Seminario Permanente Studi Shakespeariani

Past events

2014 

Da Beckett a Shakespeare. La Tempesta messa in scena da Valerio Binasco (19 dicembre)
a cura di Rosy Colombo, Nicola Fano, Nadia Fusini, Andrea Peghinelli con la partecipazione di Francesca Bernardini.

L’evento che vede Valerio Binasco protagonista di questo Seminario di Studi Shakespeariani nelle aule della Sapienza si inserisce in una tradizione di studi volta a sondare l’abisso poetico e drammatico della Tempesta; una delle ultime opere, se non proprio l’ultima, di Shakespeare (1611). Una tradizione avviata negli anni Settanta del secolo scorso da una memorabile collaborazione fra Agostino Lombardo e Giorgio Strehler per la messa in scena al Piccolo di Milano (maggio 1978), entrambi consapevoli di una mutata visione dell’opera, fuori dalla convenzione di spettacolarità e perdono. Ora ne coglievano piuttosto l’inafferrabilità, la mancanza di un “centro”: e cercavano la resa di alcuni nodi di senso senza la pretesa di scioglierli in spiegazioni razionali. Quella storica collaborazione dettò a Lombardo scritti importanti come La grande conchiglia (2002) e infuse energia nuova alle sue lezioni universitarie, tanto sapienti quanto a loro volta teatrali, grazie alla passione della voce e del gesto. L’intero carteggio fra i due, durato un anno su questioni traduttive e su scelte di regia, vide poi le stampe, a cura mia, per l’editore Donzelli, nel 2007. Nel frattempo Eduardo regalava alla Sapienza la prima lettura della sua traduzione in napoletano antico (1983), suggestivamente riproposta quest’anno da Paola Quarenghi e Antonella Ottai.

2015

Dealing with Shakespeare’s heritage: Edward Eond’s Anatomy of the Human (10 dicembre)
The playwright in conversation with Rosy Colombo, Andrea Peghinelli and Sapienza University students with the participation of David Tuaillon.

Edward Bond is considered one of Great bBitain’s most important, challenging and controversial playwrights. His formal and thematic innovations contributed to bring into question the function of contemporary dramatic literature. The pope’s wedding, his first play staged at the royal court theatre in 1962, was defined as an astonishing tour de force. Then, in 1965, followed Saved which would become a classic, a landmark for uncompromising playwriting. ‘It is one of those rare work of art that can be said to have rearranged the cultural landscape’, wrote Michael Billington. It proved that even inarticulate characters were worthy of attention in a new dramaturgy and exposed the absurdity of theatrical censorship. Violence is culturally determined, it is a society product and, as a ‘cheap consumer commodity’, it is showed to be the outcome of a class-based capitalist society that depends on its existence on a semi-illiterate workforce imbued with images of aggression. ronald bryden in his review vividly remarked that with Saved Bond wanted to ‘rub our noses in the fact the real new poor are the old poor plus television, sinking deeper in a form of poverty we do not yet recognise – poverty of culture’, an image that is tragically still up to date. His characters are not screened behind a literary language. through the impoverishment of their linguistic capacity, bond exposes their moral and cultural vacuum, in their dialogues they can just convey the most basic needs or feelings.

2017

La stoffa dei sogni. La Tempesta tra Shakespeare e Eduardo (22 maggio)
a cura di Andrea Peghinelli, coordina Giuseppe Massara.

Proiezione de La Stoffa dei sogni. Interviene il regista del film Gianfranco Cabiddu. Partecipano alla discussione Isabella Imperiali, Paola Quarenghi.

2018(a)

Shakespeare's English Goes Digital: Texts, Tools, Methods (9 marzo)
a cura di Donatella Montini, Giuseppe Massara, Iolanda Plescia, Monika Wozniak.

Digital databases and text analysis tools offer us radically improved ways to understand Shakespeare's English, both within the Shakespeare canon, and in the wider context of Early Modern English language. Shakespeare's English Goes Digital: Texts, Tools, Methods aims to newly investigate the ways in which digital tools can aid contextual glossing and the translation of Shakespeare, as well as how an awareness of statistical text analysis can serve to question or refine traditional literary criticism. This event is a Sapienza Permanent Seminar on Shakespearean Studies and part of a Sapienza Department research project on Shakespeare’s language in translation.

2018(b)

Peter Stein e il teatro di Shakespeare (7 maggio)
a cura di Giuseppe Massara e Andrea Peghinelli.

Peter Stein, uno dei più importanti e innovativi registi della scena teatrale contemporanea, incontra gli studenti in un colloquio con Mara Fazio, Gianluigi Fogacci e Andrea Peghinelli che verterà sulle sue messe in scena shakespeariane. L'evento si inserisce nell'ambito del Seminario Permanente di Studi Shakespeariani. 

2020

Voice and voices in Shakespeare's world (20-21 febbraio)
a cura di Donatella Montini, Iolanda Plescia, Andrea Peghinelli, Irene Ranzato.

The reception of Shakespeare’s plays reflects the history of the interpretation of his dramatic language. Playwriting implies cohesive textual and physical structures through which words resonate, that is why a play can never be taken as a definitive text; on the contrary, it stands for the precarious nature of the theatrical word which changes as it is voiced in performance or as it becomes the voice of linguistic, cultural, historical or political stances. For these reasons, the conference will take into consideration material aspects related to performance: much as the Shakespearean text is peppered with words that are now archaic and with familiar words whose original meanings have changed, so too the means of stage representation also undergo constant change, change inflected by the shifting behaviours animating the social world outside the theatre. This admission is hardly shocking: all participants in a production (translator, actors, directors, scholars?) are trying to make it speak, which means that they must speak for it, by it, and that it will speak in their present voices. The role and functions of oral/aural aspects of Shakespeare’s dramatic language will - also and necessarily - be part of our investigation: linguistic perspectives have recently taken a fresh look at ‘speech-related’ written genres, and have offered important clues as to the historical use of language as face-to-face interaction. Possible issues to be tackled include: the discovery of dialect in the early modern period as a question of cultural authority conveying both the perception of the ‘Other’, and the definition of a national ‘Self’; the idea of alternative Englishes, defined by their value or status relative to other English dialects (including the King’s English); material traces of orality in objects of writing on stage; the performative representation of different accents and their cultural and ideological impact; the question of original pronunciation; linguistic, literary and performative multilingual interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants, or with foreign languages.