Tragedy without society: Alfieri’s Italian theater and the discourse of value

Abstract

This essay explores the connections between the meditations on theater by the Italian pre‐Romantic tragedian Vittorio Alfieri and the larger European discussion about the centrality of civic society in the creation of “literary value,” a notion born in large part because of the emergence of two defining Enlightenment disciplines, aesthetics and political economy. In lamenting Italy’s lack of civil society – a view echoed in the most important Romantic foreign novel about Italy, Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy, 1807) – Alfieri’s writings reveal the major obstacles for the creation of a tragic stage in an Italy lacking the same public sphere that was elsewhere transforming European culture. The enormous semantic pressure Alfieri exerts upon the signifier il popolo (the people) in his tragedy Bruto secondo (The Second Brutus, 1789) gives aesthetic form to his ideas about the absence of the necessary national and social components for an Italian tragic theater.