Arrigo Boito’s Legacy to Futurism: Re Orso and its influence on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance

Abstract

This article establishes the mock-epic poem, Re Orso, by Arrigo Boito, first published in 1864, as an underacknowledged source text for Le Roi Bombance, an important pre-Futurist play by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, first published in 1905. In so doing, it asserts Boito’s legacy to twentieth-century Italian modernism, a standing often denied to him. The debt Marinetti owed to nineteenth-century Italian literature is also established, one often neglected due to the fact that Marinetti wrote exclusively in French between 1899 and 1912. A new interpretation of the philosophy of Re Orso is offered, which argues that a rejection of anthropocentrism constitutes the poem’s central message. There is a demonstration of how Le Roi Bombance built on the ideas put forward in Re Orso, and how Marinetti would subsequently make a rejection of the anthropocentric system an important element of his Futurist theory of literature, following the launch of the Futurist movement in 1909.