Valeria Finucci, Duke University

Shakespeare loved to set his plays in the Veneto region. From Othello and The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, Venice, Padua and Verona have been the backdrop for some of his most unforgettable dramas. Italians too loved the theater, so much so that in the 18th century Venice had fifteen theaters and seven opera houses and every gondolier could claim free passes to the stage. This course will center on the contributions of Venice and the nearby region to the stage beginning from the moment when comedies started to be represented. It will open with a play perhaps never publicly staged and only recently recovered, the anonymous La Venexiana, to include The Stablemaster by the adopted Venetian citizen, Pietro Aretino, and The Woman from Ancona by Ruzante, on to the no longer crossdressed “Commedia dell’arte” theater, in which women both recited and wrote scripts, as in the play by Isabella Andreini, Mirtilla, first perfomed in Venice. Opera theater, the most successful literary/musical Italian invention, had its most spectacular moments in Venice and we will make full use of our stay in the city. We will also study the original scripts of three Italian novellas, which eventually developed into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (hopefully adding a visit to Verona at Juliet’s still extant house) and examine in depth some bourgeois Venetian comedies of Goldoni and Gozzi. Venice and nearby cities (such as Vicenza, where the first regular theater was open, but also Verona) will serve to reconstruct up close the pleasure of the stage through cultural, political and historical upheavals.

Required Texts:

Eric Bentley, ed. The Servant of Two Masters and Other Italian Classics (New York: Applause, 1992.
Adolph Caso, ed, Romeo and Juliet. Original Text of Masuccio, Da Porto, Bandello, Shakespeare (Boston: Dante University of America, 1992).
Carlo Goldoni, The Venetian Twins /Mirandolina, trans. Ranjit Balt (London: Oberon Books, 1997).
Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hokins UP, 2003).

Other material for this course will be available in a course pack at the beginning of the semester or on line, according to the syllabus.