Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This chapter is dedicated to my mother and my Istrian family.
- 2.
Maurice Aymard, “Le minoranze”, in L’Europa e gli europei, edited by Fernand Braudel (Bari: Laterza, 1992), 204.
- 3.
Mate Zorić, “Croati e altri Slavi del Sud nella letteratura italiana dell’800,” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensa 33-34-35-36 (1972–73): 126–127.
- 4.
Giorgio Pullini, “Il teatro fra scena e società”, in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 6: Dall’età napoleonica alla Prima Guerra Mondiale, edited by Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1986), 256 ff.
- 5.
Carmelo Alberti, “La scena delle metamorfosi. Il teatro negli anni della municipalità democratica di Padova,” in La Municipalità democratica di Padova (1797). Storia e cultura, edited by A. Balduino (Venezia: Marsilio, 1998), 154.
- 6.
Alberti, “La scena delle metamorfosi,” 145.
- 7.
Giustina Renier Michiel, “Prefazione della traduttrice,” in Opere drammatiche di Shakespeare volgarizzate da una dama veneta, 1 Vol. (Venezia: eredi Costantini, 1798), 15.
- 8.
Carlo Federici, Otello, ossia lo Slavo in Capricci teatrali, volume 3 (Roma: Gioacchino Puccinelli, 1805). A different edition appears in an undated miscellany housed at the Marciana national library in Venice. All quotations from the text refer to the Rome edition and its relative page numbers. Translations are mine.
- 9.
Antonio Neu Mayr, Notizie biografico-letterarie sul commediografo Camillo Federici (Venezia: tipografia Alvisopoli, 1838), 38.
- 10.
For this hypothesis, see Mate Zorić, “Croati e altri Slavi del Sud,” 128.
- 11.
Voltaire, Zaire (1732). In Théâtre 1, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, 50 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877), vol. 2.
- 12.
Margaret Gilman, Othello in French (Paris: Libraire Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1925), 36.
- 13.
Claudia Campanelli, “J. F. Ducis: Othello come spunto per una tragedia neoclassica,” in Il libro del teatro, edited by Roberto Ciancarelli and Silvia Carandini (Roma: Bulzoni, 1996), 141. Marion Monaco, Shakespeare on the French Stage in the Eighteenth Century (Paris: Didier, 1974), 162.
- 14.
Quoted by Julie Hankey in William Shakespeare, Othello, edited by Julie Hankey (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 76.
- 15.
Campanelli, “Ducis”, 147.
- 16.
Genoa, it might be added, was another ancient oligarchic republic with historical relations with Eastern Europe. Renato Risaliti, Gli slavi e l’Italia: viaggi e rapporti dal Quattrocento al Novecento (Moncalieri: Centro interuniversitario di ricerche sul Viaggio in Italia, 1996), 155.
- 17.
Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs. The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 224.
- 18.
Goran Stanivukovic, “Illyria Revisited: Shakespeare and the Eastern Adriatic,” Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, edited by Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 402; see also Martin Procházka, “Shakespeare’s Illyria, Sicily and Bohemia: Other Spaces, Other Times, or Other Economies?”, Litteraria Pragensia 12, no. 23, special issue on “Shakespeare’s Illyrias: Heterotopies, Identities, (Counter) histories” (2002): 130–149.
- 19.
Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 45
- 20.
Larry Wolff, “The Enlightened Anthropology of Friendship in Venetian Dalmatia: Primitive Ferocity and Ritual Fraternity Among the Morlacchi,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 2 (1998–1999), 158.
- 21.
Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 68–69.
- 22.
Mate Zorić, Italia e Slavia. Contributi sulle relazioni letterarie italo-jugoslave dall’Ariosto al D’Annunzio (Padova: Antenore, 1989), 1–24. As G. Stanikunovic observes, quoting Cicero, the association of Illyria with violence is much older. “Illyria Revisited”, 402.
- 23.
Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 64.
- 24.
Venice and the Slavs, 75.
- 25.
Venice and the Slavs, 75.
- 26.
Wolff, “Enlightened Anthropology”, 157.
- 27.
Quoted in Wolff, “Enlightened Anthropology”, 157.
- 28.
“Enlightened Anthropology”, 163.
- 29.
Zorić, “Croati e altri Slavi del Sud”, 116–117.
- 30.
Alberto Fortis, Viaggio in Dalmazia, ed. Eva Viani (Venezia: Marsilio, 1987), 38 [my translation]. See Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 176, for a discussion of this passage.
- 31.
Zorić, “Croati e altri Slavi del Sud”, 4.
- 32.
This speech seems to be delivered by Guelfo, even though it is assigned to one GAL, an abbreviation which corresponds to no other character and is probably a misprint.
- 33.
Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 225.
- 34.
Quoted in Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 152.
- 35.
Quoted in Venice and the Slavs, 306.
- 36.
Zorić, “Croati e altri Slavi del Sud”, 128
- 37.
It is also to be noted in passing that if divine assistance is invoked throughout the play, no specific mention of religion is ever made. Here, the distinction between Catholic Dalmatians and Orthodox Morlacchi seems irrelevant. Giustina Renier Michiel had suggested, echoing Charles Gildon, that the Moor’s tumultuous and wandering life had prevented him from studying any religion in depth and choosing a definite one: his faith must have been at once Christian and Muslim, with a smack of magic. See Anna Busi, Otello in Italia (1777–1972) (Bari: Adriatica, 1973), 24.
- 38.
Alberti, “La scena delle metamorfosi”, 156–157.
- 39.
Zorić, “Croati e altri Slavi del Sud”, 128.
- 40.
Giovanni Scarabello and Veronica Gusso, Processo al Moro. Venezia 1811. Razzismo, follia, amore e morte (Roma: Jouvence, 2000).
- 41.
William Shakespeare, Le theatre anglois, vol. 1 (London, 1746), 39.
- 42.
Giustina Renier Michiel, Ottello [sic], in Opere drammatiche di Shakespeare, 118.
- 43.
I refer to the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia as applied by Martin Procházka in his essay “Shakespeare’s Illyria”. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27.
- 44.
Bassi, Le metamorfosi di Otello, 165–168. See also Chap. 4.
- 45.
Angelo Del Boca, Italiani brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2009).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bassi, S. (2016). Slav-ing Othello. In: Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-50285-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49170-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)