Roman Shakespeare by Daniela Guardamagna

Roman Shakespeare by Daniela Guardamagna

This book addresses the memory of Rome: the dialectic between the glorious historical past of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire and its echoes, representations and interpretations in the works of Shakespeare. The essays explore multiple layers of time and place in relation to Shakespearean plays: throughout the world (from Romania to Japan) and down the centuries, in the arts (paintings, music) and in dramatic performances.

Individual essays (by Michel Dobson, Peter Holland, Richard Wilson and Piero Boitani, among others) address multiple aspects of the complex relationship between two countries (England and Italy) and two moments in time (the Ancient Roman and Early Modern periods). Essays include analyses of less studied works (e.g. Cymbeline), rewritings of Roman narratives (e.g. Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece), modern enactments of Shakespearean performances around the world, the representation of Shakespearean myths in Renaissance paintings, and the music accompanying the text of Roman plays.

Daniela Guardamagna is Full Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where she lectures on Shakespeare and Early Modern drama. Her main fields of study are Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Shakespeare's tragedies, Beckett, and dystopia. She has written extensively on Jacobean drama, on Shakespeare's apocrypha, on some aspects of Shakespeare's plays, on contemporary theatre and on dystopias. She has just completed a monograph on the tragedies of Middleton after the revision of his canon, forthcoming in October 2018. She organised the international conference Shakespeare 2016. Memoria di Roma, together with colleagues from the other two universities in Rome. She has adapted for Italian television the BBC versions of Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest.