 proceeding from a discussion of the Italian contributions to Israel Gollancz’s 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, and their discursive
strategies complying, but also competing, with the book’s imperialist design, to an exploration of the 1916 issue of the Florentine
literary magazine Il Marzocco devoted to a celebration of Shakespeare, this chapter explores how Shakespeare was
‘narrativised’ into a multi-faceted political icon. It discusses the manners of silencing, but also exposing, his subversive potential
in the context of the Tercentenary, exhibiting the manipulative force of memory and forgetfulness at a time of sudden political and
cultural changes which reflect a crisis of national identity.
Article outline
- Narratives of power for imagined communities: 1916
- Italy and the Book: A Rhetoric of Competition
- Creating a political icon: The Il Marzocco polemic
- An interval
- Narratives of crisis
Notes References
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