Shaul Bassi

Fixed Figures: The Other Moors of Venice

This chapter shows how the several Venetian toponyms and artifacts that refer to ‘Mori’ (Moors) give precious and unexpected indications on the vexed question of the meaning of this famously ambiguous ethnic designation. Showing how each name changes its significance from place to place, and the same ‘moors’ elicit different stories in different times, this survey suggests that the historical shiftings of these monumental texts and their projective powers may find a correspondence in Shakespeare’s Othello. Highlighting how various Moors have inspired stories of petrification, I read these anecdotal evidence through the myth of Medusa (from Fanon to Agamben), arguing that they offer precious insight into the ways in which Western culture constructs stereotypes and dehumanizes its ‘others’.

The Prison House of Italy: Caesar Must Die

This chapter returns to Julius Caesar to discuss, by way of an epilogue to the book, the 2012 film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Documenting a production of Julius Caesar realized by director Fabio Cavalli in the prison of Rebibbia in Rome, the film is also used as a litmus test for the current ‘country disposition’ of Italy, a nation that has often represented itself by reinventing classical Rome and has produced important reflections from within a prison cell. By looking at the treatment of gender, place, and ethnicity in the film, I suggest that the Tavianis’ cinematically transfigured prison becomes a heterotopia, a mirror image of neoliberal Italy and a paradoxical refuge from its political and cultural impasse.

Introduction: Country Dispositions

This chapter presents the structure of the book and provides a theoretical framework for it. The three sets of chapters, divided into subgroups under the headings ‘race’, ‘politics’, and ‘place’, offer a partial guide to the afterlife of Shakespeare in Italy and to the ‘blind spots’ of Italian history and culture as revealed by Shakespeare appropriations in criticism, performance, and in physical sites. The book also suggests that this view from the Italian margins may also reveal some ‘blind spots’ of mainstream Shakespeare criticism produced in English-speaking countries, especially when it comes to loaded categories such as ‘race’ and politics. A brief overview of how Shakespeare came to Italy is also offered as a general background to the following chapters.

Neocon and Theoprog: The New Machiavellian Moment

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of recent critical studies that read Shakespeare in the light of Machiavelli. By mapping their different preoccupations and styles onto the Hobbesian division of political theory into libertas, the space of ‘natural’ relationships between individuals, imperium, the domain of the monarchy and the state, and religio, the realm of God and the Church, I suggest that the seven authors under scrutiny have produced a multifaceted, prismatic Shakespeare with political profiles reminiscent of twenty-first-century trends: a moderate Shakespeare, a neoconservative Shakespeare, a theoconservative Shakespeare, a neomarxist Shakespeare, a Nietzschean Shakespeare, a neoprogressive Shakespeare, and a theoprogressive Shakespeare. The picture indicates that the early 2000s marked a distinct new Machiavellian moment in Shakespeare studies.

Iago’s Race, Shakespeare’s Ethnicities

This chapter is the most theoretical contribution in the book and the first of three ‘race’ chapters. I discuss the genealogy of Shakespeare ‘race’ studies to argue that racial thinking is quintessentially a nineteenth-century product and a powerful ethnic fiction aimed at appropriating symbolic capital. A minor Victorian work, A New Exegesis of Shakespeare: Interpretation of His Principal Characters and Plays on the Principle of Races (1859), which purports to demonstrate that the whole of Shakespeare is just a demonstration of how ‘race’ is no less than the main key to human knowledge, is used to discuss Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that the category of ‘race’ should be dropped altogether or, at the very least, supplemented by the largely underutilized notion of ethnicity.

Shakespeare, Nation, and Race in Fascist Italy

This chapter investigates the impact of the cultural politics of Fascism on Shakespeare, particularly on the criticism and performance of his Venetian and Roman plays. The largely forgotten Carlo Formichi and Piero Rebora were prominent intellectuals in an academic milieu where only 1 % of university professors refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the Fascist Party. Their interpretations of Shakespeare were pervaded by a self-conscious, militant ‘presentism’, aimed at a celebration of his Italian characters and plots functional to the consolidation of ethnic and national pride. However, some characters and plots proved recalcitrant, requiring elaborate and ultimately unconvincing reading strategies. Italian interpretations of Shakespeare demonstrate a diffuse aversion to ethnic and religious difference, a common thread that can be found even in democratic, anti-Fascist thinkers such as Croce and Gramsci.

The Grave and the Ghetto: Shakespearean Places as Adaptations

This chapter explores whether we can consider a physical place as an adaptation of his plays and considers how a place appropriates and ‘remembers’ Shakespeare. Case studies include Romeo & Juliet’s Verona, including its famous balcony, and the Venice of Othello and The Merchant, with the Ghetto of Venice as the relevant historical site. In the case of Verona, Shakespeare has inspired a whole Romeo and Juliet industry, which greatly contributes to the tourist economy. In the case of Venice, the most controversial characters of Othello and Shylock remain hitherto invisible. I also consider the motivations underlying the continuing fascination with the notion that Shakespeare may have really visited Italy, as many like to believe.

Hamlet in Venice

This chapter examines the political praxis of a major Italian theorist, Massimo Cacciari, in the mirror of his analysis of Shakespeare. After surveying his Cacciari’s political career and philosophical trajectory, I analyze his essay on Hamlet and read it in the light of Luisa Accati’s book Beauty and the Monster, whose argument is that Catholicism in Italy is less a religious institution or belief than an anthropological situation that has produced a seemingly paradoxical patriarchal society with weak fathers. Her theory helps us to contextualize the uncanny analogies between Cacciari’s interpretation of Ophelia, and the feminine ideal still promoted by Catholic Italy: this simultaneous idealization and marginalization of women may be a blind spot of mainstream Italian theory.

Infinite Minds: Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno Revisited

In this chapter, I interrogate the puzzling absence of Giordano Bruno from contemporary Shakespearean criticism. Why is the most radical and innovative early modern philosopher overlooked by critics of the most radical and innovative early modern playwright? Part of the answer lies in the monopoly created by Frances Yates, whose highly influential portrait of the Italian philosopher as an esoteric figure has remained by and large unchallenged in Shakespeare studies. It is only at the margins that we find new attempts to correlate the works of Bruno and Shakespeare, in particular in the books by Gilberto Sacerdoti, who reads Bruno’s radical thought between the lines of Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest.

Slav-ing Othello

In this chapter, I analyze a minor, early nineteenth-century Italian adaptation. Carlo Federici’s Otello ossia lo Slavo (Othello, or the Slav) moves the action to Genoa and radically alters the ethnic identity of all the main characters, departing from the traditional dialectics of whiteness and blackness. This alteration demonstrates how Othello’s ethnicity has always been a more complicated matter than his skin color and that it depends on specific geopolitical dynamics. By inventing a Slavic hero who assimilates into an Italian city, Federici’s text epitomizes a model that has remained dominant in Italian culture to this day, where consent may be more important than descent but equality requires ethnic homogeneity and minorities are more imagined than accepted in their real outlook.