Eleonora Duse Research Articles

VERGA AND DUSE: TRANSPOSING SILENCE FROM ‘IL CANARINO DEL N. 15’ TO IN PORTINERIA. A PRELUDE TO SYMBOLISM?

This article offers a thorough examination of the central hypothesis that Verga’s In portineria (1885), based on the short story ‘Il canarino del n. 15’ (1883), anticipates the French Symbolist theatre of silence. Through a textual analysis of the way in which Verga transposes the unspoken in the passage from page to stage, the article illustrates how In portineria can be considered a ‘pre-intimist’ work — the antithesis of his first play, Cavalleria rusticana (1884). Despite the remarkable similarities, however, the ideas underlying the Symbolist literary movement remain different from Verga’s desire to reflect reality, thus it is suggested in conclusion that what actually inspired his ‘intimist’ approach was Eleonora Duse, the grande attrice instrumental in transposing this silent voice onto the stage.

Enif Robert, F.T. Marinetti e il romanzo Un ventre di donna: bisessualità, trauma e mito dell'isteria

Author(s): Re, Lucia | Abstract: This article provides the first in-depth and contextual study of the experimental futurist novel Un ventre di donna, written during the First World War by the Italian author and stage actress Enif Robert in collaboration with F.T. Marinetti, who allowed some of his wartime letters from the front to be included in the novel. Un ventre di donna also incorporates letters by the famous actress Eleonora Duse, who was a close friend of Robert’s. The article explores in particular the theme of bisexuality and female homosexuality in the novel in the context of the ideology of gender in Italy and in Europe in the early 20th century, and in particular with reference to the influential work of Otto Weininger and concurrent theories of hysteria and bisexuality, as well as the so-called “gender inversion” generated by the war.

Eleonora Duse's Library: The Disclosure of Aesthetic Value in Real Acting

Eleonora Duse's Library: The Disclosure of Aesthetic Value in Real Acting

The Spirit of the Chorus in D'Annunzio's La città morta

Fros nella pugna invitto (O Eros, invincible in strife) begins Gabriele D'Annunzio's tragic drama, La citta morta (The Dead City, 1898). (1) These are the words that are being read to the blind Anna by Blanca Maria, the beautiful young woman who holds the important position of being the play's primary object of desire. They are the same words that form the play's epigraph, a line from Sophocles' Antigone. The result of such literary admixture is convergence. An attempt is made to invoke the spirit of Antigone in the figure of Bianca Maria, to bring together ancient and modern heroine. But the reference also enacts a more complicated convergence, for these are not the words of Antigone but those of Sophocles' chorus. Concerning these opening lines, it has been said that The space of modern tragedy is an empty zone where only of the ancient of the chorus remain. In this space, the chorus can be expressed only in a quotation ... the lone voice of a woman who reads from a book. (2) This article examines what constitutes these traces of the ancient of the chorus,' focusing its attention on the clamor of classical tragedy. For D'Annunzio, whose interest in Attic drama was whetted by his trip in 1895 to see Schliemann's excavations of Mycenae, it was the clamorous aspect of Greek drama that best represented its genius. La citta morta represents his first attempt to incorporate the ancient spirit, as he saw it, into a modern tragedy. (3) One cannot bring up the of classic tragedy without thinking of the chorus, whose presence first and foremost separates classic and modern drama, at least superficially. To solve the problem of how to incorporate a chorus into a drama of fin-de-siecle Europe, D'Annunzio looked to the diva and to what she could accomplish onstage. The result is a chorus of one. She is Anna, the blind older woman married to Alessandro, the man who is in love with the younger Bianca Maria, who is in turn incestuously desired by her brother Leonardo. She is the figure around which this mangled love story congregates, but she is also D'Annunzio's modern chorus, the conduit through which the characters are presented to a modern audience. It has been said that the figure in which the most precise psychology of ancient dramaturgy is maintained, the one who represents most evidently the new theatrical vision of D'Annunzio, is that of Anna. (4) Her role was written specifically for the great actresses who dominated European theater in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first brought to the stage by Sarah Bernhardt in the French production and then by Eleonora Duse in the original Italian production. As the blind woman from whom nothing can be hidden, she is both Tiresias and Cassandra. Bianca Maria says of her, Ella sa tutto, ella comprende tutto. Non e possible nascondere (60) (She knows everything, she understands everything. It is not possible to conceal; 122). Anna's importance to the whole rests on the duality of her position within the play. As both seer and choral figure, she acts as a type of lynchpin that holds the drama together. D'Annunzio conceived of Anna's role in his play in light of ideas concerning how the chorus functions in Attic drama. The difficulty of assessing this indebtedness derives from the singularity of each classical chorus and its varying roles to each particular tragedy. La citta morta may begin with a reference to Antigone, but Anna's role as blind prophetess, as part Tiresias and part Cassandra, also brings to mind, among other things, Oedipus Tyrannus and Agamemnon. Thus it is less these specific works than an idea of classical tragedy that inflects La citta morta. D'Annunzio announces his influences in the first documented reference to the play we have, a letter from 1895. He writes: At Mycenae I reread Sophocles and Aeschylus, under the Gate of the Lions. The form of my drama is already clear and firm. …

Toward a National Heterotopia : Ancient Theaters and the Cultural Politics of Performing Ancient Drama in Modern Greece

Performing in ancient Greek theaters in modern Greece is an activity which often finds itself embroiled in the cultural politics surrounding a classical heritage which is conceptualized as venerable, unbroken, and exclusive. The first ever instance of a non-Greek production of a Greek play at the ancient theater of Epidaurus was the British Royal National Theatre's Oresteia directed by Peter Hall in 1982. (1) Despite Hall's adherence to key conventions of classical theater, such as an all-male cast and the use of masks, the admission of a non-Greek group to the theater of Epidaurus did not go uncontested. Yannis Varveris, a well-known critic, maintained: I do not think that this generosity is to our own cultural benefit, especially when it comes to Epidaurus. We are--as Rondiris has at least proved--capable of articulating our heritage better than anyone. A place of such sanctification like this koilon [the spectators' area in ancient amphitheaters] could be reserved for the whatsoever most legitimate interpretation of ancient drama and not yielded as an arena for international theater acrobatics, especially if the genre itself is not amenable to them. It is a matter of category. The tragic word is not just one page in theater repertory. It is morally and aesthetically adamant, most of all because it is ontological. Epidaurus is its natural manger. On the contrary, the foreign director, having not the affinity of language and the umbilical cord--of both language and place--with the source deigns well-intentioned experimentations which are perhaps irreverent. (2) This passage encapsulates the most cherished Greek views about ancient drama: uniqueness, legitimate interpretations, and the authenticity of a highly acclaimed tradition established by past Greek directors (Dimitris Rondiris, 1899-1981). It is telling that the theatrical space is discussed in a language pregnant with religious allusions (sanctification, manger) which, in turn, generates the view of a sacredly ontological text. Most notably, performing in Epidaurus, in the critic's view, presupposes a biological relationship with the place and the language (umbilical cord, source) which naturalizes the idea of Greek continuity from antiquity down to the present day. The view of the theater of Epidaurus as a sacred place continues to come up in disputes over stagings of Greek drama by, most characteristically, non-Greek directors. In the 2009 production of Dimiter Gotscheff's Persians, for example, the audience was exasperated every time the actors set foot on the ancient thymele, the altar of the god Dionysus, which is not meant to be stepped over according to a well-established Greek theater custom. (3) The spectators responded in indignation against the supposed act of desecration with hisses, loud jeers, and massive walk-outs which nearly interrupted the performance. The sacralization of the ancient theater of Epidaurus within modern Greek culture requires serious scrutiny in relation to the Greek claim of an exclusive authority over classical antiquity and the sense of cultural preeminence. However, the idea of sacred ancient ruins was not unknown to the nineteenth-century European imagination. The foundation of Greek state itself in the mid-nineteenth century triggered the Romantic Hellenism of European travelers, by providing the actual place where they could connect to the classical past through the ruins of antiquity. (4) In this spirit, leading theater figures of that time sought the very origin of the theatrical art in the ancient theater of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis. When great Italian tragic actresses toured to Athens, their visits to the ancient monuments was filled with a sense of worship. Adelaide Ristori marveled at the theater of Dionysus in 1865, (5) while it is submitted that Eleonora Duse went on a pilgrimage there on the evening before her Athenian performance in 1899. …

Teatro y vanguardia en hispanoamérica (review)

204 LATINAMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW is incomplete unless it marries this consideration of technique with a thorough historical understanding of the work in question and the context of its creation. The inclusion in the volume of essays treating the techniques and contributions of actors – among them Margarita Xirgu, Irene López Heredia, Enrique Santos Discépolo, María Podestá, Pablo Podestá, and Eleonora Duse – facilitates the connections among theory, practice and history emphasized by De Marinis. In “Teatro, diálogo y silencios: El dolor de las palabras,” María Esther Badin eloquently discusses Eleonora Duse’s conflicted relationship with words, which the actor herself describes in her personal correspondence. Duse rejected traditional rhetorical conventions, choosing instead to obligate each word to “nacer de nuevo” through speech, silences and gesture. This technique forced her to grapple with the limitations of language, a process that ultimately resulted in critical acclaim for her interpretations. Finally, the volume’s critical analyses of texts and performances treat the works of playwrights from both Spain – Rojas Zorrilla and Sanchis Sinisterra, for example – and Latin America – Rafuls; Rosencof; Conteris; Escalante; Pavlovsky; and Spregelburd, among others. Jorge Dubatti’s essay “Relectura de Flores de papel: dramaturgia vertical y producción de sentido político” is representative of those studies that offer a new reading of canonical texts. Dubatti rejects previous interpretations of Flores de papel as an essentially absurdist work. Although he concedes that El Merluza lacks referential qualities typical in traditional realism, he argues that the piece ultimately cannot be classified as absurdist, given its situated nature vis-à-vis the socio-historical context of Chile. Instead, Dubatti posits that Wolff’s work offers a dramatic metaphor of a realistic situation: the violence underlying the relationship between Eva and El Merluza, which in turn represents the socio-economic and political tensions present in Chile at the time the work was written. Dubatti then goes on to conceive of Flores de papel as an example of “realismo vertical,” a concept elaborated by Wolff in which a realistic situation is condensed into a metaphor, thereby eliminating the justification of cause-effect relationships in the dramatic action. To conclude, this volume offers a valuable contribution to the field of Hispanic theatre and, true to the goals of GETEA, will be particularly useful to both practitioners and scholars who wish to expand their respective fields of reference. Ariel Strichartz St. Olaf College Reverte Bernal, Concepción. Teatro y vanguardia en hispanoamérica. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006. 192 p. The considerable amount of critical attention to the poetry and narrative of writers like Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo and Miguel ÁngelAsturias has eclipsed FALL2007 205 their less investigated dramatic works. Concepción Reverte Bernal’s study of plays by these and additional writers builds on a growing body of criticism on Spanish American vanguardist theatre. This book’s strength lies in its comparative and interdisciplinary nature, as the critic is keenly attentive to considering each play within the framework of not only its author’s life and larger body of work, but also international artistic tendencies. While offering astute commentaries, however, the chapters assembled in the book do not coalesce around an overarching critical position, and a guiding thesis is not clearly articulated from the start of some of them.At times, lengthy direct citations of previous critics also detract from Reverte Bernal’s original insight; she diminishes her own critical voice, for example, by ending two chapters with prolonged excerpts from other scholars. These statements aside, the author’s exhaustive research has generated perceptive readings of the plays and their contexts, and scholars will appreciate the extensive bibliographies that accompany each chapter. The introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s focus on dramatic texts written from the 1920s to the 1940s with a useful summary of general movements (vis-à-vis international avant-garde tendencies), key works and important critical assessments of Spanish American literary vanguardism. The chapter ends with an apt consideration of the relevance of vanguardist drama – and Reverte Bernal’s study – to contemporary questions, such as how to create an intellectual and experimental theatre with wide appeal and the role of theatre amid increasingly mimetic technologies. The second chapter examines...

The Political Afterlife of Eleonora Duse

Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), international star, national treasure, and patriotic Italian died in Pittsburgh in April 1924. Those involved in the memorializing process contended for control of her body, attempting to interpolate her renown in competing narratives of national pride and the universality of art. Duse died at a turning point for Italy, the year Mussolini's Fascists became the majority party. For Mussolini and the Fascists, Duse's death became the occasion for a pageant of Italian pride through a series of carefully orchestrated ceremonies. At the same time, the theatre community tried to establish an artistic narrative more akin to the ideals Duse expressed in life. In the end, nationalist motifs dominated the memorial discourse. Duse's own assertions of the importance of spirit over corporeality became an ironic footnote to a story in which the actress's body stood in for the nation.

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (review)

.Reviews113 might also quibble with Mayer's contention that melodrama, unlike tragedy, "exacts no toll" on its protagonists: u[t]he good characters emerge unscathed; they have grown wiser in the ways of the world" (149). Such, of course, is generally the case. But what is one to make ofthe numerous historical melodramas on the laterVictorian stage,Dion Boucicault's RobertEmmet(1884) for instance, that lead inexorably to the gallows or scaffold, culminating in the execution of the historical hero turned martyr? These questions, much like the unfortunate spelling of Eleonora Duse's first name (corrected in the index, but not in the text both times it appears), hardly amount to a molehill ofobjection. For much like writing a letter of recommendation for a superior colleague or student, tempering praise for this very fine book with a few grains of criticism is tough work. There's just not very much to complain about. Stephen Watt Indiana University Alan Shepard.Marlowe's Soldiers:Rhetorícs ofMasculinityin the Age oftheArmada.Aidershot and Burlington:Ashgate,2002. Pp. viii + 248. $69.95. In Marlowe's Soldiers, Alan Shepard focuses less on Marlowe's depictions of actual soldiers than on the playwright's complex response to the period's stern military ethos, an important component ofthe early modern understanding of masculinity. For Shepard, Marlowe's characterization of military men, perhaps even his choice ofplots,was deeplyaffectedbythe war fever in England following the defeat ofthe Armada in 1588. After all, during the 1590s the reading public was deluged with treatises and pamphlets (some ofwhich Shepard analyzes) on the subjects of military strategy and deportment. Like Marlowe, several other playwrights, including Peele, Kyd, and Chapman, addressed public concerns about state security by treating military subjects in their plays. Shepard argues that Marlowe's work both presents and problematizes his culture's "regulated codes of masculinity" as well as its valorization of"callous violence, ... ironic disrespect for diplomatic and even martial rhetoric, and contempt for any form oftheatricalized identity"; ultimately,"the plays do bedevil the putative links ... between state security, prescriptive English masculinity, and the act ofplaying soldier on the stage" (4). Shepard carefully contextualizes Marlowe in a postArmada England whose values Shepard reconstructs not only from dramas but from such texts as Barnabe Rich's Allarme to England and A Path-Way to MilitaryPractise,William Blandys TheCastle,orpictureofpollicy,and Geoffrey 114ComparativeDrama Gates's The Defense ofMilitaryProfession. This book's historicist presentation ofthe cultural documents ofthe day, then, serves a broadly deconstructive rhetorical analysis. Shepard's work usefully complicates the standard views of Marlowe's protagonists. The book benefits from the recent work ofEmily Bartels, Simon Shepherd, Nick de Somogyi, and Curtis Breight but builds primarily on the foundation provided by older historical critics such as Paul Kocher, Leicester Bradner,and Paul Jorgensen.With chapters on TamburlaineIand II,Dido, Queen ofCarthage, Edward II, The Jew ofMalta, The Massacre at Paris, and Doctor Faustus, this work offers a graceful argumentative arc. In Shepard's formulation , the book's argument forms a parabola: Its highest points are its first and last chapters on Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus respectively: in these plays we can see Marlowe's least and most ironic representations ofthe culture wars between soldiers and civilians.... [T]he farther one reads beyond Chapter 1, the weaker the magnetic pull of Tamburlaine's hypermilitarism; the closer to Chapter 6, the stronger the playwright's skepticism. (15-16) Given this structure, the most provocative chapters are those in the second half of the book. Hypermilitarism in Tamburlaine and even Dido needs little commentary . The authorial resistance that Shepard perceives in such elements as the responses ofTamburlaine's prisoners seems slight; these scenes are perhaps an inevitable part of dramatizing a conqueror's progress. In the early chapters the most notable sections are those that draw on contemporary documents to compare Marlowe's handling of well-known events with that of other writers. Aeneas's betrayal ofDido, for example, seemed serious enough to Barnabe Rich for him to question why the English "'for the glory of antiquity shoulde bee so fond to recount their Genealogy from such a desteyned progeny'" (qtd. in Shepard 54). Several of Marlowe's contemporaries wrote approvingly...

Vera Kommissarzhevskaya: The Actress as Symbolist Eidolon

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the leading lady of the legitimate stage was often regarded as a diva. Just as such romantic feminine archetypes as la belle dame sans merci and the ethereal muse were enjoying a revival in decadent poetry and painting, so the great actresses of the time embodied them in flesh-and-blood. Sarah Bernhardt's gaunt features and flamboyant personality, when portrayed in the posters of Mucha and the poetry of Rostand, created a type of exotic sensuality. In contrast, instinctive femininity stared from the limpid gaze of Eleonora Duse, her soulfulness glorified by Gabriele D'Annunzio. For their contemporaries, these women were more than actresses, more even than spectacular celebrities: they were at once the incarnation and the epitome of a refined sensibility that dwelt in transcendent spheres. They were less of this world than of Byzantium or the inner realm of the feminine psyche. Artists and poets projected on to them fantasies and obsessions which, refiltered through their performances on stage, inspired new aesthetic creativity. Bernhardt the divine, Duse the earth-mother: add to these another panel, to make a triptych: the panel of the prescient mystic. As Bernhardt and Duse associated with fashionable poets, so Vera Fyodorovna Kommissarzhevskaya (1864-1910)' hobnobbed with the literary avant-garde of Russia. She could reckon in her orbit the pleiad of Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Fyodor Sologub, Georgy Chulkov, almost the entire cohort of Russian symbolism. If she sought to nourish her art on their ideas, they in turn looked to her to realize their concepts in the theatre. This essay does not pretend to be a full biography of Kommissarzhevskaya or to evaluate her place on the Russian stage. It intends to explore

The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse

The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse

Sixteen Years of the Piccolo Teatro

The Piccolo Teatro of the city of Milan, now entering its seventeenth year, represents both the result of a historical movement for the renewal of the Italian theatre and an entirely new phenomenon whose methods and orientations have served as a model for many similar organizations. Historical precedents can be found in the sustained efforts of persons like Eduardo Boutet, Eleonora Duse, Luigi Pirandello, and Silvio D'Amico; it was they who encouraged the Italian theatre to organize in permanent companies and to improve its technical and aesthetic levels, thus putting it on a par with the theatres of leading foreign countries.When the Piccolo Teatro began in 1947, the Italian theatre was characterized by two traditions: the star, and the traveling company. Throughout Europe the day of the great director (Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Copeau, etc.) had ended; but in Italy it had not yet begun.

The Lady of the Camellias

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi s opera "La Traviata," in a sparkling new translation "One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi s opera "La Traviata," the Oscar-winning musical "Moulin Rouge!," and numerous ballets, stage plays (starring Lillian Gish, Eleonora Duse, Tallulah Bankhead, and Sarah Bernhardt, and films (starring Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Rudolph Valentino, Isabelle Huppert, and Colin Firth), "The Lady of the Camellias" itself was inspired by the real-life nineteeth-century courtesan Marie Duplessis, the lover of the novel s author, Alexander Dumas "fils. "Known to all as the Lady of the Camellias because she is never seen without her favorite flowers, Marguerite Gautier, the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome, and hopelessly in love with her. Marguerite and Armand are the kind of bright, self-destructive young things we still read about in magazines, watch on-screen, or brush up against today. Liesl Schillinger, from the Note on the Translation For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators."