Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Performing National Identity Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

114

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Performing National Identity Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions

Edited by

Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover image: David Hockney: Flight into Italy—Swiss Landscape, 1962, Oil on canvas, 72 x 72'', ©David Hockney Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-2314-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Manfred Pfister Introduction: Performing National Identity

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1. Early Modern Literary Exchanges Werner von Koppenfels ‘Stripping up his sleeves like some juggler’: Giordano Bruno in England, or, The Philosopher as Stylistic Mountebank

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Ralf Hertel ‘Mine Italian brain ’gan in your duller Britain operate most vilely’: Cymbeline and the Deconstruction of Anglo-Italian Differences

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2. Italian and English Art in Dialogue John Peacock Inigo Jones and the Reform of Italian Art

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Alison Yarrington ‘Made in Italy’: Sculpture and the Staging of National Identities at the International Exhibition of 1862

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3. Travelling Images Barbara Schaff Italianised Byron – Byronised Italy

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Fabienne Moine Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity and Shaping the Poetic Self

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Stephen Gundle The ‘Bella Italiana’ and the ‘English Rose’: Reflections on Two National Typologies of Feminine Beauty

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4. Political Negotiations Pamela Neville-Sington Sex, Lies, and Celluloid: That Hamilton Woman and British Attitudes towards the Italians from the Risorgimento to the Second World War

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Peter Vassallo Italian Culture versus British Pragmatics: The Maltese Scenario

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David Forgacs Gramsci’s Notion of the ‘Popular’ in Italy and Britain: A Tale of Two Cultures

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Carla Dente Personal Memory / Cultural Memory: Identity and Difference in Scottish-Italian Migrant Theatre

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5. Contemporary Mediations Claudio Visentin The Theatre of the World: British-Italian Identities on the Tourism Stage

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Judith Munat Bias and Stereotypes in the Media: The Performance of British and Italian National Identities

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Sara Soncini Re-locating Shakespeare: Cultural Negotiations in Italian Dubbed Versions of Romeo and Juliet

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Mariangela Tempera Something to Declare: Italian Avengers and British Culture in La ragazza con la pistola and Appuntamento a Liverpool

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Anthony King English Fans and Italian Football: Towards a Transnational Relationship

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Greg Walker Selling England (and Italy) by the Pound: Performing National Identity in the First Phase of Progressive Rock: Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and PFM

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Gisela Ecker Zuppa Inglese and Eating up Italy: Intercultural Feasts and Fantasies

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Notes on Contributors

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Manfred Pfister Introduction: Performing National Identity I. National identity is not some naturally given or metaphysically sanctioned racial or territorial essence that only needs to be conceptualised or spelt out in discursive texts; it emerges from, takes shape in, and is constantly defined and redefined in individual and collective performances. It is in performances—ranging from the scenarios of everyday interactions to ‘cultural performances’ (Milton Singer) such as pageants, festivals, political manifestations, or sports, to the artistic performances of music, dance, theatre, literature, or more recent media—that cultural identity and a sense of nationhood are fashioned.1 National identity is not an essence one is born with but something acquired in and through performances. Particularly important here are intercultural performances and transactions, and that not only in a colonial and postcolonial dimension, where such performative aspects have already been considered, but also in innerEuropean transactions.2 ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ and Italianità, the subject of this anthology, are staged both within each culture and, more importantly, in joint performances of difference across cultural borders. Performing difference highlights differences that ‘make a difference’; it ‘draws a line’ between self and other—boundary lines that are, however, constantly being redrawn and renegotiated, and remain instable and shifting. This book has resulted from the first of a series of four conferences In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions, which was held at the Freie Universität Berlin from 31 March to 2 April 2006 with the generous support of the British Academy, the University of Pisa, and the DFG-sponsored ‘Sonderforschungsbereich 447: Kulturen des Performativen’. Its contributors from Great Britain, Italy, Malta, France, and Germany, all of them members of, or affiliated to, the international In Medias Res research group headed by Martin Stannard (Leicester), focus on how Italians have performed their Italianità to and for British audiences and, respectively, how Brits have performed their Britishness to and for Italian audiences from the Renaissance 1. 2.

See Traditional India: Structure and Change, ed. by Milton Singer (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959). See Fremdheitserfahrung und Fremdheitsdarstellung in okzidentalen Kulturen: Theorieansätze, Medien/Textsorten, Diskursformen, ed. by Bernd Lenz and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Passau: Rothe, 1999).

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to the present. They explore, as it were, ‘Italies’ made in and for England, ‘Englands’ made in and for Italy, and give special emphasis to what is beyond texts and their discursive constructions of national identity, to popular or everyday rather than canonised culture, and, in particular in the last and longest section of this book, to more recent exchanges and transactions.3 To consider national or cultural identity as a sense of identity enacted in individual and collective performances does not depart from the essentialist question of who or what ‘is’ English or Italian; it asks instead how a sense of being English or Italian is created, how one fashions oneself as English or Italian. In anthropological parlance: it is by ‘doing being’ English or Italian that Englishness or Italianità is constructed and performed. It is this performative aspect that distinguishes our approach from the traditional study of stereotypes or from ‘comparative imagology’: where cultural auto- and hetero-stereotypes project static images, performances of identity are active and interactive.4 In this regard, a comparative or interactive perspective such as ours, linking two cultures which, across more than half a millennium, have engaged in significant intercultural exchanges with each other, can be particularly illuminating. What it highlights is how the construction of the other is always informed by the construction of one’s self and vice versa; how the other always serves as a contrastive foil or as a projection screen for the anxieties or the desires of the self; how performing one’s cultural identity is always a performance against the backdrop of the other performing culture or even for it; how our performances of national identity react and respond to expectations and role scenarios projected by the other culture; how we are always both performers and spectators, performers aware of an audience and an audience aware of performances, at one and the same time. To take myself as an example: I notice that, every time I find myself in ‘my’ little village in the Tuscan Maremma, I quite inadvertently am more German with my Italian neighbours than with those in Berlin. Despite all my ambition to become one with them, to fade into the Italian background and ‘go native’ in my performance of a would-be Italian, I, nevertheless, act the German for them, responding in my performance to what I believe they expect from a German—and a German male professor at that, who seems to be to them a German to the second power. That is, I am a German in Berlin, but I act the German in Italy, 3. 4.

See The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers: An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). For the traditional approach see Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. by Cedric C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); for comparative imagology see Europa und das nationale Selbstverständnis: Imagologische Probleme in Literatur, Kunst und Kultur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Hugo Dyserinck and Karl Ulrich Syndram (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988).

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I am ‘doing being the German’—‘den Deutschen geben’, as one would say in German in a phrase rich with theatrical connotations. Of course, within the context of a symposium of two-and-a-half days or, respectively, a single collection of essays, one cannot cover these interactive scenarios exhaustively, neither historically nor systematically or typologically. One can only make inroads—as we are attempting to do here—, inroads from the Renaissance to the present, and inroads across the various arts and media, in which Italian self and English other, or vice versa, English self and Italian other, are not only represented but enacted and performed. The arts and media addressed range from philosophical, political, and poetical self-stagings to theatre, film, and television, from literature to the visual arts and music, from canonised cultural products to the popular culture of the cuisine, tourism, rock concerts, or football and on to political negotiations. Our choices of material opt for heterogeneity, for a historical, generic, and medial diversity that cuts across the domains of literary, visual, media, gender, and cultural studies. However, there is unity on the level of analysis; at least we hope and trust coherence will emerge from the kinds of questions we are asking here. II. Berlin and Germany as a venue for such a conference on Anglo-Italian transactions was not an obvious choice. Why not leave such a topic entirely to the two cultures immediately involved in the transactions and explore them from a participant’s perspective? Malta as a significant in-between place would also make sense as a venue for such research activities as interest in this issue is particularly acute there—a fact borne out by its thriving ‘Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies’ and Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies.5 But what therefore is the reason for the (in this context) eccentric German location? Can it add anything in particular to the reflections on Anglo-Italian relations and transactions? I believe it can, and there are at least two reasons for this. First, the German location and the participation of German (and French!) critics and scholars enhance the awareness that an intensive interaction with Italian culture is not an English privilege but one shared with most of the European and North American cultures. The story of Anglo-Italian transactions is always a partial story—‘partial’ in the double sense of the word: part of a larger story encompassing the transactions between all European cultures; and traditionally seen and studied from the partial or one-sided per5.

See the contribution on the Maltese problems of identity by Peter Vassallo, the institute’s director and general editor of its journal, in this volume.

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spective of one of the main protagonists, the English and the Italians. There is, therefore, certainly some heuristic surplus value to studying these interactions from a bystander or observer position. And it is, therefore, important that not only English and Italian critics study the English and Italian performances of cultural identity and difference, but also critics from other countries. Only by opening up these pursuits to European dimensions will an awareness of a wider, European story and a sense of European cultural identity emerge from the study of bi-lateral performances of national identity and difference. Secondly, there is a special relationship between Britain and Germany to be taken into account here. For cultural interactions with Italy have had a far deeper impact on England and Germany than on any other European countries; none of the other European cultures has fallen as deeply in love with Italy as Britain and Germany. And for both the Anglo-Saxon and the German culture, this love affair—like any passionate love affair—has been charged with the most intensely contradictory impulses and emotions. There has been an English-Italian as well as a German-Italian romance at least since the Renaissance and, more importantly, these two romances, sharing the one object of desire, have become entangled in an erotic triangle of jealous lovers for one object of desire. One may claim that he had come first, ardently wooing Italian culture in his Tudor age already; the other that his love has been deeper and more mature and that it is only the account of his love affair with Italy, Goethe’s Italienische Reise, that has become a national and also a European classic. Let me weave this argument round two images. I will begin with an image of great mythical power for German viewers: Friedrich Overbeck’s Germania und Italia of 1828 (illustration 1).6 There is the spell of romance here, even though the erotic tension and passion is sublimated into sisterly love and tenderness. The two girls amicably share the space of the picture, leaning towards each other, their silhouettes overlapping. There is a subtle interplay of symmetry and a-symmetry at work in this allegory of Italia and Germania which emphasises the concordance and complementariness between the two: the wide and open Italian veduta with its Romanesque building as against the more closed-in German setting with its medieval castle and church; the national tricolore of Italia’s costume as against the more earthy colours of Germania; Italia’s darker complexion against her German sister’s lighter skin and hair; the more erect, higher, and static posture of Italia against the more actively wooing gesture of Germania. The painter of this intercultural romance was the leading figure in 6.

Neue Pinakothek München (Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, 1982), p. 249– 50; ill. IX.

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Illustration 1: Friedrich Overbeck, Germania und Italia (1828), Munich, Neue Pinakothek.

the group of ‘Nazarene’ painters or ‘Deutsch-Römer’, German artists who settled in Rome or nearby Olevano in their search for a more spiritual art, seeking inspiration particularly in the spirituality of early Italian art—just as their Pre-Raphaelite English counterparts would a generation later. And Overbeck went the whole way in this romance: the son of a family of three generations of Lutheran pastors in Lübeck went native—or went as native as one can go if one wishes to go native—and spent the rest of his long life in Rome, re-inventing himself as a Roman Catholic of the most fundamentalist persuasion. The intimacy of the sisterly bonding imagined by him lays claim to a very special, an exclusive and proprietorial Italo-German relationship, a spiritual axis, as it were, that will culminate perversely and disastrously in the military axis between Nazi Germany and fascist Italy a century later. There does not seem to be any space for a third party to this romance—and least of all for a foreigner, some English girl, for instance, or, even worse, some British gentleman. Of course, such English ladies and gentlemen were present in Italy together with the Germans—and that in increasing numbers, alarmingly outnumbering them actually. What does one do with such trespassers on sacred

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grounds, such intruders upon one’s romance? Well, one makes them invisible, as Overbeck does in his allegory, or one ridicules them, as the well-known German Biedermeier painter Carl Spitzweg does in my next image, Engländer in der Campagna (ca. 1845) (illustration 2).7 There are two Italians in this genre painting, both clad in black: the cicerone proffering his commentary on the field of ruins in the Campagna, and an archaeological guard watching them or looking nowhere in particular. And there are, set off in gayer colours, three British tourists, perhaps a family of father, mother, and adult daughter. But there is hardly any communication going on between the two groups: the three Brits seem to be as detached from the two Italians, mere functionaries within the touristic system to them, as they are from the Italian landscape. They apparently do not even deign to look at it and them, the husband being preoccupied with his guidebook, from which he reads to his attentively listening wife, the daughter drawing—without actually looking up—not the landscape with ruins in front of her but rather some déjà vu cliché of the Italianness of Italian landscape. Spitzweg’s caricature satirically rubs in the underlying construction of Anglo-German difference: where the British tourists are ludicrously out of place in Italy and out of contact with its classical heritage, its Southern scenic beauty, and its inhabitants, the German travelling artist who painted the picture takes it all in and sides with Italy and the Italians against the arrogant disregard displayed by the Brits. Such caricaturing of the other’s performance in Italy is by no means restricted to the German view of English tourists. Anyone familiar with German and English travel writing on Italy—but not only on Italy—from the 18th century to today will have noticed that travel writers do not only look at Italy but also look at the English or respectively German travellers looking at Italy. And in this triangulation of gazes, of observers observed, English writers can be just as acerbic in their constructions of national difference as German painters and writers, and frequently are. Over the years, I have compiled an impressive collection of specimens of such moments of triangulated glances between English and German travellers and Italian travellees which demonstrates that the dismissive side glance at travellers from the other country has become a topos in both English and German travel writing. Two examples from a recent English travel book, Charles Lister’s highly acclaimed Between Two Seas (1991), shall suffice here. Here is Lister, heroically walking, all by himself, down the Appian Way, as the subtitle has it, watching a coach load of German tourists arrive in Terracina: 7.

Galerie der Romantik. Nationalgalerie (Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1986), p. 161–62; the painting is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin.

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Illustration 2: Carl Spitzweg, Engländer in der Campagna (ca. 1845), Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. A slick chrome coach has drawn up behind us, expelling a squadron of storm-trooping Einsatzgruppen, pointing their cameras like Sten guns and marching with invasion vigour across the road towards a bar where the waiters are uncertain whether to smile of take cover.8

And here is Lister again, watching German tourists display their racial superiority to the flabbergasted population of Brindisi: Anything to escape the buzz of German tourists, swarming over everything with recent sunburn and discontent at everyone’s inefficiency—no newspapers, no ferry timetables […], in fact no useful information at all. They retaliate by strutting loudly like swollen flamingos, then shunt their Mercedes from one possible departure point to another […] in fits of exasperation. All their heated energy is gazed at sourly by phlegmatic onlookers leaning against walls […]. Another Aryan tribe, the hardheeled Jugend, all creamy-haired and bronzed to the hilt of their rolled-up shorts, are

8.

Charles Lister, Between Two Seas: A Walk Down the Appian Way (London: Minerva, 1991), p. 30.

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Manfred Pfister staggering up from the station, bent like avalanched Atlases under boulders of rucksacks—their flags of discomfort in the pursuit of pleasure.9

Spitzweg’s painting and Lister’s travelogue mirror each other in sharing a passion for Italy that cannot suffer rivals from other cultures and therefore construct the English or German other in terms of tendentious and denigrating dichotomies. In both cases—and in many others—Italy is a stage, on which not only the English and the Germans perform their cultural identity to the Italians, and the Italians to the foreigners, but on which Germans also perform their Germanness to the English and the English their Englishness to the Germans, both maximising the difference between each other to give as sharp a profile as possible to their own identity. So the two stories—the Anglo-Italian and the German-Italian romance—are part of one story and as such need to be studied together. And painful as it may be to observe the longevity of such triangulated constructions of difference and of the interactional mechanisms and dynamics at work in such vicious triangles, only observing and analysing them can help us to make progress in Europe. It is the aim of this book to make a contribution to this process. III. The book is divided into five sections, which follow a roughly chronological order and highlight different kinds of material; here the movement is from literature to the other arts and to wider cultural performances particularly in the present era. We begin not at the beginning, i.e. in the Middle Ages, although there had already been a considerable cultural exchange between England and Italy; we begin rather with Early Modern Literary Exchanges in the Renaissance, when the Anglo-Italian ‘traffic’ of persons, commercial goods, artistic achievements, ideas, and texts took on new dimensions.10 It remained for some time, however, largely one-way traffic, with England at the receiving end: the presence of Protestant refugees, artisans, musicians, painters, or bankers from Italy in England was much more notable and visible than the fairly limited presence of English recusants or of the first (and few) Grand Tourists in Italy. Whereas there was an Italophile faction and fashion of Inglesi italianati at the Tudor court that alarmed many patriots, in Italy, in contrast, 9. Lister, Between Two Seas, p. 304. 10. The best general survey still remains Lewis Einstein’s The Italian Renaissance in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1902).

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there was no reason for such an alarm. The cultural traffic of ideas connected with the Renaissance was equally one-sided: humanism, classical philology, or the new science, aesthetic genres such as the madrigal, the sonnet, the novella, or the commedia dell’arte, and Italian texts by Petrarch, Tasso, Guarini, Castiglione, Machiavelli, or Aretino which were translated into English, to mention but a few of Italy’s cultural exports. There was something theatrical and flamboyant about both the English Italophile faction in their Italianate selffashioning and the comportment of the Italian ‘go-between’ figures staging their foreignness in England.11 Perhaps the most spectacular of all these go-betweens was the philosophical iconoclast Giordano Bruno, whose performances in Oxford and London form the focus of the contribution from Werner von Koppenfels, ‘“Stripping up his sleeves like some juggler”: Giordano Bruno in England, or, The Philosopher as Stylistic Mountebank’. Bruno’s Italian dialogues written during his London years, in which he propagated his revolutionary ideas of infinite worlds, staged and dramatised a clash of cultures and national temperaments with histrionic exuberance. The author’s self-portraiture and the adopted role of boastful foreigner amount to an ironic exhibition of his Italianità and the parade of his copia verborum, a verbal comedy with a serious purpose, serves to parody the pedantic wordiness of official scholasticism and to proclaim a new freedom of speech and thought. The negative, xenophobic English stereotypes of ‘the’ Italian which Bruno holds up, and sends up, so brilliantly in his performance—the mountebank theatricality, deceitfulness, and insubstantiality of the Italian—informed and infected much Elizabethan fiction and drama, not excluding Shakespeare’s. His Cymbeline with its arch-Italian scheming villain Iachimo supporting a black-and-white construction of Anglo-Italian difference seems to be an excellent case in point here. Yet, as Ralf Hertel demonstrates in his essay, ‘“Mine Italian brain ’gan in your duller Britain operate most vilely”: Cymbeline and the Deconstruction of Anglo-Italian Differences’, Shakespeare’s mise-en-scène of Roman-British myth and Italian novella creates a ‘performative surplus’ that undermines the all too facile clichés. What play and audience end up with is rather the unrelieved tension between two performances of national identity, the one defining Englishness by what it is not, and safeguarding it against the Italian poison, infection, and vice, the other by hoisting an emerging British identity upon Roman tradition and establishing ancient Rome as an alternative model for the Jacobean projects of a British nation-building that fuses England, Scotland, and Wales into one. 11. On such ‘in-between’ figures see Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005).

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The second section, Italian and English Art in Dialogue, offers two case studies in the important traffic of art, artists, and works of art between England and Italy—which has had a significant impact throughout all phases of art history from the Early Modern period to Postmodernism. The cover image chosen for the present volume illustrates this enduring impact: David Hockney’s Pop Art painting ‘Flight into Italy—Swiss Landscape’ of 1961 shows two young English artists driving through the Swiss Alps on their way to Italy.12 The lightning speed with which they travel is given a subtle double meaning in the title: ‘flight’ as a flying swiftly towards a passionately desired other, and ‘flight’ as an urgent fleeing, an escape from the self, one’s own culture. And this double movement is given mythical dimensions by the title’s allusion to a time-honoured motif of sacred art: ‘Flight into Italy’ as another ‘Flight into Egypt’, the escape from tyranny—in Hockney’s case from drab, homophobic middle-class England and a yet far from swinging London—towards the promesse du bonheur of some Mediterranean land of sensuous abundance and abandon.13 The two case studies presented here go considerably further back in time, to the seventeenth and the nineteenth century. John Peacock in ‘Inigo Jones and the Reform of Italian Art’ studies the great stage designer and architect in a mythological image borrowed from a contemporary source as the ‘Mercurius’, the god of all go-betweens, here of English and Italian art.14 The title of an ‘architect’, which he was among the first to claim in England, was already of Italian import, and so were the models for his theatrical sets and his temporary buildings erected for specific occasions such as the obsequies for James I. A closer analysis, however, reveals that Jones did not just copy these models slavishly but pursued a reforming agenda which disciplines the baroque exuberance of ornament according to classical Vetruvian standards of rationality and order, thus bringing them closer to post-Reformation English sensibilities. Surprisingly, similar critical norms were still evoked some two and a half centuries later in the discourses surrounding the display of Italian and English 12. David Hockney: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988), ill. 14, p. 31; for the autobiographical context of Hockney’s journey to Italy see David Hockney by David Hockney, ed. by Nikos Stangos (London: Guild Publishing, 1976), pp. 87–88. 13. That this promesse did not fulfil itself for Hockney in Italy is another matter; suffice it to say here that his later journeys have taken him to Egypt, Marocco, Japan, and, again and again, to Paris and in particular California, which has become his second home. 14. See Manfred Pfister, ‘Inglese Italianato—Italiano Anglizzato: John Florio’, in Renaissance Go-Betweens, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels, pp. 32–54 (p. 32).

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(including American) sculpture at the London International Exhibition of 1862, as Alison Yarrington shows in her essay on ‘“Made in Italy”: Sculpture and the Staging of National Identities at the International Exhibition of 1862’. Modern Italian achievements, in this case Antonio Canova’s, were still denigrated in official or semi-official commentaries by Francis Palgrave, Beavington Atkinson, or Anne Jameson against the background of those of classical Rome in terms of a loss of natural strength and an over-ripe concern with artistic panache and sophisticated effects; they continued to be compared unfavourably as expressions of nerveless languor, effeminate emotionalism, or moral laxness in contrast to the moral health, the natural grace and vigour of their English and American counterparts (as long as they have not given in to the lure of Italy). But how ‘English’, or how ‘Italian’, were the statues produced by English and American sculptors in Rome or by Italian sculptors working in England? What impact did an international market for sculpture have on fashioning and exhibiting national identity for the artists and their work? Or what national or international political contexts suggested themselves to the viewers of these works of an emphatically public art when show-cased in nationally defined sections of a ‘universal’ exhibition? Questions such as these put sculpture back into performative spaces and interactions, and contribute towards undermining clear-cut stereotypes and deepening an awareness of the variety and the ambivalences of performances of cultural difference. The third section, Travelling Images, cuts across genres and media in studying a number of culturally significant images shared by the English and the Italians and circulating between them in mutual appropriation or contestation or in a criss-crossing of perspectives. Such an approach lends itself particularly well to the many English poets in the nineteenth century who made Italy their second home or place of exile and who were involved in both British expatriate communities and Italian social and political life and had to react immediately to what they perceived as the Italianness of the local population and to Italian expectations of what an English milord or milady is and how they would or should comport themselves. The most prominent figure here is, of course, Lord Byron, the great selfstager who managed to become a myth both in England and Italy (and in the rest of Europe) even to people who have never read a single line of his works. As the bi-partite title of Barbara Schaff’s essay, ‘Italianised Byron— Byronised Italy’, already indicates, this involves a two-way traffic of images and projections: Italy Italianised the poet in exile, or rather, the English poet Italianised himself by playing up with histrionic bravura to the conventions and expectations of a society which he saw as a society of spectacle, of the

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theatre and opera, of improvvisatori and carnival, of erotic masquerade and political subterfuge. And Byron Byronised Italy: not only by writing it, in his diaries, letters, and poems, and turning it into his own vision of Venice or Rome—a vision infused with traditional English fantasies of Italy, yet heightened in its colours and made exciting by the dramatic nature of immediately recorded experience—but also, and perhaps even more so, by turning it into a stage for the enactment of his self. Both his texts in their performative qualities and his actual performances on the Italian stage have provided compelling models for later re-enactments by literary tourists travelling in his traces and which still lend themselves for tourist commodification even today.15 Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems, at a first glance, to be the female counterpart to Byron, domesticated, fragile, and subdued where he is political, robust, and passionate. Fabienne Moine’s gendered rereading of the poems written in Florence, however, argues persuasively that such a view belittles Barrett Browning’s achievement and has led to critical disregard or misunderstanding of her later work. In ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity and Shaping the Poetic Self’, Moine stresses the female poet’s deep engagement in the Italian cause and her active identification with the Risorgimento, which inscribe themselves into her poetry not only on a thematic level but also in images that link her own femininity with that of Italy, conceived of as woman and mother. In her poetic performance, the female body and the body politic are made to interact with each other: her rebirth, after long suffering, as a passionately committed poet enacts the rebirth of long-suffering Italy into a new autonomy and freedom on a private scale. In her case, it is not Italy per se that liberates her from Victorian constraints but the Italy of Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Anita Garibaldi, with whom she had an affectionate friendship. The female body as a political signifier and agent plays a central role also in Stephen Gundle’s essay on ‘The “Bella Italiana” and the “English Rose”: Reflections on Two National Typologies of Feminine Beauty’. With the revolutionary movements in the nineteenth century the image of the monarch lost its cohesive power as embodiment of national unity and identity and was replaced in that function in many European countries by symbolic female figures or culturally encoded ideals of femininity. We have come across an example of that already in Overbeck’s painting of Germania und Italia, where the juxtaposition of two national types of female beauty conveys a political message of complementarity and mutuality of the two nations. Here, 15. See Manfred Pfister, ‘Travelling in the Traces of…: Italian Spaces and the Traces of the Other’, in Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, ed. by Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 25–37.

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as in Gundle’s Anglo-Italian examples from the period of the Risorgimento to the present, these stereotypes emerge from processes of auto- as well as heterostereotyping: the elegantly composed, fragile, and fresh English Rose is of Italian as much as of English growth, blossoming in the writings of Gabriele D’Annunzio or Guglielmo Ferrero; in the same way, the spontaneous, sensuous, and passionate beauty of the Bella Italiana has acquired particular radiance in French or English writings by Madame de Staël or Stendhal, George Meredith or, in the twentieth century, Cecil Beaton. What these two types enact—in literary texts as well as in the visual and performing arts—is more than just their physical beauty: they embody in their temperament and habitus contrasting political stances: the upper-class and lady-like English Rose is supported by, and supports, the stable social order of a hierarchical society; the Bella Italiana, from the Risorgimento heroine of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s novels down to her latter-day incarnation in the popolana figures of a Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale, draws its impassioned strength from the subversive energies of the common people. All the contributions so far have shown that intercultural transactions, in providing stages for the performance of national identity, are always by nature political. They always are, or always involve, political negotiations. The transactions singled out in the fourth section under the rubric Political Negotiations are, therefore, not different in kind from the others studied in this book; they differ from them only in focusing more directly upon political issues or intervening more immediately in ongoing political scenarios. This is certainly the case with Alexander Korda’s film discussed by Pamela Neville-Sington in ‘Sex, Lies, and Celluloid: That Hamilton Woman and British Attitudes towards the Italians from the Risorgimento to the Second World War’. The film, shot in Hollywood in 1940/41, was part of Churchill’s cultural war effort to draw the United States into a direct military partnership with England against Hitler’s Germany. The famously scandalous romance of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, wife of the British Ambassador to Naples, suggests a set of quite obvious political parallels between the situation in 1800 and the contemporary crisis: Napoleon is Hitler, and England’s heroic struggle with Hitler equates to that against Napoleon; further, Nelson’s urgent appeal to the Kingdom of Naples to abandon their policy of neutrality and fight shoulder to shoulder with England against Napoleon’s tyranny is quite transparently encoded as Churchill’s appeal to the United States to enter the war against Fascism. Where Nelson’s Naples was still undecided, Churchill’s Italy had, however, just betrayed its neutrality and joined forces with Hitler. In the face of the political weight of the ItaloAmerican electorate in the United States, the staging of the Italians required

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the utmost delicacy of touch to avoid alienating this important group. What Churchill, Korda, and his script writer fell back upon in this quandary was the experience of British partisans of the Risorgimento, such as the Brownings, who, though frequently exasperated with Italian political naïveté, maintained a bemused admiration for the childlike innocence of the Italians. Thus, a time-honoured topos of English travellers and residents in Italy was refurbished to turn the problematic Italian role in this triangulated scenario of English, Italian, and American politics into light comic relief. ‘The Maltese Scenario’, which Peter Vassallo explores under the heading ‘Italian Culture versus British Pragmatics’, is also triangular, or has been so ever since Britain consolidated its at first tutelary intervention in the Maltese revolt against the Napoleonic occupation into colonial hegemony in the early nineteenth century. And ever since, any self-definition or self-positioning of the Maltese as Maltese involved a politically crucial, and at times fatal, choice between three cultural models or various hybrid combinations of them: the Maltese-speaking nationalist insisting upon his or her autochthonous North and Semitic roots, the Italophile Maltese cultivating close linguistic and cultural bonds with the Italian mainland and Sicily, and the Anglicised Maltese for whom English speech and cultural values have become part and parcel of his identity. These once traumatic divisions have, however, been largely overcome in the present, and under the auspices of the European Union many Maltese have learnt to consider their cultural in-betweenness an asset rather than a liability. Politics is not a matter of political platforms and their discursive conceptualisation alone; it is, as the Maltese example shows so clearly, also, and often more importantly, a matter of identity politics, of enacting political stances, of casting oneself in performative roles. This applies even to political theory and theorising. The case of Machiavelli’s political theory and the uses to which it was put in the English Renaissance bears this out, as do the fortunes in post-war Italy and in Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s of Antonio Gramsci’s political ideas, which were committed to writing in his prison diaries of 1928 to 1937. David Forgacs in ‘Gramsci’s Notion of the “Popular” in Italy and Britain: A Tale of Two Cultures’ focuses on one word here, il popolare (frequently nazionale popolare), the ‘popular’, and its fortunes both in its Italian and its English reception. Again, this involves a triangulated plot, as Gramsci’s popolare is already a translation of classical Marxist and Soviet Russian notions relating to the Volk or narod. A translation of such a notion from one language, one categorical schema, and one political context to another always involves semantic negotiations which are, at the same time, incisively political. What was and still is at stake in the case of ‘the popular’ is the question of what cultural identity and political unity is, or should be,

Introduction

23

based on and, in particular, the role of the political intelligentsia in its hegemonic, elitist, alienated, or ‘organic’ relation to ‘the people’. The history sketched here—from early Marxist and Soviet notions of the popular to Gramsci’s Italian appropriation of them for his more libertarian views of communist leadership’s grass-roots links with organic communities and beyond to the fairly short-lived English enthusiasm in communist or socialist politics and in the field of cultural studies for Gramsci’s organic intellectual—instances the volatile dynamics of theoretical concepts and brings out the performative side of political theoretical writing. The performative resides here in the scripting of the role as political intellectual by the writer— with results that vary widely in different national cultures. Carla Dente brings to our attention a largely disregarded yet significant case of performing politics in British-Italian in-between spaces. ‘Personal Memory / Cultural Memory: Identity and Difference in Scottish-Italian Migrant Theatre’ studies the identity politics of the twentieth-century Italian immigrant community in Scotland, drawn between integration into the host culture, hybridisation, and maintaining a separate identity, charged with a cultural memory that comprises both British, Scottish, and Italian traditions, stories, and histories. In the 1980s, second generation Scots-Italians were already sufficiently integrated into the local language and educational system to adopt a public voice and contribute to the new Scottish theatre movement struggling to free itself from the overpowering English theatrical traditions. Again, the stage for acting out cultural identity is a triangular one, involving three languages and national contexts: Italian, Scottish, and English. And what is literally staged in plays such as Ann Marie Di Mambro’s Tally’s Blood or Emanuela Rossini’s and Margaret Rose’s Six Months Here, Six Months There are the clashes of individual and collective memories and the Foucauldian micro-politics of xenophobia and mutual prejudice, exclusion and inclusion, hostility and attraction, nostalgia and pragmatics on the level of family sagas reflecting national and finally European processes of identity formation. The fifth and last part of this collection of essays is dedicated to contemporary cultural studies of Anglo-Italian transactions in fields beyond—or below—the canon of ‘High Culture’. The title of this section, Contemporary Mediations, has a deliberate double meaning: ‘mediation’ as negotiation and as negotiations via the media. ‘Cultural performances’ such as sporting events, rock concerts, or cuisine play an increasingly important role in mediating cultural difference, and the modern media of film, television, or the Internet, which straddle national cultures in a new global economy of inter- and transcultural performances, provide a new and compelling stage for them.

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Tourism, of course, is in itself a cultural performance, perhaps the greatest show on earth nowadays. It involves millions and millions of people every year as performers of their own national identity to their hosts, who in turn perform for them their otherness. As Claudio Visentin suggests in the theatrical metaphors of the title of his essay, ‘The Theatre of the World: British-Italian Identities on the Tourism Stage’, modern mass tourism has turned all the world into a stage, though in a sense notably different from what Shakespeare’s Jacques intended, extending it from the cultural to the intercultural. He approaches the contemporary situation from earlier forms of AngloItalian travels, the English Grand Tour and Giro d’Italia, and sceptically questions whether both the older Bildungsreise with its educational ethos and the modern hedonistic tourism geared towards ‘sun, sea, sand, and sex’ actually promote a better mutual understanding among the peoples involved. Rather than challenging national stereotypes, the tourist interaction with the other national group has tended to reinforce them. (The same might be argued for international sports contests, Anglo-Italian football matches for instance, but this is covered in another essay later in the book.) Such stereotypes as group generalisations based on information received primarily through cultural mediators, are discussed with particular reference to the English and Italian press in Judith Munat’s paper on ‘Bias and Stereotypes in the Media: The Performance of British and Italian National Identities’. The discourse analysis of a corpus of 50 articles from the British and 50 from the Italian press reporting on the other country from the beginning of 2005 to March 2006, with Blair’s visit to Berlusconi as the highlight, confirms the suspicion that the press, even the quality press studied here, reinforces the mutuality of the old projections of identity and difference in the carefully chosen and pregnantly staged images illustrating both negative and positive stereotypes: Italy continues to be staged as politically and economically unstable, with a somewhat lax approach to democratic procedures, yet lovable for its innocent sense of fun and its excellent cooking, and England as staunchly traditional, insular in its Euro-scepticism and slightly, though lovably, eccentric in its love of animals and the monarchy. Ultimately, these journalistic performances are scripted by their own cultural ideology, rather than informed by new perceptions of the other culture. Of particular interest in our context are transpositions of performances from one culture into another. Shakespeare’s plays are a culturally significant case in point because here the cultural mediation is frequently twodirectional. In Romeo and Juliet, as in so many others of his plays, he stages an originally Italian novella complete with its Italian characters and locations in the English theatre. What cultural negotiations are at work here has been already studied sufficiently—but what happens when the English theatre play

Introduction

25

is screened in Hollywood and the American film is then dubbed for an Italian audience? This is precisely the question Sara Soncini asks in ‘Re-locating Shakespeare: Cultural Negotiations in Italian Dubbed Versions of Romeo and Juliet’, and she studies this linguistic homecoming of the archetypal Italian love story in the dubbing of George Cukor’s 1936 and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet. There is more at stake here in the translation than a mere transcoding from one language into the other; what is at stake is rather an intercultural negotiation of attitudes and values and a struggle for national and cultural ownership of the romantic tragedy of love. Is it Italy’s, from which it derives? Is it England’s, where it found its classical shape? Is it that of the United States, whose film industry has made several versions? Does it become Italian again by being re-adapted to national tastes? English Cukor’s dubbed version invokes Shakespeare’s cultural prestige by using a canonical nineteenth-century Italian verse translation; yet at the same time it topicalises the play by modifying and adjusting the translation in a way that makes it resonant with the contemporary political context of Mussolini’s Ethiopian imperialist venture. Zeffirelli, in contrast, went out of his way in the process of dubbing his film to make a more vernacular and regional Italian harmonise with the demonstratively ‘authentic Italian’ locations in which he had shot the film and he reinforced the ‘Italianisation’ of his Hollywood film by putting less emphasis on the American context of the ongoing Vietnam War and more on its sexual politics of young vs. old, which would find a particular resonance in the climate of prudery and repression in the Italy of the 1960s. Shakespeare and other English Renaissance writers of comedies and of revenge or love tragedies frequently took their English audiences to Italy and many an English or American novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has taken its Anglo-Saxon protagonists to Italy. Much rarer, however, are the cases in which Italian fictions take their Italian protagonists, and with them their intended Italian readers or audiences, to England. Mariangela Tempera in her contribution, ‘Something to Declare: Italian Avengers and British Culture in La ragazza con la pistola and Appuntamento a Liverpool’, singles out two films who do just this. Both Mario Monicelli’s Italian style film comedy of 1968 and Marco Tullio Giordano’s film drama of 1988 reverse the typical plot of the English Renaissance tragedy of revenge in at least three ways: their main action takes place in Britain, not in Italy or another Mediterranean country, their avengers are female, not male, and both Monicelli’s Assunta from Sicily and Giordano’s Caterina from Lombard Cremona abandon their vendetta in the end, thus turning their films into antirevenge comedy or melodrama. The interaction between the Italian avengers and the Brits helping or hindering them stage the traditional stereotypes of English vs. Italian stereotypes for Italian audiences—for comic effect in La

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ragazza and as seriously intended clashes of ‘them’ and ‘us’ in Appuntamento—and offer illuminating insights into how these stereotypes are constructed, how they have shifted from the late 60s to the late 80s and what cultural misunderstandings are triggered by them. Giordano’s melodrama starts with the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, where Caterina had to witness her father’s death at the hands of an English hooligan during the fateful Liverpool vs. Juventus football match in Brussels. This was just one of a number of instances when the drama of international sports competition, particularly heightened in the cultural performance of football, exploded into trauma. The fatal dynamics of the English and Italian football fans’ mutual self-stagings and perceptions of the other which fuel such aggression are studied in Anthony King’s paper on ‘English Fans and Italian Football: Towards a Transnational Relationship’. It takes into account also the role British and Italian journalism has played here in reporting on, mediating, and shaping the British-Italian interactions of fans and teams as well as the emergence of an increasingly powerful UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) which has transformed the international competition into a transnational spectacle and, simultaneously, national identifications into localised fan cultures. This is, for once, at least partially a success story—a story of crude and violently aggressive national typecasting gradually giving way to better informed and more differentiated views of regional and local particularities. Like football, rock music is a cultural performance that works both on the stage of live interactions between the players and between players and audiences and on the virtual stages of LP, CD, DVD, radio, or TV recorded and mediated performance. And, again like football, it has become a powerful medium for fashioning collective identities both in a local, national, and international arena. Greg Walker in ‘Selling England (and Italy) by the Pound: Performing National Identity in the First Phase of Progressive Rock: Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and PFM’ examines the various ways in which English and Italian national identity and experience influence the work of a number of seminal progressive rock bands in the early 1970s. It focuses on the English bands Jethro Tull and King Crimson, and their Italian counterpart Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), exploring how the apparently idiosyncratic Englishness of the progressive movement was formed, performed, and received in Italy, and how the Italianness of PFM caused them to attempt various forms of cultural translation in the course of their early career. The exploration of factors such as the origins, history, and composition of the bands contributes further to revealing the constructedness of the national identities they seemed to perform. The essay ends with an examination of the treatment of urban life and experience, a fundamental theme in the early

Introduction

27

work of Jethro Tull, inflected rather differently in the work of PFM whose attempt at yoking their ‘Mediterranean’ instrumental identity to English cityscape lyrics, even where they turned from Italian to English, eventually proved only partly successful on an international or US market. Rock is primarily British or American, not Italian. A reversed asymmetry applies to cooking: the fairly unanimous consensus of tourists to Italy as well as of the Italians themselves is that Italy means good food, that good cooking is an Italian, not a British virtue. Gisela Ecker explores this intercultural asymmetry in ‘Zuppa Inglese and Eating up Italy: Intercultural Feasts and Fantasies’ by examining a great variety of Italian and English texts, from travel literature and cookery books to their combination in the new genre of ‘gastro-travelogues’ such as Matthew Fort’s Eating up Italy, from essays, letters, and diaries to contemporary novels staging national difference in sharply contrasted culinary performances. Such an analysis helps to deconstruct totalising notions of the Italianness of Italian cooking, which has varied greatly in its long cultural history as well as in regional and local terms. The discerning English lover of Italian food here has to learn the same lesson the English soccer fan has had to learn: that the notion of ‘Italian’ food is a chimera in just the same way as that of ‘Italian’ football, that there is as great a difference between Sicilian or Lombard cooking, or, if it comes to that, between Cremonese or Ferrarese cooking, as there is between Juve’s and Lazio’s football. The quest for the ‘authentic’ and ‘genuine’, be it authentically or genuinely Italian or English, is a performance that emplots many of the texts studied here; what it ends up with, however, even if this was against their author’s firm convictions, is the kind of cultural hybridity for which zuppa inglese provides such a delicious metaphor. *** Mille grazie to our secretary, Frau Manuela Kuhlen, and to our student assistants Melanie Knospe, Kirstin Müller, and Rebekka Rohleder both for their help in staging the conference and taking painstaking care of the minutiae of publication

Bibliography Barfoot, Cedric C., ed., Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). David Hockney: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988).

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Dyserinck, Hugo and Karl Ulrich Syndram, eds., Europa und das nationale Selbstverständnis: Imagologische Probleme in Literatur, Kunst und Kultur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988). Einstein, Lewis, The Italian Renaissance in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1902). Höfele, Andreas and Werner von Koppenfels, eds., Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005). Lenz, Bernd and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, eds., Fremdheitserfahrung und Fremdheitsdarstellung in okzidentalen Kulturen: Theorieansätze, Medien/Textsorten, Diskursformen (Passau: Rothe, 1999). Lister, Charles, Between Two Seas: A Walk Down the Appian Way (London: Minerva, 1991). Pfister, Manfred, ed., The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). Pfister, Manfred, ‘Inglese Italianato—Italiano Anglizzato: John Florio’, in Renaissance Go-Betweens, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels, pp. 32–54. Pfister, Manfred, ‘Travelling in the Traces of…: Italian Spaces and the Traces of the Other’, in Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, ed. by Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 25–37. Singer, Milton, ed., Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959). Stangos, Nikos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney (London: Guild Publishing, 1976).

1. Early Modern Literary Exchanges

Werner von Koppenfels ‘Stripping up his sleeves like some juggler’: Giordano Bruno in England, or, The Philosopher as Stylistic Mountebank A Mountebank Scene in (Ben Jonson’s) Venice In act two, scene two of Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606), one of the great plays in a great age of drama, the protagonist gives a virtuoso performance of his foxlike art of dissembling. Disguised as the famous mountebank Scoto of Mantua, he mounts a scaffold—a stage on stage—put up in a corner of the Piazza San Marco, right under the window of the beautiful Celia, whose seduction is the final raison d’être of the scene’s extraordinary verbiage. If the Venetian local colour serves as ironic camouflage for an allegoric plot involving very English gulls and crooks, Scoto’s rhetorical bombast peppered with Italian terms seems to present English eyes and ears, as it were, with an Italy raised to the second power. The Italian mountebanks embody their nation’s volubility no less than its deceitfulness, as the two English travellers observing the scene point out at the very beginning. The gullible Sir Politic Would-be calls them ‘the only knowing men of Europe! […] The only languaged men, of all the world!’, while the sceptic Peregrine regards them as ‘most lewd impostors;/ Made all of terms, and shreds’, that is to say, of jargon and tags. The hallmark of their rhetoric is the tautological catalogue of self-advertisement and the hyperbole of self-aggrandizement, as Scoto’s great harangue goes to show. Here is a small sample: […] gentlemen, if I had but time to discourse to you the miraculous effects of this my oil, surnamed oglio del Scoto; with the countless catalogues of those I have cured of th’aforesaid, and many more diseases; the patents and privileges of all the princes and commonwealths of Christendom; or but the depositions of those that appeared on my part, before the signiory of the Sanità, and most learned college of physicians; where I was authorized, upon notice taken of the admirable virtues of my medicaments, and mine own excellency, in matter of rare and unknown secrets, not only to dispense them publicly in this famous city, but in all the territories, that happily joy under the government of the most pious and magnificent states of Italy […]1

‘Is not his language rare?’ asks Sir Politic admiringly, and Peregrine answers ‘But alchemy,/ I never heard the like’ (117–18). The display of puffing elo-

1.

Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. by Philip Brockbank (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), pp. 53–54.

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quence in this scene is quite disproportionate to its minor plot interest, and in marked contrast with its anti-climactic ending, when Celia is dragged from the window, and Scoto/Volpone beaten from his platform by the jealous husband Corvino. But its aim is to make a linguistic point. It illustrates and mocks the discrepancy of words and meaning, the eloquence of obfuscation, self-applause, and imposture, which for Jonson is the mark of a dysfunctional and diseased language.2 The Italianità of his mountebank scene is ultimately as metaphorical as the esoteric double Dutch in his later comedy The Alchemist. … and in Elizabethan Oxford In some respects the most extraordinary of all continental expatriates who found (if only for two years) a haven in Elizabethan England, may be regarded as a colleague of Jonson’s. For Giordano Bruno, rebel against all orthodoxies and undaunted speculative mind, had made his literary debut in 1582 with the satirical comedy Il Candelaio or ‘The Candle-bearer’, which ridiculed not only the jargon of Alchemists, but of Petrarchists and grammatical pedants as well, and whose ending is no less harsh and punitive than that of Volpone. In England, where Bruno lived from 1583 to 1585 under the benign patronage of the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, he was to reveal himself as a philosophical thinker and writer of incomparable boldness. His six Italian dialogues, written and printed in London, are arguably the greatest cultural legacy left by continental exiles to Shakespeare’s England.3 Yet his unorthodox message, couched in a somewhat southern style of delivery, created a scandal within the English academic establishment. How some Elizabethan worthies reacted to his public performances may be gathered from a unique piece of evidence, discovered only in 1960 in an obscure work of Protestant polemics.4 This is Bruno, true to nature, lecturing in Oxford: […] that Italian Didapper, who intituled himselfe Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus, magis elaborata Theologia Doctor, &c. with a name longer then his body […] when he had more boldly then wisely, got vp in the highest place of our best &

2.

3.

4.

He echoes Francis Bacon’s statement that it is ‘the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter’ (Ben Jonson, Discoveries, ed. by George Bagshawe Harrison [London: John Lane, 1923], p. 80). See my article ‘Ash Wednesday in Westminster’, in Renaissance Go-Betweens, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 55–77, a few passages of which I have incorporated into this essay. Robert McNulty, ‘Bruno at Oxford’, Renaissance News, 13 (1960), 300–05 (p. 302).

‘Stripping up his sleeves like some juggler’

33

most renowned schoole, stripping vp his sleeves like some Iugler, and telling us much of chentrum & chirculus & circumferenchia (after the pronunciation of his Country language) he vndertooke among very many other matters to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did goe round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his owne head which rather did run round, & his braines did not stand stil.

Here we see Bruno in philosophical action through a pair of traditionalist eyes whose owner is not amused. The herald of disturbing intellectual news is written off—with more than a touch of xenophobia—as that familiar figure of fun, the Italian mountebank, declared crazy, and blamed for his un-English pronunciation of Latin; the bird image suggests short stature and bragging behaviour. The Staging of the Bruno Persona Of course a dialogue of cultures, especially if the challenger of the status quo seems to present himself as a boastful foreigner and a daredevil iconoclast, has rich potential for misunderstanding. The author of the vitriolic sketch just quoted, George Abbot, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, remembered and quoted verbatim the words which opened Bruno’s dedication of his first work printed in England (a Latin Art of Memory and two other texts) to the vice-chancellor and university of Oxford. Let me quote this famous selfpresentation in Frances Yates’s translation: Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus, doctor of a more abstruse theology [thus Yates, forever in search of Bruno the Magus, renders magis elaborata theologia], professor of a purer and more innocuous wisdom, noted in the best academies of Europe, an approved and honorably received philosopher, a stranger nowhere save amongst the barbarous and ignoble, the waker of sleeping souls, tamer of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, proclaimer of a general philanthropy, who does not choose out the Italian more than the Briton, the male more than the female, the mitred head more than the crowned head […], but (where a man may be known by his face) the culture of the mind and soul. Who is hated by the propagators of foolishness and hypocrites, but sought out by the honest and the studious, and whose genius the more noble applaud […].5

Perhaps Mr. Abbot may be excused for scenting a touch of the Italian charlatan and braggadocio in this orotund, self-celebrating catalogue of piled-up honorary attributes. This cumulative display of copia verborum may not seem

5.

Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge 1964), p. 206.

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the best strategy for gaining the hearts and minds of Oxford, but it is part and parcel of Bruno’s Italian mise-en-scène, as the English reaction to the didapper and juggler goes to show; with a touch of comic exaggeration, setting off the speaker’s contempt for all barriers of nation, class and religion, in his markedly arrogant and elitist search for an intellectual community of the best. His Cena de le Ceneri or Ash Wednesday Supper records, with a great deal of satiric gusto, the failure of Anglo-Italian communication at a philosophical banquet dedicated to the theories of Copernicus. In this foreign-language masterpiece of Elizabethan literature the breakdown of academic discourse is, somewhat tactlessly, staged as a clash of national temperaments which exposes the courageous and eloquent thinker from the South, first to the dark and muddy ways of nocturnal London and its xenophobic rabble, and afterwards to the mental stagnancy and benighted thinking of English scholasticism. The ill-fated supper is set forth—like Plato’s Symposion—as a narrated banquet, and in a vein of satiric comedy of which a Ben Jonson might have been proud. With a rapid exchange between Smitho, an English acquaintance, and Teofilo, Bruno’s spokesman as earwitness of the conversation, we go right into the middle of things. Was there ever a philosophical dialogue starting like this? Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo. Smitho. Teofilo.

Parlavan ben latino? Sí. Galantuomini? Sí. Di buona riputazione? Sí. Dotti? Assai competentemente. Ben creati, cortesi, civili? Troppo mediocremente. Dottori? Messer sí, padre sí, madonna sí, madesí, credo da Oxonia. Qualificati? Come non? uomini da scelta, di robba lunga, vestiti di velluto; un de’ quali avea due catene d’oro lucente al collo […] Mostravano saper di greco? E di birra eziandìo.6

Smitho: Did they speak Latin well? — Teofilo: Yes. — S: Were they gentlemen? — T: Yes. — S: Of good reputation? — T: Yes. — S: Learned? — T: Competent enough. — S: Well-bred, obliging and polite? — T: Not sufficiently. — S: Doctors? — T: Yes, for ‘tis ‘yes sir’, ‘yes father’, ‘yes milady’, ‘yes’, ‘yes’ [sic]; graduated 6 . Dialoghi italiani [=DI], ed. by Giovanni Gentile and Giovanni Aquilecchia, 3rd edn (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 20–21.

‘Stripping up his sleeves like some juggler’

35

from Oxford, I think. — S: Qualified? — T: Certainly. Distinguished, long-robed men, dressed in velvet: one wore two sparkling chains of gold around his neck […] S: Did they seem to know Greek? — T: And beer, eftsoons.7

With a few skilful traits the author sketches his pair of English academic philistines, beery and trimmed with the trappings of worldly success, and bogged in old languages and thinking habits—whereas Bruno uses his native Italian, a language spoken by the courtly elite in England, to expound his philosophy, because new thinking demands new expression.8 The Bruno persona is split up into two personalities: Teofilo the narrator, whose verbal impatience is a first demonstration of Italian temperament in a chilling climate, and Il Nolano, the man from Nola, of the banquet proper. The double focus is a trick of perspective that serves as a distancing or empathising device, as the case may be. This is how Teofilo, after giving sincere, if qualified praise to ‘the German Copernicus’, introduces the Nolan to his hearers and readers: Or che dirrò io del Nolano? Forse, per essermi tanto prossimo, quanto io medesmo a me stesso, non mi converrà lodarlo? […] se vien lodato lo antico Tifi per avere ritrovata la prima nave […], se a’ nostri tempi vien magnificato il Colombo […], che de’ farsi di questo, che a ritrovato il modo di montare al cielo, discorrere la circonferenza de le stelle, lasciarsi a le spalli la convessa superficie del firmamento? […] ch’a varcato l’aria, penetrato il cielo, discorse le stelle, trapassati gli margini del mondo, fatte svanir le fantastiche muraglia de le prime, ottave, none, decime […] sfere […], nudata la ricoperta e velata natura, ha donati gli occhi a le talpe, illuminati i ciechi […], sciolta la lingua ai muti […], risaldati i zoppi […], e n’apre gli occhi a veder questo nume, questa nostra madre, che nel suo dorso ne alimenta e ne nutrisce, dopo averne produtti dal suo grembo, al qual di nuovo sempre ne riaccoglie […] (DI, pp. 29–33) And now, what shall I say of the Nolan? Perhaps it is not appropriate for me to praise him, since he is as close to me as I am to myself […]. If the ancient Tiphys is praised for having invented the first ship […] if, in our own times, Columbus is glorified […], how shall we honour this man who has found a way to ascend the sky, compass the circumference of the stars, and leave at his back the convex surface of the firmament? […] Now behold the man who has surmounted the air, penetrated the sky, wandered among the stars, passed beyond the borders of the world, effaced the imaginary walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth sphere […], laid bare covered and veiled nature, gave eyes to the moles and light to the blind […], loosed the tongues of the dumb […], strengthened the lame […]; who opens our eyes to see this deity, this our mother who feeds and nourishes us on her back after having conceived us in her womb to which she always receives us again […]. (AWS, pp. 87–90)

7. 8.

The Ash Wednesday Supper [=AWS], trans. by Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 81–82. See Giovanni Aquilecchia, ‘L’adozione del volgare nei dialoghi londinesi di Giordano Bruno’, Cultura Neolatina, 13 (1953), 165–89.

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There can be no doubt that this rhetoric smacks of the market-place, and that this is intentional: it is a half-ironic stage performance of southern eloquence; yet, at the same time, the crescendo of the syntactic movement, the widening circles of a powerful rhetorical upsurge carry us along on a wave of enthusiasm (a Brunian key term).9 In a characteristic feat of juggling, or rather, of levitation, the Italian mountebank takes off and mounts up into infinite space. The juggler persona is the appropriate mask for a Mercury, a Prometheus, an angel of light.10 Pedantry Parodied There is thus an element of parody as well as a deeply serious side to Bruno’s display of his Italianità. The former is much in evidence during his party’s adventurous approach over the water and through the London shoreside mud to the site of the Ash Wednesday supper. The episode is presented like a mock-heroic descent into the underworld, complete with an invocation to the burlesque Muse of Merlinus Coccaius, and a leaky boat rowed by two Charon-like ferrymen. The mournful music of the tub’s groaning planks inspires Nolano and his compatriot John Florio to sing snatches of love songs from Ariosto in duet, like two Venetian gondolieri: ‘Messer Florio, ricordandosi de’ suoi amori, cantava il “Dove, senza me, dolce mia vita”. Il Nolano ripigliava: “Il Saracin dolente, o femenil ingegno”.’ (‘Messer Florio, as if remembering his loves, sang: “Where, without me, sweet my life”. The Nolan responded: “The wretched Saracen, O feminine mind”’; DI, pp. 55–56; AWS, p. 112). Italian warmth and wit, literacy and sense of harmony are played off, in humorous exaggeration, against the dark, cold, inhospitable, and dissonant English surroundings, whose boorishness anticipates the pedantesca ostinatissima ignoranza and rustica incivilità of Bruno’s Aristotelian opponents at the banquet (DI, p. 133). The inauspicious boat excursion, to be followed by a muddy walk and maltreatment by a group of Londoners taking the evening air, is a black parody of the heroic voyages of discovery undertaken by Tiphys, Columbus, and Bruno himself. The antics and histrionics of the mountebank are finally located, of all places, in the innermost sanctum of the academia, as the narrator’s stage

See Michele Ciliberto, Lessico di Giordano Bruno (Rome: Ateneo, 1979), s.v. ‘entusiasmo’ (p. 386). 10. See Michele Ciliberto, ‘Bruno allo specchio: Filosofia e autobiografia nel Cinquecento’, in Giordano Bruno 1583–1585: The English Experience, ed. by Michele Ciliberto and Nicholas Mann (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1997), pp. 61–89 (p. 72). 9.

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directions to the great debating scene make quite clear. There a docta ignorantia, quite different from the one preached by Bruno’s beloved forerunner Cusanus, is put in its true light. We see the Oxonian Doctor Torquato in the posture of Jupiter among the Gods before thundering his tremendous sentence against the profane Lycaon (Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 178–79). After admiring his own golden necklace (torquem auream, hence his telling name) and looking at the breast of the modestly dressed foreigner to see if any buttons are missing, straightening himself, taking his arms from the table, shaking his back, puffing some humid air from his mouth…—but we need to hear this in the original: sbruffato co’ la bocca alquanto, acconciatasi la beretta di velluto in testa, intorcigliatosi il mustaccio, posto in arnese il profumato volto, inarcate le ciglia, spalancate le narici, messosi in punto con un riguardo di rovescio, poggiatasi al sinistro fianco la sinistra mano per donar principio a la sua scrima, appuntò le tre prime dita de la destra insieme, e cominciò a trar di mandritti in questo modo parlando:—Tune ille philosophorum protoplastes? (DI, pp. 127–28) puffed and sprayed somewhat with his mouth, arranged the velvet beretta on his head, twisted his moustache, put his perfumed face in order, arched his brows, expanded his nostrils, settled himself with an oblique look, put his left hand to his left side in order to start the duel, pointed the first three fingers of his right hand and began to wag his hand back and forth, saying: Tune [for the erroneous tunc] ille philosophorum protoplastes? [Do you claim to be the arch-philosopher in person?] (AWS, pp. 182–83)

This is the classical posture of the puffed-up Latinising pedant, from François Rabelais’ Janotus de Bragmardo down to the ‘bursten-belly inkhorn orator’ Vanderhulk in Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller.11 Like George Abbot in Oxford, Bruno’s scholastic interlocutors in Westminster can only defend themselves against his startling message by declaring its bearer crazy: Anticyram navigat, he is on his way to Anticyra, the place were hellebore, the supreme drug against madness, is to be got (DI, p. 37; p. 132). The final joke of the matter—for here as elsewhere in this dialogue Bruno shows his hand as a writer of comedy—may be the fact that, at one dramatic moment, the man from Nola strikes his word-besotted nominalist listeners dumb. To their shouts of Ad rem, ad rem, ad rem! (To the point!) he replies laughingly: ‘Ista sunt res, res, res’, these are the ‘things’—as opposed to mere words (DI, p. 132). After he has expounded his idea of an ‘infinitely infinite’ universe,

11. François Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. 18–20, in Œuvres, ed. by Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 50–56; Thomas Nashe, Selected Writings, ed. by Stanley Wells (London: Arnold, 1964), pp. 220–22.

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Dr. Nundidio, a little less arrogant than his colleague Torquato, remains stunned, like someone who has seen a ghost: ‘rimase stupido e attonito, come quello a cui di repente appare nuovo fantasma […] e non aggiunse paroli, ove non posseva aggiongere ragioni’ (DI, p. 105). Thus Bruno’s Italian copia verborum parodies the wordiness of rampant pedantism, which he attacks so unmitigatingly ‘per amor de la mia tanto amata madre filosofia e per zelo de la lesa maestà di quella’ (‘out of devotion for the offended majesty of my belovèd mother, philosophy’), as he states at the beginning of De la Causa, his second Italian dialogue, when an English friend takes him to task for his harsh attacks on the local rabble both in the streets and at High Tables; 12 and he goes on to claim that, thanks to her false friends, philosophy has become, in the public opinion, synonymous with charlatanism: ‘appresso il volgo tanto val dire un filosofo, quanto un frappone, un disutile, pedantaccio, circulatore, saltainbanco, ciarlatano, buono per servir per passatempo in casa e per spavantacchio d’uccelli a la campagna’ (‘among the common people, philosopher rhymes with impostor, quack, swindler, good-for-nothing, charlatan and howling pedant, good only as home entertainment or country scarecrow’; DI, p. 202; CPU, p. 21). The Stylistic Upsurge: Enthusiasm A little later the same Brunian spokesman, Filoteo, outlines his anti-poetics and anti-grammar in a mock invocation to the archididascali, the custodians of philosophical and poetic orthodoxy: A voi dunque mi rivolgo […], correttori de l’intusiasmo, demagoghi del popolo errante, disciferatori di Demogorgone, Dioscori de le fluttuanti discipline […]; a voi raccomandiamo la nostra prosa, sottomettemo le nostre muse, premisse, subsunzioni, digressioni, parentesi, applicazioni, clausule, periodi, costruzioni, adiettivazioni, epitetismi. […] riferite a buon consiglio i nostri barbarismi, date di punta a’ nostri solecismi, turate le male olide voragini, castrate i nostri Sileni, imbracate i nostri Nohemi, fate eunuchi di nostri macrologi, rappezzate le nostre eclipsi, affrenate gli nostri taftologi, moderate le nostre acrilogie […]. (DI, pp. 219–20) Thus, it is to you that I turn […], moderators of enthusiasm, demagogues of wandering peoples, decipherers of the Demogorgon, Dioscures of fluctuating disciplines […]; to you we recommend our prose, submit our Muses, our premises, subsumptions, digressions, parentheses, applications, clauses, periods, constructions, adjectives and epithets […]; you, who submit our barbarisms to your wise judgment, stick our solecisms with your arrows, staunch our malodorous chasms, castrate our Silenes, clap our Noahs into breeches [this alludes to the drunkenness of Noah in Genesis 12. DI, p. 202; Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, trans. by Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) [=CPU], p. 21.

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9:21], emasculate our macrological discourse, patch up our ellipses, curb our tautologies, temper our acrylogies […]. (CPU, pp. 31–32)

In this wonderful litany, a mixture of intercessional prayer and grammarians’ hard words, Bruno boasts of his unruly (and utterly un-English) eloquence, alludes to the Platonic-Erasmian-Rabelaisian poetics of the Sileni, the comic disguise of serious matter, and addresses his would-be critics as ‘moderators of enthusiasm’, an enthusiasm, whose un-quenchable vigour makes itself felt in the impetuous rhythm of the passage.13 Bruno’s mockery and verbal aping of philosophic charlatans is, of course, only one side of the coin or, to change the metaphor, the linguistic catabasis or descent into the underworld of intellectual rot. Its reverse is the upsurge of the furor eroico, the ‘enthusiastic’ anabasis into the heavenly realm of pure cognition, a path open only to the immense minority of the elect. Its price is transgression, the painstaking and intrepid crossing of all boundaries that separate nations and denominations. Listen to the voice of Sofia, the embodiment of wisdom, in Bruno’s great and daring dialogue on the reformation of the world, called The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast: Se vuoi esser là dove il polo sublime de la Verità ti vegna verticale, passa questo Apennino, monta queste Alpi, varca questo scoglioso Oceano, supera questi rigorosi Rifei, trapassa questo sterile e gelato Caucaso, penetra le inaccessibili erture, e subintra quel felice circolo dove il lume è continuo e non si veggon mai tenebre né freddo, ma è perpetua temperie di caldo e dove eterna ti fia l’aurora o giorno. (DI, p. 713) If you want to be there where the sublime pole of truth will be vertical to you, pass over those Apennines, ascend these Alps, cross this reefy ocean, pass beyond this sterile and icy Caucasus, overcome those inaccessible heights, and enter into that happy circle where light is continuous and neither shadows nor cold are evident, but you will enjoy eternal dawn and daylight. [my translation]

This Messianic vision of a contemplative heaven above and beyond the murky lowlands of learned prejudice and religious intolerance reflects—at least in part—Bruno’s own itinerary of self-liberation, which took him from his monastery in Southern Italy through Switzerland and France to England, where he proclaims himself cittadino e domestico del mondo, citizen and familiar—or servant—of the world, and states his firm belief that ‘al vero filosofo ogni terreno è patria’, the true philosopher’s country is all the world 13. For the Sileni see Nuccio Ordine, Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), ch. 11; and Nuccio Ordine, Giordano Bruno, Ronsard et la Religion (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004), ch. 18; for Bruno’s stylistics of enthusiasm, see Vito Mariano Cancelliere, Un Pedante viene battuto (Bern: Lang, 1988), ch. 9.

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(DI, p. 552; p. 201). His Cena, written in spirited Italian, set in England, dedicated to the French ambassador, praising and expounding the ‘German Copernicus’ (DI, p. 28), is a truly European book. Satire is not only the antithesis of, but also the prologue to utopia, as Thomas More was so brilliantly to teach his epoch. Bruno’s Italian stylistics of excess has both a satirical and a utopian side to it, a tendency in malam and in bonam partem. Thus the Eroici Furori, provokingly dedicated to the great English love poet Sir Philip Sidney, start with a furious anti-petrarchan imprecation against the poetic cult of woman (‘quel puzzo, quel sepolcro, quel cesso, quel mestruo, quella carogna, quella febbre quartana’; ‘that stink, that tomb, that latrine, that menstruum, that carrion, that quartan ague’; DI, p. 929), only to lead on to to a rapturous Platonic quest for the true beauty of wisdom and intellectual jouissance, to ‘contemplazione divina’ and ‘furori no de volgari, ma eroici amori’, ‘divine contemplation’ and ‘frenzies not caused by vulgar but by heroic love’ (DI, p. 936).14 Similarly, in the Cena de le Ceneri, Teofilo praises Queen Elizabeth and her model courtiers to the skies come quelli che […] con la luce de la lor gran civiltade son sufficienti a spegnere ed annullar l’oscurità, e con il caldo de l’amorevol cortesia desrozzir e purgare qualsivoglia rudezza e rusticità, che ritrovar si possa non solo tra brittanni, ma anco tra sciti, arabi, tartari, canibali ed antropophagi. (DI, p. 69) these men […] are able, with the light of their lofty culture, to expunge and dispel the darkness and, with the warmth of loving courtesy, to smooth and polish any rudeness and crudity which is to be found not only among the Britons but also among the Scythians, Arabs, Tartars, cannibals and anthropophagi. (AWS, p. 120)

A compliment with a somewhat unflattering coda, to be followed by heartfelt imprecations against the xenophobic London rabble: ‘potrebe vantarsi l’Inghilterra d’aver una plebe, la quale in essere irrespettevole, incivile, rozza, rustica, salvatica e male allevata non cede ad altra, che pascer possa la terra nel suo seno’ (‘England could boast a people which in irreverence, incivility, coarseness, boorishness, savagery and ill-breeding would yield nothing to any other people the earth might nourish on its breast’; DI, p. 70; AWS, p. 120). Vulgar Speech The ups and downs of Brunian discourse are extreme, and the contrast of noble and vulgar minds (the latter including learned pedantry) is one of its constant factors. At the same time there are signs of a certain striving for an 14. Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies [=HF], trans. by Paul Eugene Memmo, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), pp. 60 and 66.

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Anglo-Italian synthesis, not only on the aristocratic, but also on the more popular level. The ebullient, and rather bawdy, invocation, at the beginning of the Cena, of the Muse d’Inghilterra, young, delicate, blond, fair-skinned, with rosy cheeks, is a case in point: ‘inspiratemi, suffiatemi, scaldatemi, accendetemi, lambiccatemi e risolvetemi in liquore, datemi in succhio, e fatemi comparir […] con una copiosa e larga vena di prosa lunga, corrente, grande e soda’ (‘inspire me, breathe on me, warm me, ignite me, distill and resolve me into liquor, make me into juice, and make me utter […] an abundant, broad vein of lengthy, fluent, grand and steady prose’; DI, p. 26; AWS, p. 84). This grand vein is again related to popular tradition at the beginning of De la Causa, when Armesso declares his faith in ordinary and vulgar speech, that is to say, in the words which he imbibed from his nurse’s teats: tale quali m’insaccò nel capo la nutriccia, la quale era quasi tanto cotennuta, pettoruta, ventruta, fiancuta e naticuta, quanto può essere quella londriota, che viddi a Westmester; la quale, per iscaldamento del stomaco ha un paio di tettazze, che paiono gli borzacchini del gigante san Sparagorio, e che, concie in cuoio, varrebbono sicuramente a far due pive ferrarese. (DI, p. 196) such words as my wetnurse hammered into my skull—a woman as thick-skinned, big-chested, wide-hipped, ample-bellied and broad-bottomed as that Londoner I caught sight of in Westminster, who possessed such ample mammaries, like hotwater bottles for her stomach, that they seemed the halfboots of the immense Saint Sparagorio, and which if tanned would match [sic] a pair of Ferrarese bagpipes. (CPU, p. 18)

Armesso’s wetnurse and the big-breasted woman of Westminster, the halfboots of the saintly giant Sparagorio, whoever he may be (the commentaries are not sure), and the pair of Ferrarese bagpipes drawn in for purposes of burlesque comparison lead a merry Anglo-Italian coexistence in praise of the vital and spicy lingua volgare, which is the opposite of authoritarian discourse and pedantic jargon. To the echoes from Aretino and Berni discovered in this passage by the editors of the Dialoghi italiani, I would add the linguistic giantism of Rabelais, obviously one of Bruno’s favourite authors: Aretino’s physical anarchism, Berni’s irreverent mockery, and Rabelais’ humanist exuberance constitute a triple anti-classicist influence on Bruno’s style and mission, which was the task of liberating the best minds of Europe from outdated systems of thought and the rigid tyranny of their terminology.15 In the dedicatory epistle of his Spaccio to Sir Philip Sidney, Bruno pro15. See Giordano Bruno, Dialoghi Italiani, p. 196 fn. 4.

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claims his right to speak the vulgar tongue, to call a spade a spade, and to shake off the pedantic slavery of words—thank God we are free and licensed to make them our servants: ‘a noi non conviene l’essere, quali essi [i pedanti] sono, schiavi de certe e determinate voci e paroli; ma, per grazia de dei, ne è lecito, e siamo in libertà di far quelle servire a noi’ (DI, p. 551; p. 553). Small wonder that, in matters of poetry, Bruno declares himself a confirmed rebel against the Aristotelian rules (DI, pp. 958–59). As Nuccio Ordine notes in his remarkable book on Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass, ‘Bruno saw the anti-classicist tradition as a reference point for his linguistic research, tending to create expressive modes capable of translating the violent revolt against the “Ptolemaic” system in philosophy and literature […]. The sentence becomes an infinite universe—it is transformed into a plurality of worlds […].’16 There is no real contradiction between Bruno’s partiality for the vulgar tongue, including its lower registers, and his superb contempt for the plebeians who lack, and the vulgarly learned who betray, the intellectual heritage of man. In both the Cena and De la Causa he assumes the role of the ‘Cynical Dog’ (‘cinico dente’; ‘rabbioso cinico’, DI, p. 5; p. 199), and in the Spaccio, his main spokesman is Momus, cynical critic of men and gods. The kynikós trópos or dog-like perspective taught by the school of Diogenes, the radical scepticism which Bruno claims for his work of demolition, entails a no less radical irreverence of discourse. Bruno’s partiality, as far as Cinquecento literature is concerned, goes towards the irregular, blasphemous, and obscene—thus Giorgio Squarotti, one of the best authorities on Brunian stylistics.17 This shocking bluntness serves as a demolition tool against the pseudophilosophers, and as a dramatic foil to Bruno’s own philosophical flights. The impure mixture of both style and matter is akin to the seriocomic strategies of Menippean Satire, and reflects a multifarious and contradictory concept of reality that resists closure. Like the Ash Wednesday supper, it is ‘sí grande, sí picciolo; sí maestrale, sí disciplinale; sí sacrilego, sí religioso; sí allegro, sí colerico; sí aspro, sí giocondo; sí magro fiorentino, sí grasso bolognese; sí 16. Ordine, pp. 144, 146.—See Michele Ciliberto, Lessico, p. xxvii: ‘La nuova visione del mondo s’intreccia a una nuova concezione della lingua. Dal nuovo pensiero germina una lingua strutturalmente antipedantesca, capace d’esprimere plasticamente, in modo duttile, la pluralità infinita dei linguaggi umani e naturali, la varietà della realtà […]’ (‘The new vision of the world connects with a new concept of speech. From the new way of thinking springs a language that is structurally anti-pedantic and able to express graphically, in a ductile way, the infinite plurality of human and natural speech and the variety of existence’). See also Michele Ciliberto, La ruota del tempo (Rome: Riuniti, 1986), ch. 5. 17. Giorgio Squarotti, Parodia e pensiero: Giordano Bruno (Milan: Greco, 1997), p. 41.

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cinico, sí sardanapalesco […]’ (‘a banquet so great and small, so professorial and studentlike, so sacrilegious and religious, so joyous and choleric, so cruel and pleasant, so Florentine for its leanness and Bolognese for its fatness, so cynical and Sardanapalian’ […]; DI, p. 8; AWS, p. 67). The Cusanian term coincidentia oppositorum, which critics frequently apply to this cumulative pairing of opposites, may be equally invoked for the contrast between Italianità and Englishness so drastically staged in some of Bruno’s London dialogues. As the first of these began with an invocation to the English Muses, the last one, the Eroici Furori, ends with the final illumination of nine young lovers, after a ten-year odyssey which led them from the Circean Campania to Elizabethan London, under the eyes of the beautiful and graceful nymphs of Father Thames. It cannot be a matter of chance that the British Muses open and close the great cycle of Bruno’s Anglo-Italian writings. They symbolize the happier aspects, the mental as well as literary inspiration of his English exile.

Bibliography Aquilecchia, Giovanni, ‘L’adozione del volgare nei dialoghi londinesi di Giordano Bruno’, Cultura Neolatina, 13 (1953), 165–89. Bruno, Giordano, The Ash Wednesday Supper [=AWS], trans. by Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). Bruno, Giordano, Cause, Principle and Unity [=CPU], trans. by Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Bruno, Giordano, Dialoghi italiani [=DI], ed. by Giovanni Gentile and Giovanni Aquilecchia, 3rd edn (Florence: Sansoni, 1958). Bruno, Giordano, The Heroic Frenzies [=HF], trans. by Paul Eugene Memmo, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). Cancelliere, Vito Mariano, Un Pedante viene battuto (Bern: Lang, 1988). Ciliberto, Michele, ‘Bruno allo specchio: Filosofia e autobiografia nel Cinquecento’, in Giordano Bruno 1583–1585: The English Experience, ed. by Michele Ciliberto and Nicholas Mann (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1997), pp. 61–89. Ciliberto, Michele, Lessico di Giordano Bruno (Rome: Ateneo, 1979). Ciliberto, Michele, La ruota del tempo (Rome: Riuniti, 1986). Jonson, Ben, Discoveries, ed. by George Bagshawe Harrison (London: John Lane,1923). Jonson, Ben, Volpone, ed. by Philip Brockbank (London: Ernest Benn, 1968).

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Koppenfels, Werner von, ‘Ash Wednesday in Westminster’, in Renaissance Go-Betweens, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 55–77. Rabelais, François, Gargantua, in Œuvres, vol. 1, ed. by Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1956). McNulty, Robert, ‘Bruno at Oxford’, Renaissance News, 13 (1960), 300–305. Nashe, Thomas, Selected Writings, ed. by Stanley Wells (London: Arnold, 1964). Ordine, Nuccio, Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Ordine, Nuccio, Giordano Bruno, Ronsard et la Religion (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004). Squarotti, Giorgio, Parodia e pensiero: Giordano Bruno (Milan: Greco, 1997). Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964).

Ralf Hertel ‘Mine Italian brain ’gan in your duller Britain operate most vilely’: Cymbeline and the Deconstruction of Anglo-Italian Differences If we look at presentations of Italians on the early modern English stage, it seems that Anglo-Italian relations have not always been harmonious. It would appear that the English valued the Italians particularly as objects of xenophobic prejudices. In many of these plays, Italians tend to be viceridden schemers such as Iago in Othello, heartless capitalists such as Ben Jonson’s Volpone or Shakespeare’s Venetian Merchant, or immoral seducers such as Justiniano in Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, the play I will focus on in this essay, is at first sight no exception to this rule of theatrical Italian-bashing. Iachimo, the main Italian character, not only resembles the Iago of Othello in name, but also in deed. He is a villain who could hardly be more villainous, talking the naïve Briton Posthumus into a wager on the chastity of the latter’s wife. When the Italian finds the British princess Imogen as chaste as her husband claims, he decides to fake evidence to the contrary. Hidden in a chest, he tricks his way into her bedroom so that he can describe it in detail to Posthumus who believes that his wife has indeed been seduced. Shakespeare takes especial care to make clear that Iachimo is not just a villain but an Italian villain. He is called ‘a slight thing of Italy’ (5.4.48), an ‘Italian fiend’ (5.5.210), and ‘a saucy stranger’ coming from ‘drug-damn’d Italy’ (3.4.15), behaving at Cymbeline’s court like in a ‘Romish stew’ (1.6.152), i.e. a Roman brothel.1 When his double-play is finally uncovered, he himself admits to his vices in terms of national difference: ‘Mine Italian brain/ ‘gan in your duller Britain operate/ most vilely’ (5.5.196–98). Indeed, it soon emerges that Shakespeare constructs the conflicts of the play in terms of Anglo-Italian differences. Iachimo’s unsuccessful conquest of the British princess is paralleled in the Roman army’s failed invasion of Britain that follows Cymbeline’s refusal to pay tribute to Rome. It is not only here that interpersonal action is mirrored in international events; names resounding with nationally charged connotations indicate further that what we are dealing with here is symbolic Cymbeline. The king’s name refers to historical Cymbeline who was King of Roman Britain at the time of Christ’s birth. His 1.

Quotations are from William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 2005).

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two sons Arviragus and Guiderius, who are abducted in infancy, are renamed Cadwal and Polydore by their foster father, and their names similarly point to a beginning and also to an ending, in this case of Saxon English history. As Ros King observes, ‘Polydore’ might refer to one of the youngest sons of Priam, King of Troy, who was murdered by a Thracian king. At the beginning of the travels that would eventually lead him to Britain, Brutus sees his ghost. Cadwal, on the other hand, might allude to Cadwallader, the last Celtic King of Britain.2 Behind the personal, the national looms large in Cymbeline. The bet on Imogen’s chastity conceals another indication that Shakespeare intends to construct his play along lines of national confrontation. He adopts this so-called wager plot from a story of day two in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and its English version, Frederick of Jennen. While in Boccaccio the dispute about the virtue of wives takes place amongst Italian merchants, Cymbeline significantly relies on the more international setting of the English version, even adding a Dutchman. Thus, it deliberately turns this quarrel into an international beauty—or rather chastity—contest. Here, the argument is not so much about individual wives but about ‘any lady in Britain’ (1.4.69) and the ‘shes of Italy’ (1.3.29) as such. The catastrophic wager on Imogen’s chastity, which sets in motion a quick succession of deceit and revenge, of murder and narrow escapes, is motivated by national pride and prejudice. Why is Shakespeare so keen on imbuing his play with national undertones? What is his point in setting the British against the Italians? Britain versus Italy That the Italians are described in negative terms is already clear from the characterisation of Iachimo. More specifically, the semantics of Italianness suggests insubstantiality: Iachimo is ‘some jay of Italy’ and a ‘slight thing’, another Italian is called ‘Philario’, which translates as ‘lover of air’.3 On the British Isles, Iachimo feels his powers waning for ‘the air on’t/ revengingly enfeebles me’ (5.2.3–4). The Italians of Cymbeline seem to be fickle, weightless creatures, their Italian nature hanging around them in the air like a per2. 3.

For the implications of the names see Ros King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 70–75. The folio spells his names ‘Filorio’, for Roger Warren an indication that Shakespeare possibly intended to ‘suggest a Renaissance Italian name rather than a classical one’. Roger Warren, ‘Appendix A’, in William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by Roger Warren (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 265–69 (p. 269). One could, however, also speculate whether this suggests an allusion to the Italian-born lexicographer and translator John Florio, a central go-between figure in the Anglo-Italian relations of late 16th and early 17th century whose writings Shakespeare was acquainted with.

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fume—or a disease, and indeed, the second semantic field employed for their characterisation is medical: Posthumus’ sudden jealousy—a character trait Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed to be typically Italian—appears as an infection he catches in Rome, and the ghost of his father chides Jupiter for allowing Iachimo to ‘taint’, i.e. to infect, ‘his nobler heart and brain, with needless jealousy’ (5.4.48–49). Italy, or to be precise: Italian behaviour, is like a virus, and as such all the more dangerous for it turns innocent Britons into hosts of disease, into enemies within. Italy corrupts the blood, contaminates and poisons it. Pisanio’s remark is in line with the contemporary image of Italy as ‘the Apothecary-shop of poyson for all Nations’, as Thomas Nashe phrases it, when he exclaims: O master, what strange infection Is fall’n into thy ear! What false Italian, As poisonous-tongued as handed, hath prevailed On thy too ready hearing? (3.2.3–6)4

In Cymbeline, ‘drug-damn’d Italy’ not only poses a military threat but also a moral one, contaminating innocent British travellers with jealousy and turning them into Italianate Englishmen; Posthumus, who has been banished for loving the king’s daughter and who, as Imogen fears, ‘has forgot Britain’ (1.6.113–14), is a case in point. These, however, are even worse than the Italians themselves, as Shakespeare’s contemporary Roger Ascham already knew: ‘hear what the Italian saith of the Englishman […]: “Inglese italianato è un diavolo incarnato”.’5 Furthermore, this moral threat is highly gendered. It is no coincidence that all Italians in the play are male, while all the women we encounter are English. Italy not only penetrates innocent, virginal Britain like a virus but also like a rapist. When in a dramatic scene Iachimo, the vile Italian seducer, steps forth at night from his trunk in Imogen’s bedroom, he also steps forth from the worst of British xenophobic nightmares: by cunning and courtly over-refinement, Italy is making a conquest of Britain’s ‘secret parts’, defiling a woman whose name not coincidentally ranges somewhere between ‘innocence’ and ‘immaculate’.6 The danger of moral corruption goes beyond this bedroom scene. As Wil-

4. 5. 6.

The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow, 2nd edn, rev. by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), I, p. 186. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, facsimile (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968), p. 66. It is interesting in this regard that ‘Imogen’ might have originally been ‘Innogen’, as some editors argue—in this case, her name would be even closer to ‘innocence’. For a discussion of the spelling of her name see Warren, pp. 265–68.

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son Knight observes, the fateful wager is conceived in terms of courtly refinement. Iachimo bets that just as a ‘cunning thief’ might easily win Posthumus’ ring, so ‘an “accomplished courtier” (i.e. of continental training and experience) would soon vanquish the simple British girl in question’.7 If one takes a closer look, however, not only is Imogen in danger of being seduced by the Italian, but the entire nation is at risk of being seduced by Italian fashions. Cymbeline can be read as a critique of courtly life, i.e. of a behaviour pattern originating in Renaissance Italy and spreading to England through books such as Thomas Hoby’s translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano. The very first lines of the play not only refer to, but are also spoken by, London courtiers: You do not meet a man but frowns. Our bloods No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers’ Still seem as does the king’s. (1.1.1–3)

The reason for the courtiers’ frowns is the banishment of Posthumus whom princess Imogen has married secretly against the will of her father but who in the eyes of the courtiers is ‘a poor but worthy gentleman’ (1.1.6). Yet, their praise of him remains indirect and subdued as if they were afraid that it might be overheard by the raging king: 1st Gentleman:

As to seek through the regions of the earth For one his like, there would be something failing In him that should compare. I do not think So fair an outward and such stuff within Endows a man but he. 2nd Gentleman: You speak him far. 1st Gentleman: I do extend him, sir, within himself, Crush him together rather than unfold His measure duly. (1.1.20–27)

As Ros King points out, the gentlemen give us a taste of the hypocrisy of courtly double speak: ‘In their obsequiousness and readiness to acquiesce in a situation they find distasteful, they tell us things that, as characters, they do not intend. We see the very conditions that would cause anyone who wanted to retain their decency to fly the court.’8 Indeed, in the course of the play all protagonists leave Cymbeline’s Lon-

7. 8.

G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 143. King, p. 8.

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don court—Cymbeline included. Imogen and her husband Posthumus as well as her suitor Cloten, Posthumus’ servant Pisanio and, earlier on, Belarius with the two abducted princes Arviragus and Guiderius, all make their way to Wales in a rite de passage of sorts. The wilderness of Wales is constructed as the antithesis of everything courtly and overly refined in London. No palaces, advisors, fashions, and false talk here but caves, rags, and rough deeds; no conceited stepsons and boastful kings-to-be like Cloten but true princes full of unpretentious virtue; no wicked queens but immaculate princesses—no Italy but true Britain. Travelling to Wales represents a return to the roots, to a chivalric, heroic Britain as yet still untainted by the decadent influence of the Italian Renaissance court. As Imogen exclaims on her first encounter with life outside court: ‘Gods. What lies I have heard./ Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court:/ Experience, O thou disprov’st report’ (4.2.34–36). The protagonists go native, and they do so quite literally—they go back to what is presented as their native origins, to a place and time prior to Italy’s corruption of England. What does Italy do to the British? Shakespeare sums it up in an image as simple as powerful. When banished Posthumus leaves Imogen and sails over the horizon, he waves a handkerchief as pure and white as his soul. He returns from Italy, however, with a ‘bloody cloth’ (4.1.1). The implication is obvious: Italy stains the pure British character, dirtying it with false Italian blood and filthy vices. The message is all too clear: Italy is a place where the innocent British traveller is corrupted, as well as the source from which courtly vices spread like infections—a bad influence, a bad moral influenza of public health. Italy is the opposite of Britain; villains such as Iachimo are the foil against which the heroism of supposedly true English characters shines only the brighter. Accordingly, the play is frequently read in terms of national confrontation. For Harry Levin, the play ‘does indeed present a stereotypic contrast between the ingenious natives of Roman Britain […] and “that drug-damn’d Italy”’.9 And John Pitcher sees Imogen’s rejection of Iachimo’s advances as ‘English Protestant disgust about Papal Rome—sexual as well as religious’.10 In short: in Cymbeline, Italy is the Other, something crucially anti-English that has to be rejected in order to find a specifically British identity. Or so it seems. For the smug juxtaposition of Italy and Britain is a bit too

Harry Levin, ‘Shakespeare’s Italians’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. by Michele Marrapodi and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 17–29 (p. 20). 10. John Pitcher, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. by John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. xxi–lxxvii (p. xlviii). 9.

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easy in my opinion. Instead, I would argue Italy is not just the opposite of Britain here. While taking up national stereotypes, the play in fact goes a long way to undermine those clichés. Taking a closer look, we realise that the Italians are not very Italian at all in Cymbeline. In fact, sometimes the British are the better Italians. Britain and Italy Although almost half of the cast of Cymbeline is Italian and several scenes are set in Italy—amongst them the crucial wager scene—critics have not usually counted it as one of Shakespeare’s Italian plays.11 This omission is understandable, since the Italy of Cymbeline is not very Italian. There are no striking landmarks and the Italian places are far from being as symbolic as, for instance, Milford Haven, the focal point of the action in Wales, which reverberates with allusions to Tudor and Jacobean mythology, as I will explain in a moment. The main Italian location we encounter is Philario’s house where the wager is made, a place that is by no means marked as particularly Italian. Taking into account the sparse decoration of the Shakespearean stage, the place could be situated anywhere were it not for its inhabitants—and the group of people assembling there is not very Italian either. The Italians are not even in the majority. Instead, we are presented with a rather international cast of gentlemen: we find the place peopled with Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, and Britons. Italy appears as an international place, and Posthumus’ confusion of nationalities is revealing when he imagines Iachimo, the Italian seducer, mounting Imogen like ‘a full-acorned boar, a German one’ (2.4.168). In this late romance, the Italians are not too strictly confined to their own nationality but in constant exchange with foreign nations. This chimes in interestingly with Werner von Koppenfels’ article in this anthology in which he describes Giordano Bruno as selfdeclared ‘cittadino e domestico del mondo’: Bruno appears as a real-life example of an Italian constantly thriving to overcome national boundaries in search of a supranational elite, as an embodiment of the internationality of the Italians we find in Cymbeline. Tellingly, the Italians of Cymbeline do not speak Italian. Unlike the French, the Irish, the Scottish, or the Welsh in Shakespeare’s history plays, where the playwright employs linguistic diversity as a marker of national 11. The anthology Shakespeare’s Italy, for instance, omits the play altogether, as do Murray J. Levith’s Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1989) and Paul A. Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).

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differences, the Italians are not marked out as foreigners by their language. If anything, the smart rhetoric of Iachimo, the seducer, is even more effective than Posthumus’ restricted vocabulary of honesty—he is ‘the master of [his] speeches’ (1.4.137) indeed, and even so in English. Simultaneously, it seems that the English are more Italian than the Italians. They demonstrate character traits stereotypically considered to be Italian: the Queen is a poisoning Machiavellian schemer rivalling, if not outdoing, Iachimo in vice and deceit, and Posthumus’ jealousy could hardly be surpassed by any Italian. If theatricality is characteristic of Italian behaviour as Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed—note how Bruno is attacked for his showiness according to von Koppenfels—it is the Britons in the play that are Italian: the great theatrical scenes such as the princes’ ritualistic burying of Fidele or Imogen’s weeping over Cloten’s body are reserved for the English, and the most theatrical character, the swaggering Cloten, is English to the bone. Cymbeline further undermines national opposition with international friendships and intranational confrontations. On the one hand, Philario, the Italian, and Posthumus, the Briton, are close friends; Lucius, the Roman messenger, is held in high esteem at Cymbeline’s court. On the other hand, Cymbeline banishes Belarius and Posthumus—both British. Posthumus’ counterpart is not only the Italian Iachimo but also the Briton Cloten, and in the plotting Queen it is a British person who is deceiving Cymbeline, King of Britain. The lines of confrontation do not run between nations but within them. Cymbeline is a play of crossing boundaries. First of all, this is true in a geographical sense. Posthumus travels from London to Rome and back via Wales; Iachimo moves in the opposite direction, leaving Italy twice for Britain in order to seduce Imogen and to fight in the Roman army; Posthumus’ servant Pisanio is engaged in shuttle-diplomacy of sorts, moving rapidly between London, Rome, and Wales. Yet, not only are borders crossed in the play, but a kind of national cross-dressing is a recurrent motif, too. As the wager scene presents us with a Spaniard and a Dutchman who both have not a single line to speak, their nationality must be visualised by their costumes. Yet, costumes are easily, and prominently, changed in Cymbeline. Not only does Cloten dress in Posthumus’ garments but through cross-dressing, the British princess Imogen turns into the Roman servant Fidele. Posthumus provides a particularly prominent example of changing national allegiance like, and together with, clothes: the Briton dresses as an Italian gentleman to join the Roman invasion of Britain, before changing to the apparel of a British peasant in order to fight back the same invasion, only to change into the habit of an Italian gentleman once more and become prisoner of the British (5.2 and 5.3). Nationality is presented here not as an essential given but as something outward, superficial. It is as if this play, so full of deceiving im-

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pressions—is Imogen seduced? Is Fidele dead? Is Posthumus slewn?— cautions us against trusting appearances, not least in terms of nationality. The protagonists’ names further indicate that a separation of Italian and British identity is not quite so easy. Posthumus’ British servant Pisanio has a very Italian-sounding name, and his own name is only one of many Latinate ones in the play. In the course of the play Imogen adopts the identity of an Italian servant and the telling Italian name ‘Fidele’. Arviragus and Guiderius are renamed Cadwal and Polydore by their foster-father Belarius, their identity onomastically situated somewhere between Britain’s Roman roots (as indicated by their Latinate names), its Celtic origins (Cadwallader being the last Celtic King of Britain), and Renaissance Italy (‘Polydore’ might have reminded the contemporaries also of Polydore Vergil, the Italian historiographer at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII). The onomastic confusion in Cymbeline runs counter to a construction of identity along clear national divisions and more towards flexible identities negotiating various cultural influences. The subversion of Anglo-Italian differences also takes place on a structural level. One can observe it already in the genre of the play. Cymbeline is a pastoral tragi-comedy, a form that came to early modern England from Italy through the influence of playwrights such as Battista Guarini. Yet, Shakespeare not only resorts to Italian genres for his British play but also to Italian plots. As mentioned before, the wager story derives from Boccaccio, and in the making of Cymbeline Shakespeare relies no less on Latin sources such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses than on Raphael Holinshed’s English and Scottish chronicles or Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene.12 If the spatial setting and the naming of the protagonists suggest that identities are no longer constructed along national divisions, the structure of the play underlines this: its form and plot is inspired both by British and Italian sources alike. Thus, Cymbeline implicitly demonstrates that contemporary English culture is rooted in Italian and Roman as well as English traditions—at least, Shakespeare’s own play, this piece of contemporary Jacobean culture, is. Obviously, Shakespeare’s interest is not so much in Italy as such but in Italy as a cultural influence on Britain. The unspecific Italian locations demonstrate that Italy is less described than evoked, and as the play develops, real Italy tellingly soon fades away. There are no more Italian settings in the last two acts but only Italians in Britain, indicating that the focus shifts from Italy itself to what comes from Italy to Britain. Instead of clear-cut Italians, we get stereotypical Italian behaviour patterns in Italian and British characters alike; instead of Italy we get Italianness. The Italy of Cymbeline is not to be found 12. See John Pitcher, ‘Sources’, in Cymbeline, ed. by John Pitcher, pp. 151–54. For references to Ovid see Pitcher, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv and xliv and King, pp. 20–30.

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south of the Alps but in the double-talk of the courtiers at Cymbeline’s court, in the scheming and poisoning of his Queen, and the jealousy of his daughter’s husband Posthumus. It is nothing external to the British but often part of their own identity. In this regard, the play is part of a more general development which A. J. Hoenselaars observes for early 17th century drama: ‘The increasing tendency to transfer stereotypical character traits from foreigners to Londoners was the sign of a more deeply rooted consciousness. It was symptomatic of the budding scepticism with regard to the available definitions of national types.’13 Focussing on Italy within the British, on their adoption of Italian manners, Cymbeline fits in with this development. In other words, it is not only about specific ‘Italian brains’ in ‘duller Britain’ but more generally about Italian ideas in the climate of British culture. Britain as Italy The Italy of Cymbeline is inconsistent; in fact, there are two Italies. The first one is the Roman Empire at the time of historical Cymbeline, i.e. around the birth of Christ. It is represented by the honourable ambassador Lucius and dominates the plot around Cymbeline’s refusal to pay tribute. The second is Renaissance Italy, which might be seen embodied in Iachimo, the courtly seducer, and leaves its traces in the wager plot derived from Boccaccio, the Machiavellism of the ‘wicked Queen’, the double speak at Cymbeline’s court, and the fear of an Italianisation of Englishmen as exemplified in the character of Posthumus. Shakespeare does not seem to worry much about mingling epochs more than 1500 years apart. This anachronism can be explained when one considers the Italy of the play rather as a symbol of a certain set of ideas than as a consistent, realistic depiction of a particular state. Taking for granted that, as Manfred Pfister puts it, ‘what is at stake is not simply images of Italy, reflecting Italian reality, but constructions of Italy reflecting at least as much the interests, needs and anxieties of the English themselves’ we should ask what this particular double-sided construction of Italy in Cymbeline reveals about the English—or, rather, about the British.14 For if Shakespeare is unashamedly careless about mixing Italy and the Roman Empire, he is painstakingly consistent in referring to Britain and not to 13. A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1643 (Rutherford: Associated University Press, 1992), p. 109. 14. Manfred Pfister, ‘Shakespeare and Italy, or, The Law of Diminishing Returns’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. by Michele Marrapodi and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 295–303 (p. 299).

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England. Cymbeline’s power seems to end at the Welsh frontier, and he can only grant Lucius safe conduct to the shores of the Severn (3.5.15–16)—yet he is not presented as an English king but as ‘King of Britain’. Despite the fact that the play sets Wales as the wild, primitive Other against the court in London, it persistently plays down Anglo-Welsh differences. In fact, it is impossible for differences between the English and the Welsh to arise for a simple reason: there are no Welsh characters in Cymbeline. Even those figures living in Wales are English exiles. Yet they are never called ‘English’, but exclusively referred to as ‘British’. In a play full of Italians, Romans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and Spaniards, there is no space for the English. Of course, the play is set in a British, pre-English era and references to England would therefore be anachronistic. Yet, Shakespeare does not hesitate to mingle Frenchmen and Gallia (2.4.18) or to mention Italians alongside Romans, thus creating coexistences no less anachronistic. Together with some critics, I believe that this striking insistence on Britishness has a deeper meaning: it alerts us to the topical allusions of the play. As Leah S. Marcus and others demonstrate, one can read this play with a Jacobean unionist agenda—just as James I would no longer speak of the English, Welsh, or Scottish but only of Britons, so the play blends out the differences between the various peoples of Britain.15 It is not merely the replacement of English characters by British ones that indicates a unionist streak. The fact that the story line of Belarius and his two foster-sons driving back the Roman invasion is a British reworking of a Scottish plot from Raphael Holinshed’s chronicles, in which three Scottish farmers drive out a Danish invasion, seems to further confirm a unionist reading—in Cymbeline, Scottish history is British history.16 And if Posthumus jumps to the side of Belarius and the princes in defending Britain, this is significant not least because his name echoes the Jacobean term ‘post-nati’, an expression James coined for those born after his succession and the union of the crowns, i.e. for what he believed to be the model citizens of a future Britain. In a unionist reading, then, 15. Leah S. Marcus, ‘Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality’, in Shakespeare: The Last Plays, ed. by Kiernan Ryan (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 134–63. 16. The topicality of the so-called Hay-plot grows even stronger when one takes into account that one of James’s favourites descended from this particular Scottish family. For further reading on the Hay-plot see Glynne Wickham, ‘Riddle and Emblem: A Study in the Dramatic Structure of Cymbeline’, in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner, ed. by John Carey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 94–113. See also Mary Floyd-Wilson who argues ‘that Cymbeline’s central plot may be an amalgamation of Scottish and English histories’; ‘Delving to the Root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English Race’, in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. by David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101–15, (p. 101). The relevant passage from Holinshed is reprinted in King, p. 98.

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it is this coming generation who, fighting in a brotherly way side by side, wards off foreign threats that the individual peoples of Britain alone were not able to defend themselves against. The Romans might have conquered England, the implication goes, but they cannot defeat a united Britain. In addition, the prominence of Wales reverberates with the Jacobean desire to integrate the margins, simultaneously highlighting a place central to Jacobean myth-making: it is here that James’s ancestor Henry VII landed before ending the Wars of the Roses; and it is this first Tudor king on which James’s son Henry modelled himself when he was invested as Prince of Wales in 1610, tellingly in the same year that Cymbeline was very probably first performed.17 Indeed, as Ros King demonstrates, one can trace many parallels between the play and Henry’s investiture.18 In the ears of the contemporary audience the Welsh location must have resonated both with the ending of the Wars of the Roses, i.e. a harmonious fusion of hitherto warring nations, as well as with the promise of future glory. If Cymbeline is a play of displacement and exile, its final reconciliation of nations reverberates with the Jacobean hope for a united kingdom that is at peace with itself and its neighbours, with the hoped-for union of the various peoples inhabiting the British isles brought about by James who is King of Scotland, England, and Wales, or, in short: King of Britain—like Cymbeline. In this context, the Roman Empire gains particular significance. This ancient superpower, which absorbs rather than occupies foreign countries through its politics of self-regulation, becomes a model for a multi-ethnic British Empire as James might have envisaged it. Cymbeline’s ultimate decision to pay tribute despite his victory is highly symbolic in this regard, speaking of the recognition of Britain’s roots in the Roman Empire. If the play anachronistically introduces Renaissance Italy as a contrast to the Roman Empire, this is not only to provide a foil to set Britain against; it also demonstrates that contemporary, decadent Italy is unworthy of its ancient heritage, thus legitimising Britain’s claim to be the proper successor to the Roman Empire.19 Shakespeare borrows authority from the Roman Empire for 17. For dating the play see John Pitcher, ‘Cymbeline and the Court of King James’, in Cymbeline, ed. by John Pitcher, pp. 155–59 (pp. 156–57). 18. King, pp. 47–63. For an analysis of topical allusions to James and his court see also Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 84–99, and Leah S. Marcus, ‘Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality.’ 19. Willy Maley reads Cymbeline together with The Tempest and Henry VIII as ‘postcolonial plays’: ‘These plays are postcolonial in so far as Shakespeare is working through England’s post-Reformation history, the history of a nation wrested from an empire that copied (in true deconstructive fashion) the thing to which it was ostensibly opposed, a history in which a new English nation grew into an empire virtually overnight, then sealed its fate

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his construction of Britain, however, he is not alone in borrowing authority to lend gravity to a message—as we will discover in Sara Soncini’s analysis of Italian dubbed versions of cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Here she demonstrates how translators in turn borrow Shakespeare’s British authority in order to legitimise Italy’s imperial ambitions—the direction of Anglo-Italian appropriation is reversed. Significantly, Cymbeline is a play of visions. The protagonists frequently, and prominently, fall asleep, crossing the border between reality and a world of dreams, and in a highly theatrical scene the ghosts of Posthumus’ ancestors appear together with Jupiter himself who provides a prophecy. These prophetic scenes indicate that the play is not so much about real, historical Britain as about the imaginary geography of Britain—about the dream of a future Britain that revives former imperial greatness. Frontiers and their crossing are crucial elements of this imaginary geography, and the envisioned Britain takes its shape from its relationship to the foreign. Two dreamlike scenes in particular capture the extremes of this relation. When the ‘tempters of the night’ (2.2.9) visit sleeping Imogen in the form of an Italian Jack-, or rather Iachimo-in-the-box, this nightly apparition symbolises British xenophobic fears of foreign seduction and corruption. In contrast, the prophecy placed on sleeping Posthumus’ breast speaks of Britain as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. As the soothsayer says, the Roman eagle, From south to west on wing soaring aloft, Lessened herself, and in the beams o’th’sun So vanished; which foreshadowed our princely eagle, Th’imperial Caesar, should again unite His favour with the radiant Cymbeline, Which shines here in the west. (5.5.468–74)

As Wilson Knight points out, this is not merely an image of the reconciliation of Cymbeline and Caesar but also the ‘foreshadowing’ of a radiant British Empire rivalling the splendour of the Roman one.20 Hence Cymbeline is not only a play of visions but also a visionary play: by referring back to Britain’s past as part of a multi-ethnic Roman Empire, it prefigures in its theatrical reality the union of nations James eventually failed to establish, a union that through an act of union that resulted in a net loss of English sovereignty in favour of a British empire modelled on the Roman one that had only just been shaken off.’ Willy Maley, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays, ed. by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 145–57 (p. 149). 20. Knight, pp. 163–64.

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was achieved only a hundred years later by the Act of Union of 1707. Set at the time of Christ’s birth, Cymbeline is a nativity play of sorts, yet what is staged here is the birth of a British nation. By playing down Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Scottish differences while simultaneously stressing the importance of Roman-British roots, Cymbeline constructs an ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson) that goes beyond racial boundaries, that is not ethnic but national, not English but British. If the history plays construct national identity in opposition to foreigners and as a struggle between the various peoples of Britain, Cymbeline uses foreign influences to deconstruct a limited understanding of nationality. There are still advocates of a narrow-minded, insular patriotism in the play—Cloten’s proud ‘Britain’s a world/ by itself, and we will nothing pay/ for wearing our own noses’ (3.1.16–18) speaks of such a stance, and his mother’s defiance of the threat of a Roman invasion expresses it even more clearly. Yet tellingly, neither lives to see the final reconciliation—in the new, imperial Britain, there is no place for their isolationist stance. In other words, the construction of British identity goes hand in hand with the deconstruction of a particularly insular English identity. Cymbeline emerges as a synthesis of Shakespeare’s prior occupation with national identity, fusing the interest in an emergent English identity of the history plays with the fascination with the cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire in a celebration of a Britain that goes beyond ethnic divisions. The development from a play such as Henry V to this late romance is a move from English nationalism to British imperialism that implicitly reflects the change in politics from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean era. Britons Playing Italians, or, The Performative Surplus Can this be more than a 21st century projection onto a 17th century text? What effect did the play in performance have on its contemporary audience? With most of Shakespeare’s plays, this is merely guesswork. With Cymbeline, however, we are in the rare situation of possessing an eye-witness account of a performance by Shakespeare’s company. Simon Forman must have seen the play staged in 1610 or 1611, and since his report gives us the unique chance to grasp its effect, I would like to quote him extensively: Remember the story of Cymbeline, King of England in Lucius’ time, and how Lucius, the Roman ambassador came from Octavius Caesar for tribute; and being denied, after sent Lucius with a great army of soldiers who landed at Milford Haven, and after were vanquished by Cymbeline, and Lucius taken prisoner; and all by means of three outlaws of the which two of them were sons of Cymbeline stolen from him when they were but two years old by an old man whom Cymbeline banished, and he kept them as his own sons twenty years with him in a cave. And how one of them

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Ralf Hertel slew Cloten that was the Queen’s son going to Milford Haven to seek the love of Innogen the King’s daughter, whom he banished also for loving his daughter. And how the Italian that came from her love conveyed himself into a chest, and said it was a chest of plate sent from her love and others to be presented to the King; and in the deepest of the night she being asleep, he opened the chest and came forth of it, and viewed her in bed and the marks of her body, and took away her bracelet and after accused her of adultery to her love etc. And in the end how he came with the Romans into England and was taken prisoner and after revealed to Innogen, who had turned herself into man’s apparel and fled to meet her love at Milford Haven, and chanced to fall on the cave in the woods where her two brothers were; and how by eating a sleeping dram they thought she had been dead, and laid her in the woods and the body of Cloten by her in her love’s apparel that he left behind him; and how she was found by Lucius etc.21

What strikes one first is the breathlessness of Forman’s account; even in retrospect (‘remember’) he appears to be completely overwhelmed. Like an overexcited child he is unable to structure his impressions and only just manages to add up observations in the parataxis of amazement. His is the syntax of astonished disbelief, and indeed, does the play not put high demands on the audience’s credulity? A princess who leaves for Wales in search of her lover and in a cave happens to stumble across her two brothers who had gone missing twenty years ago? These two long-lost princes defeating the entire Roman army in their first battle? Jupiter himself descending as a veritable deus-ex-machina to make things work out?22 Is this not just a bit too much? The story-line of Cymbeline is highly improbable, and Forman’s account seems to take account of this. He is, by the way, not alone in his irritation; some hundred and fifty years later, Samuel Johnson’s famous remark expresses the same bewilderment much more drastically: To remark the folly of the fiction and the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism on unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation.23

Well, let us waste just a little more criticism on this unresisting imbecility. Less polemically and more to the point of our concern here, one could say

21. Quoted from John Pitcher, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi. 22. It has been argued that the epiphany of Jupiter was not written by Shakespeare but added later. Yet, if G. Wilson is right in arguing that this scene is indeed Shakespeare’s, this would support our reading: dispensable in terms of plot, this scene serves mainly to highlight the theatricality of the play. See Knight, pp. 168–203. 23. Quoted from H. R. Woudhuysen, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 235.

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that the performance of the play undermined its supposed message: although the play ends in harmony, its performance makes it clear that this can only be achieved by the most unlikely twists of fate. Rather than propagating a harmonious union of peoples, the excessive theatricality and entirely implausible plot of the play remind us of the near impossibility of such a supranational union—and this should make us wary of accepting topical readings of the play too readily. Forman at least is not willing to give up national differences so readily. He speaks of Cymbeline as ‘King of England’ and of Iachimo coming to ‘England’—obviously he has not yet embraced the idea of a British identity that the play seems to promote. Tellingly, he omits the final reconciliation between Rome and Britain; for him, the coming together of the different nationalities does not seem to be an indispensable part of the play. And when speaking of Iachimo, he makes sure to identify him as ‘the Italian’ rather than by his name—national differences are obviously still important to him. Or are they? For in his account, we can simultaneously spot the same underlying questioning of national differences that we have observed in the play. He begins with matters of state, with Cymbeline’s refusal to pay tribute and the ensuing war, i.e. with international aspects. Yet, he swiftly moves on to the interpersonal, to Imogen and her brothers, to her relation with Posthumus, and to Iachimo spying on her. In other words, Forman perceives the play predominantly in terms of personal constellations—its national dimension does not seem to interest him for long. Even Iachimo does not appear to be all that foreign. The notes speak of Forman’s fascination with this character in particular—more than a third is dedicated to his description. Upon closer inspection, the seemingly unordered excitement of his prose gives way to a carefully crafted circular structure with the Italian at the very heart of it: from Lucius, Forman moves on to the princes, Cloten, and Imogen, before dwelling in detail on the bedroom scene with Iachimo, from which he returns to the respective plots of Imogen, her brothers, Cloten, and, finally, Lucius again. Obviously, Forman’s fascination with Iachimo reveals a dilemma of performance: if the play is at first sight about the rejection of Iachimo in favour of the honourable Lucius, about turning from Italian vices to Roman virtues, it might well fail on stage—Iachimo the villain is just so much more intriguing than Lucius the noble bore. He not only steals Imogen’s bracelet but also the show. Despite all this, Forman cannot quite escape the voyeuristic temptations of Iachimo—and neither can the spectators. In spying on the naked Imogen on stage we become accomplices of the Italian against our will and share his dirty little secret. Iachimo might be a representative of Italian vices, yet his emotions are not entirely foreign to us; no matter what nationality, we might

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experience the same illicit arousal as he does—there is an Italian voyeur in all of us. Significantly, unlike in Shakespeare’s sources where the Italian trickster is finally killed, Iachimo is forgiven in Cymbeline. Partly, this might be due to the genre-specific happy ending of romances but it might also indicate a less clear rejection of the Italian in Shakespeare. Indeed, the play makes clear that he is not alone in his guilt. A close reading reveals that Iachimo is not so much a liar than a clever rhetorician. For instance, he speaks ambiguously of Imogen’s bedchamber ‘where I confess I slept not, but profess/ Had that what was well worth watching’ (2.4.67–68). It is only Posthumus’ tacit interpretation which turns this into a claim of adultery—Iachimo might just as well be referring to the elaborate decoration of the room, as indeed he continues with a description of its tapestry. Posthumus interrupts him before he has to go into describing sexual activities—the jealous husband would not hear more and concludes: ‘If you will swear you have not done’t, you lie,/ And I will kill thee if thou dost deny/ Thou’st made me cuckold’. Iachimo’s answer again is evasive rather than false: ‘I’ll deny nothing’ (4.2.143–46). Iachimo’s deceit, the play suggests, is only made possible by Posthumus’ readiness to believe it. Iachimo merely seems to bring out the doubts Posthumus harbours silently; at times, he appears as Posthumus’ dark alter ego, as an embodiment of his hidden fears and, possibly, his secret sexual desires rather than as a character entirely foreign. In its insistence on, and simultaneous deconstruction of, national differences, Forman’s account mirrors the double structure of Cymbeline. To my mind, this is the structure of a struggle, of a competition between a negative concept of national identity that works by means of contrast and defines Englishness by what it is not, and a positive concept of the nation as a kind of cultural melting pot, of pitting the English against the Italians and of integrating the Roman tradition into an evolving British identity. This is the reason for the strange anachronism of Cymbeline: it needs both Renaissance Italy and ancient Rome as alternative models for British nation-building. Both, a narrow ethnically defined identity and a more imperial conception of the nation, can be felt in the play. Cymbeline acts out the conflict between these two notions of nationhood. Today, it offers us a glimpse of the struggle that the search for national identity must have been in early modern England. Interesting as this is, it might also be one of the reasons why the play often fails modern-day audiences: this particular concern is no longer as pressing today. Or maybe it is. Is our own national identity not questioned by a more cosmopolitan form of self-perception? Are we not also witnessing the deconstruction of national differences in a globalised world? These questions are certainly too complex to be answered here, yet it appears that pre-national

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Cymbeline, precisely because it is one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays, has the potential for a revival in a post-national world. Bibliography Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso 2006). Cantor, Paul A., Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). Floyd-Wilson, Mary, ‘Delving to the Root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English Race’, in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. by David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101–15. Hoenselaars, A.J., Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1643 (Rutherford: Associated University Press, 1992). Jones, Emrys, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 84–99. King, Ros, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Knight, G. Wilson, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1947). Levin, Harry, ‘Shakespeare’s Italians’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. by Michele Marrapodi and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 17–29. Levith, Murray J., Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1989). Maley, Willy, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays, ed. by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 145–57. Marcus, Leah S., ‘Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality’, in Shakespeare: The Last Plays, ed. by Kiernan Ryan (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 134–63. McKerrow, Ronald B., ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 2nd edn, rev. by F.P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). Pfister, Manfred, ‘Shakespeare and Italy, or, The Law of Diminishing Returns’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. by Michele Marrapodi and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 295–303. Shakespeare, William, Cymbeline, ed. by John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 2005).

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Shakespeare, William, Cymbeline, ed. by Roger Warren (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Wickham, Glynne, ‘Riddle and Emblem: A Study in the Dramatic Structure of Cymbeline’, in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner, ed. by John Carey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 94–113. Woudhuysen, H.R., Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1990).

2. Italian and English Art in Dialogue

Illustration 1: Inigo Jones, Funeral catafalque for James I, Worcester College, Oxford. Photo: Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.

John Peacock Inigo Jones and the Reform of Italian Art The reception of Italian art, architecture, and design in early seventeenthcentury England was dominated by one commanding figure, the architect and scenographer Inigo Jones. He was not of course the sole agent of this reception. There were Italian artists who worked for the early Stuart court, such as Costantino de’ Servi and Orazio Gentileschi, and also northern European artists, notably Rubens and Van Dyck, who mediated the achievements of Italian painting from Raphael and Titian onwards to an élite (and therefore influential) English public.1 The art collections initiated in the first decade of the century by James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and her elder but shortlived son Prince Henry, also exerted a notable influence, especially as they were followed and surpassed by the collections of the Earl of Arundel, the Duke of Buckingham, and King Charles I.2 But the person who took it upon himself to publicise and interpret the resulting cultural resources, along with the vast store of aesthetic riches which were only accessible to travellers in Italy and those continental countries most affected by the Italian Renaissance, was Inigo Jones. His official title from 1615 onward was Surveyor of the King’s Works, which is to say that he was court architect, as well as overseer of all the constructional projects (whether ceremonial and temporary, or fixed and permanent) necessitated or commissioned by the royal administration, first under King James and then, after James’s death in 1625, under King Charles. Earlier, from 1610 until 1612, he had been Surveyor of Works to Prince Henry (died 1612), who had been given his own independent establishment on being created Prince of Wales in the summer of 1610. However this seems to have remained largely an administrative post, with architectural projects being entrusted to two continental artists with a proven record of achievement, Costantino de’ Servi and Salomon de Caus.3 Most of the creative work under1.

2. 3.

See Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), pp. 88–105 (on Costantino de’ Servi); Orazio Gentileschi and the Court of Charles I, ed. by Gabriele Finaldi (London: National Gallery London, 1999); Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Jeremy Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s “Cabinet de Titien”: The Contents and Dispersal of his Collection’, Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 680–95. See The Evolution of English Collecting, ed. by Edward Chaney, Studies in British Art 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Strong, Henry, pp. 110–13.

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taken by Jones up to and during this period, and really until his succession to the Royal Surveyorship in 1615, was bound up with the court entertainments known as masques, for which he designed the costumes and sets, also supervising the productions. So for about the first decade of his employment under the new Stuart dynasty he devised ephemeral stage pictures which often had settings of imaginary architecture.4 Nonetheless we find an engraved portrait of Jones, probably executed a year and a half before he became Surveyor of the King’s Works, on which he is prominently described as an ‘architect’. This was almost certainly commissioned in January 1614, when he was accompanying the Earl and Countess of Arundel on an extensive continental journey, and their party had stopped in Rome; the portrait is prominently signed by one of the leading printmakers in contemporary Rome, Francesco Villamena.5 Jones appears in what might be called Italian neo-antique guise, his bust framed by an oval in a setting which imitates an antique Roman altar. The inscription reads: ‘INIGO IONES/ ARCHITECTOR MAGNAE BRITANIAE ’. The term ‘Architector’ appears unwarranted, as Jones had not yet erected any notable buildings, while on the administrative side he was still as it were between Surveyorships. It is however proleptically appropriate, in that, before setting out on his European travels in 1613, he had been granted the reversion of the Royal Surveyorship, which would therefore become his on the death of the incumbent. It is even more appropriate in terms of what we might call cultural theory. The concept of the ‘architect’ as a commanding figure who exerted control over the realisation of a building through the intellectual process of design, a concept naturalised in Italian culture, was still relatively new in Jones’s native land, and it was one of his ambitions to exemplify it as fully as possible in the realm of ‘Great Britain’, the composite supermonarchy which had been formed by the accession in 1603 of King James of Scotland to the English crown. The full scope of Jones’s ambitions had been set out in the earliest years of the new reign by his friend Edmund Bolton, who presented him with a book inscribed in the following terms: Tertio Calendas Januar. MDCVI Styl. Angl. Arrham, tesseramque amicitiae, futurae cum Ignatio Jonesio sempiternae, Edmundus Bolton do libellum hunc. Ignatio Jonesio suo per quem spes est, Statuariam. Plasticen, Architecturam, Picturam, Mimisim, omnemque veterum elegantiarum laudem trans Alpes, in Angliam nostram aliquando irrepturas. MERCURIUS IOVIS FILIUS. 4. 5.

See Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Reproduced in Strong, Henry, plate 34. See the discussion of this portrait in the forthcoming edition of Inigo Jones’s Roman Sketchbook by Edward Chaney.

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30 December 1606. As an earnest and a token of a friendship which is to endure forever with Inigo Jones, I, Edmund Bolton give this little book. To his own Inigo Jones through whom the hope is that sculpture both carved and modelled, architecture, pictorial art, theatrical representation, and all that is praiseworthy in the elegant arts of the ancients, may some day insinuate themselves across the Alps into our England. MERCURY SON OF JOVE. 6

The reference to Mercury is a learned joke, depending on his function as the messenger of the gods, and his broader role as the patron of all kinds of mediations and transactions, which range along a spectrum from the art of eloquence—and, increasingly in the early modern period, the arts in general, including the visual arts—at one extreme, to merchandising and simple thieving at the other.7 Bolton invokes him as the god of what we might call cultural appropriation, expressing a hope that ‘the elegant arts of the ancients’, revived beyond the Alps by the Italian Renaissance, will in the course of time be stealthily imported into England by Jones. This way of putting the matter assumes that the arts in England, presumably since the Reformation (Bolton was a Catholic), have got stuck far behind developments in Italy, and that the surest way of bringing them up to date is not a head-on assault but a gradual campaign of hidden persuasion. Bolton’s inscription was written in a book of Latin poetry by the Italian Gianfrancesco Bordino, entitled De rebus praeclare gestis a Sixto V, and published in Rome in 1588.8 The ‘famous deeds’ of Pope Sixtus V celebrated by the poet are mostly his feats of building and urban planning, which changed the face of late sixteenth-century Rome in a dramatically short period of time, conferring on it a new amplitude and grandeur. The text was illustrated with etchings, one of which depicted the refurbishment of the Lateran complex by the Pope’s chief architect, Domenico Fontana, who had not only designed the new Lateran Palace but modernised the façade of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano by adding an imposing benediction loggia in a modern classical style. San Giovanni was of course the cathedral church of the Roman diocese, and Jones was later to emulate Fontana’s work there and surpass it when by royal command he refurbished his own metropolitan cathedral, St Paul’s, and enhanced its front with a classical portico of unparalleled height and richness.9

6. 7.

8. 9.

John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 7, 329 fn. 10. See a similar invocation of Mercury in Robert Walker’s Self-portrait which is a pastiche of Van Dyck: Edward Chaney and Godfrey Worsdale, The Stuart Portrait (Southampton: Southampton City Art Gallery, 2001), pp. 28–9. Giovanni Francesco Bordino, De rebus praeclare gestis a Sixto V Pon. Max. (Rome, 1588). John Harris and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (London: Zwemmer; New York: The Drawing Center, 1989), pp. 238–47.

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Illustration 2: Domenico Fontana, Funeral Catafalque for Sixtus V (etching by Girolamo Rainaldi). Photo: British Library.

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Illustration 3: Donato Bramante, Tempietto, San Pietro in Montorio (woodcut from Serlio, Archittetura). Photo: author.

While the work at St Paul’s was still far short of completion Jones seized an opportunity to imitate another of Fontana’s projects, as part of his overall plan to bring Italian Renaissance art and architecture to England through a process of benign infiltration. James I died in 1625, and Jones was required to erect a catafalque which would be the centrepiece of the funeral service in

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Westminster Abbey (illustration 1).10 He took as his model the catafalque which Fontana had designed for the funeral of Sixtus V in 1590 (illustration 2), although he imitated it in a critical spirit.11 Fontana’s catafalque is a compendium of the Pope’s building projects, ingeniously combined into a single, though necessarily elaborate form—a circular, domed, classical tempietto. The dome is a scaled down version of Michelangelo’s design for the dome of St Peter’s, which Sixtus had brought to completion, and is flanked by the obelisks which he had re-erected at significant sites to punctuate his replanning of the city of Rome, and the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius which he had restored and Christianised, surmounting them with the statues of the saints Peter and Paul. Other projects too complex to form part of an architectural pastiche, such as the Lateran Palace, are shown in pictorial form around the drum of the dome. This triumphant, overladen design is severely revised by Jones, with reference to Fontana’s own original model, the Tempietto by Bramante at San Pietro in Montorio (illustration 3), which was of course the archetype of a papal funeral monument, built on the supposed site of St Peter’s martyrdom.12 Jones uses Bramante’s austere design to critique Fontana’s inflated reworking of it, so that his adaptation of the Sixtus catafalque for James I remains monumental and enriched with ornament, while being decidedly simpler. His structure, like Fontana’s, is a summary, but on a more abstract level: it is a summary of a tradition of Italian architectural design, from Bramante at the beginning of the sixteenth century to Fontana at the end, a compendium of architectural principles presented to English eyes still largely unfamiliar with them. Considering the catafalque for King James in the context of Jones’s programme of cultural appropriation, his sustained effort to familiarise his compatriots with the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance, we can see him engaged in two distinct but complementary processes. First of all, he is engaged in propaganda. This temporary structure, eventually to be dismantled, was nevertheless on show in Westminster Abbey for some time, and most people who saw it would scarcely have encountered such an avantgarde piece of architectural design. At the same time however, he is engaged in a work of reform. The catafalque of a counter-Reformation pope has to be made suitable for the obsequies of a Protestant monarch, and one who had taken pride in his anti-Catholic theological polemics. So Fontana’s overbear-

10. John Peacock, ‘Inigo Jones’s Catafalque for James I’, Architectural History, 25 (1982), 1–5. 11. Baldo Catani, La pompa funerale […] di Papa Sisto il Quinto (Rome, 1591), plate 24. 12. Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospettiva (Venice, 1619), book 3, p. 68.

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ing design is rendered more spare, sober, and chaste, more appropriate for a Protestant culture; and the method by which this is achieved—the corrective reference to Bramante and his concept of an apostolic funeral monument— involves a harking back to origins, a characteristically Protestant move. Jones’s catafalque is a very choice specimen of ‘Italian’ architecture, while by no means unreservedly imitative: this is italianità riformata. Constructed of wood, canvas, and plaster, and painted in a style which was partly decorative and partly illusionistic, the catafalque occupied an ambiguous position between Jones’s actual buildings (which by then included the new Palladian Banqueting House in Whitehall, completed in 1622) and the scenographic architecture which he had been designing for court masques since 1605. The masques were extravagant, multi-media theatrical entertainments similar to the intermedi performed at Italian courts, especially the Medici court in Florence. They comprised poetry, music, dance, and visual spectacle; and from the early years of the reign of James I until almost the outbreak of the Civil War Jones played a major part in staging them, as scenographer and producer. It was above all through the masques that he conducted the persuasive campaign, recommended by his friend Bolton, of bringing ‘the elegant arts of the ancients […] across the Alps into […] England’, of making the influential courtly élite gradually familiar with the visual culture of Renaissance Italy.13 Just as the catafalque for King James is adapted from Fontana and Bramante, by way of prints, almost all his designs for the masques are derived from engravings, etchings, and woodcuts (and occasionally drawings or paintings) of Italian or Italianate provenance—those not directly from Italy are by northern European artists bringing the Renaissance to their own localities. In effect, Jones treated the annual masque productions as if they were recurring exhibitions, where the manifold developments in Italian art and architecture throughout the sixteenth century were recapitulated and advertised to the English court. At the same time the process of advertisement is mediated by a reforming agenda: in composing his designs Jones never reproduces his sources uncritically, but, wherever he sees the need, subjects them to corrective revision, to what might be called a classicising discipline. Just as he judges Fontana’s over-elaborated tempietto by the standards of Bramante’s original, and reclassicises it in generating his own design, he judges all the sources of his masque designs with the same judicious eye even while he seems to be imitating their forms and motifs very closely. So the corpus of imaginary architecture which he designed for the masques may 13. For an extended argument to this effect see Peacock, Stage Designs, from which the following paragraph is largely drawn.

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often retain elements of fantasy which he finds in his sources, and which are appealing in a theatrical context, but at the same time he picks out and corrects architectural solecisms—for example, in the grammar of the classical orders—with unsparing vigilance. In the same way his scenes of landscape, often derived from mannerist landscape compositions with deliberate spatial quirks, retain the picturesqueness of their sources while reordering them as far as possible along classicising lines. The vocabulary of ornament used on his proscenium arches—which had to be designed afresh for each new production, matching its thematic content—was also largely derived from mannerist examples, but Jones would habitually give the motifs increased substance and clarify their relationships, tempering aesthetic licence with rationality and order. Here, on this relatively minuscule scale, just as on the grand scale of architecture, he could appeal to the authority of ‘the ancients’. Vitruvius, who for the Renaissance was the canonical architectural theorist of antiquity, had written about ornament in both architecture and interior decoration, condemning decorative schemes composed of motifs that were wilfully unrealistic and irrational.14 On every level the masque designs could be understood as bringing ‘the elegant arts of the ancients’ from Italy to England. In speaking of the catafalque for King James as a case study, and using it to point up the role of the masque designs in a programme of cultural persuasion, I have used the terms ‘propaganda’ and ‘reform’, which in Jones’s era had religious significance, the first in the context of Roman Catholicism and the second of northern European Protestantism. His contemporary, the great collector Lord Arundel, was praised by Rubens as ‘one of the four evangelists of our art’.15 A similar description might aptly have been applied to Jones, who was engaged on a kind of mission from an idealised Italy to his native England, albeit a complex mission, in which the fervour to convert went hand in hand with a zeal to return to pristine origins.

14. Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. by Frank Granger, 2 vols (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1931–4), 7.5.1–4. 15. M. F. S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 176 fn. 2.

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Bibliography Bordino, Giovanni Francesco, De rebus praeclare gestis a Sixto V Pon. Max. (Rome, 1588). Cattani, Baldo, La pompa funerale […] di Papa Sisto il Quinto (Rome, 1591). Chaney, Edward, ed., The Evolution of English Collecting, Studies in British Art 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Chaney, Edward, and Godfrey Worsdale, The Stuart Portrait (Southampton: Southampton City Art Gallery, 2001). Donovan, Fiona, Rubens and England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Finaldi, Gabriele, ed., Orazio Gentileschi and the Court of Charles I (London: National Gallery London, 1999). Harris, John, and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (London: Zwemmer; New York: The Drawing Center, 1989). Hervey, M. F. S., The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921). Orgel, Stephen, and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Peacock, John, ‘Inigo Jones’s Catafalque for James I’, Architectural History, 25 (1982), 1–5. Peacock, John, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Serlio, Sebastiano, Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospettiva (Venice, 1619). Strong, Roy, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. by Frank Granger, 2 vols (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1931–4). Wood, Jeremy, ‘Van Dyck’s “Cabinet de Titien”: The Contents and Dispersal of his Collection’, Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 680–95.

Alison Yarrington ‘Made in Italy’: Sculpture and the Staging of National Identities at the International Exhibition of 1862 Uplift a thousand voices full and sweet, In this wide hall with earth’s inventions stored, And praise th’ invisible universal Lord, Who lets once more in peace the nations meet, Where Science, Art, and Labour have outpour’d Their myriad horns of plenty at our feet […] And, lo! The long laborious miles Of Palace; lo! The giant aisles, Rich in model and design; Harvest-tool and husbandry, […] Of wonder, out of West and East, And shapes and hues of Art divine! All of beauty, all of use, […]1

Tennyson’s ‘Ode’, written to mark the International Exhibition that opened in London in 1862, suggests the scale, the intent, and the range of this hugely popular, public spectacle. The exhibition housed on the site now occupied by the South Kensington Museums covered an area of 16.5 acres adjacent to the Horticultural Society’s Gardens, the latter space also being utilised as a sculpture ‘court’ for large-scale works.2 Between May and October 1862 six and a quarter million visitors toiled along its interminable avenues viewing and interacting with the cacophonous mixture of exhibits that stood for the cul-

1.

2.

Alfred Tennyson, Ode for the Opening of the International Exhibition (London: E. Moxon, 1862), 1–6; 11–14, 21–23. This Ode is presumably that set to music by Sterndale Bennett for the opening of the exhibition, as noted by Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (London: Athlone, 2002), p. 131. She also states that Verdi, substituting for Rossini, had been asked to provide music for the opening ceremony of the exhibition but that ‘changes by the composer’ meant it was not ready in time (p. 131, p. 419 fn. 38). What is not mentioned here is that during that year the music was in fact circulated widely as published sheet music for piano and singer. The words to Verdi’s music ‘Inno delle Nazioni’ were composed by the young poet Arrigo Boito. It is interesting to note that John Rosselli claims that this work ‘committed neither man deeply’; see John Rosselli, The Life of Verdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 123. For an account of how the 1862 exhibition was conceived and built, and its relationship with the preceding international exhibitions in London (1851) and Paris (1855) see Hobhouse, pp. 118–40.

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tural and economic strength of participating nations.3 It had been intentionally conceived on a grander scale than the previous embodiment of Britain’s place in the modern world, the 1851 Great Exhibition housed in Paxton’s Crystal Palace. But unlike its innovative predecessor the exhibition building, described by one trenchant critic as ‘the national disgrace of the wretched shed that was the Fowke version of the Crystal Palace’, failed to capture the popular imagination.4 It is this second, vast theatre of display that is the primary subject of this paper, as a site where national identities were performed, paraded, confused, and inevitably judged one against the other.5 My focus is upon a single category of exhibit, the ‘grand art’ of sculpture, one that at this time was materially and historically imbued with a sense of permanence and cultural significance as well as being linked by its materials and processes to contemporary industrial production. My intention is to examine how sculpture that was identifiably ‘made in Italy’ was understood to embody nationhood, interrogating what constituted Italianness on this supposedly international stage, during the early stages of unification and at the time of the American Civil War. The perspective on this construction of Italian identity is taken from a British viewpoint, measured in the main through critical responses to works by the ‘Roman-American’ Harriet Hosmer, the ‘Anglo-Roman’ John Gibson, and to two Milanese sculptors, Raffaele Monti and Pietro Magni. Sculpture was—and is—an international business. Viewed from a British perspective arguably the key site for its production at the mid-century was Italy, and specifically, Rome. Joseph Beavington Atkinson writing his review of the ‘foreign’ sculpture at the exhibition for the Art Journal summed this up nicely:

3.

4.

5.

Hobhouse, pp. 134–35. She cites one estimate that there were 6,211,103 visitors between the opening of the exhibition on 1 May 1862 and its closure on 15 November. The prizes were distributed at a ceremony held on 11 July. The idea of national identity was embedded in the Crystal Palace, having been designed using the structure of the South American Victoria Regia lily, a potent emblem of Queen Victoria’s reign and Empire, that had been propagated successfully for the first time in England at Chatsworth by Paxton. For Emma Peachey, wax modeller to Queen Victoria, as for many others, the lily was ‘a symbol of strength and power’, that was to become a symbol of the exhibition itself. See Emma Peachey, Peachey’s Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling (London: Published and Sold by Mrs Peachey, Artiste to Her Majesty, 1851), p. 58. On the other hand, the utilitarian architecture of 1862 designed by Captain Francis Fowke that ‘roofed’ 988,000 square feet of exhibition space was not well regarded and was demolished (with the help of Fowke) in 1863; see Hobhouse, p. 140. Joseph Beavington Atkinson, ‘Introduction’, in The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition (London: James S. Virtue, 1863), p. xii.

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Freedom there has been […] for the talent of all lands; freedom from conventional restraint, immunity from the partial and passing fashions of the vain, vaunting capitals of Europe; so that sculptors of all nations, dwelling among temples and sepulchres of gods and heroes, and sleeping, it may be, in garrets, and eating ofttimes the bread of penury, have founded in Rome, as the most fitting abode, the world’s school of sculpture.6

Sculptors operating in this international milieu may therefore be seen to have the freedom to dance across national boundaries, and consequently there was a degree of confusion about their national identities: they could be as easily classified by the location of their studio workshop, as their sculptural style or actual nationality. An obvious example of this hybridity is Baron Carlo Marochetti, ‘an Italian by birth, a Frenchman by parentage, and an Englishman by adoption’. 7 He settled in London in 1849 and from this base gained many commissions for public art, his equestrian statue of Carlo Alberto of Savoy (1861, bronze, Turin) being an example of the sculptor’s response to Piedmont’s—and Turin’s—central role in the new unified Italy. Philip WardJackson has discussed the sculptor’s ‘supposed patriotic delinquency’, seeing him as a ‘product of the cultural cosmopolitanism of the [Napoleonic] First Empire’.8 At the 1862 exhibition, national identity may be seen to be based upon a variety of factors within this cosmopolitan range. For example, the American Harriet Hosmer’s work was physically placed in the British section alongside that of the Welsh sculptor John Gibson, in whose Roman studio she trained and where she then worked. Work by another ‘Roman-American’, William Wetmore Story, was to be found in the Roman section of the exhibition, although when Beavington Atkinson reviewed the sculpture displays for the Art Journal in two articles headed ‘England’ and ‘Foreign’, Story and Hosmer were defined as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ regardless of their chosen professional location: ‘English [….] and American sculpture, is free from the sickly sentiment of the Italian; is delivered from the extravagance of the French’, standing preeminently ‘for simplicity, for balanced moderation…’.9 And yet by contrast, Francis Turner Palgrave, the author of the Official Catalogue to the Exhibition and Tennyson’s (self-styled) close friend, saw Hosmer’s work as infected by Italian artifice, describing her treatment of drapery as ‘conventional’ and

6. 7. 8. 9.

Joseph Beavington Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, The Art Journal, NS 1 (1862), 213–15 (p. 214). Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 214. Philip Ward-Jackson, ‘Carlo Marochetti and the Glasgow Wellington Memorial’, The Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 851–62 (p. 852). Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 215.

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‘so little like nature’ with a ‘display of polished ornament in the tasteless Italian style’.10 This tension between the material permanency of sculpture in the context of the fluctuating and unstable political nationalism(s) of modern Italy, Britain, and America in the early 1860s permeates the viewing of these works, the imprint of which is found in these critical discourses. In his articles on the International Exhibition’s sculpture, Beavington Atkinson conjured many vivid images redolent of the endemic decay, death, and disease of modern Italy to convey the dangers that threatened its contemporary sculpture. Many of these would be familiar to a wide range of readers and literate exhibition visitors. Like Niobe, Italian sculpture was seen to be in the process of being ossified. For this critic the items of sculpture on display at the exhibition represented ‘the dying embers’ of a long and noble tradition that was in danger of being corrupted by the false values of the present. ‘Thus Italy, dowered with the fatal gift of beauty, has held her loveliness even in death: the languor of the placid cheek still conserves the lines where grace lingers.’ So Italy’s school of modern sculpture, at the head of which stands Antonio Canova, whose work was well represented at the exhibition, displays a similar ‘nerveless languor’. But it is an art that still survives: Italy, ‘the Niobe of nations, gathers to her sorrow a world of sympathy, as year by year thousands throng to gaze on the agonising hues wherein the dolphin dies. Hence in many ways has been kept alive, even to this day, a school of Art, especially in sculpture, which neither malaria can kill, the stiletto stab, nor tyranny extinguish.’11 Beavington Atkinson’s readership would have recognised these allusions. The stiletto would evoke the popular fear of brigands that was a staple of traveller’s tales and popular novels. The reference to tyranny was also one that had particular resonance given the recent Italian wars of independence. But those images taken from the natural world—malaria and the dolphin— were equally redolent of current concerns with the state of Italy. That of the dying dolphin would conjure the idea of Venice (then still under AustroHungarian rule) in the mind of the reader, through a range of cultural references: from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth, (also present in Beavington Atkinson’s earlier use of the phrase ‘fatal gift of beauty’) XXIX , with its musings on Venice’s chequered past (‘Dies like the 10. Francis Turner Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook to the Fine Art Collections in the International Exhibition of 1862 (London: Macmillan, 1862), p. 96. He also published International Exhibition 1862 Official Catalogue Fine Art Department (London: Truscott and Simmons, 1862). Palgrave was assistant private secretary to William Ewart Gladstone in 1846, and then became involved in the Education Department, 1855–84. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1885–95. 11. Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 213.

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dolphin, whom each pang imbues/ With a new colour as it gasps away,/ The last still loveliest, till—’tis gone—and all is grey’), to the physical shape of the city as it appeared in maps, appearing in and out of the waves; and—for a few—the more abstruse iconography found in Marin Sanudo’s description of Venice in 1493: According to what wise men say the Venetian Republic will last for ever, as appears in this epigram: So long as the sea contains dolphins,/ So long as clear skies contain stars,/ So long as the moist ground yields her pleasant fruits,/ So long as the human race survives on earth,/ The splendour of the Venetians will be celebrated for all eternity.12

Beavington Atkinson’s references to Canova’s great skill as a sculptor but also to his pervasive influence over modern Italian sculpture that appear later in the essay are linked to this evocation of the sculptor’s homeland. It was here that the Venetian Canova ‘among the most gifted of modern sculptors’ derived his early talent which was then nurtured in Rome ‘the eternal city of the Arts […] the earth’s capital for sculpture’.13 Italian sculpture can therefore be seen to be both blessed and cursed by its resistance to the present and its adherence to a tradition that can be traced back to the ancient classical past. Whilst maintaining these healthy artistic ‘roots’, its growth among native practitioners was seen to be threatened by an over-dependency upon the fashion for ‘Romance’ rather than fusing antique precedent with natural form to produce works of vigour and truth. It is here that the reference to malaria has most meaning, with its vivid images and memories of prolonged illness and death among the Italian people. Whilst cholera raged across Europe defying any national boundaries, the miasma that was thought to emanate from stagnant pools and marshland to produce malaria, the scourge of modern Italy, was understood to be particularly endemic to the campagna around Rome. As Daniel Pick has argued in his detailed study of nineteenth-century responses to malaria-ridden Rome, this was physically evident to travellers who saw the devastation wreaked by the disease on the inhabitants of the region and its prevalence in certain areas of the

12. Cited in Deborah Howard, ‘Venice as Dolphin: Further Investigations into Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View’, Artibus et historiae, 18 (1997), 101–11 (p. 108; p. 111 fn. 84). The prevalence of this imagery is evident elsewhere in contemporary poetry, for example in Anne C. Lynch’s, ‘Mediterranean [A school composition]’: ‘[…] The paradise of earth, sweet Italy;/ Stript of her queenly robes, in dust she lies,/ Enchained by—slaves,—nor struggling to be free./ There hath she fallen, as the dolphin dies,/ More brightly beautiful in her last agonies’, published in 1852. 13. Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 213.

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city itself.14 In 1858, having received an important commission for a monument to Judith Palezieux Falconnet, Hosmer longed to stay in her Roman studio ‘all summer if I dared’. Although she planned to stay ‘rather late, into July’ she would not return until the 1st October ‘punctually’, having spent the summer in the healthier climes of Siena, and away from possible infection.15 In his summation of the sculpture at the exhibition for the commemorative volume The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition in 1863, Beavington Atkinson suggested a ‘cure’ for this Italianate ‘nerveless languor’. By a ‘simple return to nature [….] health and vigour are thus once more imparted to enervate limbs, and renovated life lays hold of forms long sunken with decay’.16 The ‘Italian’ works that received most praise from Beavington Atkinson and Palgrave were quite different in their rhetoric as will be discussed later. In the critical literature that emanated from the 1862 International Exhibition, Americans working in Rome were categorised as honorary ‘English’ men and women, linked by their colonial past, Anglo-Saxon roots, and a common tongue. Yet at the same time, their works were also sometimes seen to exemplify un-natural artifice, infected by the mal’ aria of contemporary Italian art, signifying the sickness, death, and corruption of an ancient artistic heritage. But what of Italian sculptors who worked in the ‘natural’ and uncontaminated artistic milieu of Britain? Raffaele Monti, a political exile who had set up his studio in London in 1848, was to produce many works for the British establishment during the years up to the opening of the 1862 exhibition.17 14. Daniel Pick, Rome or Death: The obsessions of General Garibaldi (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp. 25–55, provides the context for Garibaldi’s project to eradicate malaria with a history of its incidence in nineteenth-century Italy. See also pp. 33–34 where Pick cites Charlotte Eaton, Rome in the Nineteenth Century, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: Bohn, 1852), II , p. 386; I, p. 63, to exemplify the visitor’s approach to the city through apparently fertile countryside that is, nevertheless, ‘pestilent with disease and death […] like a devouring grave, it annually engulfs all of humankind that toil upon its surface’. 15. Hosmer to Wayman Crow, Rome, 11 March 1858, in Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, ed. by Cornelia Carr, (New York: Moffat, 1912; London: John Lane and Bodley Head, 1913), p. 124. The monument to Falconnet (marble, 1857–58) is in the Capella di San Francesco di Sales e di Sta. Giovanna di Valois, S. Andrea delle Fratte, Rome. 16. Joseph Beavington Atkinson, ‘Modern Sculpture of all nations in the International Exhibition of 1862’, in The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition (London: James S. Virtue, 1863), pp. 313–24 (p. 316). 17. Philip Ward-Jackson in his entry on the sculptor in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has pointed out how Monti was very much in the public eye in Britain when his work was staged at the 1862 Exhibition. The sculptor had, according to this author, produced decorative work for the Crystal Palace when it was removed to Sydenham, Kent, in 1853, notably the coloured plaster casts of the Parthenon sculptures. By 1858, his relief for the proscenium arch at the Covent Garden Opera House was in place and during

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Nevertheless, he was still classified as Italian and ‘foreign’ by Beavington Atkinson and, presumably, by many of his readers. For him Monti was bound inextricably to his artistic heritage, but there is an inference that his art had improved by removing himself from the stagnant pools of contemporary Italian art to the healthier artistic climes of Britain. Beavington Atkinson therefore praises the fusion of an Italianate ‘lusciousness of sentiment’, ‘rapt reverie’ and ‘unreal idealism’ with a Milanese attention to ‘small detail’ married to a close study of nature in Monti’s work that brought his work into close association with Pre-Raphaelitism.18 At the exhibition, Monti was to be reunited with his compatriots, the fellow Milanese Pietro Magni and the Florentine Cesare Fantacciotti, within the boundary of the Italian sculpture courts. In the neighbouring Roman Court, works by sculptors such as Giovanni Maria Benzoni were on view, representing ‘the eternal city of the Arts [….] the earth’s capital for sculpture’.19 In such settings sculptural works by Italians were viewed variously as products of the Risorgimento and indicative of specific, current political affiliation. It was also the case that on the international stage of a universal exhibition devoted to trade and industry, Italy’s sculpture would inevitably be seen to perform both as a product of its rich cultural heritage, its mineral resources, and its place in the commercial market as well as of its recent political shaping.20 Garibaldi’s spectacular part in the conquests of Sicily and Naples was very much in the public mind in 1862. So too was the coronation of Victor Emmanuele II as King of Italy on 1 May 1861 that had taken place precisely a year prior to the opening of the London International Exhibition, marking the birth of a new nation. However, the occupation of distinct national territories by a nascent Italy and the papal states of Rome at the exhibition indicated that this was still unfinished business. The decade that had elapsed since the last London international exhibition had brought with it political and global problems that threatened the viability of the second venture. Lord Granville wrote to Canning, then Governor General of India, in January 1861, urging him to ‘stir up’ his ‘people’ to send some good items for show. He then comments upon the difficulties in staging a successful exhibition: ‘There are some fearful contingencies. War—in Europe—another bad season—failure of cotton crop—What is going on in America is wonderthat decade he had also worked for the influential Rothschild family at Mentmore. He also designed the bronze equestrian statue of the Marquis of Londonderry, unveiled in 1861 in the market square at Durham. 18. Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 213. 19. Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 214. 20. In the vicinity of the Italian sculpture courts was a ‘wonderful collection of minerals’ and also a model of Milan Cathedral.

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fully interesting.’21 Tennyson’s lines ‘[…] once more in peace the nations meet,/ Where Science, Art, and Labour have outpour’d/ Their myriad horns of plenty at our feet’ can therefore be seen to have particular resonance in these troubled times. For American sculptors living and working in Rome there must have been a double sense of displacement and uncertainty, presenting threats to their livelihoods at every turn. With Garibaldi’s recent victories at the battle of Milazzo and on the Volturno River in 1860 presaging the declaration of the Kingdom of Italy the following year, the civil war that was breaking out in their native homeland could perhaps be said to be a little more than ‘wonderfully interesting’, presenting a potentially cataclysmic outcome. Whilst as a group of expatriates sitting on the outskirts of Italian society and therefore able to adopt a certain level of detachment from the escalating conflict, the immediate threat to their economic viability and the constant reminder of the state of their own nation could not have been easy. Harriet Hosmer had particular reason to be deeply concerned over events at home and abroad if her familial networks are examined. Raised in Watertown, Massachusetts, she had been sent to a ‘progressive’ girls’ school in Lenox, where she became firm friends with Cornelia Crow (later Carr), her biographer.22 This schoolgirl friendship brought her into contact with Wayman Crow, a member of the Missouri Senate and founder of the Eliot Seminary in 1853 that in 1857 became Washington University in St Louis. It was through Wayman Crow that Hosmer was able to study anatomy at the medical school in St Louis, Missouri, between 1850–51, an essential part of realising her ambition to become a sculptor and difficult for a woman to access in her hometown.23 She lodged with the Crow family during this period of study and it was with Wayman Crow’s financial support that she made the important professional move to Rome in 1852 to work in John Gibson’s studio. It was also through his influence that she received two early commissions, for Oenone (1854–55, marble, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum) and Beatrice Cenci (1856, marble, St Louis Mercantile Library).24 Her contact with Crow would continue from this point predominantly by correspondence. The 1820 so-called ‘Missouri Compromise’, that had extended the Union territory west 21. Granville to Canning, 24.1.1861, cited by Hobhouse, pp. 124, 418 fn. 24. 22. See fn. 15 above. 23. For an account of this see Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830– 1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), pp. 22–33. Hosmer’s bust of Wayman Crow (marble, 1866), in the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Washington University, was her gift to mark the commencement ceremonies of 1868. 24. Oenone was a direct commission from Crow and that for Beatrice Cenci came, at Wayman Crow’s suggestion, from Alfred Vinton, chairman of the board of directors of the St Louis Mercantile Library.

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of the Mississippi, made slavery an issue of which she would have been all too aware and one that would also have been very current in the Hosmer family household given their friendship with Lydia Maria Child. But it is clear from correspondence between the two women that they did not share the same views regarding the abolition of slavery. In a good-humoured letter from Child to Hosmer, written before the outbreak of war in September 1860, there is a direct reference to Hosmer’s earlier support for the anti-abolitionist ‘Missouri Ruffians’ who in 1855 had crossed into Kansas Territory in order to vote (illegally) to ensure a pro-slavery territorial legislature.25 She writes, ‘if you had had your will, little “Missouri Ruffian” that you are! And had exterminated the abolitionists, let me tell you, you would have destroyed the wheat of the country and left nothing but the chaff’. She concludes the letter hoping that Hosmer will not ‘get into a fight’ with any of her ‘rivals and settle the question with Bowie knives and revolvers, Missouri fashion. I can send you a Bowie knife bearing the motto, “Death to Abolitionists,” if you want it, but Bowie knives won’t kill us. God bless you, dear little Ruffian!’26 Whilst her most recent biographer Dolly Sherwood sees this as a momentary episode in Hosmer’s life, influenced by her stay with the Crows, the tone of the letter suggests that this is still current thinking for the sculptor.27 To be called a ‘Missouri Ruffian’ was no term of endearment; from a freestater’s perspective it was a construct that implied a ‘violent, savage other’, a long way from Southern chivalry.28 Hosmer had arrived in Italy at a time of great political uncertainty, and Sherwood has suggested that she with other ‘Roman-Americans’ shared a certain ‘ambivalence’ at the impulse towards unification.29 It is certainly the case that her statements in surviving letters are difficult to construe. Her friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning that had blossomed since their first meeting in 1853 meant direct contact with an enthusiastic supporter of Italian liberty and freedom from Austrian rule.30 Just as a previous generation of British sculptors working in Rome during the French campaign of 1796– 97 and under Napoleon’s Empire had found, war disrupted trade, not least because it stemmed the flow of rich patrons from abroad. This was equally 25. Kristen Tegmeier Oertel, ‘“The Free Sons of the North” versus “The Myrmidons of Border-Ruffiansism”: What Makes a Man in Bleeding Kansas?’, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, 25 (2002), 174–89. 26. Child to Hosmer, Wayland, 16 September, 1861, in Carr, p. 162. 27. Sherwood, p. 37. 28. Oertel, p. 182. 29. Sherwood, pp. 43–44. Sherwood also lays out the context for the production of Zenobia, pp. 181–82 and 202–4. 30. Sherwood, p. 44.

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true for Hosmer working from Italy over half a century later, whatever political sympathies she might have held personally. In 1862, Garibaldi was to attempt an ill-judged march on Rome that gave rise to his famous catchphrase, ‘Roma o morte’ [Rome or Death].31 Five years later, at the time of his thwarted plans to invade Rome once more, she would write from England of the hero becoming ‘a regular nuisance’. This was hardly surprising given that she was receiving news at this time of the work of her Roman studio being disrupted by the activities of his supporters, worst of all, as Sherwood has pointed out, with injuries incurred by some of her studio assistants.32 But it is also true that in divided America, as the hero of the Italian revolution of 1859–61, Garibaldi held a privileged status as ‘the only man of integrity, one who refused mendacious treaties and stayed true to his vision of a united Italy’.33 In June 1861, Abraham Lincoln offered him the rank of majorgeneral in the Union army. In Britain he also attained hero status, demonstrated by the huge crowds that turned out to see him when he visited London in the spring of 1864.34 In 1861, Hosmer was completing work on her statue of the defeated Queen Zenobia of Palmyra who reigned 267–272 A.D., travelling to America and working in Rome during its period of gestation.35 Her choice of subject, researched and discussed often with friends and associates such as Anna Jameson, was that of a ruler who had unsuccessfully fought for the independence of her country against the Roman Emperor Aurelian. It was a choice that raises many questions about what is exactly being said, when viewed from a British perspective, about monarchical rule, women’s rights, and slavery.36 31. Pick, pp. xx–xxi. 32. Sherwood, p. 267. 33. Dennis Berthold, ‘Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution’, American Literary History, 9, 3 (1997), 425–59 (p. 431). He investigates the ‘Cult of Garibaldi’ in America demonstrating how American newspapers reported in detail upon the Italian wars and Garibaldi’s part in them (p. 430). 34. Berthold, p. 432. Accounts of this visit were circulated widely, not least through the illustrated papers, see for example the wood engraving, ‘Garibaldi in London: The arrival of the General at Stafford House’, that appeared in the Illustrated Times, April 16, 1864, p. 249. 35. For a history of the statue and its sources see Susan Waller, ‘The Artist, the Writer, and the Queen: Hosmer, Jameson, and Zenobia’, The Woman’s Art Journal, 4, 1 (1983), 21– 28. The whereabouts of the eight-feet high statue shown at the 1862 Exhibition is unknown, but a half-size version is at the Wadsworth Atheneum. 36. Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture Britain 1850–1900 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 101–41 provides a rich and persuasive argument concerning the reception of Hosmer in Britain in 1862. She points to the issue of monarchical authority in the context of Queen Victoria’s withdrawal from sight of the public during a long period of mourning for Prince Albert. She also explores the work in the contexts of

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The significance of it being conceived and made at a time when Hosmer was closely involved with a group of women artists, writers, and historians is also crucial and often discussed. But I wish to raise a further level of interpretation to contribute to this debate, one that is not necessarily in tune with these other viewpoints: that of enslavement in the light of Hosmer’s pro-slavery views. An often-cited review of the work published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1865, had stated that Zenobia was a great Queen, with ‘a hundred slaves at her beck, and a devoted people within reach of her couriers. She does not tremble or swerve’ in defeat.37 Given the approval by Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865 and Hosmer’s political sympathies, is it not most logical to read this imprisoned Zenobia when viewed in America in that same year as representing those ‘honourable’ supporters of a lost cause? (In this context it would be useful to take into account Hosmer’s unsuccessful proposal for a monument to Lincoln circulating through Conalghi’s The Art Journal and the Illustrated London News immediately after the President’s assassination in 1865.) Deborah Cherry has suggested that the statue ‘may have been read as an allegory of captive Italy, her chains signifying the yoke of the Austrian empire’, given the years in which Zenobia was being made, and it is surely right to do so in terms of reception. But intention is more difficult to place.38 Hosmer’s views about unification and its effects are not clear, although from comments in her correspondence she obviously did not share the high levels of enthusiasm for Garibaldi, and she was not happy at the prospect of Rome being disrupted by war. In 1861, Hosmer was physically in Rome, experiencing day-to-day uncertainties in her place of business and adopted home and at a distance, in her mind concerned about the situation in her native land. She was to write a revealing letter to Crow only nine days after the King of Italy’s coronation, and a month after the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbour, and shortly before Lincoln’s offer of a commission to Garibaldi, revealing her worries: Our glorious republic seems to be in an uncommonly bad way, but we at a distance hope and feel that matters will yet be arranged, and that our dear old country (dear, if not old) will still hang together. I suppose clever statesmen foresaw all this when Lincoln was elected, but I am not of that category, and cannot say that I was quite

women’s rights and Hosmer’s defence of her working practices set out in Hosmer’s essay, ‘The Process of Sculpture’, The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics, 14 (1864), 734–737. 37. ‘Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia’, The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics, 15 (1865), 248–50 (p. 249). 38. Cherry, p. 127.

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She finishes by saying, ‘Lincoln may be shot, Davis may be hung, but I pray God to watch tenderly over you’.39 The question of Zenobia’s site at the 1862 exhibition is therefore of significance. Firstly, I want to say a little more about the viewing public encountering sculpture in the spaces of the exhibition which is crucial for an understanding of the statue’s reception in Britain, as distinct from its early sightings in her Roman studio and its later showing in America. It should be noted from the outset that the cacophonous mass audience for Universal Exhibitions was different to those that sought only high art or dramatic performance in the hushed halls of an art gallery or the stalls and boxes of a theatre. The interweaving of critical responses to these ‘fairs’ with their mixture of objects needs to be recognised as distinct from the ‘pure’ fine art shows of national exhibitions such as the Paris Salon or the Royal Academy annual exhibition. The latter were in the main selected by ‘peer review’, by juries of artists, from works submitted for inclusion in exhibitions that represented state institutions. In such a rarefied environment, sculptors’ works were viewed, interpreted, and disseminated at different stages of development to different audiences: a performative role that maintained sculpture’s classical hauteur as ‘le grand art’. It was also understood by many as the last bastion of high art with its indissoluble links to its ancestry in classical antiquity and in its apparently immutable rules. This viewpoint coupled with the re-presentation of works at successive exhibitions often left those eager for signs of artistic innovation with the impression that the art was becoming moribund.40 At the Universal Exhibitions, sculpture’s status, amidst the burlesque of lesser genres and commodified art, was unstable, both distinguished and uneasy in its role as high art and industrial product: for example, bronze editions or sculptural works associated with natural history were judged outside the fine arts class. The burgeoning market for public commemorative and monumental sculpture was well represented at these exhibitions, redolent with national and civic identities and allegiances as well as artistic merit and technical skill.

39. Harriet Hosmer to Wayman Crow, Rome, 10 May 1861, in Carr, p. 176. 40. In part this was due to the lengthy processes involved in making sculpture, from the sketch model through to the finished work. This meant that often works would be exhibited at different stages of evolution and/or in different media in successive exhibitions.

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Illustration 1: Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains (1859, marble. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hatford, CT, Gift of Mrs Josephine M. J. [Arthur E.] Dodge).

How was sculpture displayed in these ‘Universal’ exhibitions? In the 1862 exhibition, large pieces of sculpture were placed along the main avenue, with national sections devoted entirely to the fine arts including smaller works. At the 1851 Great Exhibition, Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave was firmly in place in the American section jostling for attention amidst the displays of canoes, bearskins, and machinery. However, she managed to maintain her dignity in this mixed company, set apart on a small platform and placed against red velvet

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that echoed the display of the Medici Venus in the Uffizi, Florence at that time. This stage served the dual purpose of lending a roseate hue to the marble, making it appear more ‘fleshy’ and at the same time keeping the viewer ‘at bay’ as was the case with the red-coloured niche housing Zenobia in 1862.41 Powers had stated that his statue represented a Greek Christian woman captured by the Turks in the 1820s, being sold into slavery. So as a representative sample of Americanness, what did the statue, the sculptural ‘hit’ of the Great Exhibition, convey to its viewers in this location? Was it seen simply as an indicator of national excellence in this art form? Was it interpreted as a covert, or not so covert, reference to the conflict between Christian and Islamic faith? Or to current issues of slavery—the Missouri Compromise—and the divisions that it caused in America? Was the woman here seen as a ‘product’ of America, a commodity to be bought and sold? Was it a record of historical events in the conflict between Greece and Turkey? Was it American or Tuscan? Of course, it may be all or none of these things and unrelated to the original intentions of the sculptor depending upon the standpoint of the viewer. But it is worth noting, as will be the case with several of the works that I shall be considering here, even with its designation as an American product in the context of the 1851 exhibition, the Greek Slave had an ambivalent status as an object: designed by an American but ‘made’ in Florence out of Italian Seravezza marble, largely by an Italian workforce, as were the six full-size replicas that Powers was to circulate in Europe and America.42 In the 1862 exhibition, Hosmer’s Zenobia together with Gibson’s Tinted Venus were isolated from the hubbub of the exhibition by being placed in a temple that celebrated Gibson’s innovative sculptural polychromy.43 Hosmer wrote to Wayman Crow from Rome in March 1862: You don’t know what a grand place they have assigned the Zenobia in the English exhibition. A small octagonal temple is to be erected, with niches of Pompeian red. Into three of these go Mr. Gibson’s coloured statues, and into the fourth my own unworthy one. This structure is to be just in the centre of the Exhibition Hall, with an 44 admirable light. This is owing to Mr Layard, principally.

41. The first version of the Greek Slave was completed by 1844 and sold to John Grant, an English army captain. 42. Powers, originally from Woodstock, Vermont, had maintained a studio in Florence since 1839. 43. J. B. Waring, Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International Exhibition 1862, 3 vols (London: Day and Son, 1863), II, plate 101. Waring mentions the ‘room specially fitted up to bring out the effect’ of the statue in Gibson’s Roman studio, implying that its setting at the exhibition funded by Mrs Preston was meant to achieve a similar resonance. 44. Carr, p. 184.

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Progress on Zenobia was detailed in letters accompanied by photographs sent to influential friends, such as Anna Jameson.45 In response to Hosmer’s correspondence, Sir Henry Layard wrote enquiring about the progress of Zenobia, ‘is she turned into a pillar of marble, for the admiration of posterity, or does she still stand in her frail mortal clay? The photographs you sent Mrs. M. have been greatly admired and I hope ere long the statue itself will be placed in some place worthy to receive it.’ He then goes on to mention Powers’s Greek Slave, suggesting that she too should send ‘something’ to the forthcoming universal exhibition.46 This invitation suggesting that she could be of a similar standing to Powers, and that she should follow his example, was to bear spectacular fruit in the promotion of her career. With Gibson’s and Layard’s support she sent the completed tinted marble Zenobia to the exhibition certain of a setting that would enhance both the work and her reputation. At this point Hosmer’s unequivocal statement made to Wayman Crow in a letter of 1857, ‘my principle is to seize opportunities’ may be seen to be paying real dividends.47 Zenobia’s place in Owen Jones’s temple designed to house the Tinted Venus and Gibson’s other sculptures was much more than a physical niche to house sculpture. It symbolised Hosmer’s place within the protective domain of his Roman studio as a favoured pupil and his artistic heir. It also placed her work centre stage at the most important public exhibition of the decade to be held in London. And yet responses to Gibson’s and Hosmer’s use of colour were not positive, many couched in terms of an infection taking root, as was the case with Palgrave who writes of Gibson being ‘misled by too much learning into the attempt to tint and varnish into life the faces to which even his practised hands could give no vitality’.48 A few were more receptive to Gibson’s evocation of ancient Greek practices: ‘The object of the tinting— which was effected by the application of wax, slightly coloured with yellow ochre, and rubbed in with a warm cloth—was to give the appearance of ivory. [….] The idea of imitating the colour of life never entered into the mind of the sculptor.’49 The Italian and Roman sections at the ’62 exhibition were of course designed to demonstrate the continuing strengths of the modern Italian school, from Canova to Ignazio Villa, and its commercial dominance. But there were 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Letter from Anna Jameson to Harriet Hosmer, 10 October, 1859, in Carr, pp. 149–51. Letter to Harriet Hosmer from Sir Henry Layard, 27 June, 1860, in Carr, pp. 159–61. Letter from Harriet Hosmer to Wayman Crow, 25 July, 1857, in Carr, pp. 82–83. Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook, p. 90. Waring, II, plate 101. The Preston Venus, a replica of the first statue of 1849, shown at the 1862 exhibition (c. 1851–56) is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The statue’s colouring is the result of restoration.

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other references implicit and overt within the displays. What, for example, should we make of the inclusion in the Italian section of Pandiani’s marble Statue of Garibaldi, mentioned in most reviews of the exhibition?50 Interestingly, in the context of this Anglo/American-Roman/Italian display, and as already mentioned, Garibaldi had been offered a Union command in the American Civil War in 1861 and was to be wounded in his attempt to march on Rome during July-August 1862. There was also the wave of sectarian violence in Wakefield and Leeds in September and London in October provoked by sympathy for the plight of this working man’s hero.51 Therefore, to view Garibaldi’s statue in the Italian Court, adjacent to the Roman Court, over the period of the exhibition was a nuanced encounter, an interaction between memory, experience, and place. What subtexts should we read therefore between Zenobia and William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1858, marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the latter a major success with French and British commentators? In this setting of nationalities and nations, how should we read Marochetti’s equestrian monument to Carlo Alberto sited in the gardens of the exhibition, ostensibly celebrating the Piedmontese as liberating force, relieving Lombardy from Austrian rule, a figure whom Daniel Pick has described as ‘no staunch ally of the Risorgimento’? How many of the visitors to the exhibition that stood in front of Gibson’s Tinted Venus would realise that elements of the work had been designed and made by a political exile from Rome? This modern Venus de’ Medici wore earrings ‘modelled [….] from antiques found in an Etruscan tomb’, designed and made by the goldsmith Castellani, who had been expelled from his native city following his gift of a sword ‘made by him for the people of Rome’ presented to Victor Emmanuele II in 1859.52 Whilst these remain open questions, there were other works in the Italian section that were seen to directly refer to the recent conflicts and the newly unified nation, notably Monti’s The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy (1861, marble, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), and Pietro Magni’s Reading Girl (1861, marble, National Gallery of Art, Washington).53 50. Official Catalogue, pp. 258–62; p. 261, no. 2432: Adelaide Pandiani marble bust Mary Magdalene; no. 2433: Giovanni Pandiani marble statue of Garibaldi. The statue remains untraced. 51. Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi Riots of 1862’, The Historical Journal, 16 (1973), 697– 732 (p. 703). 52. Waring, II, plate 101; III, plate 245. 53. Magni’s work had been in circulation before the exhibition, the plaster having been completed in 1856. Waring, III, plate 253. Waring also provides the information that the plaster model had been exhibited at Milan in 1856 and the marble shown at the Florence International Exhibition in 1861 when it was purchased by the Italian government. For

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Illustration 2: Pietro Magni, The Reading Girl (La Leggitrice), National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The Reading Girl is often cited as a clear example of the scuola Lombarda, but it too is a tribute to Garibaldi, although in a more multi-faceted way than Pandiani’s portrait statue. When viewed closely it shows that the girl has a tear rolling down her cheek as she reads. Around her neck is a portrait medallion of

confirmation of the latter, see Esposizione Italiana Agraria, Industriale e Artistica Tenuta in Firenze nel 1861 Catalogo Officiale (Firenze: Tipographia Barbera, 1861). Magni’s statue is listed as exhibit no. 5917. The marble was purchased from the 1862 exhibition by the London Stereoscopic company. It was then shown at the International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures held in Dublin in 1865, ‘sculptures’ no. 16.

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Garibaldi. The book she reads contains lines by the patriot, poet, and dramatist Giovanni Battista Niccolini, who died on 20 September 1861. This suggests a further role for the sculpture at the 1862 exhibition as a memorial to Niccolini. The conjunction of these elements indicates that this is more than an exercise in sentimental ‘verism’ and more like the complex interiority found in works by the sculptor’s teacher at the Brera Academy, Milan, Vincenzo Vela; most clearly visible in Vela’s The Last Days of Napoleon (1866, marble, Musée National du Château de Versailles). The fact is that Niccolini’s writings were and are associated with the uprisings against the Austrians in 1848 and, as its current display in the National Gallery, Washington, makes clear, with ‘themes of Lombard freedom’.54 At the 1862 exhibition, all commentators, even a grudging Palgrave, saw the work as conveying political meaning. For him its ‘appeal to national sympathies and the reality of its aim, gained a reputation in Italy [that was] perhaps due less to Art than to Politics’.55 This was certainly the case in the description of the work found in the magnificent three-volume, Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International Exhibition 1862, with its dedication to Queen Victoria. The author, the architect J. B. Waring, wrote of the statue as ‘always surrounded’ by crowds at the exhibition. He provides an account of Magni’s involvement in the national movement as well as quoting the words that the young girl is reading that prompt in her ‘ardent and patriotic thoughts, prophetic in their inspiration’: Mi fa profeto iddio! veggo concordi Fede giurarsi i popoli Lombardi, E di venti cittadi al ciel s’inalza Tra le ceneri e il sangue, un sol vessillo. Tra le stragi de’suoi, veggo i Tedeschi Oltr’Alpe fuggir, tratta nel fango L’Aquila ingorda, e un popolo redento Farsi ludibrio della cor corona.56

The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy is a more complex allegory of the Risorgimento as Anthony Radcliffe’s article of 1975 has shown.57 A vir54. http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=124598+0+none (accessed 18 April 2007). This entry cites Waring’s and Atkinson’s responses to the work and its associations with Vela’s veristic works. 55. Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook, p. 104. 56. Waring, III, plate 253. 57. Anthony Radcliffe, ‘Monti’s Allegory of the Risorgimento’, Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin, 1 (1965), 25–38. See also Diane Bilbey (with Marjorie Trusted), British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2002), pp. 341–342, that gives the prove-

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Illustration 3: Raffaele Monti, The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy (1861, marble, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

tuoso performance of marble carving, this strange figure shrouded in a suffocating veil rises above a sleeping figure resting on a richly detailed, verdant and flowery bank. For Beavington Atkinson, Monti’s work, like Magni’s, was about the artistry used to convey narrative. In its facture he sees it as preeminently Pre-Raphaelite, the ‘roses […] are, in their feigned illusion what apple-blossoms and white lustrous satin gowns are in the wonder-working hands of Millais and others of his fraternity’.58 The ‘trickery’ of Italian carving here is admired for its skill in replicating nature and its nearness to contemporary British art. Unsurprisingly, the national perspectives from which the reviewers assessed these sculptures found the means of preferring their own ‘product’ nance of the work and mentions Waring’s comments upon the work’s political significance and its subsequent popularity as a Parian ware figure. 58. Atkinson, ‘The International Exhibition’, p. 214.

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over those of others. Anna Jameson’s 1853 Handbook to the collection of modern sculpture from the 1851 Great Exhibition at Sydenham, is a text that seems to have provided a source for Palgrave’s and Beavington Atkinson’s critical writings on sculpture. 59 Attributing distinctive national characteristics to contemporary sculpture, she seems to take moral health as a means for defining true excellence. She describes English (British) sculpture as having ‘purity and depth of feeling’, but notes that it lacked ‘largeness of style’. Its deficiencies could be measured against the advanced nature of French sculpture, but whilst she praises the ‘elegant fancy’ of French ornamental bronzes, she also points to the ‘predominance of the voluptuous and ferocious sentiment in some of the finest designs’ where ‘the appetite for sensation is obvious’. The inference being that this emotional laxity was the greater failure of the two. In similar vein she praises the ‘power and poetical feeling’ and ‘largeness of style’ of German sculpture, but also its frequent ‘exaggeration and want of grace and repose’.60 Italian sculpture had ‘much fire and poetry of conception and delicacy in the treatment’, but there were nevertheless faults with the Florentine and Roman school where ‘feebleness and mannerism’ was too often displayed. Milanese sculpture showed a ‘high in point of originality and talent’ but there was also evidence that it had taken ‘a decided turn to the romantic and picturesque style of art’.61 Palgrave’s assessment of the sculpture at the 1862 exhibition, although in similar vein, was more antagonistic and extreme in tone, quite contrary to the lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ode’ that this was ‘Art divine!/ All of beauty, all of use’. For him it demonstrated vice, artifice, and a sickness that was not confined solely to Italy, although this was its main centre: ‘Meanwhile, no longer tested by Truth and Nature, even the technical qualities of the art begin to fail; blunt cutting (as in England), or smart cutting (as in France), or hard cutting (as in Italy), takes the place of tenderness and finish.’62 He rails against the use of polychromy evident in the Tinted Venus, placing Canova at the heart of the corruption: Has Canova, with his waxen work and frivolous sentiment,—his Parisian airs, and ballet-girl Graces? Has Gibson, his too faithful follower, in these fair forms, in which ninety-nine of every hundred spectators will only find—and in the writer’s judgement, must find only, masterpieces of lifeless labour and careful coldness? 63

59. Anna Jameson, A Handbook to the Courts of Modern Sculpture (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), p. 3. 60. Jameson, p. 12. 61. Jameson, p. 13. 62. Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook, p. 92. 63. Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook, pp. 89–90.

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It is, inevitably, the consummate skill of the marble cutting that he cannot stomach: The execution generally corresponds with this: by its sharpness and dexterity it has been witness to the long traditional practise of carving in the south; but it is almost uniformly and coldly monotonous; clear, hard and smooth,—qualities which may suffice for ornamentalism, but cannot express the varied play of natural surface.

In this view the magic of illusionism becomes an art of deception ‘with portions polished, and others deadened in surface’ and the ‘lavish display of elaborate and personal decoration’. 64 Beavington Atkinson, also in Jamesonean mode, took a similar view in his essay in The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition, published in 1863. In his summary of the national schools of sculpture on show, he also makes much of the pernicious effects of Canova’s legacy upon contemporary Italian sculpture: ‘his figures have the air of a dancing master, and seem as if draped by the hand of a milliner; and so the school of Canova, which now reigns through Italy, forsaking the severity of the antique, is surrendered to the soft fascination of romance.’ There was, however, evidence that this pervasive Italianate tendency that ‘corrupts the ancient Greek and emasculates the vigour of the old Roman style’, was in the process of being cured. The Reading Girl and the Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy undoubtedly indicated the efficacy of a ‘simple return to nature’.65 What in sculpture would therefore show this natural health and simple return to nature? To exemplify this, I want for a moment to step outside the 1862 sculpture halls to look at a contemporary work that has been shown as a plaster model at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857, in order to explore Palgrave’s and Beavington Atkinson’s references to dancing and exercise. Thornycroft’s The Skipping Girl had received positive critical responses in 1857 and again when the marble version exhibited at the RA in 1867. It was a familiar work with the public having also been copied in Parian ware by Minton, ‘one of the largest works ever executed in that material’.66 Its popularity with art critics was due not least to its representation of healthy womanhood, a ‘natural’ work far removed in British critics’ minds from the affec64. Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook, pp. 102–3. 65. Atkinson, ‘Modern Sculpture’, p. 315. 66. ‘Sculpture at the Royal Academy Exhibition: The Blind Girl Reading’, Illustrated London News, 10 August (1867), 153. The original plaster model dated 1854 was given to Salford Museum in 1861 and was subsequently lost, according to Fiona Darling-Glinski in ‘The Privilege of Patronage: Mary Thornycroft and the sculptural aesthetic’, Sculpture Journal, 11 (2004), 55–68 (p. 66).

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tation of previous examples of similar subjects, notably Canova’s Danzatrice, which despite its ‘consummate delicacy of finish’ was to remind Anna Jameson ‘too much of ballet dancers’, suggesting questionable artifice.67 The Illustrated London News made the contrast clear: From a familiar, homely, healthy, salutary exercise, in which our wives and daughters have at some time indulged, the artist [Thornycroft] has derived an attitude as elegant as that of most ‘dancing girls’, and less affected than some—as, for example, the well known figure by Canova.68

For Palgrave, Canova was the ‘evil genius’ that had ‘palsied Sculpture’. The Zephyr and Flora by Benzoni shown in the Roman Court therefore represented for many British critics the Canova effect: technically brilliant but essentially flawed.69 The competition for a part in this international theatre of display was highly prized and hotly contested. But such spectacles, although interpreted as a means of assessing national achievements, could never be truly representative where the art of sculpture was concerned for very mundane reasons: full scale sculptures executed in marble, such as those exhibited by Hosmer, Gibson, Story, Monti, and Magni at the 1862 Exhibition, were large, heavy, costly to move and difficult to accommodate. It was therefore inevitable that at every international exhibition sculptors working outside the host country were at a disadvantage, particularly when theirs was an art form not actively supported by the state. This state of affairs was further exacerbated by the fact that sculpture was also contending for funding and space with other cultural, scientific, and industrial products that also stood as indicators of a nation’s economic and political health. Sculptors were often forced to sell or raffle their works rather than bear the cost of bringing them back to the studio. It is not surprising, therefore, that a persistent theme that emerges in the history of these exhibitions was sculptors’ dissatisfaction given that if their 67. Jameson, p. 13. 68. Illustrated London News (1867), 161. 69. For a full discussion of the evolution of Benzoni’s group and its several versions see Antonia Boström, ‘Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Randolph Rogers and the Collecting of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century Detroit’, The Sculpture Journal, 4 (2000), 151–59. The Detroit Institute of Arts Zephyr dancing with Flora, signed and dated 1870, is a later version of that shown at the 1862 exhibition which Boström notes was bought by ‘an Englishman, G. Wynne Holford of London’. This remains untraced although she speculates that the version sold at Sotheby’s, London, 7 November 1985, signed and dated 1861, may well be that shown in 1862; see p. 158 fn.13. Boström also mentions Beavington Atkinson’s jaded view of Canova’s ‘emasculating’ influence on contemporary Italian sculpture at the 1862 Exhibition (p. 153).

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work were selected, they would have to pay high insurance and shipping tariffs. There was also the possibility that their works might be exhibited without their knowledge, lent by owners in the vicinity at the request of the national committees in order to lessen overall transportation costs. Under such circumstances the commercial and professional opportunities that were seemingly proffered by inclusion in universal exhibitions were just as quickly rendered void. So although sculpture appeared initially to be advantaged over the other fine arts by its complementariness to industry and manufacturing in these ‘universal’ exhibitions, it was inevitably an unrepresentative showing. But perhaps more difficult for the construction of national identity were the very processes involved in bringing any sculpture to the floor of an exhibition. Hosmer’s professional reputation established by Zenobia did not go unchallenged. Claims were made against her in the press in 1863–64 and fermented by the sculptor Joseph Mozier, suggesting that she fraudulently took credit for work executed by Italian workmen.70 She had, in fact, as was normal practise, left the completed clay model to be translated into a plaster model and cut in marble by her Italian workmen.71 Therefore, Palgrave’s criticism of the ‘tasteless’ Italian finish can be seen not just as a value judgement, but as an acute, connoisseurial, assessment of the techniques used by these Roman marble cutters. So what does ‘made in Italy’ mean in the context of sculpture presented on the national theatre of the 1862 exhibition? Perhaps the conclusion can only be that it was a hybrid species, and that its performance was largely dependent upon its stage and the viewing public. Bibliography Atkinson, Joseph Beavington, ‘The International Exhibition’, The Art Journal, NS 1 (1862), 213–15. Atkinson, Joseph Beavington, ‘Modern Sculpture of all nations in the International Exhibition of 1862’, in The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition (London: James S. Virtue, 1863), pp. 313–24. Atkinson, Joseph Beavington, ‘Introduction’, in The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition (London: James S. Virtue, 1863), p. xii. Bilbey, Diane (with Marjorie Trusted), British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2002). 70. See fn. 36 above. 71. Shakespere Wood kept her informed of progress and of Mozier’s burgeoning resentment at her success; see Sherwood, p. 190.

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Berthold, Dennis, ‘Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution’, American Literary History, 9, 3 (1997), 425–59. Boström, Antonia, ‘Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Randolph Rogers and the Collecting of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century Detroit’, The Sculpture Journal, 4 (2000), 151–59. Carr, Cornelia, ed., Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories (New York: Moffat, 1912; London: John Lane and Bodley Head, 1913). Cherry, Deborah, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900 (London: Routledge, 2000). Darling-Glinski, Fiona, ‘The Privilege of Patronage: Mary Thornycroft and the Sculptural Aesthetic’, Sculpture Journal, 11 (2004), 55–68. Gilley, Sheridan, ‘The Garibaldi Riots of 1862’, The Historical Journal, 16 (1973), 697–732. ‘Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia’, The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics, 15 (1865), 248–50. Hobhouse, Hermione, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (London: The Athlone Press, 2002). Hosmer, Harriet, ‘The Process of Sculpture’, The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics, 14 (1864), 734–737. Howard, Deborah, ‘Venice as Dolphin: Further Investigations into Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View’, Artibus et historiae, 18 (1997), 101–11. Jameson, Anna, A Handbook to the Courts of Modern Sculpture (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854). Palgrave, Francis Turner, Descriptive Handbook to the Fine Art Collections in the International Exhibition of 1862 (London: Macmillan, 1862). Peachey, Emma, Peachey’s Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling (London: Published and Sold by Mrs Peachey, Artiste to Her Majesty, 1851). Pick, Daniel, Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). Radcliffe, Anthony, ‘Monti’s Allegory of the Risorgimento’, Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin, 1 (1965), 25–38. ‘Sculpture at the Royal Academy Exhibition: The Blind Girl Reading’, Illustrated London News, 10 August (1867), 153. Sherwood, Dolly, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830–1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Tegmeier Oertel, Kristen, ‘“The Free Sons of the North” versus “The Myrmidons of Border-Ruffiansism”: What Makes a Man in Bleeding Kansas?’, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, 25 (2002), 174– 89.

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Tennyson, Alfred, Ode for the Opening of the International Exhibition (London: E. Moxon, 1862). Waller, Susan, ‘The Artist, the Writer, and the Queen: Hosmer, Jameson, and Zenobia’, The Woman’s Art Journal, 4, 1 (1983), 21–28. Ward-Jackson, Philip, ‘Carlo Marochetti and the Glasgow Wellington Memorial’, The Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 851–62. J. B. Waring, Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International Exhibition 1862, 3 vols (London: Day and Son, 1863). Internet Sources http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=124598+0+none (accessed 18 April 2007).

3. Travelling Images

Barbara Schaff Italianised Byron—Byronised Italy Italianised Byron In November 1816, on his way to Venice, Byron visited Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. With John Hobhouse as his sole audience, he stood on the stage and recited lines from Virgil’s Aeneid.1 This incident metaphorically opened the curtain to Byron’s Italian years and works: like Aeneas, the expatriate, Byron was an exile, and like Aeneas he was entangled in amorous and political engagements abroad. In addition, Byron’s theatrical gesture has a metonymic quality: on entering the stage of the Teatro Olimpico, he was also making an entrance onto the stage of Italy, thus embracing a complex theatricality which shaped his poetical writings and his highly performative letters home. The Italian theatre can serve as a way into the various aspects of Byron’s performances. Byron’s sense of displacement made him acutely aware of places, and especially of the modes in which places could be explored performatively.2 From now on, Byron was to remain on stage, playing his role as a writer in exile or, as he later expressed it in a letter to Teresa Guiccioli, a ‘cittadino del Mondo’.3 The stance of the exile was to become the hallmark of his identity, insofar as he disowned Englishness and immersed himself in Italian culture: Italy became the stimulus and setting for his life’s performance. Byron’s liberalism, his free-thinking and cosmopolitan sophistication were intensified in Italy, catapulting him not only geographically but also intellectually far out of the British mainstream.4 The first two encounters Byron had with Italian theatricality hint at a view of Italy as the home of the theatrical as well as the sexually liberated, if not deviant. While visiting the theatre in Milan, an incestuous couple was pointed out to him, causing him to comment in a letter to Thomas Moore: ‘The state

1. 2. 3. 4.

Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 315. This aspect is explored in Stephen Cheeke’s excellent study Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2003). Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie Marchand, 8 vols (London: John Murray, 1976), VI, p. 258. For a detailed analysis see Peter Graham, ‘Byron and the Business of Publishing’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron ed. by Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 27–43 (p. 35).

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of morals in these parts is in some sort lax.’5 A little later, he attended a performance of the famous improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci, who was, according to Byron, a celebrated sodomite—a fact which, as he explained to Hobhouse, was not an issue in Italian society: ‘[…] they laugh instead of burning—and the Women talk of it as a pity in a man of talent.’6 Hence Byron, during his first days in Italy, found the same forms of sexual deviancy which had driven him out of England staged publicly, discussed openly, and accepted in Italian society. For Byron, Italy’s distinctive sexual politics opened up a realm of a new publicity of sexual deviancy, which he not only appropriated but eagerly performed in his letters home. In these letters, he habitually presented himself as a spectacle to his addressees, a spectacle of an AngloItalian hybrid, negotiating the newly adopted role of an Italian cavaliere servente, an exotic role by English standards, alongside the role of the English aristocrat and professional man of letters. The letters, when read chronologically, even have a formal theatrical resonance, as they very often appear like a repeat performance, because Byron reiterates the same anecdotes to several of his addressees, only slightly altering the details. They display a complex assertion of identity through a perpetual re-establishment of different roles. When writing to his friend Thomas Moore or his publisher John Murray II, Byron not only relates sometimes rather mundane acts and events, but he makes sure that many of these acts are understood as being performed while writing, frequently incorporating his addressees as participants in the current scene.7 Especially his amorous relations are a continuous presence in his letters: as a source of inspiration for his writings, as constituents for the plot of his little narratives, and at the same time as reasons for not writing or not continuing a letter. Thus, for instance, having described to Thomas Moore the Oriental beauty of his mistress Marianna Segati, he adds in a postscript five days later: ‘You will perceive that my description, which was proceeding with the minuteness of a passport, has been interrupted for several days. In the meantime…’8 Or, in another letter, also to Thomas Moore, he breaks off in the middle of the sentence and writes: ‘I really cannot go on. There is a pair of great black eyes looking over my shoulder, like the angel leaning over in St Matthew’s, in the old frontispieces to the Evangelists—so that I must turn and answer them instead of you.’9 Similarly, he concludes a letter to Murray: ‘My Adriatic

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Byron’s Letters, V, p. 125. MacCarthy, p. 314. MacCarthy, p. 329. Byron’s Letters, V, p. 130. Byron’s Letters, V, p. 186.

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nymph is this moment here—and I must therefore repose from this letter “rocked by the beating of her heart”.’10 This staging of simultaneous, complementary, and interdependent writing and lovemaking reinforces Byron’s reputation as the promiscuous womaniser, embracing the role of notorious Don Juan: in one letter to Hobhouse, he names a whole string of women, in the manner of the conquests itemised by Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and concludes: ‘some of them are Countesses—and some of them Cobblers’ wives—some noble—some middling—some low—and all whores.’11 John Murray was the recipient of many of the highly anecdotal, gossipy, brilliant, and verse-enriched letters, not least because Byron was certain that Murray would circulate them, or even read them out to his literary friends in Murray’s office, and in the presence of Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Byron.12 Corresponding with Murray, Byron exceeded the conventions of the private, intimate letter, and instead staged himself in the literary public, conflating the roles of the poet, the glamorous celebrity, notorious womaniser, and the poetical persona of his works. In his relationship with Teresa Guiccioli, the nationally encoded model of the cavaliere servente, which had accommodated his needs in previous love affairs in Venice, turned into a site of contest for two conflicting love models. According to the Italian custom, Byron’s affair with Teresa was tolerated in so far as he stuck to the official role of the cavaliere servente, i.e. as the acknowledged lover of a married woman who attends to her needs and desires, but does not interfere with the marriage. This concept was seriously undermined by Teresa, who embraced the newly emerging Romantic model of passionate and exclusive love, and hence tried to persuade Byron to an elopement. In his book Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, Niklas Luhmann, describing the fundamental changes in European encodings of love and passion around 1800, has argued that in the Romantic era passion, self education, and refinement through love became inextricably linked to marriage and a new model of intimacy.13 In the terms of this new semantics of love, Teresa was unable to harmonise her marriage and love affair any longer. In a letter to Augusta Leigh, Byron states that Teresa’s attachment is a romantic one, based on the literary model of Corinne, thereby requiring him to perform the role of Lord Neville with Teresa as his

10. 11. 12. 13.

Byron’s Letters, V, p. 153. MacCarthy, p. 340. See Graham, p. 35 and MacCarthy, p. 323. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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Corinne.14 The traditional Italian convention of cicisbeismo, and its established codes of passion and sexual performance, suddenly had become infiltrated by a foreign love model which thoroughly disturbed the stability of the arrangement. Moreover, Teresa’s romantic fantasy threw Byron back into the position of the Scottish Lord he had tried to leave behind in his process of Italianisation. All these Byronic performances most certainly were much influenced by his acquaintance with the Italian theatre, not least because he was impressed by the contemporary Italian neoclassical drama, especially the plays of the Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri.15 An example for the impact of Alfieri’s work is the carnivalesque collapse of the distinction between audience and spectacle, induced by Byron’s attendance of a performance of Alfieri’s Mirra, which was rehearsed in a letter to Murray. The day after the performance, Byron wrote: Dear Sir—I do not know how far I may be able to reply to your letter—for I am not very well today.—Last night I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Mirra—the last two acts of which threw me into convulsions.—I do not mean by that word—a lady’s hysterics—but the agony of reluctant tears—and the choking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction.16

In this letter, Byron reported a visit to the theatre and at the same time performed as a spectacle of Romantic sensitivity before Murray. This is a paradigmatic situation, showing how easily Byron shifted the positions between stage and audience. Lilla Crisafulli has hinted at the political relevance of this performance, which certainly had added to Byron’s emotional upheaval. She identified it as ‘a Carbonaro-like experience, because the performance was authorized just for one evening without being allowed to be publicized in the official programme, under penalty of imprisonment for the company and the theatre manager’.17 Apparently, the play’s political relevance, its inherent struggle for Italy’s national identity, facilitated Byron’s simultaneous identification with its political issues as well as its theatricality. Or, more generally, it can be said that the projection of his own political convictions and desires

14. Byron’s Letters, VI, p. 248. 15. Alan Richardson, ‘Byron and the Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. by Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 133–150 (p. 136). 16. Byron’s Letters, VI, p. 206. 17. Lilla Crisafulli, ‘Theatre and Theatricality in British Romantic Constructions of Italy’, in British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting, ed. by Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 149–163 (p.160).

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onto the experience of Italian theatricality culminated in his own theatrical performance, eroding the boundaries between spectator and actor. As a performative concept, this collapse of dramatic roles is of course tied up with the Venetian carnival. The Venetian carnival is a social practice which celebrates the idea of the all-encompassing spectacle. During the carnival, the distinction between actor and audience disappears, as does the spatial opposition between stage and stalls: all participants take part in a mutual performance, are spectators and spectacle at the same time, thus suspending the established order. Tony Tanner has read Byron in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin and Terry Castle’s work on masquerade and has argued convincingly how Byron used the carnivalesque in order to bring about an inversion of hierarchy, a destabilisation of gender, and a liberation from conventions. The overall effect is an undermining of the dualities and binary oppositions on which culture is founded and for which, in terms of the theatrical spectacle, the collapse of the distinction between actor and spectator serves as an apt metaphor.18 Byron fully immersed himself into the Venetian carnival, using proto-Bakhtinian dialectical strategies to explore a heteroglossic mode of subjectivity. Apart from shaping Byron’s modes of self-staging, Venetian carnivalesque performativity also infiltrates much of his poetical works, not least in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Beppo, and Don Juan. It is staged on the diegetic level as a turbulent gender confusion in the harem scene in Don Juan (canto 6), in which Don Juan enters the harem masqueraded as a girl, and the Sultana as well as the Odalisques fall in love with him.19 In the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the carnivalesque principle serves to conflate the author and the narrator. The main protagonist is indistinguishable from Byron’s own experiences: Byron portrays himself here as the epitome of the Romantic expatriate. Peter Vassallo has convincingly shown that canto 4 is not so much a record of Byron’s own observations as a product of his reading, an intertextual response to the many Venices and Italies that he had aesthetically encountered.20 In addition to this, I would contend that in the fourth canto Byron adopts a new performative role which was directly inspired by the various manifestations of Italian theatricality—the spectacle of the improvvisatore, the carnival, and the opera; so that his poetry gained a new and much more stage-like quality. The famous first lines which have turned the Bridge of Sighs into a major attraction for tourists ever since, make this explicit. When reading ‘I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, a palace and a prison 18. Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 41. 19. Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 591–620. 20. Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 16.

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palace and a prison on each hand’, one is confronted with a gesture which, as Tanner has claimed, serves to undermine the conventional duality between palace and prison.21 Moreover, these lines invite emulation, and they were in fact easily appropriated by generations of tourists, who, for a moment, could rehearse the pose of the poet and the protagonist in a performative speech act on the spot.22 It was the performative quality of Byron’s poetical writings, characterised by an acute sense of place combined with a sense for lively dramatic scenes, which guaranteed his reputation as the creator of the modern tourist itinerary, and which eventually, as will be shown later, lead to their frequent citation in Murray’s Handbook for Travellers to Central Italy and, in 1843, the publication of a pocket-sized travel edition of Byron’s works, to be read—and rehearsed—on the spot. This edition was advertised in the 1843 edition of The Handbook to Central Italy as ‘The traveller’s complete and portable edition of Lord Byron’s Poetical Works in one volume’, clearly targeted also for the use in situ: ‘For travellers and tourists, at home and abroad, this Companion will be found in every way complete. The volume is very handsomely bound in strong durable cloth.’23 And last but not least, not only Murray’s use of Byron but also the impressive list of British poets, travelling in Byron’s footsteps and producing immensely popular Italian travelogues themselves, among them Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1822), William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour in Italy (1837), and John Edmund Reade’s Italy (1839; rev. 1844), document the longstanding and unflinching British interest in Italy—or rather the interest in a Byronic view of Italy.24 A last aspect of Byron’s Italian performances which should be mentioned is his flirtation with the Carbonari, the clandestine revolutionary society which he joined in 1820.25 Gradually, Byron had shifted from the position of a sympathetic spectator to a full member, not least because of his attachment to Teresa and her family, the Gambas, among whom were several Carbonari activists. His political performance as an Italian freedom fighter certainly was an attempt at a more concerted Italianisation, especially at a time when his relationship with Teresa was causing a public stir. His involvement with the 21. Byron, p. 148; Tanner, p. 26. 22. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture 1880–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 117. 23. John Murray, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy Including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1843), inside of back cover. 24. For a detailed discussion of the post-Byronic literary interest in Italy see Christopher Kierstead, ‘Where “Byron Used to Ride”: Locating the Victorian Travel Poet in Clough’s Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus’, Philological Quarterly, 77, 4 (fall 1998), 377–393. 25. MacCarthy, p. 384.

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Carboneria, however, had an undesirable outcome: rather than helping his integration, it led to his status as a political persona non grata in Italy; not for the first time, he was marked as an exile and a politically dangerous influence. In England, Byron’s disavowal of Englishness was severely reprimanded; in August 1822, Blackwood’s Magazine accused him of having lost his Englishness: ‘Byron has often forgotten, and often misremembered, his native country.’26 The ‘Letter from Italy’ in the October number of the same year remarks on Byron’s extensive debts to Italian poets, whereby the argument is not so much a literary as a political one. Another author notes that ‘if Voltaire, writing in exile, was the motive force behind the French Revolution, then Byron, operating from Pisa, might be the unintentional cause of an English rebellion’.27 Even as an exile, Byron was seen as a political force, dangerously undermining national stability. In the context of his posthumous reputation in Britain and the creation of the Byron myth, his position as a key literary figure was cemented on these three aspects of his life performance and his work: his passionate erotic performances, his magnificent theatricality, and his full-blooded political engagement, all of which are inseparably linked to Italian culture. The film poster and video cover for Illustration 1: Film Poster the production The Bad Lord Byron: A Visit with of The Bad Lord Byron England’s Greatest Sinner from the late 1940s (1949). demonstrates that even then the framework for Byron’s interpretation had not changed (illustration 1). Theatricality and performance are emphasised, as the picture looks very much like a stage photograph. Byron, played by Dennis Price, is standing under an arch, behind him the skyline of Venice. His relaxed posture and half-dressed appearance serve to hint to his appropriation of Italian manners. What is striking is the colourful Union Jack in the front, half covering Byron’s legs and contrasting with the muted colours of the photograph. Looking like a theatre curtain just come down, it enhances the stage-like quality of the image. As a symbol for England, it evokes ambiguous interpretations: firstly, it relates to Byron’s status as a national poet. One is reminded of official burial scenes—the coffins of national heroes are covered with the flag, and this association is sup26. Quoted in Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 122. 27. Quoted in Parker, p. 123.

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ported by the film’s first scene, showing Byron on his death bed. On the other hand, rather than as a cover, the arrangement of the flag could be interpreted as an act of unveiling—unveiling the truth perhaps, i.e. the spicy details of the poet’s numerous affairs. Or it could be read as a metaphorical frontier the exile did not cross, barring him from coming home. However ambiguous the symbolism of the film poster might be, its essence can be narrowed down to a rather simple statement: in the British cultural consciousness, it had been first and foremost Italy which had provided the stage for the display of Byron’s public image as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Byronised Italy For Victorian British tourists, Italy has long had theatrical Byronic resonances. During his Italian years, Byron had served as a spectacle for British tourists. Byron’s friend Richard Hoppner, the British Consul in Venice, gave a rather comical account to Murray about how English celebrity hunters were on the lookout for Byron during his daily ride on the Lido: The spot, where we usually mounted our horses had been a Jewish cemetery; but the French, during their occupation of Venice, had thrown down the enclosure, and levelled all the tombstones with the ground, in order that they might not interfere with the fortifications upon the Lido, under the guns of which it was situated. To this place, as it was known to be that where he alighted from his gondola and met his horses, the curious amongst our country-people, who were anxious to obtain a glimpse of him, used to resort; and it was amusing in the extreme to witness the excessive coolness with which ladies, as well as gentlemen, would advance within a very few paces of him, eyeing him, some with their glasses, as they would have done a statue in a museum, or the wild beasts at Exeter ’Change. However flattering this might be to a man’s vanity, Lord Byron, though he bore it very patiently, expressed himself, as I believe he really was, excessively annoyed at it […]. The curiosity that was expressed by all classes of travellers to see him, and the eagerness with which they endeavoured to pick up any anecdotes of his mode of life, were carried to a length which will hardly be credited. It formed the chief subject of their inquiries of the gondoliers who conveyed them from terra firma to the floating city; and these people who are generally loquacious, were not at all backward in administering to the taste and humours of their passengers, relating to them the most extravagant and often unfounded stories. They took care to point out the house where he lived, and to give such hints of his movements as might afford them an opportunity of seeing him.28

This is one of the earliest statements about the ways the emerging Italian tourist industry responded to the Byron hype. Byron’s importance as sym28. Thomas Moore, Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1839), p. 417–18.

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bolic cultural capital was quickly recognised and everything was done to create the specific sort of Byron which would satisfy the needs of British tourists. After Byron’s death, his cult status only gradually declined, and Byron was quickly commodified into a valuable tourist asset. The English pilgrimage to a Byronised Italy was supported and intensified by Italians in the familiar Catholic forms of hagiography and relics. In his Pictures from Italy (1846), Charles Dickens relates how a waiter in a hotel in Bologna, as soon as he had recognised that the traveller was from England, hastened to regale him with anecdotes about Milord Beeron: He knew all about him, he said. In proof of it, he connected him with every possible topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner which was grown on an estate he had owned, to the big bed itself, which was the very model of his. When I left the inn, he coupled with his final bow in the yard, a parting assurance that the road by which I was going, had been Milord Beeron’s favourite ride […].29

This reads like an explicit strategy of Byronisation: for the English tourist, not only the celebrated sites of Italy but even its more mundane aspects, like hotel beds, food, and modes of transport were all turned into Byronic devotional objects and helped to create the infrastructure for a Byronic literary trail. Biographical and literary associations with Byron formed and enhanced their experience of Italy, and places associated with him became the most famous sites to be visited. The Byronisation of Italy, however, shifted from the attraction of the scandalous spectacle of his life—English mothers used to tell their daughters to avert their eyes when Byron passed—to the perception of places of natural beauty associated with Byron, and thus to a far more sanitised and abstracted version of a Byronised Italy. This shift is principally due to John Murray’s aforementioned exploitation of Byron’s verse in his Italian handbooks. Byron, Murray’s most prestigious literary property, often figures as the exemplary itinerant, and his protagonists as model spectators. Byron’s acute sense of place and his performative style helped Murray to aestheticise Italian sites and sights with poetical quotes. In the hands of Murray, Byron, who had famously fashioned himself as the eternal out-ofplace exile, paradoxically was to become the epitome of the commodified poet in the British guidebook industry, as the Giro d’Italia was turned, in the hands of Murray, partly into a Byron literary trail. These poetical add-ons were inserted in texts which were primarily designed as objective and factual objects of utility. The Murray handbooks provided information about geogra-

29. Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 325.

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phy, social, and cultural practices, economic and political facts. In the following advertisement for the handbooks, the objective is made clear: The object of Murray’s handbooks is to give matter-of-fact descriptions of what ought to be seen at each place, and is calculated to interest an intelligent English traveller, without bewildering him with an account of all that may be seen, […] and to use the description of others where good and correct.30

In accordance with this specification, Murray, referring to the Colosseum, claims in the first edition of Murray’s Handbook to Central Italy (1843): ‘We shall not attempt to anticipate the feelings of the traveller, or obtrude upon him a single word which might interfere with his own impressions, but simply supply him with such facts as may be useful in his examination of the ruin.’31 This attempt at objectivity is, however, seriously undermined by Murray’s poetic Byronisation of Italy. A few pages later, after having provided the reader with the detailed historical facts and measurements of the Colosseum, Murray’s description metonymically culminates in the view from the summit, and this view is encoded as a Byronic scene: ‘The scene from this summit is one of the most impressive in the world, and there are few travellers who do not visit this spot by moonlight in order to realise the magnificent description in Manfred, the only description which has ever done justice to the wonders of the Coliseum.’32 This was complemented with an extract from Manfred, establishing a dramatic contrast between the well preserved Colosseum as a symbol of death and cruelty, and the scarce ruins of the palace of the Roman emperors, the ‘Augustan halls’ as a symbol for culture. Murray again chose a quote with a highly performative quality, enabling the tourist to identify with the narrative persona: I do remember me, that in my youth, When I was wandering,—upon such a night I stood within the Coliseum’s wall, Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome; The trees which grew along the broken arches Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars Shone through the rents of ruin […].33

Murray’s instructions to experience the Colosseum, of course, read like the opposite of his proposed matter-of-fact description, and indeed, his strategy 30. Murray, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 4th edn (London: John Murray, 1857), p. 34. 31. Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1843), p. 294. 32. Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1843), p. 296. 33. Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1843), p. 296.

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of a Byronised poeticisation of Italy added a surplus of a culture of feeling to the dry factual information, thus thoroughly modelling British tourists’ views of Italy. This concept, however, had its limits, and as soon as the actual circumstances of travelling had ceased to guarantee anything like a solitary romantic experience, the parody of the tourists’ pose of the solitary Byronic wanderer became a standard figure in Victorian literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun, paints a vivid picture of mindless and intoxicated English speaking tourists, doing the Colosseum by moonlight and ‘exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron’s and not their own’.34 As Beard and Hopkins point out, the experience of the Colosseum by night had, by mid-nineteenth-century standards, mostly turned into a vulgar mass event.35 Due to the democratisation of travelling and modern means of transport, the Victorian middle class tourists in Italy were now able to travel extensively, but they still willingly relied on literary sources as instructions for the right perception of place, thus mimicking the aristocratic Grand Tour of the 18th century. This embrace of the older model of travelling as a culturally more valuable one, exhibits the 19th century tourists’ class-consciousness, their anxieties and social frictions. Through the knowledge of Byron’s poems, they hoped to distinguish themselves from non-literary tourists and to be classified as part of a cultured elite.36 A literary example for this kind of Victorian pretentiousness which is inextricably linked to the dissemination of Byron’s works through Murray is portrayed in E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread: Here Mrs Herriton wants to find out about Monteriano, a little town in Italy where her daughter-in-law is staying. She consults her library, three different works respectively: first an atlas, then Childe Harold, then Mark Twain’s Tramp Abroad, and last, because ‘Byron had not been there’, she literally leaves the territory of literature and resorts to her son’s room where she finds Baedeker’s guide to Central Italy. This book is not to her taste: ‘Some of the information seemed to her unnecessary, all of it was dull.’37 If one reads Mrs Herriton’s choice of reference books as symptomatic for the average middle class British tourist in the late 19th century, one could deduce two hypotheses from Forster’s gently ironic description: firstly, Childe Harold was the Urtext of the Italian experience for the British tourist, acknowledged as a normative model for the perception of Italy. Secondly, a

34. Quoted in Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins, The Colosseum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 7. 35. Beard and Hopkins, p. 7. 36. Buzard, p. 121. 37. E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975 [1905]), p. 29.

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guidebook designed for the use of the educated middle classes should not limit itself to factual description, otherwise its readers will be bored. If Baedeker obviously failed to live up to the standard of the literary taste of Mrs Herriton, Murray’s handbook certainly would have suited her ideally.38 Ultimately, the sophisticated Victorian tourist would resort to Byron’s prominent role as the exile par excellence to stand out from uncultivated mass tourism. Childe Harold’s proud world-weariness here served as the model pose: I stood and stand alone,—remembered, or forgot. I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow’d To its idolatries a patient knee,— Nor coined my cheek to smiles,—nor cried aloud In worship of an echo; in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts; and still could, Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued. (Canto III, Stanza 112/13)

Childe Harold provided the tourist with an elitist consciousness of literariness as well as an attractive role model of distanced separateness from the hordes of other tourists. Thus, Byron in a double sense epitomised an idea of cultured elite travelling and individuality. ‘Byron furnished’, as James Buzard put it, ‘post-Romantics with accredited anti-touristic gestures that were performable within tourism’.39 The literary references served to authenticate the tourist experience in complex ways, not least in their tendency to foreground the view of a distinctive single author as narrative persona, such as in the above mentioned quotes from Childe Harold and Manfred. They transformed the handbook into a manual for pilgrimage and the itinerary of the Giro d’Italia itself into a hagiographic exercise. Buzard has claimed that, through the influence of Byron, the tourist map of Europe was changed, but in the Byronic construction of Italy, Murray certainly played an important role. How long did the fascination with the spectacular Byron last? What traces are left of Byron in contemporary Italy? How do Byronic associations inform contemporary tourism? One can assume that by the late 20th century the 38. Forster does not mention the Murray handbooks—neither in Where Angels Fear to Tread nor in A Room with a View. His digs at British tourist practices always refer to the Baedeker guides. 39. Buzard, p. 121.

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Illustration 2: Plaque at the Palazzo Toscanelli, Pisa.

figure of the sexual libertine had become outmoded, as has the figure of the ardent freedom fighter. Indeed, contemporary references to Byron on tourist websites give the impression of an innocuous nature poet. The unveiling of a Byron statute among others of famous literati in the sculpture park of the Villa Borghese by the Queen Mother in 1959 was official confirmation of Byron’s importance for Italy (and vice versa) on the British side. Yet how does Italy today use Byron as cultural capital? The plaque on the front of the Palazzo Toscanelli (former Lanfranchi), Byron’s residence in Pisa from 1821–1822, is a good example for the ways in which Byron is appropriated, italianising the poet’s name into ‘Giorgio’ (illustration 2). This plaque links a place with Byronic associations, the palace in Pisa, to the literary production of its inhabitant: it gives information about the specific works written in this place, namely six cantos of Don Juan. This renders the Palazzo Toscanelli more significant in Byron’s biography not only as a place to live in but as the point of origin of the literary work. Generally speaking, Italian references to Byron appear to emphasise the inspiration Byron drew from places or the exact location where a work was conceived and written, thus forging place and poetry into a direct causal connection: Italy is not seen as objectified landscape but rather as the agent inspiring the poet’s creativity. In contrast, Murray, who never hesitated to advertise his product ‘Italy made by Byron’, was not much interested in the topographical point of origin for poetry. When describing the Palazzo Lanfranchi, the connection with Byron is established not through his poetry, but it is mentioned solely as the poet’s residence: ‘The Palazzo Lanfranchi, now

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Toscanelli, is attributed to Michel Angelo; the mellowed tint of the marble adds much to the effect of the architecture. It was the residence of Lord Byron in 1822.’40 To put it briefly, whereas Murray was interested in the places Byron described, the Italian tourist industry seems to prefer to exhibit the places where Byron wrote, thus highlighting the authenticity of Italian locations as sources of inspiration for literary works. A glance at Italian tourist websites advertising the Golfo dei Poeti makes this strategy of topographical appropriation even more obvious: The Golfo dei Poeti is a stretch of the Ligurian coast between La Spezia and Lerici. It is named after Shelley and Byron: the Shelleys and Jane and Edward Williams had rented the Casa Magni at Lerici in summer 1822, but the associations with Byron are rare. Byron never lived there in the first place but he sailed there, and he is reputed to have swum in the Gulf after having cremated Shelley’s body on the beach at Viareggio. Mario Curreli has pointed out how a series of misinformation and hisIllustration 3: Grotta di Byron, Golfo dei Poeti. torical infelicities, of ignorance and abundant fantasies concerning the time Byron spent in and near Pisa, and in the company of the Shelleys, have amalgamated into the legend of the Golfo dei Poeti, thus turning the Ligurian coast between La Spezia and Portovenere into a highly marketable literary place (illustration 3).41 Without regard to the correct historical circumstances, the tourist industry advocates the Golfo dei Poeti as the major source of inspiration for Byron and sometimes more generally for British writers. The following excerpt from a Ligurian tourist website demonstrates that the modes of representing Byron are almost identical: he is presented as the famous British Romantic poet who had marvelled at the beauty of the Italian landscape and had drawn inspiration from it, and even more importantly, Byron and Shelley figure as the founders of a literary tradition forever linked to the region: 40. John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 11th edn, (London: John Murray, 1892), p. 150. 41. Mario Curreli, ‘Golfo dei poeti, lapidi bugiarde e altri miti’, Soglie, 6,2 (2004), 19–44.

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Furono due poeti inglesi, Shelley e Byron, a scoprirla e a farne un luogo letterario oltre che turistico, inaugurando una tradizione che peserà non poco sui destini dell’intera regione.42 It was two English poets, Shelley and Byron, who had discovered it [i.e. the Golfo dei Poeti], adding a literary dimension to a tourist place and founding a tradition which will greatly weigh on the future of the whole region. [my translation]

The homepage of the Cinque Terre tourist office obliquely refers to famous inhabitants of the region (‘illustri scrittori hanno soggiornato per lunghi periodi in questo lembo di terra’ [‘famous writers have sojourned for long periods in this spot of the earth’; my translation])—and then boldly proclaims: Cantato da Byron e Shelley, il Golfo dei Poeti è molto apprezzato nelle calde giornate estive trascorse in riva al mare, in barca per ammirare la splendida baia o fra gli stretti vicoli dei borghi medievali in visita ai tanti monumenti e chiese.43 Extolled by Byron and Shelley, the Gulf of the Poets is very much appreciated during warm summer days which are spent on the beach or in a boat, admiring the splendid coastline or in the narrow paths of the medieval towns, visiting many monuments and churches. [my translation]

The imaginative use of Byron’s biography is endless: Byron is constructed as a poet for whom the sojourn in and around Pisa in 1821 and 1822 became the source of inspiration for some of his major works. A particularly striking example is the connection between the Golfo dei Poeti and The Corsair. Byron had written The Corsair in 1813/14 in England, long before he had come to Italy. If the poem had been inspired by particular landscapes then probably by those of Albania and Greece where he had been travelling in 1809. The Gulf of the Poets most definitely had not been the source of inspiration because he had not been there before he wrote his poem, but this false link between text and place is a persevering feature of Italian publications well into recent times. In 1877, a bilingual inscription had been placed on a rock in the grotto near Portovenere—up until today called the ‘Grotta Byron’—stating that it was this grotto which had inspired Lord Byron to write the sublime poem The Corsair. As Mario Curreli relates, this inscription was quoted in an English publication in 1904, the Sketches on the Old Road through France to Florence by A. H. Hallam Murray, the son of John Murray III, who of course knew that this was a gross misrepresentation of facts, and

42. http://www.webliguria.com/mod/liguria/dettaglio.php?wl_id=72 (accessed 26 February 2007). 43. http://www.lecinqueterre.info/golfo-dei-poeti (accessed 26 February 2007).

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wondered ‘how the fable first originated’.44 Even though the inscription has been long since then replaced by one that omits the reference to The Corsair, the myth continues to be reiterated in the context of tourist advertisements, even if it is presented more cautiously now as a rumour: Lord Byron soggiornò a La Spezia, dove si dice compose Il Corsaro, sono a lui intitolate una grotta sul mare a Portovenere e una gara di nuoto […].45 Lord Byron sojourned in La Spezia, where, as rumour has it, he composed The Corsair, and a grotto in the sea at Portovenere is named after him as well as a swimming competition. [my translation]

These websites are all designed after the same scheme: the cultural importance of the region is emphasised through repeated references to canonical writers, Byron and Shelley as the most prominent ones. The Ligurian coastline is depicted as the principal agent for their works. Tourists are invited to follow Byron’s and Shelley’s tracks, and experience the genius loci themselves. Byron’s abundant literary heritage is condensed into the image of a poet who translated the beauty of Italian nature into English verse, thereby making it attractive, familiar, and approachable for English tourists. As represented by the contemporary Italian tourist industry, the Gulf of the Poets is not only a clever mystification but a perfect simulacrum in the sense that it masks the absence of a reality. Tourists are invited to certain locations associated with Byron which are complete fabrications. In order to fuel the tourist industry, the region is staged as being replete with Romantic literary associations, as having been textualised in major British literary works, and, above all, as a model for the sublime experience of landscapes. Jean Baudrillard has described Disneyland as a third-order simulation that conceals the fact that the real America is no longer real, and he has further argued that the loss of the real is inextricably linked to the emergence of nostalgia, distinguished by a proliferation of myths of origin and authenticity.46 The same can be said about the Golfo dei Poeti: it is also a simulacrum, masked as a poetical topography, and a myth of origin for famous Romantic nature poetry. The Byron we find in contemporary tourist sites is a Byron stripped of most of what 19th century tourists had found appealing. For the purpose of his handbooks, John Murray had been able to rely on a common knowledge of

44. Curreli, p. 41. 45. http://www.forumpa.it/forumpa2003/espositori/espositore.html?id=487 (accessed 26 February 2007). 46. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166–184 (pp. 170–71).

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Byron’s works among his readers. He established concrete and tangible connections between Byron, his works, and tourists, making Italy function in the context of a literary topography. Thus, the Bridge of Sighs or the Colosseum were recreated as literary places to invite the tourist’s engaged performance, based on literary knowledge and a belief in authenticity, a function of the literary text as reflecting the sentiments of its author, and the Italian topography. The contemporary tourist industry faces a different situation. It can neither rely on tourists’ fascination with Byron nor on a common consent about a mimetic relation between text and topography. Therefore, Byron associations nowadays are Illustration 4: Hotel Byron Bellavista, Lido di Jesolo. represented differently, as nostalgic evocations of literary greatness, as myths of origin for his poetical works. And most important of all, they stand for the essence of Italy, the one and most important reason why English tourists keep travelling to Italy: A room with a view—Bella Vista (illustration 4). Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Mark Poster (Stanford, Stanford University Press 1988), pp. 166–184. Beard, Mary and Keith Hopkins, The Colosseum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Bone, Drummond, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Buzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture 1880–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Cavaliero, Roderick, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). Cheeke, Stephen, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2003).

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Cochran, Peter, ‘Byron’s European Reception’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. by Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 249–64. Crisafulli, Lilla-Maria, ‘Theatre and Theatricality in British Romantic Constructions of Italy’, in British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting, ed. by Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 149–63. Curreli, Mario, ‘Golfo dei poeti, lapidi bugiarde e altri miti’, Soglie, 6, 2 (2004), 19–44. Dickens, Charles, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). Forster, Edward Morgan, Where Angels Fear to Tread (London: Penguin, 1976 [1905]). Graham, Peter, ‘Byron and the Business of Publishing’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. by Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 27–43. Kierstead, Christopher M., ‘Where “Byron used to ride”: Locating the Victorian Travel Poet in Clough’s Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus’, Philological Quarterly, 77, 4 (fall 1998), 377–394. Luhmann, Niklas, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). MacCarthy, Fiona, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002). Marchand, Leslie, ed., ‘So late into the night’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 5 (London: John Murray, 1976). Marchand, Leslie, ed., ‘The flesh is frail’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6 (London: John Murray, 1976). Moore, Thomas, Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1839) Murray, John, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy Including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1843). Murray, John, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 4th edn (London: John Murray, 1857). Murray, John, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 11th edn (London: John Murray, 1892). Nicolson, Harold, Byron: The Last Journey, April 1823–April 1824 (London: Constable, 1929).

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Origo, Iris, The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli as Told in Their Unpublished Letters and Other Family Papers (London: Cape and Murray, 1949). Parker, Mark, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Quennell, Peter, Byron in Italy (London: St James’ Library, 1951). Richardson, Alan, ‘Byron and the Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. by Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 133–150. Tanner, Tony, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Trueblood, Paul Graham, ed., Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteeth Century Europe (London: MacMillan, 1981). Vassallo, Peter, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1964). Walker, Keith, Byron’s Readers: A Study of Attitudes Towards Byron 1812– 1832, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Romantic Reassessment (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979). Wilson, Frances, ed., Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000). Internet Sources http://www.forumpa.it/forumpa2003/espositori/espositore.html?id=487 (accessed 26 February 2007). http://www.lecinqueterre.info/golfo-dei-poeti (accessed 26 February 2007). http://www.webliguria.com/mod/liguria/dettaglio.php?id=72 (accessed 26 February 2007).

Fabienne Moine Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity and Shaping the Poetic Self After Elizabeth Barrett married the poet Robert Browning in 1846, the newly-wed couple settled in Italy, a soothing place for Elizabeth’s poor health and a land of psychological independence, very unlike the prison-like house of Wimpole Street where her father had kept her away from any suitor. From her Florentine windows in Casa Guidi, the famous poet contemplated Italian history in the making during the Risorgimento. There she wrote one of her best poems, Aurora Leigh (1856), an aesthetic autobiography in verse. This epic poem would hardly have been so successful had she not previously written her political verse Casa Guidi Windows. In the two parts of this poem committed to the birth of the new nation, Barrett Browning reveals how deeply engaged she is in the Italian cause. Indeed, the last fifteen years of her artistic life were dedicated to the country which welcomed the poet and opened new perspectives in terms of poetical writing. From 1846 onwards, Barrett Browning unceasingly appealed to and supported the Italian people and openheartedly fought for the freedom of the country in her poems: Casa Guidi Windows, Poems Before Congress, and Last Poems published posthumously and after she had been buried in the English cemetery in Florence. Barrett Browning had a personal approach to Italy entirely different from her husband’s who could stroll about Florentine streets. She would stay behind her windows, as the title of her political poem indicates, but would nevertheless invest her own poetical energy in the transcription of historical events she experienced as metaphors of her own inner life.1 Although she considered herself a simple witness to the Italian events, in her 1851 preface to Casa Guidi Windows she also admitted that her poems are ‘a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country’.2 I shall keep in mind throughout this study the emotions involved in her Italian poetry because they make it more than poems merely witnessing 1.

2.

For interpretations of the window metaphor see Isobel Armstrong, ‘Casa Guidi Windows: Spectacle and Politics in 1851’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 51–69. ‘Advertisement to the First Edition, Florence 1851’, in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ware: Wordsworth, 1994), p. 340. All references to Barrett Browning’s poems, apart from Aurora Leigh, are taken from this edition.

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events. Contemporary critics overlooked her political poetry claiming that, at the time, she was suffering from bouts of madness since a woman poet should never enter the forbidden masculine territory of political writing. This is the reason why most of her last poems have been neglected or misunderstood. I shall consider the echoes and comparisons between Barrett Browning and allegorised Italy, since both seem to suffer from a long illness that has weakened them. Suffering women in her Italian poetry allow the poet to analyse the power of pain as the condition for the construction of a new identity. Italy comes alive and is incarnated in her poetry which questions stasis and suffering as conventional motives for women and war. The poet performs Italy when she refuses to write an emotionless historical poem. I wish to examine how the Risorgimento mirrors Barrett Browning’s own poetic struggle. When she starts writing a new type of poetry, combining politics with poetics, the form and rhythm of her Italian poetry dramatise the struggle outside the windows as well as inside her own brain. How does Barrett Browning manage to go beyond the respectable limits of her windows and her status as female poet, turning into a real actor performing on the Italian political scene? When Barrett Browning settled in Florence in 1846, she had been ill for nearly half her life. Consumption and a spinal disorder had made her a bedridden cripple with only books for company. The exchange of love letters with her future husband, which gave way to the writing of Sonnets from the Portuguese had radically altered her reclusive existence, restoring life in this death-like chamber of hers in Wimpole Street. The rest of the story has become legend: Elizabeth Barrett marrying Robert Browning in secret and travelling to Italy to benefit from the healing virtues of the Italian climate. Beyond this romance we cannot help noticing the similarities between the crippled lady rapidly recovering and the Italy of the mid-1850s also suffering from the pangs of inner conflicts. Italy became for the poet not only the country of freedom from paternal power but also a place of rebirth, a land of emotions, a sort of feminine body experiencing sensations that the poet had not dared acknowledge and accept before. It is, then, no surprise that Barrett Browning’s fictional double, Aurora Leigh, ends her artistic and personal quest in Florence. The feminised Italy that is described in detail in Casa Guidi Windows most particularly, and in emotional terms in Aurora Leigh, is predicated upon the allegory of a woman now suffering in birth pangs, now enduring wounds caused by the violence of men, but in both cases her body is alive, ready to give birth, either to nourish the future offspring or to recover from painful episodes. In the central Book 5 of Aurora Leigh, which deals with the nature of art and poetry, Aurora reaches the ultimate conclusion that there is no other destination but Italy to experience her long expected rebirth:

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And now I come, my Italy, My own hills! Are you ’ware of me, my hills, How I burn toward you? Do you feel to-night The urgency and yearning of my soul, As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe And smile? 3

Italy is akin to a perfect mother whose nurturing and appeasing presence alleviates pain and sorrow.4 At the end of the epic poem Romney Leigh, Aurora’s cousin whom she had always loved but also rejected due to his commitment to vain philanthropic causes, meets her in Florence on a warm spring evening. They both admit their mutual love, culminating in the announcement of a New Jerusalem resulting from joining their strengths. Romney calls Aurora ‘my Italy of women’ (VIII, 512), eventually linking syntactically and metaphorically the woman, the poet, and Italy. However, before witnessing such a profession of faith, the Barrettian reader has to go through certain ordeals that the poet herself underwent on her arrival in Florence. The historical conflict leading to the unification of Italy was going on when Barrett Browning arrived in Italy and started writing her longest political poem, Casa Guidi Windows. This long and—particularly for a female poet—unusual poem is composed of two very different parts. The part entitled ‘A Hope in Italy’ was written in 1847–1848 during her enthusiastic manifestation of support for the Grand-Duke Leopold of Tuscany. This first part shows how Florentines demonstrated ardour and energy during the long procession of 1847. However, the second part is darker and full of resentment and disappointment. Written in 1851, after the return of Leopold in an Austrian uniform at the head of an Austrian army, the second part conveys Barrett Browning’s sense of frustration in part compensated by her hope for a new form of life, domesticity, and maternity. Witnessing the abortive attempt to achieve Italian freedom, she concludes her poem by appealing to her ‘own young Florentine’ (II, 692), her own son whose blue eyes and youth foretell the advent of a new era, probably the Jerusalem engendered by Aurora’s and Romney’s love. Metaphors of maternity, giving birth, and nurturing abound in Casa Guidi Windows and correspond to the poet’s own fruitful pregnancy. For the poet, history in the making cannot be separated from the process of childbirth, breast-feeding, and cherishing one’s offspring. In the following, I will analyse how Barrett Browning gives life to 3. 4.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. by Kerry Sweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), V, 1266–1271. See Sandra Gilbert, ‘From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’, PMLA, 99, 2 (March 1984), 194–211.

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her host country and reveals how painful and distressing the birth of a child or a nation can be. The poet’s Italy turns into a real persona performing a role on the scene of the poem which presents suffering as a metaphor for the construction of national identity. In Aurora Leigh, the poet presents her future poetical projects before heading for Italy: The poet’s ‘sole work is to represent the age,/ Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age’ (V, 203). She also adds that her poetry is ‘living art,/ Which thus presents and thus records true life’ (V, 221–222). Poetry has broken from conventional standards, freeing the poet from aesthetic chains and allowing her to engage in political writings. The personal is the political, as the saying goes, and that is exactly what lies beneath Aurora’s motto: ‘this is living art.’ Her poetry is not ‘lifelike’ since the gerund insists on the performative implications of poetical writing. Barrett Browning’s Italy not only corresponds to what artists consider as ‘living art’, making the country the original cradle of art, but chooses to infuse ‘this live, throbbing age’ into her own poetry. Dead metaphors of ancient cities and static images of potent history and architecture fade into new visions of Florence.5 This poetic investment in politics is dramatised in feminine and maternal metaphors, blurring the limits between art and politics, between events outside and emotions inside, between national and personal identities.6 For Barrett Browning, the Risorgimento refers to the resurgence of a lost community of women. I am not saying that the poem at that stage opens unexplored perspectives, since the trope had already become familiar by the time Barrett Browning started her unusual Casa Guidi Windows. What I am examining is how intricate the web of identities is, since the poet’s life and contemporary events in Italy mingle, turning the windowsill into a thin and transparent Anglo-Italian frontier. At the beginning of Book 1, Italy is compared to a mourning mother, Niobe, and to the mother goddess Cybele, both lying ‘corpse-like’ (I, 33) after the murder of their children. A few lines further on, Italy becomes a ‘Juliet of

5.

6.

See Dolores Rosenblum in ‘Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh: The Genesis of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Visionary Aesthetic’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 4, 1 (1985), 61–68: ‘Barrett Browning envisions a cleansing destruction of the old order to make way for the new. The living must go on with their present concerns, the making of a future, and remain strengthened by their links to the dead past, but not enthralled by it’ (p. 63). Critics have already analysed feminine interventions in the poem, exploring the various metaphors uniting the wounded woman/land. See for example Sandra Gilbert, ‘From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’ and Jean Hoffmann Lewis, ‘Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aesthetic Struggle’, Victorians Institute Journal, 25 (1997), 159–176.

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nations’ (I, 36), comparing the country to Shakespeare’s beautiful living dead. Italy’s beauty cannot prevent her from being abandoned by potential lovers and becoming estranged from maternal joys. She even embodies a linguistic paradox, becoming a ‘childless mother’ (I, 22). Italy keeps on dying, however not as a metaphor of a decaying world. These negative feminine images symbolise a world that refuses to die and that clings to its past heritage as the condition of its survival.7 Mothers not only give birth to future generations but they most of all incarnate the necessary transmission that is at the core of Barrett Browning’s poetical writing. Suffering, childbearing, and birth-giving mothers reject the traditional image of the feminine muse that has always been associated with Italy in general and Florence in particular. Questioning reproduction—a problematic issue in Barrett Browning’s own private life—allows the poet to reject dead metaphors and a poetic status quo and to challenge the meaning of creation.8 Part 1 tackles the relevance of the past in the construction of the future. The poet wonders if ruins should be the stumbling blocks of new Italy: ‘We, who are the seed/ Of buried creatures, if we turned and spat/ Upon our antecedents, we were vile’ (I, 288–290). The idea of transmission captures the poet’s main motive, since ‘If orphaned, we are disinherited’ (I, 442). Her questioning of maternal relations conveys Barrett Browning’s personal implication in Italian politics. Maternity is no longer the result of a natural process, since metaphorical miscarriages and accidents can interrupt the natural and conventional visions offered by tradition. Mothers refuse to adopt the role of the muse, which is transmitted to children at the end of Book 2: ‘But we sit murmuring for the future though/ Posterity is smiling on our knees’ (II, 722–723). Women and mothers do not match masculine expectations in Barrett Browning’s poetry for they reject a poetry that is merely picturesque or written from the perspective of a witness; rather, they dramatise the outside world when they refuse to correspond to gender standards. Unceasingly suffering women allude to traditional visions but at the same time this painful experience, which is the essence of the poet’s life as a crippled middle-aged woman, leads to the artistic exploration of gender roles. 7.

8.

See Steve Dillon, ‘Defenestrations of the Eye: Flow, Fire and Sacrifice in Casa Guidi Windows’, Victorian Poetry, 35 (1997), 471–492: ‘Thus the poem attempts to bridge between past and present, and present and future, to give hope to an Italy which, until now, seemed only to possess a past’ (p. 472). In this volume, Pamela Neville-Sington notices how Barrett Browning distances herself from the English tradition which considers Italy as ‘a fallen woman, her glory long past, her people often duplicitous, always lazy’. See also Esther Schor, ‘The Poetics of Politics: Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 17, 2 (1998), 305–324. For Schor, the poet rejects excessive sentimentalism and particularly ‘the sentimentalism of Italy’s elegiac sonneteers’ (p. 312).

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‘Bianca among the Nightingales’, a dramatic monologue from Last Poems (1862), examines an Italian woman’s lament after her lover Giulio has been taken from her by a seductive British Protestant girl. Bianca has followed the couple from Florence to England. The form of the dramatic monologue allows the narrator to perform a role on the scene of the poem. The poem denounces the problem of abandoned women and the fragility of male love, in keeping with traditional Victorian poetry by women. However, the ambiguity of pain and sweetness embodied in the opposition between two categories of women, the cold English mistress and the warm-hearted Bianca, is accentuated by the obsessive song of the nightingales. Sexuality is at the core of this erotic poem that seems at first glance to discuss religious matters. Behind the veil of religious concern, Bianca denounces the situation of redundant women. Strange though it may seem, the luscious landscapes of Italy as well as the feminine charms of the Italian women did not suffice to attract Giulio’s favours. Bianca does not fit the traditional conception allotted to Italian women because, like Barrett Browning’s other Italian women such as Aurora or the female spectator in Casa Guidi Windows, Bianca challenges established visions to impose her own voice and desires. Women suffer due to men’s attitudes and decisions but performing their suffering enables them to transform traditional masculine elegy into a personal and often gendered claim of identity. Italy thus seen as a suffering woman and mother reveals a personal commitment in the outside world and an interaction between the female body and the body politic. There are many feminist innuendoes in Barrett Browning’s poetry and mostly in her last poems, probably due to her personal engagement in the Italian cause. For her, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ because it empowers women. The mourning Laura Savio in Barrett Browning’s ‘Mother and Poet’ takes advantage of her suffering on learning of her sons’ deaths on the battlefields of Ancona and Gaeta to write an antimilitarist poem, although she was considered a heroine of the Risorgimento. For Barrett Browning, female voices can be heard, although they seem to be in keeping with women’s traditional roles. ‘Mother and Poet’ questions the difference between poetry and womanhood trying to reconcile both spheres essential to the mission of poetical writing. Female narrators, characters, or poets lean on Italian history in the making, manipulate traditional images, and finally allow feminist perspectives to be explored. What is at stake in Barrett Browning’s Italian poetry is the legitimisation of the female voice and a challenge to respectable Victorian ideology. The poet’s exotic and conflict-ridden Italy rejects the prevailing social and sexual arrangements fostered by the patriarchal order. Her Italian poetry has often been described as the first signs of a new poetry paving the

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way to feminine and feminist Pre-modernist poetry. Indeed, the poem voices inner conflicts mirroring the outside world. The poem becomes the theatre of the Risorgimento, focussing on the rejection of stasis and on the elaboration of new rhythms, full of energy and passion. Her poems turn into rhapsodies performing the spectacle of Italian politics in form and rhythm. Casa Guidi Windows has sometimes been referred to as a ‘spasmodic poem’. Indeed, Barrett Browning was debasingly considered by some literary critics as a member of ‘the Spasmodic School’, a name given to a group of nineteenth-century poets whose style was strenuous and unnatural. It is obvious for poetical reasons that Barrett Browning’s poetry does not belong to this school, but Casa Guidi Windows as well as some later Italian dramatic monologues can nevertheless be considered spasmodic in the strict sense of the word. Heartbeats, spasms, and bodily responses can be felt or heard in these poems.9 The struggle for independence outside is felt within the form of the poem, mostly in Part 1 when hope in Florentines is still at its peak. For some critics the ababab rhyming pattern enhances the confidence of the poet at this stage of the revolution. It also mirrors the quiet passage from one generation to another, from poets of yore to today’s female investment—such as Anita Garibaldi’s personal involvement—since she is torn between allegiance to the tradition and its rejection. However, behind this regularity one can hear emotion and passion when Barrett Browning breaks free from traditional witness poetry. The poet’s confidence in a new Italian future can be seen within a new poetics liberated from the masculine tradition. Expressive punctuation, like exclamation and question marks, accentuates her personal commitment denying the traditional role of the woman as ‘seer’. Here she becomes a ‘doer’ as the outside energy is performed on the scene of the poem.10 Run-on-lines resemble the procession that the poet is contemplating from her windows and transcribe the overwhelming effect of an unquenchable thirst for renewal: ‘Tend the root/ If careful of the branches, and expand/ The inner souls of men before you strive/ For civic heroes’ (I, 792–795). The second hemistich continues in the next line, when another idea rises as if new perspectives, preventing a comprehensive view of the situation, submerged her psyche. Accumulations of local and national historical celebrities show how excited the poet is when she considers that European art is brewing within

9.

See Steve Dillon, ‘Barrett Browning’s Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing’, Victorian Poetry, 39, 4 (2001), 509–532. 10. In Book 5, Aurora Leigh acknowledges the power of the artist which is ‘[…] both to be and do,/ Transfixing with a special, central power/ The flat experience of the common man,/ And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,/ Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing/ He feels the inmost’ (V, 365–372).

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Italian soil. She names poets, painters, and famous families as if they were appearing on the stage in a colourful pageant.11 However, the poem is not the poetic achievement of an eyewitness whose ocular power would bring to life the geniuses of the past.12 Intertextual references give form to the artists of the past whose words and colours can be perceived on the surface of the poem. In the second book, after expressing her disappointment, the poet calls for a new leader. Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, and his wife Anita are all named and invited in the poem to play a role, to enact their fight. Legends of the past have given way to heroes of the present. At the end of the poem graves are hushed so that new seeds can grow from the earth: […] the elemental New springs of life are gushing everywhere To cleanse the water-courses, and prevent all Concrete obstructions which infest the air! That earth’s alive, and gentle or ungentle Motions within her, signify but growth!— The ground swells greenest o’er the labouring moles. (II, 710–716)

These lines express hope in the Italian future thanks to organic metaphors which are sustained by run-on-lines and accelerating rhythm. The trochee ‘motions’ at the beginning of the line—whereas other stresses are iambic— gives an impulse to the line emphasising the relevance of energy in the poem as well as in the real world. Barrett Browning’s political poems often reflect this popular energy and accentuate the intricate entanglement of life and poetry. As a passionate poet, she writes dramatic monologues—admittedly not as famous as her husband’s—that reveal the discursive qualities of poems, rejecting her former attraction to contemplative and sublime sceneries. These dramatic monologues show that Barrett Browning has been brought back to life by the energy pregnant in both Florence and in her relationship with her husband. Her Italian poetry differs from the rest of her work since it is animated by an inner poetical energy that denies soliloquy and solitary meditation. The deadly nightingales of the Bianca poem intervene in each stanza to remind the hero11. In this volume, Barbara Schaff notes that Byron had already emphasised the Italian taste for theatricality. Carnivalesque Venice allowed him to explore the liberation from cultural and even sexual conventions. For Barrett Browning, this pageant-like parade of artists is in harmony with contemporary visions of Italy as ‘the home of the theatrical’ in Schaff’s terms. 12. Although Dillon considers Barrett Browning as a ‘martyr’, a witness in the Greek sense, I still believe that poetical performance prevails over vision.

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ine that life throbs everywhere even if her lover has forsaken her. The personal emotion of the narrator pervades the poems as in ‘Italy and the World’ for example: ‘I cry aloud in my poet-passion’ (20). This patriotic poem from Poems Before Congress (1860) does not correspond to what is expected from a lady poet. The feminine voice calls for unity and brotherhood to create a vast Christian nation bonding forever the alpha and the omega of the Christian doctrine. Union and power come from the binding forces of each entity. This active and forceful movement generates energy in the poem which combines inward and outward movement reflecting what is happening outside. National identity is performed here through the interplay of repetitive patterns: anaphoras and epizeuxes highlight patriotic emotion; rapid rhythm transpires through the hypotactic syntax; Italian regions are brought to life in allegories. Energy seems to spring from the poem, triggering passion, emotion, and political investment: And heptarchy patriotisms must follow. National voices, distinct yet dependent, Ensphering each other, as swallow does swallow, Which circles still widening and ever ascendant, In multiform life to united progression. (V, 26)

The pun on ‘swallow’ insists on the necessary integration of all the parts to form a greater whole. The repeated letter ‘w’ represents the interweaving of personal identities into the general political pattern. The poem develops the paradoxical situation of the unbreakable link between individual and common commitment which is also illustrated in ‘The North and the South’, Barrett Browning’s last poem from May 1861. North and South need each other in this poem based on figures of symmetry. The poet’s hopes in the Risorgimento are expressed in the vivid dialogues between the two allegories. Each requires presents from the other, from luscious fruits to powerful symbols. Mutual help and a fruitful dialogue shall bring peace to the nation in the same way as it does to the two cousins at the end of Aurora Leigh. Unity in progress is constructed in the poem itself, becoming a quasi-journalistic report in verse, the ‘epic poem’ of the Italian Risorgimento. Barrett Browning’s Italian poems are pregnant with energy coming from the outside. Political enthusiasm turns into poetical rhythm and reflects the poet’s coming back to life after her long disease. The poetry she wrote in England never elicited such a life-like energy; her Italian verse, by contrast, reveals that the construction of national identity is akin to the construction of her poetic style and self. For Barrett Browning, performing national identity means writing a living poetry that encapsulates the ardour of the Italian peo-

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ple and enhances her own yearning for a new poetics. Her poetry colludes with the world outside, since what is happening on the political scene runs parallel to her personal and poetical evolution. She provides her readers with new visions of Italy, as she is willing to challenge conventional boundaries in terms of poetics and gender. In the following section, I will try to show that the poet transgresses established limits while performing both a political and poetical revival. Before leaving England at the age of forty, Barrett Browning had always been considered as a sentimental poet, as she wrote only one politically committed poem, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, a long dramatic monologue spoken by a black mother a few moments before her death. Even if race and gender issues are at stake in the poem, it was at the time not considered as a purely political poem, since many women poets dedicated verse to their fight against slavery. However, when Barrett Browning published her poems from Italy, in particular Casa Guidi Windows and Poems Before Congress, the English audience strongly reacted against the poems of a woman who they thought had gone out of her mind. Political poems were a masculine domain in the 1850s. Only in industrial poetry did women poets dare express their reaction against their terrible living conditions. But never had a woman poet stepped into the male domain of political poetry as Barrett Browning had dared to do from her Italian windows. She was discarded by male critics who pretended she had been taken by bouts of madness. Her identity as a sentimental and religious poet was called into question when she started to challenge social and poetical norms. First of all, Barrett Browning as a woman poet went beyond masculine limits; secondly, she could not be considered as a muse, being one of the most famous poets of the nineteenth century; finally, Italian people, and mostly Florentines, saw her as a compatriot who played a role in the construction of national identity. Like Anita Garibaldi, who is referred to in Casa Guidi Windows, she performed her part as the heroine of history. Her friendship with Cavour and Mazzini exposed in some poems, such as the elegy to Cavour ‘Died…’, shows that she was no mere witness to the Italian revolution.13 Her role as a thinker and poet under13. Alison Chapman indicates how deeply committed Barrett Browning was when she wrote her political poems from Italy. Chapman insists on the fact that most of her poems are ‘performative’ and reveal that the poet was personally implicated in Italy’s Risorgimento. She quotes one of Barrett Browning’s letters sent from Florence to Chorley: ‘I have been living and dying for Italy lately. You don’t know how vivid these things are to us, which serve for conversation at London dinner parties’ (p. 89). Barrett Browning’s poetry and life and Italy’s political situation were so tightly connected that she eventually died a few days after Cavour’s death. See Alison Chapman, ‘Risorgimenti: Spiritualism, Politics and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ in Unfolding the South, pp. 70–89.

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lines how deeply she invested herself in the Italian cause. The poem called ‘Died…’ is close to reality. The poet is reading the obituary section in The Times that announces Cavour’s death in 1861. The poem is interspersed with passages from the paper and parts of conversations between the poet and the national hero. Barrett Browning questions the traditional standards of the elegiac poem when she refuses to praise or blame Cavour but calls him simply ‘mortal’. This elegy rejects the sentimentalism of Italy’s elegiac sonneteers and puts forward action and performance. Moreover the deeds of the great man are put away to be replaced by simple anecdotes that make him more human. Barrett Browning’s poetry is then even more transgressive since the heroes of the Risorgimento are not admired but are turned into actors on her poetical scene. Garibaldi becomes the title of a poem in which he delivers a speech to the Italian people. If some parts of the poem correspond to the rhetoric of the hero, others rather describe him as a simple man with simple dreams. The poem ‘Mother and Poet’ reflects the ambivalence of the woman poet. It describes the sufferings of Laura Savio, an Italian patriot and poet, who laments the death of her two sons. Politics seems to run counter to poetics when Savio declares: ‘What’s art for a woman?’ or ‘when Italy’s made, for what end is it done/ If we have not a son?’ (4, 15). Although Savio rejects art as futile or vain after her sons’ deaths, the poem we read is a masterpiece. This dramatic monologue illustrates the ongoing reflections of the woman poet hesitating between her identity as a mother, as a patriot, and as a poet. The three levels are intricately bound up in the verse ‘the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length’ (19). Nations suffer like childbearing women, but suffering is at the origin of poetical writing. This poem about despair and war is also the expression of art, since death generates poetical life.14 The references to the death of her children come together with allusions to the act of writing: ‘letters moiled with my kisses; no last word to say; up the telegraphline’. Thus national identity cannot be separated from gender and poetry. War, death, and pain participate in the construction of the nation, of the poem, and of the poet. ‘Mother and Poet’ questions the limits that the woman poet denies when she writes political poems. Writing such poems seems irrelevant for a mother who has lost her children. However, the roles of the mourning mother and of the sentimental poet are discarded here in order to show that the identity of women poets is much more complex than Victorian stereotypes. The ups and downs of history in the making cannot be differentiated from the 14. For Jean Hoffmann Lewis, the tradition of male poets ‘has feminised Italy to render grief an artistic expression’. See ‘Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aesthetic Struggle’, p. 162.

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birth-pangs of a new poetics. The woman poet challenges the established poetics, making new aesthetics a success, a real performance. Barrett Browning shocked her British audience when she published from Italy ‘The Curse for a Nation’, an unusual, Blake-like poem in which the poet is made to write a curse addressed to America.15 An angel comes to her and orders her to ‘write a Nation’s curse’ (1). From Italy, Barrett Browning as a modern Cassandra dares utter a curse, overriding her role as a meek and comforting woman. The British public reacted violently to this poem from Poems Before Congress because they believed a woman’s function was not to curse but to soothe. Furthermore, most of the poems were highly critical of Britain’s non-intervention in Italian affairs. Even if ‘The Curse for a Nation’ is addressed to America beyond ‘the Western Sea’ (4), this poem fits the British situation, as it proved by their guilty response. ‘The Curse for a Nation’ is an odd poem in two parts: the first, a prologue, illustrates the argument between the angel and the poet; the second corresponds to the curse itself. First the woman poet refuses to write such a curse since it is a man’s task: ‘To curse choose men,/ For I, a woman, have only known/ How the heart melts and the tears run down’ (38–40). Then she accepts to do so because the angel proves to her that cursing is not incompatible with womanhood. The curse is a real performance here because it is not woman’s duty to do it and also because its function is performative in John Austin’s terms. The poet is inspired by Italian events and by the brewing liberty when she breaks free from moral and poetical standards and ‘swerves from the beaten line’, which is one of the reasons why her political poetry was deleted from her poetical canon.16 Her former political writings, like ‘A Song for the Ragged Schools of London’, are songs but not curses, thus analogous to what the public expected from women. Cursing is both a challenge to authority and a speech act. Far from corresponding to witness poetry, this curse performs Barrett Browning’s involvement in international politics. Denounced as unpatriotic, her poem paradoxically reveals how deeply involved she was in politics, not only Italian but also international. She mentions in her preface that ‘if patriotism be a virtue indeed, it cannot mean an exclusive devotion to one’s country’s interests […]. If the man who does not look beyond this natural life is of a somewhat narrow order, what must be the man who does not look beyond his own frontier or his own sea’ (p. 540). The poem closing her series of political and allegorical poems gathered in Poems Before Congress is the final conclusion 15. See Marjorie Stone’s analysis of curses in Barrett Browning’s poetry: ‘Cursing as One of the Fine Arts: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Political Poems’, Dalhousie Review, 66, 1–2 (1986), 155–173. 16. Ibid., p. 171.

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from a woman who is committed to national and gender politics and to the construction of Italian national identity. Being a woman poet cannot be separated from being a patriot, a perspective remaining rather uncommon in British literature. From Florence she has learnt to curse and to adopt a male voice while asserting her womanhood. She knows that the Italian fatherland has been destroyed by war and internal struggle.17 Similarly, Britain and the United States have led a patriarchal policy subduing the blacks and the poor. What the woman poet suggests in her Italian poetry is the return to some feminine principles or at least the integration of the feminine voice as part of national identity. Not only are patriotism and stamina required to perform national identity, but the intervention of the poetical and feminine voice sanctions this call for freedom. Barrett Browning’s Italian poetry has remained widely unread apart from her famous Sonnets from the Portuguese and her masterpiece Aurora Leigh. In this aesthetic autobiography, the heroine, born in Florence, comes back to this city when she is able to experience a poetical and personal rebirth. Italy has managed to free Aurora’s desires as a woman and as a poet. Similarly, Barrett Browning’s poetical identity has shifted from that of a sentimental poet to that of a political one. Barrett Browning enacted and performed a poetical and personal struggle that resembles Italy’s Risorgimento. As a Victorian woman poet, she still hesitates between a conventional poetics and avant-garde choices that announced the arrival of her pre-modernist sisters. This woman poet dared to fight with her artistic tools against oppression on a national and artistic front. Her poems and her style are framed by her involvement in Italian politics. National and artistic identities intermingle so that the Italian poems are permeated by a new breath of life that previous poems are devoid of. Conversely, Florence acknowledged Barrett Browning as a true heroine of the Risorgimento. Florentines placed a stone upon Casa Guidi whose words, composed by Niccolò Tommaseo, an Italian poet, state that her poetry is like a golden ring between Italy and England.18

17. See Gilbert, p. 207. 18. ‘Elisabetta Barrett Browning che in cuore di donna conciliava scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta e fece del suo verso aureo anello fra Italia e Inghilterra, pone questa lapide Firenze grata.’ In English: ‘Here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who in her woman’s heart united the learning of the scholar with the spirit of a poet, and made of her verse a golden ring between Italy and England. Grateful Florence erected this memorial in 1861.’ Trans. by Charles Hobday in: A Golden Ring: English Poets in Florence from 1373 to the Present Day (London: Peter Owen, 1997), p. 186.

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Bibliography Armstrong, Isobel, ‘Casa Guidi Windows: Spectacle and Politics in 1851’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 51–69. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ware: Wordsworth, 1994). Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, Aurora Leigh, ed. by Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Chapman, Alison, ‘Risorgimenti: Spiritualism, Politics and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 70–89. Dillon, Steve, ‘Defenestrations of the Eye: Flow, Fire and Sacrifice in Casa Guidi Windows’, Victorian Poetry, 35 (1997), 471–492 . Dillon, Steve, ‘Barrett Browning’s Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing’, Victorian Poetry, 39, 4 (2001), 509–532. Gilbert, Sandra, ‘From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’, PMLA, 99, 2 (March 1984), 194–211. Hobday, Charles, A Golden Ring: English Poets in Florence from 1373 to the Present Day (London: Peter Owen, 1997). Lewis, Jean Hoffmann, ‘Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aesthetic Struggle’, Victorians Institute Journal, 25 (1997), 159–175. Rosenblum, Dolores, ‘Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh: The Genesis of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Visionary Aesthetic’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 4, 1 (1985), 61–68. Schor, Esther, ‘The Poetics of Politics: Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 17, 2 (1998), 305–324. Stone, Marjorie, ‘Cursing as One of the Fine Arts: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Political Poems’, Dalhousie Review, 66, 1–2 (1986), 155–173.

Stephen Gundle The ‘Bella Italiana’ and the ‘English Rose’: Reflections on Two National Typologies of Feminine Beauty This article is concerned with two national stereotypes of feminine beauty. The first of these is the ‘English Rose’, that is to say the ideal of the beautiful young Englishwoman. This figure, who in the contemporary period has been associated with Diana Princess of Wales, as well as actresses such as Kate Winslet and Keira Knightley, is generally assumed to have a ‘peaches and cream’ complexion, long fair or light brown hair, full lips, and white skin. Although capable of passion, she is often seen as being self-contained and composed. The second stereotype is that of the Bella Italiana which today is mainly associated with the film actresses who first emerged in the 1950s, such as Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. With their long dark hair, olive skin, shapely figures, and volatile temperaments, they are seen as embodiments of Italian beauty.1 Monica Bellucci and Maria Grazia Cucinotta are the best-known of the women who have followed in their footsteps. In contrast to the performative stillness of the English Rose, the Italian beauty is mobile and vibrant. In many countries, there is an idea of a national version of feminine beauty that is commonly referred to in the press, and sometimes more widely in literature and the arts. Such stereotypes of national beauty simplify and embody accepted national traits and provide symbols of collective identification. Very often, prominent actresses acquire iconic status by playing canonical roles in films, plays, or television adaptations of literary works. However, often the background to the ideas of beauty they incarnate is rather hazy. Few seem to know where they come from or how they came to be formed. My purpose in the present article is to offer some reflections on how and why these two stereotypes emerged in the form that they did. It will be shown that a series of political and social developments in the nineteenth century contributed to the emergence of beauty as an area of national definition and selfdefinition. Although both England and Italy produced ideals of feminine beauty, the Italian case is better known because of the important role of foreigners in constructing the ideal. However, the English case is more complex than is sometimes thought, and curiously it too involved foreign inputs, nota1.

For a full analysis of Italian feminine beauty in the nineteenth and twentieth century, see Stephen Gundle, Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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bly from Italians. Thus there is a network of comparative influences involving England and Italy that deserves to be explored. This may shed light not only on this specific question but more broadly on cultural relations between the two countries. Beauty and National Culture Female figures first emerged in the modern era as symbols of nations in the époque following the French revolution. New images were necessary because, in the post-revolutionary era, the nation was no longer embodied by the person of a king. It was an abstract entity in which loyalty and belonging needed to be mobilised in new ways. In order to lure men into identification with the state and consolidate loyalty to the nation, female figures—often with a marked erotic appeal—were employed. Women carried a special burden of representation and were, to use Nira Yuval-Davis’s phrase, ‘constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour, both personally and collectively’.2 The use of young female figures to represent the nation had a variety of motivations. There was the desire to promote fecundity, health, and purity against the dissolute mores and corruption of the aristocracy. To establish a common ethnic identity through physical traits was also important. There was also a need to turn men into warriors who were prepared to defend the nation as they would the women of their community. In his analysis of the symbol of the French Republic, Richard Sennett says that the sheer robes and exposed body or breasts of this figure did not give ‘the slightest hint of a lascivious woman revealing herself, in part because the breast appeared by the late Enlightenment as much a virtuous as an erogenous zone of the body’.3 Her upright, heroic body stood in contrast to the pleasure-seeking bodies of the ancien régime and served ‘as a political metaphor uniting society’s vast variety of unlike human beings within her frame’.4 In an alternative interpretation, Marina Warner points out that, in the nineteenth century, imaginary women who called to mind the ideals of liberty or the nation were ‘often seen as sexual beings, driven by passion, not political considerations’.5 Such figures could be depicted as wild and dishevelled as well as stern and combative. This ambivalence suggests a connection with the

2. 3. 4. 5.

Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 47. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 287. Ibid., pp. 288–89. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), p. 289.

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pagan heritage. While goddesses were frequently virginal, they could also be promiscuous, as befitted their association with the fertility of both crops and human beings.6 In whatever form, the yearning for femininity was emblematic of a whole, non-fragmented identity. There was a mythic plenitude about such women that consoled and embraced. The maternal body and the erotic body, often undistinguishable one from the other, became a homeland. 7 Secondly, nation-formation and nation-building involved the creation of national narratives that identified the common history, ethnic identity, and ideal or typical figures of the community. The narratives of many nations were shaped in the early nineteenth century by historical novels and poems that traced the original characteristics of a population. In the wake of Walter Scott, the prolific novelist whose works enjoyed great popularity throughout Europe and beyond, authors wove tales of chivalry, heroism, love, and sacrifice and, in doing so, fuelled a largely mythical sense of the national past.8 In Scott’s writings, and those of Alfred Lord Tennyson, such legendary Medieval heroines as Maid Marian and the Fair Rosamund were given a new lease of life. In Italy as elsewhere, novels always featured canonical heroes and heroines, evil oppressors and a vast cast of minor characters. Writers including Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Massimo d’Azeglio and others used Medieval or other remote settings to develop narratives that were really about the present. The most famous heroine in these novels, Manzoni’s character Lucia Mondella, the heroine of I promessi sposi, was not a historical figure but she was situated in the real context of early seventeenth-century Lombardy. The Spanish domination of that time was meant to allude to the contemporary Austrian occupation of Lombardy. Lucia was an emblematic peasant girl who represented the strong moral character of the Italian people. Thirdly, the question of beauty was also a topic that was discussed within a variety of scientific and pseudo-scientific disciplines in the late nineteenth century. Anthropology, criminology and racial science were all in the process of constituting themselves as fields of inquiry and shared some concerns. The scientific discourse of positivism saw the importation into Italy of misogynistic assumptions that were commonplace in the medical and academic community of the period. There was also a growing preoccupation with hygiene, physical fitness, and diet. The frenzy of publications and commentary in these

6. 7.

8.

James J. Preston, ‘Conclusion’ to Mother Worship: Themes and Variations, ed. by James J. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 335. The permutations of representation and their meanings are explored in detail in Alberto Maria Banti, L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), ch. 1. Ibid., ch. 4.

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areas needs to be seen in relation to a desire to construct the nation in both gendered and racial terms. Within this, there was a widespread denigration of women as inferior. They were seen as bodies, creatures of instinct rather than reason, who were the object of a variety of discourses shaped wholly by men. In the later part of the century a whole science of anthropometry grew up that measured, assessed, and judged bodies, especially female ones. Hygiene and health were two factors that bore on this, but also present was a desire for national definition and quantification. Industrialisation was seen as having negative effects on the population’s health and the quality of what was referred to as the stock. At the same time, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that ugliness was indicative of deviance.9 The pioneer anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza addressed feminine beauty in his book Fisiologia della donna, published in 1893.10 He justified this attention on the grounds that ‘la donna in ogni razza mostri più spiccati I caratteri etnici della stripe a cui appartiene e li conservi con maggiore tenacia’ (‘the woman in every race displays more clearly the ethnic characteristics of the stock that she belongs to and preserves them with greater determination’).11 Thus the study of peoples could be advanced by paying close attention to women. Mantegazza made no pretence that his analysis was gender-neutral. ‘Noi, contemplando il corpo d’una bella donna, accarezziamo cogli occhi tutto quel mirabile concerto di linee curve, che sollevan colline e aprono valli’ (‘Contemplating the body of a beautiful woman, we caress with our eyes that whole marvellous concert of curved lines that marks hills and opens valleys’), he confessed, ‘e su quei tesori il desiderio distende come una fitta rete di possesso, che avviluppa e tien prigionieri i tesori della voluttà’ (‘and over those treasures desire extends a tight net of possession that envelopes them and holds them prisoner’).12 However, he did acknowledge that the focus on feminine beauty was a consequence of the patriarchal order of society. He foresaw that ‘il progresso civile ci condurrà poco a poco ad esigere dalle figlie d’Eva altre virtù’ (‘civil progress will lead us gradually to demand other virtues from the daughters of Eve’), but was swift to add that, ‘finchè l’uomo calpesterà la superficie del suo pianeta, la prima virtù della donna sarà per lui quella di essere bella’ (‘as long as man walks the surface of the planet, the primary virtue of woman as far as he is concerned will be that of being beautiful’).13 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

See Ceare Lombroso, L’uomo criminale (1875), L’uomo delinquente (1876), and, with G.Ferrero, La donna delinquente (1893). Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia della donna (Milan: Treves, 1895). Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., pp. 317–18. Ibid., p. 305. For comparison, see Henry T. Finck, Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1887), pp. 391–438.

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Fourthly, cultural interchanges were also important. The Francophone authors Madame de Staël, Stendhal, and Alphonse de Lamartine were among the key figures who began to take an interest in the destiny of the Italian peninsula. They engaged with the Italian cause and to some extent took possession of it in order to express their personal concerns and desires. Albeit within very different gender perspectives, they placed a common stress on Italy’s feminine identity. Later in the nineteenth century, there was a strong desire among British artists to find inspiration in the Italian art of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. This produced a strong emphasis on female portraiture and female themes that were also informed by the cultural climate of the period. For their part Italian politicians, artists, and writers looked to Britain and also France for models of development to follow in building their nation. Perspectives on Italian Beauty The many foreign travellers who visited Italy from the seventeenth century had a knowledge of Italian beauty that derived from Renaissance painting. However, in the course of their travels, male visitors also observed and remarked on the beauty of living women they encountered. One early English traveller, Kenelm Digby, endeavoured to find in Verona in 1790 ‘beauteous females’ like the figures painted by Veronese, while another British visitor, Sacheverell Stevens, praised the unchanging beauty of Roman women.14 French authors played a major role in depicting the women of the peninsula. Madame de Staël made a beautiful, spontaneous poetess into the embodiment of Italy in her 1807 novel Corinne, ou de l’Italie. Stendhal also admired the naturalness of Italy. He appreciated both the scenery and the lack of artfulness and artifice in social relations in comparison with his native France. ‘The faces of the women’, he observed, ‘time and again betrayed a passionate intelligence embodied in forms and features of the rarest beauty’.15 Rome, Naples and Florence is filled with references to women who are described as pretty, beautiful, still beautiful, and uncommonly beautiful. Each city reveals new fair types for Stendhal to praise and evaluate. To the ‘chilly perfection’ of a leading French ballet dancer, he prefers the ‘living, vivid sensuality’ of her Italian counterpart.16 The spontaneity of Italian women is lauded and the absence noted of ‘those habitually sour-tempered females, such as I have met 14. Cited in Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 119, 126–27. 15. Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence (London: Colburn, 1818), pp. 42–43. 16. Ibid., pp. 370–71.

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with in the North, in Geneva, for instance’. Whereas ‘the English style of feminine beauty’ harmonised most easily with ‘the atmosphere of a ballroom’, the Italian style was as wild and as unpredictable as the landscape.17 Thanks to ‘the fires that flash in Italian eyes’, Stendhal was convinced that ‘in Italy, even in the arms of the most venal of mistresses, no man need ever go in fear of boredom’. ‘Caprice’, he observed, ‘is ever on the watch, armed to affright the monster’.18 The English did not usually express themselves with such effusiveness. Only the Risorgimento and the cause of Italian unity produced a more active engagement with the peninsula and its people. The emotional and political link between Britain and Italy developed during the Risorgimento and there was much British support for the Italian national cause.19 Although the British had always had reservations about the Italians’ Catholicism and adopted a generally superior attitude towards them, there was also strong admiration for the artistic achievements of the past. The Victorians regarded these as in some way an inspiration for understanding the moral and aesthetic implications of their own efforts to construct a new civilisation. The passion for Italy was evident in the works of a wide range of authors. Some, like Charles Dickens, produced travel books while others, including George Eliot, whose novel Romola, set in sixteenth century Florence, was published in 1863, preferred to engage with Italy through fiction and fantasy. George Meredith, best-known today for his novel The Egoist, was one of the main nineteenth-century English novelists to depict Italians on the basis of some first-hand knowledge of the country. In his two novels Emilia in England (later re-titled Sandra Belloni) and Vittoria, published respectively in 1864 and 1867, Italy is personified by a young woman. Meredith’s heroine Emilia is half-English. In this she resembles Madame de Staël’s heroine Corinne. In both cases the unusual background of the heroine (who nonetheless is in both instances thoroughly Italian) allows her to speak with the rationality that was not at that time generally attributed to Italians. Emilia, however, is not a genius or even educated. In this respect she is a lesser figure than the beautiful poetess Corinne. She is instead simple, natural, and passionate, and devoted to music and to the cause of Italian freedom. Her primary quality is her music, but she also is a beauty. She has ‘particular charms of feature’ and ‘possessed an incomprehensible attractiveness’.20 She has

17. Ibid., p. 41. 18. Ibid., pp. 41–42. 19. Giuliana Pieri, The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Fin De Siecle Italy: Art, Beauty, and Culture (Oxford: MHRA, 2006), p. 5. 20. George Meredith, Sandra Belloni (London: Constable, 1996 [1864]), p. 92.

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beautiful eyebrows: thick rare eyebrows, no doubt; couched upon her full eyes, they were a marvel: and her eyes were a marvel. She had a sweet mouth, too, though the upper lip did not boast the aristocratic conventional curve of adorable pride, or the under lip a pretty droop to a petty rounded chin. Her face was like the after-sunset across a rose-garden, with the wings of an eagle poised outspread on the light.21

Emilia, Siegfried Sassoon wrote in 1948, is ‘living music, and her humanity is expressed by the magnificent voice which is to make her career. She is a soul harmonious with nature, and when she sings among the nightingales on a night of frost in May, she is one with them and the moonlight.’22 At the same time, she is passion; her patriotism and her heart are unreserved and guileless. Meredith contrasted the simplicity and passion of the Italian girl with ‘our English sentimental, socially-aspiring damsels’ and his evocation of her naturalness and spontaneity shows that he preferred it to the refinement and sophistication of English society.23 Compared to the cold and reserved English women who populate the novel, Emilia is a warm passionate woman who speaks without reservation of her feelings for her English boyfriend Wilfred, whom she openly describes as her lover. She seems like a goddess or a national symbol who has come to life. However, while she is contrasted, in the manner of Stendhal, to the English, she is not given the physical presence that the French author brought to his characters. She is not represented in a way that grants her the mobility of performance. In Vittoria, a novel originally conceived as a sequel to Emilia in England, the heroine is no longer named Emilia, but Vittoria. The two women are nonetheless the same character. The novel’s convoluted plot sets a variety of personal stories against the backdrop of the struggle for Italian unification. Whereas Emilia had held back from travelling to Italy to participate in the insurrection because she felt herself to be immature, in her new guise she is given the task of triggering the revolt by singing a patriotic song at the end of an allegorical opera which has somehow won the approval of the Austrian censors. In the final passages of the novel, Meredith has his heroine intervene at a grand event to give thanks for liberty. At this ceremony, ‘when an Emperor and a King stood beneath the vault of the grand Duomo, and an organ and a peal of voices rendered thanks to heaven for liberty, [she] could show the fruit of her devotion in the dark-eyed boy’, that is her son. ‘And then once more, but for once’, writes Meredith, ‘her voice was heard in Milan’.24 The 21. Ibid., p. 163. 22. Siegfried Sassoon, Meredith (London: Constable, 1948), p. 77. 23. I. Williams, ‘Emilia in England and Italy’, in Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. by Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 144–45. 24. George Meredith, Vittoria (London: Constable, 1902 [1867]), pp. 515–16.

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real event alluded to here is the visit of Kaiser Wilhem I to Milan in October 1875, an occasion that was marked by numerous musical and other festivities. Within this official frame, the woman who has not only lent her beauty and her talent to her country, but who has also produced a son, takes her final bow before returning to anonymity. The symbolic affirmation of the rule of men signals not just the end of the story but the end of any exceptional role for women. Not even in this passage did Meredith turn his heroine into a mobile, active figure with performative verve. There are very few references to her physical appearance at all. On the contrary, great emphasis is placed on her nobility of spirit, idealism, naturalness, and strength of feeling. She is an idealised figure who embodies her country and its artistic and creative talents. Italian patriots also made ample use of female beauty in the development of national images and symbols during the Risorgimento. Antonio Canova contributed decisively to this with his splendid statue of the turreted figure of Italia, carved for the tomb of the poet Alfieri in Santa Croce in Florence. Painters, particularly those belonging to the Macchiaoli school, also used domestic female images to convey the passions of the nationalist movement. Perhaps the best known paintings of the period are by the Romantic artist Francesco Hayez, whose fake-Medieval depiction of a parting couple embracing, ‘Il bacio’ (The Kiss), alluded to the sacrifice of volunteers in the nationalist struggle. His painting of a bare-breasted dark-haired woman entitled ‘La melancholia’ (Melancholy) was also known as ‘Italia nel 1848’ (Italy in 1848) and was meant to represent the despair of the nation after the setbacks of that year. Of particular interest are the novels written by Giuseppe Garibaldi in the 1860s. In his years of semi-exile on Caprera in the years following unification, Garibaldi wrote a number of fictional works including Clelia ovvero il governo dei preti. This novel is set during the Roman Republic and recounts the story of three women of very different backgrounds who join together to serve the cause of national unity. One of these, Giulia, is a wealthy Englishwoman who is a friend of Italy. The other two are Roman: Irene, the aristocratic daughter of a prince, and Clelia, a young woman of the people who is the true heroine of the novel. All three are said to be ‘di rara bellezza’ (‘of rare beauty’).25 Giulia is described as ‘la bellissima figlia d’Albione’ (‘the most beautiful daughter of Albion’), while Irene is said to be a Roman type and to have ‘un sorriso angelico’ (‘an angelic smile’), ‘bellissime guancie’ (‘beautiful cheeks’) and black eyes and hair.26 Her standing is reflected in a 25. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Clelia ovvero il governo dei preti (Milan: Societa editoriale Milanese, 1867), p. 340. 26. Ibid., pp. 69 and 142.

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‘portamento incantevole e maestoso’ (‘charming and majestic bearing’). However it is the beauty of Clelia, ‘la perla di Trastevere’ (‘the pearl of Trastevere’), that is most radiant: Le treccie brune, foltissime; e gli occhi! Il loro lampo colpiva come folgore chi ardiva affissarla. A sedici anni il suo portamento era maestoso come quello di una matrona antica. Oh! Raffaello in Clelia avrebbe trovato tutte le grazie dell’ideale sua fanciulla colla virile robustezza dell’omonima eroina che si precipita nel Tevere per fuggire dal Campo di Porsenna…. Si diceva che Clelia accoppiava alle sembianze angeliche della mamma, la robusta e maestosa dignità del padre. What thick brown locks! And the eyes! Their flash struck like lightening whoever dared to stare at her. At sixteen, her deportment was as dignified as that of a matron of ancient times. Oh! Raphael would have found in Clelia all the graces of his ideal girl combined with the robust virility of her ancient Roman namesake who threw herself into the Tiber in order to escape Porsenna’s Etruscan prison camp…. It was said that Clelia had the angelic traits of her mother and the robust, majestic dignity of her father.27

There are male patriots in the novel, but one of them expresses the view only the women will be able to cleanse Italy of its shameful subordination to the foreigners and the clergy. Similar views are expressed by the hero of another novel, Cantoni il volontario, who exclaims that ‘la donna dovrebbe dirigere la famiglia umana’ (‘woman should lead the human race’).28 Cantoni in fact is only fifteen years old when he volunteers to join the patriotic forces, but he is handsome and heroic enough to attract the keen attention of a 14-year-old, Ida, ‘la bellissima fra le fanciulle di Felsina’ (‘the most beautiful of the daughters of Felsina’) when he marches through Bologna with the volunteers. She runs away from home to be with him, leading her parents to place an appeal for help in a newspaper. This describes her as ‘una giovinetta sui quattordici anni—di statura media—occhi e capelli neri—viso regolarissimo— svelte e robusta della persona, infine di bellezza piuttosto rara’ (‘a young girl of around fourteen years—of average height—black eyes and hair—a most regular face—with a slim and strong physique and a rather rare beauty’).29 Cantoni is so taken with the patriotic war that he only notices the beauty of his devoted admirer when she faints from exhaustion. On picking her up and loosening her red shirt, ‘egli scopriva i pomi eburnei, che con mano maestro aveva scolpito natura, quel collo, quelle carni delicate, quel declivio di spalle che con qualche cosa di virile aveva pure tutta la squisitezza della più bella 27. Ibid., pp. 5–7. 28. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Cantoni il volontario (Milan: Societa editoriale Milanese, 1870), p. 140. 29. Ibid., p. 25.

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delle figlie d’Eva’ (‘he uncovered the ivory spheres that nature had sculpted with a skilled hand; that neck, that delicate flesh, those shoulders that, for all their slight virility nonetheless had all the exquisiteness of the most beautiful of the daughters of Eve’).30 In an instant, he has fallen in love with her. Garibaldi was not a very good writer, and was certainly much inferior in this regard to Meredith, yet his descriptions of his leading characters are vivid and tangible. They are mobile and active, qualities that underpin their political role. Clelia, Giulia, and others are not abstractions but real women. The passions they convey are matched by a physical being and sexual desire. D’Annunzio and English Beauty Garibaldi drew female characters to convey the true Italy that had been let down by the particular manner of national unification. He emphasised the physicality and femininity of his heroines to create a counter-position between the positive qualities of the Italian people on the one hand and the ruling elite and the Church on the other. However, the Italy of the 1870s and 1880s was strongly subject to international influences in the matter of fashion and female appearances. Writers, journalists, and fashionable people looked abroad for examples of modern styles. As a gossip columnist, writer, and socialite, Gabriele D’Annunzio did not only admire and report on trends in beauty, he also contributed, through his writings, to the formation of fashionable canons of appearance. He was one of the leading exponents of the Anglophile culture of the period. Italians admired England as the most advanced country in the world and the home of liberal values. They took cues from its politics and its civilisation. D’Annunzio’s first novel, Il Piacere, contains numerous references to pale-skinned, fair-haired women and indeed the novel features several English women. While foreigners expressed admiration for Italian beauty, he and other artists of his time developed an ideal of feminine beauty that was informed more by English poetry and painting. In Il Piacere, he elaborated a model of sensual beauty that took Italian Renaissance painting as a crucial reference point. His mysterious heroine Elena Muti is said to recall Correggio’s Danae with her extremities being described as ‘un po’ correggesche’ (‘a little in the style of Correggio’).31 Her feet and hands are small and delicate as with statues of Daphne. Donna Bianca Dolcebuono is described as ‘l’idealtipo della bellezza fiorentina, quale fu reso dal Ghirlandajo nel ritratto di Giovanna Tornabuoni che e in Santa Maria Novella’: ‘Aveva un chiaro volto ovale, la fronte larga alta e 30. Ibid., p. 54. 31. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Piacere (Torriana: Orsa maggiore, 1995 [1889]), p. 6.

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candida, la bocca mite, il naso un poco rilevato, gli occhi di quel color tanè oscuro lodata da Fiorenzuola’ (‘the ideal-type of Florentine beauty, as rendered by Ghirlandajo in his portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni that is now in the Church of Santa Maria Novella’: ‘She had a pale oval face, a high, white, open forehead, a timid mouth, a slightly upturned nose, and eyes of that dark weathered colour praised by Fiorenzuola’).32 The virginal Donna Maria, who becomes the protagonist’s object of seduction, is seen by him as having a concealed sex appeal. He sees in her the ‘donna spirituale, [la] pura madonna senese, la dama di mondo’ (‘inside the spiritual woman, the pure Siennese Madonna, the worldly woman’).33 When she appears in all her splendour at an evening function, her hair is arranged ‘in quella foggia che predilesse pe’ suoi busti il Verrocchio’ (‘in that style that Verrocchio preferred for his busts’).34 Within this traditional frame of reference, that would have been recognised outside and inside Italy as conventional, D’Annunzio brought to bear more contemporary fashionable influences. The image of the pale, fragile maiden in the poet’s early works owed much to the influence on D’Annunzio of the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The influence of Tennyson and of the painter Alma-Tadema on his literary output has also been traced. According to Giuliana Pieri, ‘D’Annunzio’s descriptions of women of Roman High Society are explicitly based on the beauties in the pictures exhibited by Alma-Tadema in Rome in 1883’.35 She goes on to suggest that in Il Piacere, the author was ‘recreating a world in the style of Alma-Tadema, but with no specific relation to any painting’.36 Rossetti is explicitly mentioned at one point, and the presence of a young English lady, Liliana Theed, whose ‘prodigiosa carnagione composta di luce, rose e latte’ (‘remarkable complexion is made up of light, roses and milk’) is possessed only by ladies ‘delle grandi famiglie inglesi nelle tele di Reynolds, del Gainsborough e del Lawrence’ (‘of the great English families in the paintings of Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence’).37 This establishes a foreign reference point for the emphasis on the fashionable pale skin of the Italian women. The ideal of white skin, blonde hair, and whiteness is clearly established.38 One Italian 32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 285. Ibid., p. 299. Giuliana Pieri, ‘D’Annunzio and Alma-Tadema: Between Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism’, The Modern Language Review, 96, 2 (2001), 361–69 (p. 365). 36. Ibid., p. 366. This general point is supported in other writings on D’Annunzio. See Federica Mastropietro, Il contesto D’Annunziano (Milan: Galleria Milano, 1981), pp. 5–14. 37. Pieri, ‘D’Annunzio and Alma-Tadema’, p. 107. 38. Ibid., p. 154.

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woman, who is deemed ‘molto bella’ (‘very beautiful’) is mistaken for an English rose on account of her colouring. Pieri has traced in detail the influence of the English Pre-Raphaelites on the imagery of Il Piacere and some of the author’s poems, as well as occasional journalistic articles.39 In his descriptions of balls and soirees, he drew inspiration from Alma-Tadema’s paintings. Rarely were the references specific to given paintings; rather, ‘the female beauties à la Alma-Tadema are extremely stereotyped and D’Annunzio treats them overtly so’.40 A second English character in the novel, Clara Green, a courtesan and ex-lover of Sperelli, is a ‘Rossettian beauty’ who ‘is said (in the novel) to have been posing for a painting called Sibylla Palmifera, which is the title of a painting by Rossetti’.41 She is described as ‘ancora giovine’ (‘still young’); ‘con quel suo profilo puro e diritto, coronato dai capelli biondi, divisi su la fronte in un’acconciatura bassa’ (‘with her pure and straight profile, crowned by fair hair, divided on the forehead by a low parting’), the author continued, ‘pareva una bellezza greca in un keepsake’ (‘she seemed like a Greek beauty in a keepsake’). Having posed for several artists, she was ‘nobilitata dall’arte’ (‘enobled by art’); ‘ma, in fondo, non possedeva alcuna qualità spirituale; anzi a lungo andare, la rendeva un po’ stucchevole quel certo sentimentalismo esaltato che non di rado s’incontra nelle donne di piacere inglesi e che fa uno strano contrasto con le depravazioni della loro lascivia’ (‘but, in the end, she had no spiritual quality; in the long run this rendered her a bit cloying; her sentimentalism was of an exaggerated type often encountered among English courtesans and that contrasts oddly with their depravity’).42 These references to English art and English ideals of beauty belong to D’Annunzio’s works of the 1880s. After that, he began to develop more specific decadent images that moved away from Pre-Raphaelitism.43 Diaphanous beauty, a beauty that was deprived of fullness and strength and that was static, was for D’Annunzio a transitional enthusiasm that was an important step in a process that would lead him to develop his own type of femme fatale. Nevertheless, it is striking that in this early work, the female characters are described in such a strongly sexualised way. The novel is permeated with attention to body parts, including hands (a recurrent motif) and smiles. Skin and complexion are evoked with rare artistry and passion. D’Annunzio’s passages on his

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Pieri, The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism, pp. 69–78. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 75. D’Annunzio, Il Piacere, pp. 242–43. Pieri, The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 76.

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English characters and English beauty in general lack the idealisation that marks Meredith. On the contrary, the women are described in terms of their physicality. The impression the reader is given is of women made of flesh and blood, who are viewed from the point of view of a desiring male author. In brief, they are sex objects in a way that the noble Emilia is not. In his 1897 work L’Europa giovane, the historian and sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero explained that a different dynamic of beauty operated within Italian and English culture. While Italian culture produced an emphasis on physicality, English culture instead produced idealisation. In order to prove his theory that English culture viewed women not purely as ‘uno strumento di piacere ardentemente desiderato’ (‘a tool of ardently desired pleasure’) but as ideals (‘la donna è amata non solo perche è bella, ma anche perchè è buona dolce, pietosa, perchè è una Venere non solo di corpo ma anche di anima’) (‘a woman is loved not only because she is beautiful but also because she is good and sweet, pious, and because she is not only a Venus of the flesh but also of the spirit’), he turned to literature.44 He identified the first ‘English Rose’ as Shakespeare’s character Miranda in The Tempest, whom he hailed as an absolutely original invention. ‘Miranda è la piu perfetta rappresentazione dell’amore spirituale, tutto intessuto di sentimento, in cui il bisogno organico di riproduzione si idealizza in una ricca e brillante associazione d’immagini, d’idee, d’emozioni’ (‘Miranda is the most perfect representation of spiritual love, all structured with sentiment, in whom the organic need to reproduce is idealised in a rich and brilliant mixture of images, ideas and emotions’), he noted. This ideal vision was not, he specified, ‘ascetismo platonico’ (‘platonic aesceticism’), because the sexual instinct was present, albeit balanced by ‘la sua compostezza pudica’ (‘her reserved composure’). ‘Miranda è una rosa di pudore e di grazia, che appassirebbe egualmente se non fosse toccata come se fosse brutalmente strappata dallo stelo verginale’ (‘Miranda is a rose of reserve and grace, who would wilt as much if she was left untouched as if she was seized from her virginal stem’).45 For Ferrero, such a figure had wide cultural implications: ‘La figura di Miranda doveva dunque corrispondere profondamente al genio sentimentale della razza, se usci dalla fantasia di un poeta inglese, violentando tutti gl’influssi della società circostante ed in cosi infauste condizioni del tempo’ (‘the figure of Miranda therefore corresponded to the emotional genius of the race since she came from the imagination of an English writer, transgressing all the influences of the surrounding society and the inauspicious conditions of the time’). ‘Quella creazione è infatti la prima esplosione di quell’idealismo della razza’ (‘that creation is in fact the first 44. Ibid., p. 143. 45. Ibid., p. 144.

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manifestation of that idealism that is typical of the race’) that marks the English, he concluded.46 Cecil Beaton and Italian Beauty Ferrero was right to stress the idealisation of women that seemed to be an English characteristic. English authors highlighted different qualities in their heroines from the Italians, a difference of approach that became most evident when each portrayed the women of the other country. The point can be illustrated by one further example, drawn from the writings of Cecil Beaton, the celebrated English diarist, photographer, fashion commentator, and set designer who first came to prominence in the 1920s. Like D’Annunzio, the fashionable social observer, Beaton wrote extensively about feminine beauty throughout his career and often commented on the appearance of prominent women of his time. Indeed, Beaton may be said to have been the principal authority on English Roses in the period between the 1910s and the 1960s. He photographed many debutantes and royal women, developing a special type of portraiture that was remote and rarefied. He was able to confer an ethereal quality on his subjects and endow them with aristocratic stillness and composure. Beaton greatly admired aristocratic women and actresses. Among his favourites were the music hall performers Lily Elsie and Gaby Deslys. One of those he wrote about was the Italian opera singer Lina Cavalieri. Born in Rome’s Trastevere district to a humble family in 1875, Cavalieri rose in the early years of the twentieth century to become an opera singer of considerable renown. She was also known as a great beauty and was even called ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, a label that became the title of the film about her life made, starring Gina Lollobrigida, in 1955.47 Despite being of humble background, Cavalieri possessed the grace and style of a lady. This quality was noted by the Russian designer Erté and was further underlined by Beaton, who called her ‘a woman of innate distinction’.48 ‘Physically, she was hardly a woman of heroic proportions, being of medium height and slender build’, he observed. ‘But Cavalieri was undeniably a great beauty in the classic mould. Her features were of a blunt, Roman cast, a magnolia complexion that complemented the black wavy hair, which was parted in the middle like that of Spanish dancer and gathered in a bun at the nape of the long neck.’49 Her ‘lady-like bearing’, Beaton noted, 46. 47. 48. 49.

Ibid., p. 147. On Cavalieri, see Gundle, Bellissima, ch. 4. Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954) , p. 65. Ibid., pp. 65–66.

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gave her the appearance of a czarina or an empress. She possessed the cool impassivity of a statue. The line of her back merged with the nape of her neck to create a noble column. Whatever the origin of her instinctive physical perfection, it lent authority and even grandeur to all bodily movements. She used her Italian opulence with a wonderful and probably unconscious distinction, a Mediterranean Valkyrie on a small and graceful scale.50

According to Beaton, the Duchess of Rutland advised her children that, if they wished to comport themselves in the most graceful and dignified manner possible, then they could not do better than ‘study every detail and gesture of Lina Cavalieri’.51 Like many beauties of the late nineteenth century, Cavalieri was deemed by Beaton to be statuesque. That is to say, she had poise, stillness, and presence. In his view, she had the gestures, bearing, and grace of a woman in her prime even when she was young: ‘Her Italianate aura of sad perfection was dominated by large eyes, compassionate and sombre, set beneath eyebrows raised not in question but in inner sorrow. Her equally sombre but sensuous mouth completed features that seemed to have derived from a painting by Murillo.’52 For Beaton, she was ‘supposed to be possessed of the perfect Roman face’.53 In his account of her, Beaton highlights not her physical beauty, although of course this is mentioned, but rather general qualities of grace, poise, and distinction. In other words, he brings to bear the English values of stillness, composure, and grace on his appreciation. Two Conceptions of Feminine Beauty How can the difference of approach between Italian and British authors be explained? Little help is to be had from the works of the academic commentators on beauty of the time. The considerations that practitioners of academic disciplines advanced were often informed by casual observation, personal preference, and a certain literary verve. The American Henry T. Finck, in a two volume work published in 1887 of some scientific pretensions, offered views on national forms of beauty, while admitting that these amounted to ‘mere casual jottings’.54 However, Guglielmo Ferrero devel-

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 66. Cecil Beaton, The Book of Beauty (London: Duckworth, 1930), p. 6. Finck, p. 391.

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oped an explanation.55 In his view, Latin males (he included France and Spain in his discussion) reached puberty earlier than Northern Europeans. This fact had a series of psychological, social, and cultural consequences which went from the rigid separation of the sexes in education and social life to a strong physical emphasis in all male discourses on love and beauty. ‘L’amore nell’uomo del Sud è soprattutto l’ammirazione per la bellezza fisica della donna, e il desiderio di goderne’ (‘love for the man of the South is above all admiration for the physical beauty of a woman, and the desire to enjoy it’), he observed, while the northern European conceived love as a more diffuse moral and affectionate bond with a woman in which the physical element was less dominant.56 Il piacere […] dell’amore è cercato sempre in una delizia del senso, dell’occhio, del tatto e dell’udito: nella vista di un bel viso o di una bella chioma, nel contatto con una pelle fine: mentre l’inglese trova il suo piacere in immagini, in idee, in emozioni di vario genere che si associano all’idea o alla sensazione della persona amata The pleasure […] of love is always sought in a delight of the senses, of the eye, touch and hearing: in the sight of a beautiful face or beautiful locks, or in contact with a fine skin. The Englishman, by contrast, finds pleasure in images, ideas, and emotions of various types that are associated with the idea or the sensation of the loved one.57

The sexual fixation of Italian men was fuelled by the difficulty of having any contact with women except prostitutes, a fact that in turn bred a male culture that was shot through with obscenity and lewdness. ‘Dai sedici ai trent’anni almeno i giovani sono nei paesi del Sud tormentati da una vera ossessione sessuale, che esplode molto spesso in manifestazioni orgiastiche ignote all’uomo del Nord’ (‘Between the ages of sixteen and at least thirty, the young men of southern countries are tormented by a real sexual obsession that very often explodes in orgiastic exhibitions unknown to northern men’).58 ‘L’amore dell’uomo del Sud è l’attaccamento ad una persona, che è sorgente d’intensissimi piaceri sensuali’ (‘love for the man of the south takes the form of attachment to a person, who is the fount of intense sensual pleasures’), he continued:

55. See, for example, Alfredo Niceforo on the Germans in I Germani: Storia di un’ idea e di una ‘razza’ (Rome: Società editrice periodici, 1917) and Guglielmo Ferrero on English women in his L’Europa Giovane (Milan: Treves, 1897), pp. 140–47. 56. Ferrero, p. 141. 57. Ibid., p. 141. 58. Ibid., p. 129.

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l’amore del tedesco e dell’inglese è l’affetto per una persona con cui esiste un’affinità di gusti, di idee, di tendenze, rinforzato da una simpatia sessuale. L’amore insomma è goduta più cerebralmente; cosicche mentre un meridionale si dispera appena debbe esser privato per poco tempo dell’oggetto dell’amor suo, perchè l’amor suo ha bisogno della sensazione attuale; il tedesco o l’inglese possono vivere lungamente lontani dall’amata o attendere lungamente le nozze, senza soffrir troppo per il mancato godimento del senso, compensandosi con il godimento dell’immaginazione che suscita e combina nei modi più vari i fantasmi iridescenti dell’amore. The love of the German and the Englishman takes the form of affection for a person with whom he shares tastes, ideas, projects and is reinforced by sexual attraction. In other words, it is experienced in a more cerebral manner. Thus, while a southerner despairs as soon as he must be deprived even for a short time of the object of his love, because his love requires immediate sensation, the German or the Englishman can live for long periods distant from their loved ones or wait patiently for marriage without suffering unduly on account of the lack of sensual enjoyment. They find compensation in the pleasure that the imagination affords by evoking in various abstract ways the presence of love.59

Like many Italian intellectuals of his time, Ferrero was an Anglophile and he greatly admired English liberal values and culture. To this extent, it could be said that, like Lombroso’s Sicilian collaborator Niceforo, who wrote about the barbarism of the South, he tended to stereotype his own culture. Nevertheless, Ferrero’s considerations differ markedly from the superficial comments of other academics of his time. Thus they deserve to be taken seriously. However, it may be argued that his explanation is incomplete. By focussing exclusively on the early puberty of southern males, he missed other cultural and political factors that bore on the construction of ideals of female beauty. Two of these factors deserve mention here. The first concerns the difference of social class. The English Rose is almost always a ‘lady’. She is usually a daughter of the landed gentry, the wealthy urban classes or even the aristocracy. Her primary qualities, beyond beauty, were composure, grace, and fortitude. Her depiction was therefore especially affected by the prudery of midVictorian England, even where the author, as in the case of Meredith, was a critic of the sentimentalism of his day. Although there is a popular current of images of ‘girls of the people’ (such as milkmaids, flower-girls, shepherdesses and so on), it is mainly upper class women who have been regarded as ‘Roses’. As a symbolic figure, the Rose is embedded in the consolidated social pattern of Great Britain and she reflects both dominance of England within the kingdom and of the monied and aristocratic classes within the social order. This also bears on her ‘minore sensualità fisica’ (‘less pro-

59. Ibid., p. 147.

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nounced physical sensuality’).60 The ‘Bella Italiana’, by contrast, is most typically a peasant girl or a young woman of the people. Stendhal, for example, depicted women of a variety of classes, but in general he tended to ‘level down’ the Italians he depicted. Even some nationalists agreed on this, since they wished to mobilise the population in support of their cause. This leads to a political point. Italy was seen as a country of beauty, instinct, and spontaneity also because it was not a nation state. It was a country of energies and promise for those who supported national aspirations. Whereas England was a solidly established nation state, with a secure pattern of class rule, Italy was a country that still needed to be made. Consequently the passion of nationalism was far more pronounced there and the female figures who were taken to embody the nation reflected this more directly. This spilled over more broadly into the culture. Unification did not bring about the normalisation of Italian representations for a series of reasons. Among these were the political disappointment with the form that unification took—a conservative monarchy rather than a democratic republic. Garibaldi’s writings were geared precisely to maintaining, through evocative female figures, the passion of the nationalist cause. This difference is reflected in the typical ‘performative’ posture of the two figures: composed and still in the case of the Rose, animated, mobile, and emotional in the case of the ‘Bella Italiana’. The emphasis on the peasant or girl of the people was not merely a reflection of Italy’s less economically developed state. It was also a reflection of unfulfilled aspirations to draw the people fully into the nation state. Bibliography Banti, Alberto Mario, L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal 18. secolo alla grande guerra (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). Beaton, Cecil, The Book of Beauty (London: Duckworth, 1930). Beaton, Cecil, The Glass of Fashion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954). Black, Jeremy, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). D’Annunzio, Gabriele, Il Piacere (Torriana: Orsa maggiore, 1995 [1889]). Ferrero, Guglielmo, L’Europa Giovane: Studi e viaggi nei paesi del nord (Milan: Treves, 1897).

60. Ibid., p. 147.

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Finck, Henry T., Romantic Love and Personal Beauty, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1887). Garibaldi, Giuseppe, Cantoni il volontario (Milan: Società editoriale Milanese, 1870). Garibaldi, Giuseppe, Clelia ovvero il governo dei preti (Milan: Societa editoriale Milanese, 1867). Gundle, Stephen, Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Mantegazza, Paolo, Fisiologia della donna (Milan: Treves, 1895). Mastropietro, Federica, Il contesto D’Annunziano (Milan: Galleria Milano, 1981). Meredith, George, Sandra Belloni (London: Constable, 1996 [1864]). Meredith, George, Vittoria (London: Constable, 1902 [1867]). Niceforo, Alfredo, I Germani: Storia di un’ idea e di una ‘razza’ (Rome: Società editrice periodici, 1917). Pieri, Giuliana, ‘D’Annunzio and Alma-Tadema: Between Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism’, The Modern Language Review, 96, 2 (2001), 361–69. Pieri, Giuliana, The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Fin De Siecle Italy: Art, Beauty, and Culture (Oxford: MHRA, 2006). Preston, James J, ‘Conclusion’, in Mother Worship: Themes and Variations, ed. by James Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 325–343. Sassoon, Siegfried, Meredith (London: Constable, 1948). Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994). Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence (London: Colburn, 1818). Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). Williams, I., ‘Emilia in England and Italy’, in Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. by Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 144–45. Yuval-Davis, Nira, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997).

4. Political Negotiations

Pamela Neville-Sington Sex, Lies, and Celluloid: That Hamilton Woman and British Attitudes towards the Italians from the Risorgimento to the Second World War The date was 29 May 1940, three weeks after Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister of Britain and two days after Belgium surrendered to Germany. The director and producer Alexander Korda met in London with the new British Minister of Information, Duff Cooper. Korda was an Hungarian refugee who had found success in Britain. He became a friend of Winston Churchill, putting him on the studio payroll in the 1930s when the out-ofoffice politician was in need of a job.1 On that day in May 1940, Duff Cooper explained that Churchill’s government wanted Korda to go to Hollywood and make a certain sort of picture. The sort, according to one of those closely involved, which would ‘relate valiant episodes in Britain’s not too distant past that would serve to counteract enemy propaganda, and do a lot of good in neutral countries, provided they didn’t wave the British flag too obviously and they had genuine entertainment value’.2 The main aim was to attack the prevailing American sentiments of isolationism and appeasement. Between them the movie mogul and the cabinet minister decided on the story of the British naval hero, Lord Nelson, who had saved England from invasion by Napoleon.3 As for the romantic love interest, there was Emma, Lady Hamilton. Korda cast in the starring roles Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, British actors at the height of their Hollywood careers. Like their onscreen characters, they had been having a passionate, illicit, and well publicised love affair. Olivier had been anxious to return home to join in the war effort, but Duff Cooper sent him a cable: ‘Think better where you are. Korda going there.’4 To write the screenplay for Lady Hamilton, as it was to be called, Korda recruited Walter Reisch, already in Hollywood and, from Britain, the playwright Robert Cedric Sherriff. Sherriff nearly did not make it to 1.

2. 3. 4.

D. J. Wenden, ‘Churchill, Radio, and Cinema’, in Churchill, ed. by Robert Blake and William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 215–239 (pp. 231– 33). Robert Cedric Sherriff, No Leading Lady: An Autobiography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), p. 321. Charles Drazin, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002), p. 232. Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 91.

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Illustration 1: Emma (Vivien Leigh, right) in jail. Scene from That Hamilton Woman (1941) (British Film Institute).

Hollywood. In June 1940 the playwright successfully dodged U-boats across the Atlantic only to find himself stranded for some weeks in Canada. The U.S. authorities had decided to ban all foreign writers from entering its borders, so determined were they to resist any attempt by a foreign power to propel the country into war—even by means of propaganda. Filming of Lady Hamilton finally began in September 1940. From London, Churchill was sending cables to Korda with his ideas for the film.5 Closer to home, the Hollywood censor, Joseph Breen, had other ideas. He was on hand to make certain that the script adhered to the industry’s Production Code, both politically and morally. But so irresistible was Vivien Leigh’s performance, so strong the sexual chemistry between her and Olivier, that all Breen worried about during filming was the moral message. One might say that Miss Leigh had turned out to be Korda’s—and the British government’s—secret weapon: the perfect decoy. ‘Here’s this feller Nelson’, Breen complained to Sherriff, as recorded in his autobiography, ‘living in sin with Lady Hamilton. They have a big affair together and she has a baby by him. 5.

Drazin, p. 237; Kenneth Richard MacDonald Short, ‘That Hamilton Woman (1941): Propaganda, Feminism and the Production Code’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11 (1991), 3–19 (p. 15).

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But his wife’s alive and her husband’s alive, and both of ‘em are still married. You see the trouble.’ ‘But it’s a famous, historic love story’, Sherriff pleaded. ‘Maybe’, the Hollywood censor replied. ‘But being historic doesn’t make it any easier.’6 Breen insisted upon innumerable changes to the script. Korda’s original title for the film, Lady Hamilton, became That Hamilton Woman, with its unmistakable tone of disapproval. Reisch and Sherriff added a prologue set in Calais in which a destitute Emma, abandoned by her country after Nelson’s death, is caught stealing a bottle of wine. The humiliated Emma is thrown in jail and a fellow Englishwoman—another tart with a heart—urges her to tell her story: ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, deary’ (illustration 1). If the moral message intended by this scene, that adultery does not pay, seems a little contrived, no one was left in any doubt as to the film’s political message. It is, in fact, about as subtle as a sledgehammer, as is apparent in the scene where Nelson’s fleet lies anchored in the Bay of Naples after heavy fighting against Napoleon’s navy. Nelson has sustained terrible wounds—the loss of an arm and of an eye—and his men are desperate for food, fresh water, rum, tobacco, even oil for the lamps. The Neapolitans are hesitant to help for fear of French reprisals. An exasperated Captain Hardy exclaims, ‘Why don’t we sail up to Naples and blow them out of their beds. They’d give us water and meat soon enough then.’ Nelson, equally frustrated, replies, ‘Do you expect me to fire at a neutral port?’‘Neutral!’ Hardy scoffs, ‘neutral against England’. At that moment a visit on board from Emma, Lady Hamilton, is announced (illustration 2). Emma, wife of the British ambassador to Naples, and Nelson had met briefly several years earlier. Nelson is clearly disappointed that her husband, Sir William, did not come in his official capacity with fresh supplies. Agitated, he describes his men’s predicament while a bewildered Emma looks him up and down, taking in the extent of his injuries. As he is berating the Neapolitans for apparently forgetting ‘that they are our allies and we’re fighting for their cause just as well as for our own’, Nelson sees Emma’s look of concern and breaks off to say, ‘I’m sorry. You must please excuse these little souvenirs of Calvi and Tenerife.’ ‘I had no idea’, Emma solemnly remarks. ‘They told us of your victories but not of the price you had paid.’7 Emma’s reaction here to Nelson’s personal appearance is one that Britain would have hoped for from the American public who by now had learned of the London blitz. And the import of Captain Hardy’s bitter phrase—‘neutral against England’—could hardly have been lost on American audiences. 6. 7.

Sherriff, pp. 336–37; Short, pp. 9–12. This is a soundtrack transcription as are the other scenes described in this paper.

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Illustration 2: Emma (Vivien Leigh) visits Nelson (Laurence Olivier) on board of his ship (British Film Institute).

The studio’s press book for That Hamilton Woman urged cinemas across America to interview local British celebrities and put on a programme of famous British naval songs.8 When the film opened at New York Radio City Music Hall on 3 April 1941, the critic for the New York Post observed: Scattered through the film are remarks and situations bearing on present world conditions. This is achieved without distortion. After all, Napoleon, like Hitler, was well on his way to world domination, having conquered Europe, when he was stopped by the English Channel and the British Navy. […] Nelson makes plain his belief that Napoleon, the dictator must be fought. Doubtless the picture of England as an international protector of the weak is considerably overdrawn. However, there was no doubt as to where the sympathy of the Music Hall audience lay.9

The film, all guns blazing, had indeed hit its target.

8. 9.

Drazin, pp. 235–36. Archer Winsten, New York Post (4 April 1941); quoted in Short, pp. 4–5.

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But I think That Hamilton Woman contains yet another, perhaps more subtly coded, message for its American and British audiences in its attitude towards the Italians. As Nelson and Emma first met in Naples, the early part of the film is set in this strategically important Italian port. Although at the outbreak of World War II Italy had been neutral, in June 1940—a full three months before Sherriff and Reisch began writing the film script—Mussolini had joined forces with Hitler against Britain and France. British lives were being lost in Africa at the hands of the Italians. So how was the film going to portray the enemy? Two different scenes reveal the filmmakers’ stance. In the first, Nelson, on his initial visit to Naples, asks Lord Hamilton to petition the King of Naples to provide troops against the French fleet. Lord Hamilton replies that it will take some days to gain an audience with the King through the proper diplomatic channels. But Nelson is in a great hurry. Emma happens to overhear their conversation and informs Nelson that it is the Queen, not the King, who is the real ruler of Naples. She offers to introduce him to the Queen that very afternoon when she goes to consult Her Majesty about a new dress. Nelson is sceptical, but Emma is as good as her word. In a marvellous scene with no dialogue, a long tracking shot follows Nelson tagging along after Emma as she enters the royal chamber. She sweeps up to the Queen; the two women kiss and compare dresses; Emma presents Nelson, who then follows the two women across the room to where a bemused King is sitting with a baby on his knee; all the while an equally bemused Nelson does his best to avoid tripping over the multitude of screaming children, scolding nannies, and barking dogs. (Emma is here clearly meant to represent the British woman doing her bit for the war effort.) The second scene takes place on Nelson’s return to Naples after famously defeating Napoleon’s navy on the Nile. The city had been enduring great hardship but, once more safe thanks to Nelson’s victory, it reverts to its former carefree self. He receives a hero’s welcome, with cheering crowds lining the streets, elaborate fireworks, and bands playing. As he walks up to the throne— the King still looking bemused and still surrounded by children (illustration 3)—an exhausted Nelson blurts out, ‘Your Majesty, I’m amazed.’ The King does not understand but grants Nelson’s request for a private audience with Sir William as interpreter. ‘Tell him’, Nelson addresses Sir William, I didn’t come to Naples to be fêted. In other times I should be grateful, but today I am appalled by it. I came here expecting to find an armed camp and I find this tragic carnival. This battle of the Nile that he’s celebrating may have destroyed their fleet, but his [Napoleon’s] army’s as strong as ever and two day’s march from Naples. Yet the men of Naples dance in the street with paper caps and toy balloons.

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Illustration 3: The King of Naples (Luis Alberni) expecting Nelson (British Film Institute).

Nelson spends the next week in Naples, recovering from sheer exhaustion and battle fatigue. When Emma informs him that, despite his recent warnings, the King and Queen of Naples are planning a gala performance at the opera in his honour, Nelson comments, ‘They’re hopeless, I give up’. Of course, this portrayal of the Italians adds a bit of comic relief to the film, but it also had a more profound, political significance. Churchill knew that President Roosevelt was keenly aware of the large Italian-American vote in the United States. (He mentions this several times in his history of the Second World War.)10 The Prime Minister did not want to upset the Italian-Americans or Roosevelt. The best—perhaps the only—way to characterise the Neapolitans in That Hamilton Woman was to show them as dupes—childish and naïve, yes, ineffectual, yes, easily swayed, yes—but neither vicious nor dangerous. Churchill and the scriptwriters had a well established literary precedent to draw upon. I first saw That Hamilton Woman a few years ago, one rainy Sat10. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1949), II, pp. 106, 116.

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urday afternoon watching television. At the time I was most struck by how the film’s depiction of the Italians as hopelessly naïve and childlike so closely echoed the sentiments of a writer I was researching at the time. The Italians in the street are ‘such children, to be sure’, with a ‘stupid habit of expressing joy & triumph […] by firing into the air’; ‘The people [are] so innocent & amiable, so everything except heroical.’11 These words could have come out of Nelson’s mouth as played by Olivier. They are, in fact, from the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Elizabeth adopted Italy as her own and embraced its efforts to become independent and united. In her poem Casa Guidi Windows (which opens, appropriately, with an Italian festa), Barrett Browning transforms the Italians’ childishness, a quality which had exasperated her as often as not, into something innocent, life-affirming and full of hope: ‘I heard last night a little child go singing/ ‘Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,/ “O bella libertà, O bella!”’ In this poem Elizabeth Barrett Browning is careful to distance herself from the view, common in Britain since at least the eighteenth century, that Italy was a fallen woman, her glory long past, her people often duplicitous, always lazy. This had been the opinion of Emma’s husband, Lord Hamilton, a famous collector of antique statues as well as ambassador to Naples. He believed that the Italians of his day were not worthy caretakers of such a rich inheritance. In 1785 a young British visitor to Florence, Bertie Greatheed, wrote a poem entitled ‘Ode to Apathy’, which began ‘O! would the sons of Italy arise,/ And shake the leaden slumbers from their eyes’.12 Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who toured Italy together in 1853—two years after the publication of Casa Guidi Windows—adopted Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s feminine/maternal view of Italians as childlike. It fit so well with the image of the Risorgimento, the ‘nascent Italian state’, the ‘new Italy’.13 The novels which the two men wrote on their return both feature an English protagonist aided by an Italian—Cavalleto in Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Pesca in Collins’s The Woman in White. Both Cavalleto and Pesca, dedicated to the cause of Italian independence, are described—and pictured in the illustrations—as infantile: short, fat, with rounded features, loud and passionate in their behaviour. And like children, they mispronounce words with the greatest enthusiasm, such as Cavalleto’s 11. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella, ed. by Scott Lewis, 2 vols (Waco: Wedgestone, 2002), I, pp. 212–13, 229. 12. Charles Hobday, A Golden Ring: English Poets in Florence from 1373 to the Present Day (London: Peter Owen, 1997), pp. 99–100; Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). 13. For this point, see Fabienne Moine, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity and Shaping the Poetic Self’ in this volume.

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‘consequentementally’. The villains in both novels—Rigaud in Little Dorrit and Count Fosco in The Woman in White—are, by contrast, portrayed as cosmopolitan, suave, and sophisticated.14 This view of Italians as infantile and innocent became something of a literary cliché. In the Italian Hours Henry James witnesses the feast of the Annunziata in Frascati: ‘Every one was shouting, singing, scrambling, making light of dust and distance and filling the air with that childlike jollity which the blessed Italian temperament never goes roundabout to conceal.’ In The Aspern Papers, set in Venice, James talks of ‘the soft-sounding, almost infantile speech of the place’. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View Miss Honeychurch remarks that she thinks the Italians ‘rather childish’. But clichés have their uses. Korda and Churchill thought that this particular cliché might just work to avoid alienating the Italian-American community and to send them a message. It is a message reiterated in perhaps the most famous scene of the film, when Nelson stands before the Admiralty Board after learning that his recent victory at Copenhagen has prompted the British to make peace with Napoleon. His voice full of emotion, Nelson addresses the seven men: Lord Spencer, Gentlemen. You are celebrating a peace with Napoleon Bonaparte. Peace is a very beautiful word, as long as the impulse of peace is behind it, but, gentlemen, you will never make peace with Napoleon. He doesn’t mean peace today. He just wants to gain a little time to re-arm himself at sea and make new alliances with Italy and Spain, all to one purpose, to destroy our empire. Years ago, I said the same thing to Naples. I begged them, I entreated them, not to give way but they wouldn’t listen to me and they paid the price. That was a little kingdom, miles away in the Mediterranean but now it is England, our own land. Napoleon can never be master of the world until he has smashed us up and, believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world. You cannot make peace with dictators, you have to destroy them, wipe them out. Gentlemen, I implore you, speak to the Prime Minister before it is too late! Do not ratify this peace!

This speech packs in many things, including an allusion to Neville Chamberlain’s by then notorious words in the House of Commons in 1938, referring to the Sudetenland crisis as a ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’. Nelson’s speech also serves to draw together the two main political messages which Churchill and Korda wanted to get across 14. Vicky Greenaway, ‘The Risorgimento in Victorian Literature’, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, forthcoming, ch. 2. Greenaway relates this English view of Italians as mere children, a view prevalent in the 1840s, to Romantic primitivism. She cites another Englishwoman, Jane Carlyle, describing the Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘as credulous and ignorant as a two-year old child’ in 1842.

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to the British and especially to the Americans: first and foremost, Hitler is the enemy, and he must not be appeased; secondly, the Italian people are not the enemy but merely innocent pawns in this war. ‘I begged them, I entreated them’, to repeat what Nelson says here of the Neapolitans, ‘not to give way but they wouldn’t listen to me’. So too had Churchill—up until the eleventh hour—tried to dissuade Mussolini from joining forces with Hitler, but he would not listen. In a shortwave radio broadcast on 23 December 1940, a few months before the premier of That Hamilton Woman, Churchill told the Italians that he knew they ‘had no lust for war’. They had been duped by Mussolini, who had, in turn, been fooled by Hitler. Churchill once wrote that the friendship between the British and Italian peoples dated from the days of Garibaldi and Cavour. He ended his Christmas 1940 broadcast to the Italians by invoking the spirit of the Risorgimento: ‘And there I leave this unfolding story until the day comes—as come it will—when the Italian nation will once more take a hand in shaping its own fortunes.’15 Some say that Churchill actually wrote Nelson’s famous ‘smashed up’ speech, as it is known.16 Certainly he heartily approved of it. That Hamilton Woman became his favourite movie. He watched it over and over again, once while on a Royal Navy battleship en route to the Atlantic Conference with Roosevelt in August 1941.17 In that same month, five months after the film first opened, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye recognised in Korda’s film what the Hollywood censor, Joseph Breen, had missed. In a radio broadcast he identified That Hamilton Woman as one of several recent pictures, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, designed to rouse America to ‘war hysteria’.18 Alexander Korda was subpoenaed to appear before a Senate Committee investigating not only That Hamilton Woman but also his involvement with foreign agents. Korda’s Hollywood offices were, in fact, acting as a cover for British agents, and Korda 15. 16. 17. 18.

Churchill, II, pp. 105, 547–48. Michael Korda, Charmed Lives: A Family Romance (London: Allen Lane, 1980), p. 154. Short, p. 14. Greg Walker points out that, owing to his roots as an Hungarian Jew, ‘the threats posed by Continental fascism is arguably a consistent factor in a number of Korda’s major films of the 1930s’: The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), with the King’s cry to build ‘ships, ships, and more ships’—a message repeated in Fire over England (1937); The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), with the Pimpernel’s activities ‘portrayed as a kind of Special Operations unit operating behind enemy lines’; Things to Come (1936), with its depiction of ‘The Chief’, a rather clownish Mussolini figure; and the RAF propaganda feature The Lion Has Wings (1939). ‘It was Korda after all’, Walker states, ‘who suggested the idea of The Great Dictator to Chaplin’. Greg Walker, ‘The Roots of Alexander Korda: Myths of Identity and the International Film’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37 (2003), 3–25 (pp. 18–19).

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himself sent encoded messages to the Ministry of Information in London. The date set for the Senate hearing was Friday, 12 December 1941.19 But events on the previous Sunday morning at Pearl Harbour made it all irrelevant. Korda later liked to claim that ‘because of himself and Churchill, Roosevelt was persuaded to bring the U.S. in [to the war]’. ‘Well, he gave a little of the credit to the Japanese.’20 Bibliography Cavaliero, Roderick, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War, 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1949). Drazin, Charles, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002). Greenaway, Vicky, ‘The Risorgimento in Victorian Literature’, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, forthcoming. Hobday, Charles, A Golden Ring: English Poets in Florence from 1373 to the Present Day (London: Peter Owen, 1997). Kiernan, Thomas, Olivier: The Life of Laurence Olivier (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981). Korda, Michael, Charmed Lives: A Family Romance (London: Allen Lane, 1980). Kulik, Karol, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1975). Lewis, Scott, ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella, 2 vols (Waco: Wedgestone, 2002). Olivier, Laurence, Confessions of an Actor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). Sherriff, Robert Cedric, No Leading Lady: An Autobiography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968). Short, Kenneth Richard MacDonald, ‘That Hamilton Woman (1941): Propaganda, Feminism and the Production Code’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11 (1991), 3–19. Tabori, Paul, Alexander Korda (London: Oldbourne, 1959).

19. Paul Tabori, Alexander Korda (London: Oldbourne, 1959), p. 222; Karol Kulik, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1975), pp. 250–53; Drazin, pp. 238–42. 20. Thomas Kiernan, Olivier: The Life of Laurence Olivier (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981), p. 195.

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Walker, Greg, ‘The Roots of Alexander Korda: Myths of Identity and the International Film’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37 (2003), 3–25. Wenden, D. J., ‘Churchill, Radio, and Cinema’, in Churchill, ed. by Robert Blake and William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 215–239.

Peter Vassallo Italian Culture versus British Pragmatics: The Maltese Scenario At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian and Italian culture dominated the Maltese cultural scene. Most educated Maltese families (the cultural elite) spoke Italian fluently among themselves. Italian was the undisputed language of the law courts, the university, and of legal documents.1 The perception of most educated Maltese was that Malta was a Latin country only sixty miles away from southern Italy. Culturally and geographically most Maltese considered themselves to be Southern Italians. Of course, Maltese as a language was also spoken but was considered to be a local dialect (some considered it an Arab dialect), useful for expressing strong emotions, and it was generally associated by the intelligentsia with the language of the kitchen. In the early nineteenth century, there was hardly any Maltese literature to speak of. Dun Karm Psaila, who was to become the Maltese national poet, first composed his poems in Italian (in the early twentieth century). Most of the poems in his Foglie d’Alloro were written in Italian in the manner of the established Italian poets of the time, Foscolo, Monti, Carducci and Pascoli, before he was persuaded by a literary friend (in 1912) to write verse (for a limited readership) in Maltese. Well before the advent of fascism, Italian was the language with which the educated Maltese felt a cultural affinity, Maltese being unintelligible to foreigners. In the sphere of trade, it had become, as Joe Cremona maintains, a lingua franca in the central Mediterranean and along the Barbary Coast.2 Young Maltese artists were awarded scholarships to study in Rome. Italian was the language in which merchants conducted their business (furniture, pottery), lawyers defended their clients, and civil servants issued bandi (public proclamations). Incidentally, it was in Malta that Coleridge taught himself Italian since, at the time, in 1804, he was public secretary, responsible for the issuing of bandi in Italian under his signature. In the perception of the Maltese elite, Italian was a sort of talisman protecting them from the incursion of English, the language of the overlords, the

1.

2.

For a detailed account of the Maltese language question see Geoffrey Hull, The Malta Language Question: A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism (Valletta: Said International, 1993). Joe Cremona, ‘“Acciocché ognuno le possa intendere”: The Use of Italian as a lingua franca on the Barbary Coast in the 17th Century. Evidence from the English’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 5 (1997), 52–69.

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British, who had been asked to help the Maltese after they revolted against the French in 1798 and who had stayed on as protectors or friendly colonial administrators, reluctantly allowing the Maltese a limited amount of selfgovernment.3 Significantly, Italian was the language of the Roman Catholic Church and from the Maltese ecclesiastics’ point of view, English was the language of Protestantism and, as far as they were concerned, the less the British penetrated the social and cultural domain the better. For most educated Maltese in the 1920s and 1930s, Italianità was a convenient banner of resistance to British anglicisation policies. Earlier, in the 1850s, British Malta had been a refuge for the Risorgimento liberals, where they found many sympathisers. The Maltese were regarded as Italians outside Italy by virtue of their ‘fede, costumi, educazione e lingua’ and Malta itself as the ‘ultimo sasso d’Italia’. The Italian exiles were grateful for the accoglienza they received on the island. Gabriele Rossetti, who fled to Malta in 1821, devoted a stanza of his poem La Vita Mia to ‘florida Malta, piccola ma bella’ which ‘fra l’inquieto mar […] dimora,/ d’italo genio e d’araba favella’.4 It is worth noting that among the distinguished political refugees who found asylum in Malta were Francesco de Sanctis, Luigi Settembrini, and Francesco Crispi, known affectionately as ‘il signor Cikko’. Giuseppe Garibaldi visited Malta twice on his way to and from London (in 1864) and was fêted by local aristocrats with strong liberal sympathies, especially by the Marchese Ramiro Barbaro di San Giorgio and the Baronessa Testaferrata Abela. His note of gratitude (Valletta, 24 March 1864) mentions the ‘fraterna accoglienza’ of the ‘brava populazione maltese’.5 Francesco Crispi was later to become Premier of Italy in 1887 and passed the ‘legge Crispi’ which defined the people of Malta (like those of Corsica, Trieste, Dalmatia) as Italiani non regnicoli (Italians not belonging to the Kingdom of Italy but enjoying the rights of residence in Italy).6 The Governor General Sir Charles von Straubenzee was understandably dismayed by the increasing tendency on the part of the Italian politicians to Italianise the Maltese. Contact with the liberal spirit of the Italian political exiles made the Maltese aware of their own rights and civil liberties and, as a consequence, the leading politicians applied pressure on the British authorities to grant 3.

4. 5. 6.

See Dominic Fenech’s perceptive analysis of this issue in Responsibility and Power in Inter-War Malta: Book One, Endemic Democracy (1919–1930) (San Gwann: Publishing Enterprising Group, 2005), pp. 4–6. See Hull, p. 18. See Hull, p. 20. See also Lorenzo Schiavone, ‘Esuli Italiani a Malta durante il Risorgimento’, in Echi del Risorgimento a Malta, ed. by Vincenzo Bonello and others (Valletta: Società Dante Alighieri, 1963), pp. 185–186.

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them constitutional rights; this eventually happened in 1849, when a second constitution with limited representation was granted but with the governor retaining the right of veto. In the political sphere of the 1920s, two parties dominated the cultural scene: the Partito Democratico Nazionalista headed by Enrico Mizzi, who had studied in Italy and who was fervently attached to the policy of ‘Italianità’—linguistic and cultural affiliation with Italy. The other political party, diametrically opposed to the Nationalist Party, was the Constitutional Party led by Sir Gerald Strickland, who was fervently pro-British and an ardent imperialist, intent on his mission of anglicising the Maltese. Those Maltese who favoured English were aware of the practical realities of using the language of the British rulers and felt that by using English they formed part of the British Empire. The language question was inevitably to become a political issue which eventually led to considerable acrimony between the two factions. This seething controversy concerning the educational system was to be partially solved by a compromise system (known as the pari passu) which decreed that at school, children were to be taught both languages and they usually learned neither of them. The urban working classes favoured English for its practical advantages and were also in favour of promoting Maltese which was the language everyone understood and spoke, and which bestowed on them, by virtue of its widespread use, a sort of national identity. Language, not religion, became a determining factor in establishing identity. The colonial administration (in the late 1920s) favoured the pari passu compromise solution (that is, equal status for English and Italian) in order to keep outside the party strife, but favoured Maltese as a language of instruction in those subjects where it was considered to be convenient. The pro-Italian faction stiffly resisted the promotion of Maltese in the educational and cultural sphere. The ‘Mizzites’ (nationalist supporters of Enrico Mizzi’s policy) saw this patronising of Maltese as a subtle ploy on the part of the British to undermine Italian, and as the thin end of the wedge in eventually establishing the supremacy of Englishness over Italianità. Mizzi’s written objection was that ‘the facilities that are meant to be given to the Maltese dialect evidently tend to undermine the survival of the Italian language’.7 To counteract this subtle anglicisation process, the Italian Under Secretary of State, Francesco Giunta, visited Malta in April 1933 and declared, in a public address, that he was on Italian soil and added that the destiny of the 7.

See Henry Frendo’s fine survey of the language question in its political context in ‘Plurality and Polarity: Early Italian Fascism in Maltese Colonial Politics’, in Malta: A Case Study in International Cross Currents, ed. by Stanley Fiorini and Victor Mallia Milanes (Msida: Malta University Press, 1989), pp. 227–240.

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Maltese islands was complete political union with Italy. As a result of his visit, numerous scholarships were offered to promising Maltese students wanting to further their studies in Italy. The British reaction was immediate and firm. The letters patent of 16 August 1934 declared that English, Maltese, and Italian were to be the official languages of Malta. However, in matters of administration and public records, English was to be the sole medium. Maltese was to become the general language of the law courts and the university, Italian was to cease in the faculty of law. The Maltese language (some still considered it a dialect), as a consequence, gained ground at the expense of Italian—an interesting instance of the proverb ‘tra I due litiganti il terzo gode’. An official version of Maltese came into being as a curious mixture of Malti safi (pure Maltese) supplemented with Italian terms where there was no equivalent. As part of a subtle anglicisation policy (which was to prove effective), the British also set up cable radio service intended for the rediffusion of BBC programmes (which had two switches: A: English and B: Maltese). English-speaking Maltese civil servants were given encouragement in the form of promotions and preferential treatment. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1936 and the Berlin-Rome axis brought the traditional friendship of Great Britain and Italy to an end. One obvious result was that the Istituto Italiano di Cultura was compelled to close down and the British Institute was opened in its place by specific order of the governor. However, the teaching of Italian in secondary schools was allowed to continue and many Maltese students still chose Italian as their main foreign language. The conflict between Anglophiles and Italophiles intensified especially when Italianità now became associated in most educated people’s minds with fascism. Sir Gerald Strickland (then Prime Minister) made it his mission to erode every possible form of Italian affinity with the island and went to the extreme of declaring that all the Maltese who favoured the Italian language were potentially disloyal subjects.8 He launched a rigorous de-italianisation campaign and he made sure that Italian ceased to be a requisite for important government jobs. Strickland, indeed an irascible and formidable politician, took personal pleasure in irking professional classes who supported the pro-Italian politicians. He even suggested to the Imperial Government that they should ask Pope Pius XI to stop letting Mussolini use the Church in Malta to promote pro-Italian sentiment. As a result Governor Du Cane asked the Vatican to impose a ban on priests contesting the elections in future. Direct confrontation between Anglophiles and Italophiles was inevitable. 8.

For a detailed account of Strickland’s policy in this regard see Dominic Fenech’s chapter ‘On Two Fronts’ in his Endemic Democracy, pp. 343–352.

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As Henry Frendo observes, ‘Malta was in an agitated state. Italian residents were expelled. There was surveillance and counter-surveillance, bugging devices placed in the offices of suspect persons, eavesdropping was rampant and a general atmosphere of paranoia prevailed.’9 The new Council of Government formally proclaimed English and Maltese the two official languages of the island colony and forbade any discussion of the language question in education. Some prominent citizens who felt a strong affinity with Italy migrated to Italy and took up Italian citizenship, the most prominent example being Professor Carlo Mallia, a former Minister of Justice, who had been deprived of his university post as lecturer in commercial law. On his arrival in Italy, he wasted no time in making anti-British broadcasts encouraging irredentist sentiments among the Maltese, and the Italian Comitato Azione Maltese offered financial support to those Maltese who were willing to hand in their British passports and accept Italian citizenship. Pro-Italian fervour on the island cooled down considerably when Italy entered the war on the axis side on 11 June 1940, and fascist bombs killed seven Maltese in Valletta on that day. One side effect of this was that it also speeded the dominance of the English language as the established language of the Empire. The official Italian attitude to Malta changed overnight: Malta was not so much a part of Italy in the south but an infection to be eventually cured, ‘un’infezione da guarire’. It was against this backdrop that the Strickland party, inflamed by Lord Strickland’s nephew, Major Roger Strickland, hysterically denounced those fifth columnists who were secretly conspiring in favour of Italy and insisted that these ‘quislings’ were to be deported. To this effect, an ordinance (later declared by the Maltese court of appeal to be ultra vires) was quickly passed and forty-three Maltese citizens, including the Chief Justice Sir Arturo Mercieca, his wife and daughter, Dr Enrico Mizzi, Mgr Pantalleresco, the dean of the Cathedral chapter, Dr Herbert Ganado, prominent lawyer and editor of the Catholic newspaper Lehen is—Sewwa, were deported to Uganda where they were interned until the end of the war. Stewart Perowne, secretary to the Governor, later described this as ‘a sad story […], a shabby affair’. This sad affair still rankles to this day as can be seen in a recent irate exchange of letters in the Times of Malta (January 2006). I should like to focus at this stage on the Borg Pisani case which, in my view, epitomises irrendentism in wartime Malta.10 Carmelo Borg Pisani was a

9. See Frendo’s essay on ‘Plurality and Polarity’. 10. For an excellent account of the Borg Pisani controversy see Henry Frendo’s article ‘The Ghost of Borg Pisani: Awaiting Redemption’, in Malta at War in Cultural Memory: Representations of ‘The Madonna’s Chosen People’, ed. by Clare Thake Vassallo and Ivan Callus (Msida: Malta University Press, 2005), pp. 184–215.

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young Maltese artist who had won a scholarship to Rome. He was ardently pro-Italian and was convinced that Italy, not Britain, was his actual patria. Refusing to consider himself a British subject and declaring his allegiance to Italy—‘La mia vera patria è l’Italia’—he joined the Partito Nazionale Fascista and wrote to Mussolini (on 30 May 1940), saying that, in his opinion, the British had usurped control of the island and that it was his dream to see Malta returned to Italy—‘il mio grande ideale di vedere Malta resa all’Italia’—, adding in a naively idealistic way that he was offering his services to this purpose. In view of the projected axis invasion of the island, he was persuaded to go on a secret mission to Malta in order to collect valuable military information. Dropped by a submarine off Dingli Cliffs, in a dinghy with radio equipment, he was left standing on a precarious ledge in rough seas. He lost his equipment and his spectacles (he was myopic) and he was therefore left helpless and had no option but to call for help. He was rescued and taken to a military hospital, where he was recognised by one of the doctors who was a former neighbour. He was court-martialled and executed (by hanging) for treason. He was twenty-eight years old. The Governor ignored pleas for clemency from the three Maltese judges who presided over the case. The Anglophile community maintained that he was a spy who got his just deserts, but the Italian Government bestowed on him posthumously the Medaglia d’Oro al Valore Militare, the highest award for bravery. The Borg Pisani controversy still rankles and the Maltese newspapers to this day print acrimonious letters in praise of his patriotism or condemning him as a traitor. Interestingly, from a semiotic point of view, Geoffrey Hull’s book on The Malta Language Question displays Borg Pisani’s well-known painting called L’Attesa on its front cover. The immediate impact of the war was that Italianità as a concept had fallen into disrepute and the new generation were contemptuous of everything Italian. The aspiring Bishop Mgr Michele Gonzi sent a confidential letter to Lieut. Governor Sir Edward St John Jackson, saying that if promoted to the post of archbishop he would do his utmost to anglicise the seminary and religious orders of the diocese. He kept his promise when he became archbishop. After the Second World War Malta relied heavily on British financial support, and emigration in the post-war period to Canada or Australia was rife— all these factors boosted the use of the English language in most spheres of life. English speech and cultural values have become part and parcel of the culture of most educated Maltese. Italian influence, mainly through television, is also present but now plays only a secondary role. In Malta, one could easily combine an English breakfast with an Italian lunch. English has also found its way into the Maltese

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language. To give one example, ‘Surmast’ (‘school teacher’) has been replaced by ‘teacher’. The old Anglo-Italian rivalry has shifted ground from the political to the cultural sphere. This is especially true of football. Most Maltese are football fanatics: there are those who fervently support Juventus or Milan or those who ardently support Manchester United or Arsenal, with the concomitant cheering and jeering on both sides and the boisterous ‘carcades’ when England or Italy win or lose their matches in the World Cup. There is at present a salutary rivalry permeating the cultural scene where the British Council and the Istituto Culturale Italiano, both housed in Valletta, now collaborate amicably on cultural projects of mutual interest. The Anglo-Italian triennial conference at the university is a case in point. Bibliography Cremona, Joe, ‘“Acciocché ognuno le possa intendere”: The Use of Italian as a lingua franca on the Barbary Coast in the 17th Century. Evidence from the English’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 5 (1997), 52–69. Fenech, Dominic, Responsibility and Power in Inter-War Malta: Book One, Endemic Democracy (1919–1930) (San Gwann: Publishing Enterprising Group, 2005). Frendo, Henry, ‘The Ghost of Borg Pisani: Awaiting Redemption’, in Malta at War in Cultural Memory: Representations of ‘The Madonna’s Chosen People’, ed. by Clare Thake Vassallo and Ivan Callus (Msida: Malta University Press, 2005), pp. 184–215. Frendo, Henry, ‘Fascism in Maltese Colonial Politics’, in Malta: A Case Study in International Cross Currents, ed. by Stanley Fiorini and Victor Mallia Milanes (Msida: Malta University Press, 1989), pp. 226–240. Frendo, Henry, ‘Plurality and Polarity: Early Italian Fascism in Maltese Colonial Politics’, in Malta: A Case Study in International Cross-Currents, ed. by Stanley Fiorini and Victor Mallia-Milanes (Msida: Malta University Press, 1991), pp. 227–240. Hull, Geoffrey, The Malta Language Question: A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism (Valletta: Said International, 1993). Schiavone, Lorenzo, ‘Esuli Italiani a Malta durante il Risorgimento’, in Echi del Risorgimento a Malta, ed. by Vincenzo Bonello and others (Valletta: Società Dante Alighieri, 1963).

David Forgacs Gramsci’s Notion of the ‘Popular’ in Italy and Britain: A Tale of Two Cultures This article is about two nations and two different times: Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings began to circulate there, and Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s, when his ideas got most widely disseminated and discussed in English. I shall concentrate here on the fortunes of one word used by Gramsci—‘popular’—and consider how and why, in the circulation of his writings, it came to acquire different senses in these two times and places. Shifts in the sense of a term are common in the history of ideas, particularly where translation and the cross-cultural transfer of texts is involved. It could even be suggested that all texts that are translated and received into another country get changed in some way in the process; they become something different from what they started out as. Often the translated work arrives in the receiving or target culture after some delay and makes an impact there only when that culture has already begun to develop an active interest in the themes the work deals with. Despite this interest, the target culture may nevertheless understand the work differently from the source culture. The world may have changed in ways that make the original work difficult to comprehend without adaptation or recontextualisation. In the case of Gramsci, the reasons why the changes occurred, and the types of change that were made, have to do, I shall argue, both with some features peculiar to his texts and their transmission and with some important differences between the cultural and political landscapes of Italy and Britain in the mid to late twentieth century. Three reasons in particular are worth isolating, though in practice they converge and interact with one another. The first is the fragmentary nature of the texts. In prison Gramsci wrote, between 1926 and 1937, hundreds of letters and over 2,000 notes and jottings of varying lengths, the latter in thirty-three different school exercise books, of which twenty-nine constitute the prison notebooks and four consist entirely of translation exercises. It is true that he followed a specific scheme of work and that he gave many of the notes one of several recurrent general headings, such as ‘Letteratura popolare’, ‘Passato e presente’, ‘Intellettuali italiani’, which served as identifiers and enabled him to group the notes together in a subsequent phase of rewriting. Nevertheless, the task of rewriting and regrouping was unfinished at the time of his death in 1937

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and, in any case, there were interconnections between notes written at around the same time to which he gave different thematic headings. This means that all editorial groupings of the prison notes are necessarily speculative. The first, thematic, edition, published in six volumes in 1948–51 under the editorship of Felice Platone, was faithful, in part, to Gramsci’s intention to regroup the notes into a series of themed books, but some of the editorial groupings and inclusions of notes were questionable. The critical edition, done by Valentino Gerratana in 1975, had the advantage of publishing the twenty-nine notebooks integrally, including first and subsequent drafts of the same note, and assembling them in chronological order according to the date in which Gramsci started writing in each one. However, it too could only provide an approximate guide to the mosaic which was Gramsci’s composition of the notebooks and which Geoffrey NowellSmith has described as an ‘open work’.1 This openness of the text means that it has been possible—more so, I believe, than with texts of a more closed and finite character—to pick out particular passages, combine them with others, in a ‘do it yourself’ fashion, and thus to assemble one’s own Gramsci. The second reason is the posthumous publication of the prison writings and thus the fact of reception into a different political climate from the one in which they had been written. There was already an important difference between the time and conditions of their composition (letters 1926–37, notebooks 1929–35) and those of their Italian publication (letters 1947, notebooks 1948–51). The former period coincided approximately with the zenith of Mussolini’s regime in Italy and Stalin’s ascendancy over the Communist International. The latter covered the transition from the brief post-war democratic interlude, with a coalition government of six antifascist parties that included the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), to the polarised politics of the Cold War, when the PCI was excluded from government (1947), defeated at the polls (1948), reined in by the newly centralising Communist movement in Moscow (the Cominform), and harassed by adverse propaganda at home. There was then a further lag between the time of publication in Italy and the time of translation and publication in other countries. In Italy, as Alistair Davidson pointed out in a carefully documented article written in 1972, soon after the first really substantial English-language edition, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, was published, the first decade of reception of Gramsci in Italy after the war had been 1.

See the Introduction to Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. by Willliam Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), pp. 9–10.

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strongly marked by the internal struggle between Marxism and Crocean liberalism in intellectual culture.2 The PCI had sought to root its own postwar strategy in Gramsci’s thought as part of its attempt to win intellectual legitimacy against the powerful liberal and idealist traditions in philosophy and historiography and to construct a national tradition of democratic Marxism, geared towards broad social alliances. In Britain, Gramsci’s work had no such role to play. The fact that Gramsci’s texts were not tied, as they were in Italy, to the legacy of an institutionalised political movement meant that it was possible to treat them more elastically, interpret them more freely, adapt them to different conditions. The third reason why the meaning of Gramsci’s writings changed was to do with the structural differences between Britain in the 1970s and 80s and Italy at the time Gramsci wrote and when his work was first published. Despite the replacement of fascism by mass democracy, Italian society, at least till the start of the economic boom in the late 1950s, still retained many characteristics of the time at which Gramsci had been writing: a strong Church and capillary Catholic movement, an economy in which the majority of the population still lived on the land and in which regions of advanced industrialisation and capitalist agriculture were flanked by regions characterised by various kinds of peasant land tenure (smallholdings in the North-West and North-East, sharecropping in Tuscany and Emilia, large estates in the mainland South). As Italy emerged from the war, the left came to be dominated by two parties of Marxist inspiration, the PCI and its historical predecessor the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano), whereas the most important mass force on the British left was the non-Marxist Labour Party. The most influential intellectual traditions in Italy were idealism, Catholic social thought, and, after the war, Marxism, whereas in Britain these were minority currents and the dominant traditions were empiricism, positivism, and liberalism. These and other structural differences between Italy and Britain may be represented schematically thus:

2.

Alistair Davidson, ‘The Varying Seasons of Gramscian Studies’, Political Studies, 4 (1972), 448–61; reprinted in Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers, ed. by James Martin, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 2002), IV, pp. 8–17. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, was published in Britain by Lawrence and Wishart, London 1971 and in the USA by International Publishers, New York, 1971.

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Italy 1930s/50s

Britain 1970s/80s

industry

late industrialisation (c. 1900), mixture of large and small-medium firms

early industrialisation (c. 1750), mainly large firms, then de-industrialisation (c. 1975)

agriculture

mixed (smallholdings, sharecropping, large estates, capitalist)

capitalist

economic geography

small industrial core region (North-West), extensive peripheries (South, NorthEast)

multiple core regions (SouthEast, Midlands, North), smaller peripheries (Scottish islands, Welsh uplands, etc.)

parliamentary tradition

short (since 1860)

long (since 1640s)

Communist party

large, direct influence on public opinion (daily and periodical press, publishing houses)

small, little public influence

social-democratic tradition

weak (small SocialDemocratic Party founded 1947)

strong (Labour Party)

Church

institutionally central (Papacy, parishes/dioceses; Christian Democracy, Catholic Action), mass participation

institutionally marginal, decline in churchgoing

dominant intellectual traditions

idealist (Hegel, Croce), Marxist, Catholic; parties and periodicals as major channels

positivist, empiricist; universities as major channels

The cultural transfer of Gramsci from Italy to Britain is not a subject from which I claim to be detached. I had written about Gramsci as part of the doctoral thesis I completed in Italy in 1978; in the early 1980s, as a lecturer at the University of Sussex, I became involved in mediating Gramsci’s work to English-speaking audiences, first as co-editor, with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, of the volume Selections from Cultural Writings in 1985, then as editor of A Gramsci Reader in 1988.3 I was a member, at that time, of the Theory and 3.

Both texts were published in Britain by Lawrence and Wishart. The former was published in the USA in the same year by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; the latter by Schocken Books, New York, 1989. The latter was also reissued in 2000 as The Antonio

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Ideology Committee (TIC) of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and I wrote about Gramsci for party publications as well as giving talks and conference papers to academic audiences. Of the various articles I wrote about Gramsci there was one that dealt with his fortunes on the left in Britain: this appeared in New Left Review in the summer of 1989.4 My own involvement with Gramsci’s work in that period is probably one reason why it has taken me a very long time, nearly twenty years, to see how closely his fortunes in 1970s and 80s Britain were tied to the political culture of that time. It is hard to identify changes clearly when one is living through them and playing an active part in them. The late 1970s and early 80s were characterised, in Britain as in many other parts of western Europe, by attempts to reconcile socialism and democracy, to move from a politics of centralism to one of pluralism, from ‘red’ to ‘green’, and to recast the language of class struggle so as to take full account of the arguments of feminism and of ethnic and sexual diversity, which meant moving away from traditional class-based struggles and aims. The word ‘popular’ (as in ‘popular politics’, ‘popular struggles’) came to be central to this reconceptualisation. It satisfied the need for a term, and an idea, that could glue together diverse movements and groups of people struggling against oppression and exploitation. The fact that it was already a universally used, even bland, term with an apparently simple meaning was a great advantage. Its very ordinariness gave it the necessary elasticity and adaptability. Gramsci’s writings, I can also see now, played such an important part in this reconceptualisation of progressive politics because of a duality or ambivalence which could be found in them, or at any rate ascribed to them. On the one hand they were deeply rooted in classical Marxism, with its language of class, and in the ‘Jacobin’ (Leninist) idea of the single party as agent of social change. On the other hand they spoke a new language, that of a knotting together of social alliances, the transcendence of narrow ‘economiccorporate’ class interests and the articulation of ‘universal’ interests. Gramsci

4.

Gramsci Reader with a preface by Eric Hobsbawm. This anthology, with my selections of texts and introductions, was adopted by the Tokyo Gramsci Society for the Japanese Gramsci Reader: Guramushi rîdâ (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobô, 1995). David Forgacs, ‘Gramsci and Marxism in Britain’, New Left Review, 176 (1989), 70–88; reprinted in Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments, ed. by James Martin, IV, pp. 61–80. Other early articles of mine that are relevant here are ‘National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept’, in Formations of Nation and People, ed. by Tony Bennett and others (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 83–98, republished in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. by Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 177–90, and ‘Gramsci and Cultural Rationalization’, in European Socialist Realism, ed. by Michael Scriven and Dennis Tate (Oxford: Berg, 1988), pp. 31–45.

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used the term ‘groups’—for instance ‘subaltern social groups’—and not just ‘classes’. This enabled various interpreters, from the mid-1980s onwards, to steer his ideas towards a post-Marxist and post-modern politics.5 The notion of the ‘popular’ was central here. Gramsci’s Reception in Italy and the Critique of the ‘Popular’ It is interesting, and ironic in view of its later fortunes outside Italy, to note that Gramsci’s use of the term ‘popular’, particularly as part of the compound ‘national-popular’, had been attacked by a number of Marxist intellectuals in Italy as far back as the early 1960s because they had seen it as a symptom of deviation from revolutionary Marxism, a throwback to a pre-Marxian language of nineteenth-century liberal and democratic politics, a turning away from class struggle into ‘populism’. Gramsci’s compound term had begun to gain currency in Italy in 1950, the year in which the volume with the editorial title Letteratura e vita nazionale appeared in the first, thematic, edition of the prison notebooks, published by Einaudi under the editorship of Felice Platone. It was frequently used thereafter in the PCI’s publications, including the weekly Rinascita and its cultural supplement Il Contemporaneo, and in criticism of literature, art, and cinema. Indeed, the term became a central token in the discussion of the PCI’s combined post-war strategies of putting the work of intellectuals (in the sense of party activists as well as of ‘career intellectuals’) at the service of the people and building broad progressive alliances in society. There were three main planks to the opposition mounted against the concept of the ‘national-popular’ in Italy in the 1960s by intellectuals such as Franco Fortini, Alberto Asor Rosa, and Romano Luperini. In the first place, they argued that the term ‘popular’ had nineteenth-century bourgeois-democratic origins and connotations—those of populism and in particular of the alliance between bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals and the peasantry—that were at odds with a working-class revolutionary socialist project. Secondly, the term was, according to these critics, symptomatic of a reformist turn within Gramsci’s own thinking after his revolutionary writings in L’Ordine Nuovo (the weekly he co-founded in Turin in 1919) and the experience of the factory council movement and the factory occupations of 1919– 20. Gramsci in prison, in defeat, they claimed, had replaced the internationalist theory of proletarian revolution with a prudent political realism based on 5.

Symptomatic examples are Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992) and, more recently, John Sanbonmatsu, The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy and the Making of a New Political Subject (New York: Monthly Review, 2004).

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class alliances and a retrieval of the traditions of national bourgeois revolutions, and this was continued and extended by Palmiro Togliatti, the PCI’s General Secretary, after the strategic conversion of the Italian Communist Party to Popular Front policies in the mid-1930s. Thirdly, the ‘national’ component of the ‘national-popular’ concept was, for these critics, a symptom of Gramsci’s cultural provincialism. The sympathy he showed in the prison notebooks for a ‘progressive’, second-rank, tradition of Italian literature— Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Giulio Cesare Abba, Raffaele Giovagnoli— and for those Italian writers and thinkers who had in some way theorised an organic relationship between intellectuals and the people—Vincenzo Gioberti, Francesco De Sanctis, Alfredo Oriani, Luigi Russo—and, finally, for that lowest of all forms of literature, the romanzo d’appendice or popular newspaper serial, served to demonstrate that Gramsci refused, or was unable, to get out of the provincial cul de sac of Italian culture and join the major highways of European philosophy and avant-garde art. Thus Asor Rosa could claim in 1965 that ‘Gramsci’s national-popular ends up being the cage in which all attempts at renewal are hemmed in by the iron laws of tradition and the Italian social status quo’.6 Salvatore Sechi wrote along similar lines in 1967: ‘We have here a concrete example of a “provincial” intellectual, typically Italian in that his cultural horizons are narrowly national, who cannot see the connections and relations at a European (not to say international) level between different ideologies, philosophies and cultures.’7 However, if one goes back to Gramsci’s texts themselves one finds that these objections do not sit well with what he actually wrote. Maria Bianca Luporini, in a paper originally given in 1987, suggested that Gramsci’s term ‘nazionale-popolare’ was a transplantation into Italian of the Russian words narod and narodnyi, put in circulation after 1819 by the critics and writers of the Romantic movement, A .I. Turgenev, Pushkin, and Belinsky. These words meant simultaneously ‘nation’ and ‘people’, ‘national’ and ‘popular’. Gramsci had acquired some knowledge of Russian during his eighteen-month residence in Moscow in 1922–23 as Italian delegate to the Comintern. It was there that he met and married Julia Schucht, a musician from a Russian Jewish family, with whom he had two children. In prison he carried out exercises 6.

7.

Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo: Il populismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, 2nd edn (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. 181 (1st edn Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1965, with the title Scrittori e popolo: Saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia). The translation is mine, as are all others from Italian texts quoted in this article. Salvatore Sechi, ‘Spunti critici sulle “Lettere dal carcere” di Gramsci’, Quaderni piacentini, 29 (1967), 100–26 (p. 124); reprinted as ‘Le “Lettere dal carcere” e la politica culturale del Pci’, in S. Sechi, Movimento operaio e storiografia marxista (Bari: De Donato, 1976), pp. 169–216 (p. 212).

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in translation from Russian, among other languages, to Italian. In a note written in 1930 he remarks: Observe the fact that in many languages ‘national’ and ‘popular’ are almost synonyms (in Russian, in German ‘völkisch’ has almost a more intimate meaning, that of race, in the Slavonic languages generally; in French it has the same meaning, but already more elaborated politically, linked to the concept of ‘sovereignty’: national sovereignty and popular sovereignty have or used to have equal value). In Italy the intellectuals are distant from the people, in other words from the ‘nation’, and are linked to a caste tradition, which has never been broken by a strong popular and national political movement, a ‘bookish’ and abstract tradition. (Q3§63)8

The polemical thrust of this passage is this: these two terms may be ‘almost synonyms’ in these other languages but in Italian they are not, and this is because of the ‘aristocratic’ and ‘literary’ character of Italian nationalism, the caste-like detachment of Italian intellectuals from the ‘real’ nation, that of the popular masses. By deliberately yoking together two terms that do not normally coincide in Italian, by creating an imaginary ‘people-nation’, Gramsci expels beyond its borders the cosmopolitan literati of Italy, those traditional intellectuals who insist on forming a caste unto themselves. In this and a number of other notes written in 1930 we not only find for the first time in the prison notebooks the pairs ‘popolo-nazione’ (here in Q3§63) and ‘popolare-nazionale’ (Q5§54 and Q6§38); we also see the beginning of a network of synchronic interdependencies between this concept and others, a network that will become more visible in the process of writing, rewriting and regrouping which characterises Gramsci’s compositional method in the notebooks. The themes to which it is connected are ‘Brescianism’ (Q1§24), in other words the conservative or reactionary attitudes and styles which he named after the nineteenth-century Catholic writer Antonio Bresciani and which he found pervading the work of contemporary Italian writers, whom he dubbed the ‘nipotini di padre Bresciani’ (Father Bresciani’s progeny); the cosmopolitan function of Catholic intellectuals (Q1§72) and the lack in Italy of a large-scale movement of religious reform similar to the Protestant Reformation; the question of the language (Italian as the language of a ‘closed caste, without contact with a historical spoken language’), which is linked in turn to the political fragmentation of Italy and the cosmopolitan function of the Papacy (Q1§73); the Risorgimento as a failed Jacobin revolu-

8.

The numbering here and hereinafter follows the critical edition, Quaderni del carcere, ed. by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1975); the number of the notebook (Q = quaderno) quoted or cited is followed by the number of the paragraph (note). The quotation here is from p. 343.

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tion, that is to say a failed alliance between city and country, North and South, democratic bourgeoisie and peasantry (Q1§§43 and 44). Behind all these themes lies the implicit theme of hegemony. In this first group of notes on the ‘national-popular’ the concept functions to identify, in the sphere of literary culture, the historical lack of an organic and hegemonic relationship between intellectuals and the masses. In a second group of notes, written in 1931, the concept starts to be extended. In Q8§21 (which in its second draft version will become Q13§1), the relationship between the national-popular, collective will, Jacobinism, and hegemony is clarified. In an important passage in this note Gramsci writes: Any formation of a national-popular collective will is impossible unless the mass of peasant farmers simultaneously comes into political life. This is what Machiavelli wanted to achieve with the reform of the militia, it is what the Jacobins achieved in the French Revolution, and it is here that one finds Machiavelli’s precocious Jacobinism, the fertile seed of his conception of the national revolution. All history from 1815 onwards is the struggle of the traditional classes to prevent a national will from forming and to maintain ‘economic-corporate’ power in an international system of unstable equilibrium etc. 9

This note is linked to others dealing with the formation of a collective will (for instance Q8§195) and to many of the notes in Q9. This second group of notes thus demonstrates clearly that ‘national-popular’ is not just a ‘literary’ or ‘cultural’ concept. It is also a political and historical concept. Indeed, for Gramsci it is a key concept for his analysis both of Italian history (where a solid relation between nation and people has been missing) and of the contemporary political situation, in which the task of the modern ‘Prince’ (the revolutionary party) is to create just such a relation. In a note dating from February 1933 (Q14§68) Gramsci compares the positions of Stalin and Trotsky on the national question. He alludes here to the debates in the Soviet Union of 1924–26 on the peasant question, hegemony, and socialism in one country, but he goes beyond the terms of those debates because of the new situation that has arisen there after the sectarian turn of the Sixth Comintern Congress (1928), when social democracy was identified as the main enemy of the working class and international struggle was emphasised over national movements. ‘Certainly’, Gramsci writes, ‘the development is towards internationalism, but the starting point is “national” and it is from this starting point that one must move.’ In other words, Gramsci reiterates the need to build hegemony on a national level. However, he sees this hegemony not as an end in itself but as a phase in the building of an international movement. 9.

Gramsci, Quaderni, pp. 952–53.

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Finally, there is, in Q17§29, Gramsci’s discussion of Gioberti which makes the relationship between national-popular and Jacobinism even more explicit: ‘Gioberti, even if only vaguely, has the concept of the Jacobin “popularnational”, of political hegemony, in other words of the alliance between bourgeoisie-intellectuals [intelligence] and people.’ Asor Rosa saw Gramsci in this note beating a political retreat to the bourgeois-democratic tradition, but he seems not to have understood Gramsci’s historical method, since Gioberti’s bourgeois Jacobinism was for Gramsci a precursor of the Jacobinism of the Communist party as modern Prince, not a model to be followed by that party, for the simple reason that in the intervening period both class relations and the form of the state had changed. The next hegemonic class was now, necessarily, the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie, and the form of the state was to be socialist, not bourgeois-democratic. In Gioberti, in other words, one had a typically nineteenth-century form of the national-popular relation and this had to be distinguished from what Gramsci in an earlier note (Q9§43 on Adolfo Omodeo) had called its ‘modern’ form: ‘he [Omodeo] often confuses democratic or pseudo-popular [popolaresco] paternalism with that particular form of national-popular consciousness which is more modern.’ The pivot of the national-popular concept remains, through all the notes, the ideal relationship between intellectuals and nation-people, a relationship that has been lacking historically and still waits to be created. This relationship is then developed in a positive sense by being linked to Jacobinism, hegemony, the organic bond between knowledge and feeling, the historical bloc, the recognition of the need to pass through a national stage, and the reflection on historical models (Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians, Abba, Gioberti). At the same time it is developed in a negative sense, as the diagnostic key to a lack or absence, in the many polemical notes against ‘i nipotini di padre Bresciani’, Catholic intellectuals, the fascist writers of the 1920s ruralist-nationalist movement called strapaese, and in the acerbic observations on a popular taste which has remained stuck at the stage of French serial literature of a century before. Gramsci was certainly not the first Marxist to use the terms ‘popular’ and ‘people’. Against Asor Rosa and Fortini, who saw in Gramsci’s use of this term a regression from a modern language of class to a language of nineteenth-century populism, one needs to point out that in Marxist writings before Gramsci the term ‘people’ had already acquired specific connotations of class and class alliance. Engels for example wrote of the 1848 revolution in Germany: ‘Through fear of the people, that is to say of the proletariat and the democratic bourgeoisie, the grand bourgeoisie […] has formed a defensive and offensive alliance with the forces of reaction.’ This meaning of ‘people’ was then picked up by Lenin, in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the

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Democratic Revolution (1905), with reference to a similar class alliance in Russia in 1905. Equally significant is the passage in The State and Revolution (1917) where Lenin comments on the expression ‘people’s revolution’ used by Marx to describe the Paris Commune: This idea of a ‘people’s revolution’ seems strange coming from Marx, so that the Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly declare such an expression to be a ‘slip of the pen’ on Marx’s part. They have reduced Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the antithesis between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution, and even this antithesis they interpret in an utterly lifeless way. In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent. A ‘people’s’ revolution, one actually sweeping the majority into its stream, could be such only if it embraced both the proletariat and the peasants. These two classes then constitzuted the ‘people’.10

A similar definition of ‘people’, now adopted by Lenin, will reappear the following year in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government: ‘the “people”, that is […] those workers and those peasants who do not exploit the labour of others’.11 These are texts that Gramsci knew well. Already in his pre-prison writings he had carried over this meaning of ‘people’ from Marx and Lenin. However, in the prison notebooks the term ‘people’, which in some cases retains this sense of workers plus peasants (or ‘subaltern classes’), can also mean ‘all the citizens of a nation’. Moreover, when Gramsci refers in the notebooks to other historical periods the term can designate other classes than the workers and peasants of the modern era: for instance the middle and petty bourgeoisie (the ‘popolo minuto’ or ‘menu peuple’) in the feudal epoch or the urban middle classes of the pre- or proto-industrial Italy of the Risorgimento. I do not believe that these slides in the meaning of ‘people’ are accidental or careless. In my opinion they are related on the one hand to Gramsci’s desire to find a language capable of grasping the continuities and parallels in the historical process without breaking this process up, in a mechanical and undialectical way, into discrete phases, each with its own terminology, and on the other to his desire to go beyond a class language and create a language in which alliances are conceived in terms of ‘collective will’ and ‘historical bloc’. These terms, like ‘intellectual’ and ‘hegemony’, are applicable to a great variety of historical and geographical situations. I believe that ‘people’ 10. Vladimir Ilych Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (Moscow: Progress, 1949), p. 37. 11. The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, in Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English edition (Moscow: Progress, 1965), p. 238.

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has a similar function. Hence the apparent sociological indeterminacy of the word ‘people’ can be considered functional to the way Gramsci conceives of the process of revolutionary transformation effected by Marxism as a ‘philosophy of praxis’. In this process a subaltern group (in other words a part of the ‘people’ in the first sense of workers plus peasants) becomes hegemonic and tends to unify under its leadership ‘all of humanity’ (in other words a whole ‘people’ in the second, enlarged, sense of all citizens). After the term ‘national-popular’ was critically ‘liquidated’ by Asor Rosa and others in the mid 1960s it was little used in Italy except to evoke the debates of the late 1940s and 1950s. Even those who disagreed with the terms of the ‘left’ critique of Gramsci seemed to find the concept outmoded and no longer defensible. An indication of the change can be found in Cesare Cases’s paper at the conference held in Cagliari in 1967 for the thirtieth anniversary of Gramsci’s death. Distancing himself both from pro-Gramscian critics like Carlo Salinari and Natalino Sapegno and from anti-Gramscians like Asor Rosa, Cases argued that Gramsci’s whole discussion of a national culture and the role of the intellectuals needed to be shelved, to be historicised as part of the worn-out baggage of the European left of the interwar years. He argued that new categories were needed, categories better suited to a world where culture had become internationalised and massified and intellectuals had become functionaries of cultural industries and apparatuses. Gramsci in Britain In Britain the fortunes of Gramsci’s ‘popular’ were different. In the early 1980s, when Selections from the Prison Notebooks had been in print for a decade, a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher was in power and at the peak of its success (Falklands War in 1982; second general election victory in 1983; defeat of miners’ strike 1984–5) and various left groups inside and outside the Labour Party were starting to explore ways not just of beating it electorally but also of building socialist alternatives to it. Gramsci’s notion of ‘popular’ alliance and the idea of a ‘popular’ politics landed on fertile soil. It was used, notably, in the analysis of Thatcherism by Stuart Hall, Martin Jacques, Andrew Gamble, and others, which developed in a series of articles in the CPGB’s monthly Marxism Today and then in an edited book.12 Applying a Gramsci-inspired notion of alliances, as well as a Gramscian analysis of dynamic and rapidly changing political situations, this analysis 12. The Politics of Thatcherism, ed. by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983). See also the subsequent collection of articles by Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988).

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argued that Thatcher had successfully built popular support for policies that eroded the welfare state and public spending and bolstered the privatisation or part-privatisation of services such as health, education, gas, electricity, water, transport, and telephony. In the face of these radical right popular policies, and the seductive ideological packaging in which they were wrapped (promises of more freedom of choice, a cutting away of bureaucracy, the empowerment of the individual against both the state and ‘bullying’ trades unions), Labour appeared to be disarmed. All it could seem to offer as an alternative was an unreflecting defence of traditional Keynesian policies and nationalised services. It was unable to articulate an equal and opposite popular politics of a progressive kind. The analysis of Thatcherism as popular politics survived Margaret Thatcher herself, who was forced to stand down as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister in November 1990, despite the fact that one of the causes of her undoing was the deep unpopularity of the reform of local government taxation that she had championed. It also survived the two Conservative governments led by her successor, John Major, to become, at least in its general aspects, one of the influences on the internal reforms and policy rethink of the Labour Party that led to the ‘New Labour’ leadership of Tony Blair and the Party’s sweeping election victory in 1997. The New Labour innovation was to secure a cross-class consensus for attacking poverty and defending basic social provision in health and education while keeping income tax low and allowing the continued privatisation of transport, utilities, and telecommunications set in train under Thatcher, as well as the creation of parallel private healthcare and schools. However, the New Labour version of consensus politics had little to do either with a socialist version of the popular as envisaged by Gramsci or with the vision of a progressive popular politics held by Gramsci-influenced theorists such as Hall and Jacques. For Gramsci, who, as we have seen, worked to a considerable extent within a still classical Marxist paradigm, the building of a popular (or national-popular) politics of a socialist kind presupposed that the fundamental agent of hegemony was the working class and that its aim was to overthrow capitalism. The New Labour version of popular politics, on the other hand, involved the building of a consensus for ‘social-market’ politics that preserved all the essential structures of a capitalist economy while providing modernised forms of welfarism. Well before New Labour came to power, however, and even before Margaret Thatcher resigned, the world had started to change in ways that would overtake both Gramsci and neo-Gramscism. In 1989 the first non-Communist governments were elected in Poland and Hungary, the Berlin Wall came down, and revolutions toppled the regimes in Czechoslovakia and Romania. Since then a new world order has arisen: that of post-communism, the new

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American empire, the war on terror, the rise of ‘network society’ and advanced forms of multinational capitalism, together with a proliferation of anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements: Madrid 1994, Seattle 1999, Porto Alegre and Genoa 2001. Many of the latter rejected the existing institutional forms of political parties and trades unions and sought expression in looser, more informal, groupings. The Internet, which in terms of worldwide adoption was still in its infancy in 1989, would come to play a central role in these emergent forms of popular political aggregation. There was, as a consequence of these important global changes, a marked decline of public interest in the legacy of 19th and 20th-century Marxism and therefore also in Gramsci, in Italy as well as in Britain.13 The fact that Gramsci had been one of the intellectual figures of the left least identified with the institutional communism of the Soviet bloc did not help to save him from the tide of generalised neglect that overwhelmed Marxism and communism at this time. Among the few books to have engaged deeply with Gramsci’s ideas in the 1980s in such a way as to salvage him for a post-communist, post-Marxist world was Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, first published in 1985.14 This book had a significant impact in intellectual circles in Britain, as well as in North America, not least because it developed a critique of all Marxism as fatally rooted in economism. Following through consequentially the notion, developed from Gramsci, of alliances between social groups that were not necessarily based on shared economic interest, it used Gramsci to produce a strategy that went beyond Gramsci himself, and beyond traditional ideas of socialism towards ‘popular democracy’. 13. One indicative measure of Gramsci’s declining fortunes in Italy was the reduced size and visibility of the public commemorations in 1991 of the centenary of his birth compared with those of the fiftieth anniversary of his death just a few years earlier in 1987. There were material as well as ideological reasons why the 1991 event was such a low-key affair. In the space of those four years the PCI, of which Gramsci had been a founding member in 1921 and which had remained after his death the most important institutional sponsor of his heritage in Italy, had continued to lose votes and public funding (until 1993 parties in Italy automatically received funding in proportion to their share of the vote). At its twentieth and last congress in February 1991 the PCI had split into a majority social-democratic party, the Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS (later Democratici di Sinistra, DS) and a left minority, Rifondazione Comunista. Whereas in 1987 the PCI had won 26.6% of the votes for the Camera dei Deputati, by 1993 the PDS got 16% and Rifondazione 5.6%. The Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome had been forced to move out of its former premises near Campo de’ Fiori to a cheaper location across the Tiber in Trastevere. The publishing house linked to the party, Editori Riuniti, as well as its newspaper, L’Unità, were in financial crisis. Editions of Gramsci and criticial writings on him were not selling well. 14. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New Left Books, 1985). See also my review, ‘Dethroning the Working Class?’ in Marxism Today, 29, 5 (1985), 43.

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The decline in Gramsci’s public fortunes since the early 1990s has made it possible, however, to review the period before that decade in a new way. From the vantage point of the present, the whole post-1945 period up to 1989 can now appear to have been marked by certain continuities of political language and identity. At the same time, it has also become easier to see how the different appropriations of Gramsci’s writings, in Italy in the 1940s and 50s and in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, were both part of the work of fashioning collective political identities at those respective moments. In Italy, in the early postwar period, from 1947 to the mid 1950s, Gramsci’s texts, and a certain interpretation and promotion of them, played an important part in strengthening the subculture of the PCI and giving the party legitimacy in cementing social alliances in the popular front tradition. They also helped the PCI assert itself, as I have noted, as an intellectual counterweight to the two then dominant intellectual traditions: the idealist philosophy of Benedetto Croce and his followers on the one hand and Catholic social thought on the other. In Britain, although there had been an early phase of reception of Gramsci in the late 1950s and 1960s, through the small anthology of his writings edited by Louis Marks, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, first published in 1957, the main phase of diffusion, both through the publication of his work and through the circulation of discussions and interpretations of it in English, came after 1971, when Selections from the Prison Notebooks appeared, followed by two volumes of his pre-prison writings in 1977 and 1978. In part the different reception of Gramsci in Britain and the different way the notion of the popular was applied was an effect of the greater freedom that was enjoyed there in developing his ideas. There they were not promoted, as they had been in post-war Italy, by a powerful political party as part of its own theoretical legacy but primarily as a body of theory in intellectual circles of the left—in universities and socialist discussion groups, to some extent also in trades unions and Marxist collectives—and more widely in university courses on political and social thought and, notably, from the mid 1970s, in the new cross-disciplinary area of cultural studies. In terms of national politics and the national culture the discussion of Gramsci involved a much more marginal operation: that of developing a critical intellectual Marxist fringe to the left of the conservative, liberal, and social-democratic tendencies that dominated cultural life.15 Despite this difference, the British 15. Geoff Eley, in a wide-ranging discussion, published in 1984, of the reception of Gramsci’s work in English, attributed the shift of attention, towards the end of the 1970s, away from the younger Gramsci of the factory council movement to the imprisoned political leader in part at least to the fact that interest in his work spread at this time out of the

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reception of Gramsci also involved, like the Italian one, the fashioning of a collective political identity: in this case it was part of a wider move to develop a non-economistic Marxism, one that drew at the time also on the work of Louis Althusser, whose key essays were published over twenty years after Gramsci’s death, as part of the destalinisation process of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), but whose influence in Britain came at around the same time as Gramsci’s. This almost simultaneous influence of Gramsci and Althusser—an astute reader of Gramsci but also critical of his alleged ‘humanism’ from the vantage point of a more ‘scientific’ Marxism—was important in inflecting the reception of Gramsci in Britain in a certain direction. The different fortunes of the concept of the ‘popular’ and of alliance strategy in early postwar Italy and in a later period in Britain were indicative of substantial differences and changes between the political cultures of the two countries at two periods several decades apart. In Italy the essence of the concept was ‘the working class and its allies’. The alliance strategy in this version was associated with the Popular Front tradition and with the PCI. Its highpoint was the 1940s and 50s. It was attacked in the 1960s by the Italian far left and its fortunes were never really revived. In Britain in the 1970s and 80s a revamped version of Gramsci’s notion of the popular became influential. In some of its versions (for instance in the workerist wing of the CPGB and in the Socialist Workers Party) it was understood in terms of an old Marxist logic of the fundamental class and its allies, but in others (that of Stuart Hall and the Marxism Today group, and more radically that of Laclau and Mouffe) it involved an expansion of alliances beyond a class basis into an entirely different logic of alliances, based on negotiated common interests and on a recognition of differences. By the late 1990s the residual Marxist elements from Gramsci’s notion of the popular had increasingly withered away, as a result of the international crisis of Marxism and communism, and a post-Marxist model of alliance politics started to flourish. Bibliography Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo: Il populismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, 2nd edn (Turin: Einaudi, 1988). Davidson, Alistair, ‘The Varying Seasons of Gramscian Studies’, Political Studies, 4 (1972), 448–61. sphere of the Marxist left into an intellectual world supported by an academic infrastructure of university departments (in particular sociology, education, politics) and a production of PhD dissertations. See ‘Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-Speaking World 1957–1982’, European History Quarterly, 4 (1984), 441–78.

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Eley, Geoff, ‘Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-Speaking World 1957–1982’, European History Quarterly, 4 (1984), 441–78. Forgacs, David, ‘Gramsci and Marxism in Britain’, New Left Review, 176 (1989), 70–88. Forgacs, David, ‘National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept’, in Formations of Nation and People, ed. by Tony Bennett and others (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 83–98. Forgacs, David, ‘Dethroning the Working Class?’ Marxism Today, 29, 5 (1985), 43. Forgacs, David, ‘Gramsci and Cultural Rationalization’, in European Socialist Realism, ed. by Michael Scriven and Dennis Tate (Oxford: Berg, 1988), pp. 31–45. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, ed. by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. by William Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985). Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). Hall, Stuart and Martin Jacques, ed., The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983). Hall, Stuart, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). Holub, Renate, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992). Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New Left Books, 1985). Lenin, Vladimir Ilych, Collected Works, 4th English edition (Moscow: Progress, 1965). Lenin, Vladimir Ilych, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (Moscow: Progress, 1949). Martin, James, ed., Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 2002). Sanbonmatsu, John, The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy and the Making of a New Political Subject (New York: Monthly Review, 2004). Sechi, Salvatore, ‘Spunti critici sulle “Lettere dal carcere” di Gramsci’, Quaderni piacentini, 29 (1967), 100–26.

Carla Dente Personal Memory / Cultural Memory: Identity and Difference in Scottish-Italian Migrant Theatre Scottishness and Scottish Theatre Scottish national theatre has only recently become an autonomous, real fact of considerable interest in Scottish cultural life at large, whose birth was made possible, as always happens in the framework of culture, by the cooccurrence of external and internal factors. These were mainly the growing success of the Edinburgh theatre festival, every August, with the important corollary of contributing to the formation of a perceptive audience; the internal features, pivoted around a few main aspects pertaining to both the themes and style of the plays, were: a necessary connection with Scotland, a particular style of acting or writing, and a portrayal of certain subject matter made by using a local language. This lucky conjunction manifested itself only in the very last decades of the twentieth century. There are many reasons why it has been impossible to have a national theatre up to then, as pointed out by all those deeply involved with its possible development. The first to discuss the situation were the playwrights, the directors, and all those local authorities committed to the implementation of this aspect of Scottish culture, prompted by a growing drive towards a devolution process aimed at acquiring greater autonomy from the United Kingdom. In the field of culture, any attempt at autonomy should start as a definition of an identity, separated from the English. The ‘Scottish Society of Playwrights’ put the issue into the agenda of its 1977 meeting and some relevant elaborations emerged. According to Tom Gallacher, in the 1978 Conference Report, Scottish public opinion seems to endorse the view that after Shaw there has been almost no tradition of dramatic writing in Scotland. He observed that spectators tend to drastically drop in numbers when new writing is brought to the stage (but I suppose that unfortunately this is almost invariably the case everywhere) and that there was no intelligentsia in the country which could effectively promote the development of local theatre and the process of formation of educated audiences, at a time when the existence of repertory theatres is so precarious. Authors, by the way, have often minimised the significance of their work for the theatre, mainly by describing their job as a hobby. A reason might be, perhaps, that they are narrators, not specifically playwrights, and they endorse the attitude that basically every literary work can be transposed on stage or on screen. On the other hand, it is

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objectively difficult to write exclusively for the theatre since that can guarantee financial self-sufficiency only if the author’s plays are staged in the London West End, with the obvious implications of playing up to the current tastes of English and not Scottish audiences. In the 1970s, the idea of creating positions of ‘writers in residence’ for authors to work at close quarters with theatre companies seemed advantageous since it could assure the durability of commercially and artistically successful plays, making possible both the availability of performable texts, and their modifications in case of long tours and revivals. Other playwrights, like Steven Mac Donald, artistic director of the Lyceum, advocated different projects in order to promote theatre culture in Scotland: a) the creation of a national library of plays; b) the standardisation of a script format for proposing stage presentations, containing all the information relevant to a company (cast, locations, set etc.) to help selecting new plays; but also, conversely, c) the accessibility to playwrights of information about companies and their individual cultural policies, in order to help the approach of prospective authors. I would also mention a difficulty affecting both authors wishing their texts to be performed and scholars wishing to study Scottish theatre at its inception: printing houses have been extremely hesitant to risk their money on theatre texts whose circulation was, by their nature, limited. And thus many potentially interesting play-scripts are unavailable.1 Sic stantibus rebus, it is all the more surprising, however, that in only a few years, by the 1990s, the crop of Scottish plays had already become so rich in terms of new productions and critical studies, and that the same ‘Scottish Society of Playwrights’, discussing in 1998 at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh the subject of ‘Staging the Nation’, came to the conclusion that ‘there was no need to justify the topic [Scottish theatre] as a separate area of study’.2 What has happened in the meantime in Great Britain and elsewhere was a growing debate on the idea of national identity, its epistemological origin and actual orientation in a European dimension where individual national identities are supposed either to melt or to find forms of co-existence. That this was the general feeling is a view shared, back in 1998, by Sara Soncini who, writing on Scottish contemporary theatre, pointed out 1.

2.

It is certainly peculiar that a fairly famous play like Di Mambro’s Tally’s Blood, which is read in schools as part of the national curriculum should be available in school anthologies of texts but was never published as a separate theatre text. The promptbook of the first production is available at the Glasgow Library. Margaret Rose’s introduction to A Theatre that Matters: Twentieth-century Scottish Drama and Theatre, ed. by Valentina Poggi and Margaret Rose (Milan: Unicopli, 2000), p. 10. Also see Scottish Theatre since the Seventies, ed. by Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

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the paradox whereby, while ‘heading towards unification, the European countries, and the smaller ones in particular, feel their national identity is under threat, and Scotland is no exception in this respect’.3 The frequency in the use of ‘stage Scots’ was a powerful means, for example, to distinguish between the language of dominant British drama and marginal Scottish drama. This language stood for difference, not necessarily for a language the spectators would identify as their own; it was perceived, rather, as a vehicle for a specifically Scottish experience, with implicit indications of indigenous delivery. This powerful model was imported, with obvious variations, into ScottishItalian migrant theatre, my particular concern here, whose language is basically English with strong touches of Scottish accent and Italian lexical and syntactical influence. This is another way by which a theatre language becomes a metaphor for the nation, both in her relations with the outside, Englishness, and the inside, ethnic migrant groups. I will expand on this later. While still on the subject of paradoxes, I would like to point to another one: Scottish theatre, though prompted by theatre researchers to investigate the significance and role of national identity in a framework where the need for larger autonomy from Great Britain was becoming sharper at a political level, ended up dealing with a number of themes of wider interest which addressed people of all social classes, both in Scotland and abroad.4 Liz Lockhead’s, Chris Dolan’s, David Greig’s plays, for example, stand as significant cases in point.5 National Identity Of the intense, general debate over the notion of national identity, I would like to pick up what seems to me to make more sense for the case of migrant theatre. National identity is defined as a collective identity which has an origin in the past, and is cultivated in the present in a semantically charged space (characterised by a cluster of distinct shared features—social: such as customs, ethnicity, language; philosophical: such as religion, political organisation; factual: such as land and its borders—symbols: such as flags, etc.— and also by a number of narratives). This collective identity contemplates an 3. 4.

5.

Sara Soncini, ‘Questioning subjectivity in Contemporary Scottish Theatre: Nation, Identity and Difference in Chris Dolan’s Sabina!’, Gramma, 6 (1998), 151–67. Ann Marie Di Mambro, for instance, wrote Tally’s Blood (1990) following a specific request made by Ian Brown, Department of Theatre Studies, University of Edinburgh, then Artistic Director of Traverse Theatre. The play toured the country (Tron Theatre, Glasgow) and was revived in 1993, starting its new tour from Byre Theatre in St. Andrews. See David Greig’s plays Europe (1995), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman he Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999).

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endless future. Its inception has to do with collective knowledge and experience, and thus with memory, as Jan Assmann has demonstrated, a memory which is at first individual, true by convention when it becomes a narrative (the autobiographical pact), then, when transmitted, it creates the conditions to be shared, to become a part of the collective memory, oral or written materials for history, a cultural memory, which is the storehouse where national identity fishes for features making up its shape.6 I would like to follow this itinerary in the episodes that make up the plot of Ann Marie Di Mambro’s Tally’s Blood. The definition of national identity is ineludibly relational, setting up a situation where the group of selves identified as ‘us’ is necessarily confronted with ‘them’, in a dialectic process shifting between inclusion and exclusion. Historians and sociologists tend to endorse the idea that economic, social, and political forces are aspects of reality, which may be argued to have a part in the definition of group identity, while discourse and culture belong to the areas of subjectivity, and thus, according to them, cannot be contemplated in any serious discussions with a rightful claim to be called scientific. In spite of this, the process whereby a national narrative is produced and re-produced is indeed a cultural discursive formation, and for this very reason is necessarily contested as only one of the possible versions, as a dominant, subordinate, or emerging narrative, each mirroring the distinctive features of the group and lending colours to them. It is through the exploration of the relationship between central and marginal cultures, within a small nation ‘with sharp linguistic, historical and cultural particularities’, that a more productive, dialectical cultural construct of nationhood can perhaps be proposed.7 Scottish-Italian Migrant Theatre Scottish theatre output in the 1990s became sufficiently articulate to account for social differences. Second generation migrants coming from different cultural 6.

7.

Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1997). The most recent book by Joe Pieri, The Scots-Italians. Recollections of an Immigrant (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2005), destined to be followed soon by another one on a historical event of even greater relevance to my actual discourse, starts with this sentence, by way of a Prologue: ‘In the writing of this book I have been able to draw on a lifetime of personal experience as an Italian immigrant who arrived in Scotland in the early part of the twentieth century, and whose life mirrored that of many of the immigrants of those and subsequent times.’ (p. 1)—a simple statement of the pragmatic and theoretical reasons lying behind the conventional ‘autobiographical pact’. Soncini, pp. 151–52.

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environments, for example, established the basis for a new awareness about the composition of Scottish society, which started giving a different shape to the otherwise tendentially monolithic idea of Scottishness. Even this conventional concept is originally dialogic in itself, since it represents a modern version of the Clan system, a manufactured, hybrid culture which is made of the myths of Highland romanticism, interwoven with that of Lowland practicality, a mixture suitable to comply with the emergent tourist industry. Sir Walter Scott had a role to play in the formation of this cultural construct pivoted on the transformed perception of the nation from a land of warring barbaric clans to one whose romance and culture were to be found among the urban architecture of the eastern cities, Edinburgh in particular, surrounded by rural lands of natural beauty, located mainly in the central and northern parts of the country, but actually ignoring the nascent industrial Scotland, namely the huge city of Glasgow, which entered the field of culture only more recently. In the twentieth century, Italian migration to Scotland was not concentrated, as in the United States or in Australia, in city districts such as the many ‘Little Italies’ the tourist can find around the world, a kind of culturally extraterritorial neighbourhood with lifestyles and a language of their own. The Italians went to Scotland and spread everywhere in towns, big and small, isolated in all Scottish neighbourhoods. They had generally started as self-employed workers, first as street traders, but with their first savings they had bought their shops, mainly in the ice-cream and fish-and-chips trades. They could thus settle down with their families and live in flats at the back of their shops, obviously as far away as possible from fellow countrymen running the same business. This fact favoured their subjective feelings of integration with the Scots. The Italian migration had also a very peculiar feature: it was a kind of chain migration, where each new person, and later each family, was invited by a compaesano, a fellow originally coming from the same village in Italy, who needed a helping hand in his business and could more safely trust someone who owed his own opportunity and hopes for the future to him than anyone else born to the place he basically did not know. Moreover, back at home, migration of poor unschooled people could not be self-managed and had to be arranged by someone else, generally parsons, who had their own, though limited, connections. This consideration explains why so much Italian immigration to Glasgow, for example, comes curiously from essentially two villages in Italy, Barga, in the hills behind Lucca, and Picinisco, in the countryside around Frosinone. The second generation Scots-Italians were already integrated to the point of speaking the local language and sharing state education with the others, to the extent that some of them could become also writers. Marcella Evaristi, for instance, one of the first authors with a definite Italian origin, wrote Mouth-

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pieces for the St Andrews Crawford Centre for the Arts and it was performed on 21 May 1980 when she was playwright in residence there.8 In this context, Ann Marie Di Mambro started writing for television and the theatre; she wrote a brief monologue, The Letter Box, in 1989 in which a woman beaten by her husband and literally thrown out of home tries to reassure her scared little daughter, talking to her through the hole of the door letter box, to the utter indifference of the neighbours passing by on the landing.9 After this experiment she was prompted by Ian Brown to write about the experience of the Italian community in the country, something which she knew from her own family’s cultural heritage, though she was unwilling to exploit it. Tally’s Blood was produced and went on tour with remarkable success in 1990 and was revived in St Andrews, by the Byre Theatre Company in 2003. The only published edition I could find of this text is inserted in a school series for the use of theatre in education. She then wrote Brothers of Thunder, in 1994, a story dealing with a Catholic priest and a homosexual student. Now she works for famous television serials. From this short survey of her work it is sufficiently clear that her interest lies in the articulation of group identity within the larger system of Scottish society, a problem not exclusively tied to migration. The plot of Tally’s Blood is relatively simple: there are three generations of migrants of Italian origin, the old father of two sons, Massimo and Franco, Massimo’s childless wife Rosinella, whose sister had died in Scotland and left a small daughter to bring up with her help, and a husband who decided to go back home.10 At the outbreak of war, Franco joined the British Army and died leaving Bridget, his Scottish fiancée, helpless and with child, almost compelled to resort to abortion, since she was not accepted by both his and her families, while Massimo was interned in Canada for the war period. The old father died in the sinking of the Arandora Star, while Rosinella and the 8.

I managed to see the promptbook, a typescript on yellow sheets, corrected in ink by an unknown hand. The addition of a speech by Joan before an exit, evidence of proofreading, and some corrections of the conclusion seem to point towards the hypothesis of authorial modifications at rehearsals aimed at harmoniously closing up a musical movement since this pièce is a duet. 9. She is a second generation Scot-Italian, born in 1950 and now living in Hamilton, Glasgow, and has been active in the entertainment business since the 1980s. She works as playwright, but mainly as TV soap opera scriptwriter. She writes about social problems like domestic violence, the dialectics of dominance and subservience between males and females, racial prejudice, or about the Catholic religion, all this very often set in the context of the Italian community in Scotland, which is the environment she knows best. 10. Ann Marie Di Mambro, Tally’s Blood (University of Glasgow: typescript in the special Collection Archives, 1989). All the quotations from the text are taken from this typescript [TB] and will bear the indications of its page numbers.

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little Lucia had their hard lives with the shop. In the aftermath of the war, Lucia developed a strong tie with Hughie, Bridget’s brother, at first with no better chances. In the end, after Lucia’s father had called her back home in order to wed her to a wealthy young man of his village, Rosinella, after realising the devastating effects of her prejudice against mixed marriages, goes back to Italy alone and, organising a second fuitina in the traditional manner of hapless lovers in the South, this time concerning not herself but her niece, as in a fable sets everything right. A member of the first audience in 1990, taking into account the cuts the promptbook had undergone in the rehearsing process, would summarise the play as the story of Lucia and her unhappy love to Hughie Devlin, while a member of the audience of the 2003 production would probably perceive it as Rosinella’s play, perhaps more in-line with the intentions of the original text. In a still unpublished interview, in fact, Di Mambro says that she realised her play to be Rosinella’s only in the theatre—‘Even when she was not in the scene, she was always on the stage. She never left the stage. She always sat on a chair.’11 But then, resorting to an argument of authority to dampen the implicit criticism to her first director, she adds: ‘Liz Lochhead came to see the play [in 2003] and afterwards she told the actors, she much preferred this production. She said: “When I saw it before it was Lucia’s story.”’12 My interest in the story lies, however, in a series of episodes constructed the way television serials are now made—quick flashes of the ideology of the Italian migrants, their life style, Italians back at home, the prejudices of the Scots, the ambiguously guilty silence of the British government which rejects liability for still unacknowledged war episodes even to this day, such as that of the Arandora Star, which I am going to discuss later on, for which no explanation has been given and compensation has not been paid so far. The first ideological attitude Di Mambro effectively constructs on stage is the hostile attitude of Italian migrants towards those aspects of Scottish culture which look different to their traditional habits, considered as sources of reassuring certainties in an environment which marks their difference. At this 11. The allusion is to a private, still unpublished interview Di Mambro gave a few years ago to Tiziana Tanda. The privilege of the access to this material is acknowledged and the author gratefully thanked. 12. Elsewhere in the same interview, Di Mambro: ‘I think it was interesting what you said about Massimo. It’s all heartache in the play. The interpersonal heartache is caused by Rosinella, because of her prejudice. She causes Lucia and Hughie not to be together the way they should be. That’s why Rosinella has to be the one to put it right. She is the one who makes things happen. What she says is important. What she thinks, what she feels is all that matters to her.’ [ibid.].

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stage all the stereotypical judgements are passed, and they have the effect of making interethnic personal relationships difficult to various degrees. One is reminded of the notion of habitus, by which Pierre Bourdieu defines the inherited dispositions to act and think in certain ways which we can certainly modify but not completely overturn.13 Di Mambro, who is very clever at constructing naturally flowing dialogue, introduces the motif of ethnic/cultural prejudice from the start, in an exchange between Rosinella and her young brother in law: Franco: Rosinella: Franco: Rosinella: Franco: Rosinella:

Franco: Rosinella: Franco: Rosinella: Franco: Rosinella:

I told you, Rosinella I’ve got someone. You’re surely no keen on this Scotch girl? What if I am? Then she must be giving you something you can’t get from an Italian girl. I’m telling you, you better watch yourself. You know nothing about Bridget. Now you listen good to me, son. These Scotch girls they’re all the same. They just go out with you for one thing. Because your faither’s got a shop and they think you’ve got money. (indignant) Thanks very much. Alright. Alright. And because you’re tall… Good-looking… You’re good fun to be with … … a good kisser, a good dancer … Aye but that’s because you’re Italian. [TB /11–12]

The language used is invented, it reproduces idiosyncratically incorrect pronunciation, devised to give at one and the same time the colour of the Scottish-English and that of the English loaded with typical Italian mistakes. Sometimes it is the syntactical pattern and sometimes lexical items that give away the origin of the speaker. Very seldom are whole sentences in Italian and this happens when the emotions of the characters are supposed to be extreme. Shortly after the quoted dialogue, a further articulation of the cultural stereotype is represented: Italians are young and warm-blooded and it is alright to play around with Scottish girls ‘so long as you marry your own kind’ [TB /12]. The end of the scene is marked by Franco and Massimo singing a song, with quick rhythm and easy repetitive words, suitable to entertain the little Lucia. The song is ‘Giovinezza’ which was the most famous Fascist hymn celebrating youth, optimism, and self pride, here playfully giving the colour of the period as fixed in the collective memory, without any individual 13. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Le Nord et le Midi’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35 (1980), 21–25.

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political implication, as can be gathered from the explanation of the words Franco gives his girlfriend. Body language confirms the stereotype, adding suggestions for acting, this time centred on the alien perception of some features of the national character, for example in the stage direction reading: Typical volatile fight erupts (possibly some in Italian) with much pointing of fingers and nose to nose contact: Lucia howling in time to it. [TB /20]

A few features of the Italian ‘Latin lover’ archetype are disseminated in the script. Franco, just returned from a trip to Italy, meets Bridget and greets her by a ‘Ciaio bella’ [TB /15, sic], and ‘melting’, as indicated in the stage direction, the girl observes she likes his tan. On the other hand ‘all those lovely girls in Italy’ that seem to have worried Bridget while he was there, are reported by Franco not to be ‘allowed to pass the doorstep’ [ibid.], moreover, ‘if you fancy someone over there you’ve to go the house and sit with the whole family’ [TB /16]. Di Mambro keeps a careful eye on maintaining the balance of typical cultural behaviour, both national and class determined. In the hard life of a Scottish miner’s family, dance is not contemplated: Bridget:

Says lassies just cheapen themselves. Getting all done up to stand in a line to wait for some man to dance them. He says half the time you don’t even know who you’re dancing with. [TB /27]

An effort is made here to dig into a parental attitude that is shared by the two groups, previously described by Franco only from the outside, as it were, in a situation where it was easier to display a mocking attitude. The Scots have their categories for otherness, as well.14 When Hughie is still waiting for Lucia to be allowed to come to his brother’s wedding these comments are passed: Bridget:

(carrying on) … even if she wants to, she’d never get allowed. That’s Mrs Pedreschi for you! Oh Aye, she can shove money in a poke and think she’s doing you a godd turn. I can just hear her –‘Just give that to your brother’—and all the time she’s looking down her nose at you. Typical ‘eye-ties’.

14. Pieri, after reporting of some family uneasiness at his marrying his wife Mary, in The Isle of the Displaced commented in relation to their children’s experience: ’But although I was happy and pleased that they had never been subjected to any of the slights and insults common to me in my youth, I was, I must admit, somewhat surprised. Xenophobia is not the prerogative of any one social group or of any one nation. […]’ (p. 144).

206 Hughie: Bridget:

Carla Dente I’ll not hear a word against the Pedreschis, Bridget. They’ve treated me as one of the family. And that’s where it ends, son, because you’re not […]. [TB /90]

Franco took back from a visit home as a present for his girlfriend a little golden horn to keep as an amulet, which however she cannot wear because she is so poor and has neither a chain nor a bracelet. The reason for the present lies in a cultural tradition, which is explained: ‘In Italy, if you like someone, you buy them gold’ [TB /16]. The scene ends up with his intonation of a famous love song, Parlami d’amore Mariù, still recognised even by people my age, a device which conjugates temporal plausibility internal to the story and effectiveness in relation to the target culture of the Scottish Italian group. In the play forebodings of the imminent outbreak of the war are introduced in a very casual way. This is another focal moment in terms of building an awareness of national identity and in terms of the confrontation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The outbreak of war is prepared in the play by a lot of talking about the sheer expectation of it, and the shared attitude of the Italian migrants that war is something they are not concerned with since, as Rosinella says in the play ‘We are Italian, we just live here. It’s our country’ [TB / 34], and war is thus of no consequence at all. Massimo’s uneasiness at the situation is alluded to in many places. When war breaks out, Massimo sees his fears confirmed: Massimo: Rosinella:

But if Italy is at war with this country – (interrupting) Italians are good for this country. Who else is prepared to work till eleven o’clock every night, eh? You tell me that. And we work for ourselves. It’s no as we take any jobs away from any Scotch people. We stick together, pay our own way stick to the laws. What more do they want? [TB /41]

On the other end, while the play emphasises the positive dispositions of individual Scots to the family of the Italian migrants, at the level of government an attitude of systematic suspicion is embodied by the preparation of the List of Aliens. For the Pedreschis, the outbreak of war is marked by Franco immediately joining the British Army (mainly as an occasion to free himself from the heavy burden of running his father’s shop) to the angry dismay of his family and Bridget. The delicate and effective scene between the two children which follows, establishes a parallel between the adults’ and children’s games, with Hughie miming the flight of an aircraft in attack all around Lucia, who in the end kicks him in the shin, exasperated. They put an end to the game with these words:

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Hughie rubs his shin Hughie: I don’ like this game Lucia: And I don’t like it either. [TB / 42]

The national governments, instead, took a liking to it and the British one, which in all evidence had already compiled the so called List of Aliens, within 24 hours of the declaration of war, ordered all the residents in Great Britain, both foreign or of foreign origin though British born, to be taken prisoner and interned in several camps, from where most of them were to be deported to Canada and Australia, in the fear that they might act as a ‘fifth column’ in case of invasion.15 This has touches of the absurd since no attempt at distinguishing between political refugees from Italy, people born in the country, economic migrants and the very few potentially dangerous people was made and indeed it has been reported that Churchill cut every discussion short in the British War Cabinet saying: ‘Collar the lot.’16 What happened during those first days, however, is part of individual memories, scripted to become part of the Scots-Italians’, still aching, collective memory. Individual memory is responsible for our sense of personal identity, a perception destined to give anyone one’s own sense of continuity through time and (in this particular case in spite of) space. The sense of personal identity, however, is shaped also by the self-fashioning function of those features which are part of the social framework of memory. In other words what is memorable, what is worthy of being remembered by the community is consigned to the collective memory of the social group through oral or written narratives. Members of the group are then capable of ‘remembering’ even what they have not personally experienced. Any theory of culture, then, has to account for the fact that both knowledge of the past in form of recollections (chronicles, memoirs, diary, autobiographies) and the acts of memory by which we select its objects to build up a fictional narrative should be regarded as cultural constructs.17 In the case of Scots-Italians during wartime, what had happened heightened and reinforced their sense of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’, since in addition to the experience of internment their shops had also been ransacked by 15. Joe Pieri comments on this as follows: ‘This so-called “Fifth Column” was simply a fiction invented by Franco to weaken the morale of the [Spanish] Government forces and never existed, but the phrase was taken up internationally, and frequently used in Britain to describe any Fascist and Nazi sympathisers who might rise up and give help to invaders.’ Pieri, The Scots-Italians, p. 88. 16. Ibid. 17. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 46–48. See also Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69, 4 (2000), 127–50, Special Issue, Grounds for Remembering.

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mobs of Scots. Joe Pieri, author of an extremely interesting book of personal recollections in the context of the events occurred in the Italian community in Glasgow, records those days: A muted roar made itself heard from the street below, rising to a crescendo of shouting voices directly under my window. I went over and peered out. A crowd of about a hundred shouting and gesticulating people, pushing in front of them a handcart loaded with stones and bricks, were gathering in front of the shop. ‘There’s a Tally place… do it in!’, came the shout; then to an accompaniment of yells and cheers a barrage of missiles came flying through the air, smashing into the glass frontage of the shop.18

As evidence of the elaboration of the same element in the cultural memory of the community, one generation later an analogous episode is represented in Di Mambro’s play. To Massimo who was clearly worried about Lucia’s and Rosinella’s safety at the approaching mob, the latter exclaims, shocked, ‘Massimo! You don’t think…. surely? They’ll no touch us!’ to which the stage direction follows: Noise of brick bashing against boards: the ‘mob’ outside, banging on the doors and windows, shouting: Get the Tallies! Fascist bastards! Lucia starts to weep, frightened, Rosinella holds her, crouches with her. The level of noise increases: Massimo crouches over them, arms protectively around them: Rosinella trying to shoosh Lucia: Massimo looking around in despair: Rosinella putting a restraining hand on his arm: Get the bastard. Waste the place. Fascist pigs. [TB /50]

When all this is finished the knocking on the door of the police, welcomed by the family under siege, introduces only a pre-organised abuse of power, the arrest for deportation of the head of the family.19 Pieri, going back to those events now comments: An order went out to all police stations in Great Britain that all male Italians between the age of 16 and 70 should be arrested immediately and interned. This order was carried out by the police to the letter and beyond. When the arrests were begun many old men of nearly 80 were caught up in the net, as were some boys as young as 14.20

And about the indiscriminate nature of the arrests, he comments:

18. Joe Pieri, The Isle of the Displaced (Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 1997), p. 14. 19. See Emanuela Rossini and Margaret Rose, Mary e le altre (Ravina, TN: Grafiche Dalpiaz, 2002), the whole scene 2: ‘Laura: Bastardi. Vengono proprio da questa parte. Guarda tutte facce che conosco. Maria: Se almeno arrivasse Giacomo …’ (p. 24). 20. Pieri, p. 88.

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[…] the identities of those who might have constituted a danger to Britain could quickly have been established by a glance at the membership lists of the Casa del Fascio, which must have become available to the police when the premises were taken over immediately at the outbreak of war. Moreover every alien over 16 years of age, male or female, had by law to carry an alien’s identity book where every movement of the persons concerned was duly recorded by the police.21

The suggestion of Churchill’s suspicion about left wing refugees’ attitudes in the aftermath of the war seems justified. Most of the prisoners were deported to Canada or Australia on four prison ships and this was supposed to be done according to the rules of the Geneva Convention for POWs which, for civilian internees, specifies they must be protected from bodily harm and must not be transported across active war zones. The Arandora Star was torpedoed in the U-Boot infested North Atlantic on 2 July 1940; she had a certified cargo capacity of 1673 men. The Government reported the human cargo consisted of 743 Italian internees, 479 German-Jewish refugees, and 86 German POWs, but the exact figures are not known, due to the way in which those ships were loaded.22 U-Boot 47 Commander Gunther Prien, the same who had violated Scapa Flow in the Orkneys in 1939, was coming back from a tour of duty in the ocean with his last torpedo when he noted the Arandora Star on her evasive course, a British ship with some armaments, without any Red Cross sign, and since he was competent, skilled, and lucky he sank the Arandora Star, which took 720 men of her passengers and crew to the bottom of the sea. Di Mambro writes a suggestive, emotionally loaded monologue for Massimo, visible in candlelight, which takes the tale and experience of internment and the loss of his father in the shipwreck into the play. This scene was cut in the first production, but restored in the second. The danger of excessive sentimentality, however, is avoided by the use of frequent encased reported speeches, thanks to Di Mambro’s effective handling of dialogue. He calls ‘Stasio Pedreschi’ and I goes forward with my faither but the soldier says to me, ‘Wait till you’re called.’ I says ’But, that’s my faither’—he says ‘Stand back, wait till you’re called’. He tries to push my faither into the line but my faither is holding on to my arm. I can still feel his nails digging into me, he was holding on that tight. […] He was that wee looking. I had to wrench his hand off my arm. ‘You see and behave yourself, auld yin’ I says ‘and watch that tongue of yours’ He says to me, ‘You alright for money, son?’ Next thing I know they’re marching them out and my name still hasn’t been called. […]

21. Ibid., pp. 88–89. 22. For this I am indebted to Joe Pieri’s figures and information in his book The ScotsItalians, already mentioned.

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Lucia gets another candle: gets to her feet and hands it to Massimo and goes: Arandora Star. Non vi scorderemo mai. He puts the candle on the stand. We will never forget you. [TB /58–59, missing from the promptbook]

Facts such as the storming questioning of Joseph Kennedy, American Ambassador to the British Government at the time, the rejection of the repeated requests for the compensation or war pensions by the now few living survivors of the Arandora Star and by the heirs of the other victims, illustrates the continuing reticence of the British government on this issue, a matter that leaves many open wounds among the Italian community.23 Another ideological motif which dampens the sharpness of the conflicting nationalities is the feeling of double displacement expressed by the migrants. Back in a quite primitive Italian country village where she has been called back by her father, Lucia cannot stand insects, she cannot hand-wash properly the family weekly washing in the river, she is not accustomed to working in the fields, and lastly she is not willing to marry for a position, whomever her lazy and opportunistic father has decided she should marry. The migrant is never again at home, neither here nor there. Migrant Identities Today Six Months Here, Six Months there is the title of a radio play by Margaret Rose, an Englishwoman who has spent the largest part of her life in Italy, well integrated into the academic world, and by Emanuela Rossini, a Swiss researcher of Trentino emigration to Scotland.24 Maggie now has connections with the theatre environment in Scotland and spends half of her time there, formally a ‘displaced person’, but well at ease everywhere. The play follows the story of a Glaswegian family of Scots Italians, the Collinis, who owned there the first, most famous gelateria in town. It was a family divided by emigration, half in Scotland and half in Larsino, whose parallel experiences during the war and after are represented; the play also investigates the process of progressive integration in their changing societies, a process pivoted exclusively on women’s roles as vehicles for the transmission of recollections, values, fragments of languages to the next generation. The play focuses 23. See the story of Giuseppe Delgrosso and his family in Alfio Bernabei, ‘A gold watch is missing’, in Italian Scottish Identities and Connections, Notebooks of the Italian Cultural Institute, 15 (Edinburgh, n.d), pp. 53–59; and ‘A song about the Arandora Star’, ibid., pp. 61–65, 66, 67. 24. Emanuela Rossini and Margaret Rose, Mary e le altre (Ravina, TN: Grafiche Dalpiaz, 2002).

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on cultural stereotypes as well as on memories of war events, which were equally hard in the two different contexts, for all of them. In Scotland the selection of events signals as memorable those we have already discussed in the context of Di Mambro’s play, while in Italy an effective parallel is established with the atmosphere of siege and danger experienced during the occupation of the northern part of the country by the Germans. The points the play makes are particularly prominent for the exploration of the issue of identity through four successive generations of women. Certainly, events and the representation of events such as the ones addressed by Di Mambro, Rossini, and Rose, and by Pieri shed an interesting light on the perceptions of nationhood construction and on the processes by which people are included in, or excluded from, nation-state membership. The notion of the articulation of difference as a ground for integration is a relevant aspect here, as well as the awareness that the notion of integration is a label frequently used to maintain power. The fact that Di Mambro and the others show an interest in all this today shows that this issue has become all the more relevant at this stage of the evolution of the idea of European Union. Bourdieu’s authoritative opinion, for example, however arguable, is that a European shared identity is to be discussed and realised on the grounds of an articulation of national differences.25 Di Mambro seems to work in this track in her play, since she has uncovered the historical and social conditions of the otherness distinguishing Italian and Scots, she has realised on stage a strategy of harmonisation and effective integration with the change of her main character, former champion of separation, into an active instrument of cultural and practical mediation. John McGrath, a true-blue Scot, on the same issue endorses a view that in Europe there will be one culture alongside with national and local cultures.26 The history of Italian emigration, perhaps, would help studying how the importance of such memories shifts when, from a place of emigration, Italy is now changing into a place of immigration—and a multisided one at that, as even Maggie Rose’s case shows. However, in the actual situation of resurgent nationalism, often exacerbated by massive illegal immigration, of the rise of new forms of racism and social discrimination, a discussion of the role of the perceptions of migration in the past seems to me important as a way to conceptualise the formation of modern subjectivities and the actual experience of migration nowadays, without dangerous representations of a hierarchy of nations and cultures, if history has to teach a lesson at all. 25. Bourdieu, ‘Le Nord et le Midi’. 26. See John McGrath’s interview in Stevenson and Wallace, pp. 149–63.

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Bibliography Assmann, Jan, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1997). Bernabei, Alfio, ‘A song about the Arandora Star’, in Italian Scottish Identities and Connections with a Case Study on Trentino, ed. by Margaret Rose and Emanuela Rossini, Notebooks of the Italian Cultural Institute, 15 (Edinburgh: Queen Margaret University College, 2000), pp. 61–65. Bernabei, Alfio, ‘A gold watch is missing’, in Italian Scottish Identities and Connections with a Case Study on Trentino, ed. by Margaret Rose and Emanuela Rossini, Notebooks of the Italian Cultural Institute, 15 (Edinburgh: Queen Margaret University College, 2000), pp. 53–59. Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Le Nord et le Midi’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35 (1980), 21–25. Cavecchi, Mariacristina, Margaret Rose, and Sara Soncini, eds., Caledonia Dreaming: La nuova drammaturgia scozzese (Milano: Oedipus, 2001). Di Mambro, Ann Marie, Tally’s Blood: A Playscript for Higher Drama (Glasgow: Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2002). Di Mambro, Ann Marie, Tally’s Blood (University of Glasgow: typescript in the special Collection Archives, 1989); translated into Italian as Sangue italiano, in Caledonia Dreaming: La nuova drammaturgia scozzese, ed. by Mariacristina Cavecchi, Margaret Rose, and Sara Soncini (Milano: Oedipus, 2001). Greig, David, Europe (London: Methuen, 1995). Greig, David, The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (London: Methuen, 1999). Klein, Kerwin Lee, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69, 4 (2000), Special Issue Grounds for Remembering, 127–50. Pieri, Joe, The Isle of the Displaced (Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 1997). Pieri, Joe, The Scots-Italians: Recollections of an Immigrant (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2005). Poggi, Valentina and Margaret Rose, eds., A Theatre That Matters: Twentieth-century Scottish Drama and Theatre (Milan: Unicopli, 2000). Rossini, Emanuela and Margaret Rose, Mary e le altre (Ravina, TN: Grafiche Dalpiaz, 2002). Soncini, Sara, ‘Questioning Subjectivity in Contemporary Scottish Theatre: Nation, Identity and Difference in Chris Dolan’s Sabina!’, Gramma, 6 (1998), pp. 151–67. Stevenson, Randall and Gavin Wallace, eds., Scottish Theatre since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

5. Contemporary Mediations

Claudio Visentin The Theatre of the World: British-Italian Identities on the Tourism Stage Who is a traveller, who is a tourist? In this essay, I will use both terms without pretending to draw a clear distinction between them. As a matter of fact, in most cases it is difficult to distinguish a ‘traveller’ from a ‘tourist’; this distinction is often little more than a snobbish pose (‘I’m a traveller, you are a tourist’).1 The same person can at different times perform the roles of the traveller and of the tourist respectively. We can be a traveller when we adopt a more independent, flexible, and open idea of travel while tourism is more protective, predictable, and social: as tourists we follow given itineraries, interacting more or less happily with tourism industry, and, of course, with other tourists. During our holidays, we have energy and free time (we wait in airports and hotel bars, queue in lines for tickets, relax on the beach), and like amateur sociologists we devote much of it to observing and commenting on other tourists (‘Did you see that British couple?’ ‘Those Italians were really noisy…’). Should we go so far as to say that the other tourists are the main tourist attraction? It seems we spend a considerable time ignoring them, distancing ourselves from them, mocking them, admiring them, and emulating them, always trying to redefine our position within the mobile hierarchies of the tourist world, within the classificatory system of tourist, anti-tourist, and post-tourist.2 What are travellers really looking for? This touches upon a complex point. We have long presumed that travellers are deeply interested in the places they visit; that they want to be involved in—and accepted by—the local community, to be part of it, and to understand it. This may be true sometimes, but in most cases—and especially in those of British travellers in Italy—we may suppose that what they were looking for was simply freedom: leaving their own society and all its encumbrances, ties, and obligations, without entering into a new one. Travel offered them the unique opportunity to inhabit a free, empty land, a place in-between, where it was easy to choose a new identity or no identity at all. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: 1. 2.

See Jean-Didier Urbain, L’Idiot du voyage: Histoires de touristes (Paris: Plon, 1991). See Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 260–67.

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It’s sublime This perfect solitude of foreign lands! To be, as if you had not been till then, And were then, simply what you chose to be.3

It is the Theatre of the World: Tourism, as a massive contemporary phenomenon, plays a crucial role in creating, changing, and disseminating images of peoples and countries. From this point of view, the relation between Great Britain and Italy is of special importance because the British ‘invented’ tourism and Italy was for centuries (and especially in the 19th century) their favourite destination, at least until the 1860s when the French Riviera became more fashionable. Italy was the playground where they tried out their new role of tourists. Focussing on this interaction between Italian hosts and British guests and analysing the images and the stereotypes involved in such a confrontation of cultures, we should notice that it was not an equal, bilateral relation. There had always been only few Italian tourists in Great Britain, the typical Italian role being more likely that of the poor immigrant: there is an imbalance in the North-South relationship which has been performed over and over again in the contemporary tourism world. This interaction and the roles arising from it have endured in different forms for centuries, and even if we are more interested in the last phase—i.e. tourism—we should not forget the past and its legacy. British travellers have always been fascinated by Italy and the Mediterranean Sea, and if an Italian and a Mediterranean identity exist (the latter being, of course, much more questionable than the former), much is to be credited to British travellers.4 Obviously, everything started with the Grand Tour. We may say that in the Grand Tour era only, Italy was the true centre of British travel experience abroad. Later, since the end of the 18th century, Italy was only part of a wider Mediterranean experience, albeit possibly the most significant one. It is commonly accepted that the Grand Tour, in its proper meaning, ended with the Napoleonic wars that interrupted travels to Europe for a quarter of a century, even if some of the Grand Tour spirit can be found in the 19th century and in later epochs as well. The influence of the Grand Tour on later visitors to Italy was a conspicuous one in different fields: for instance, it shows in the choice of itineraries and shaped the visual experience (thanks to famous 3. 4.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. by Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), VII, 1193–96. See John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Paul Fussell, Abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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painters, tourists were already familiar with Italian landscapes even before they saw them with their own eyes). In the 1830s, a new subject entered the stage: the tourist. Following Laurent Tissot’s clear-cut historical view, tourism was promoted by three new technological and social factors: guidebooks (clearly indicating where to go), the transport revolution (travel opportunities for the masses), and travel agencies (offering tourism as a product).5 Following the decline of the Grand Tour’s travel philosophy as expressed by Francis Bacon, tourism opened up new forms of visiting Italy. The number of tourists grew every year thanks to rising incomes and cheap travel opportunities.6 In the 19th century, as most of the travellers were still following the routes of their famous predecessors, they seemed to appear in masses as they moved along a common itinerary: fall in Florence, Christmas in Rome, spring in Naples, and back in Rome for Easter. The peak was reached around 1910 with the belle époque in full swing: in a period which is considered similar to the present era of globalisation in many ways, international tourism flourished thanks to peace, freedom of movement (no passports were needed!), and stable exchange rates. In this framework, travel agencies proposed Italy as a product, as something one could buy and consume. In 1863, Thomas Cook crossed the Alps; he then toured Northern Italy’s main cities, reached Florence, and came back via Leghorn and Genoa. In 1872, Cook opened his first branch office on Italian soil and in 1886 his son John Mason bought the Vesuvius Funicular Railway.7 Despite all his success in the second half of the 19th century, Thomas Cook, who ‘invented’ the package tour, still had to defend his clients against those who considered themselves as true travellers and who complained about ‘Cookies’, ‘Cook hordes’, or the ‘Cook Circus’. We now believe that in that period tourists were far from being too many, hundreds rather than thousands, but their presence had a symbolic rather than a concrete meaning: Heaven’s doors were open to everybody. The tragedy of World War I and the difficult postwar years interrupted this process for a while. Until the end of World War II, Italy and the Mediterranean were out of reach for the lower middle and working classes and remained the preserve of the happy few, the wealthy and the intellectuals. From the 1950s onwards, however, nothing could stop the enormous energy of

5. 6. 7.

Development of a Tourist Industry in the 19th and 20th Century, ed. by Laurent Tissot (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2003). Francis Bacon, ‘Of Travel’, in Essays, ed. by Ernest Rhys (London: Everyman, 1928), pp. 12–14. Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991).

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developing mass tourism. Thanks to charter flights, members of the working classes from many north-European countries discovered seaside holidays at the Mediterranean beach. The ‘South’ stood in rather for a form of holidaymaking connoted with the four ‘s’ of tourism—sun, sea, sand, and sex—than for a specific destination with a clearly defined image. This experience only partially affected Italy, as Spain and later Greece, were preferred for such leisure holidays. All this explains why we can assume that for a long period the experience of Italy was structured along permanent (or at least similar) lines. What about the visions of Italy? First of all, we should always remember that Italy is not an idea but first and foremost an experience: of art and history, of everyday life, of the mild climate, of the sunny landscape. ‘Avez vous remarqué que le soleil déteste la pensée?’, Oscar Wilde asked André Gide in Algeria in 1895.8 Besides, conditions for a profitable cultural encounter were not always the best. The difference of language apart, contacts with local people were often reduced to the minimum because British travellers used to stay in big, international hotels—in the 19th century, servants were even imported from Great Britain. The British had their own churches, special shops, and even their own cemeteries, and it was more than just a joke when William Makepeace Thackeray said in 1854 that while in Rome he had never met any Italians.9 Apart from the landscape and the climate, the Italians were widely appreciated by British travellers, especially because they posed no real threat in terms of the class conflicts considered so dangerous in Great Britain. Of course, the British were biased, too; in Italy, they saw political and moral decadence at work and believed they witnessed the decay of culture. In 1846, Elizabeth Barrett Browning complained that in Italy only memories survived and nothing else, and in 1861—at the end of Giuseppe Verdi’s great decade, when he produced most of his masterpieces—George Henry Lewes asserted that there was no good music in Italy at all.10 Perhaps the biggest problem was that British travellers had a limited interest in modern Italy, so similar to all that they had left behind at home. The British did much to help the Italian Risorgimento but later regretted the birth of a modern Italy that, in many ways, was the natural result of it. They studied the present to understand the

Claude Martin, André Gide par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 89. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. by Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), III, pp. 333, 339, 351. 10. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. by Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols (London: Smith and Elder, 1897), I, p. 310; The Letters of George Eliot, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–56 and 1978), III, p. 419.

8. 9.

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past, and not vice versa. The past was always better compared to the present: ‘Go to Italy before it’s too late’ is the most recurrent suggestion we find in travel guides to Italy. Thus, there have been always more travellers coming to Italy, but the effects of these travels are questionable. Considering the situation at the end of this long historical period, we may doubt whether tourism promotes a better understanding among peoples. We may even suppose that tourism reinforces stereotypes rather than refutes them (‘we have been there, we saw it with our own eyes…’). Considering the vast masses of British tourists who have visited Italy in the past two centuries, I suspect that only few of them changed their views about Italy after having been there. Faced with a different national group, their Britishness was reinforced, not diluted: it was never as strong as when they ventured abroad. Most of them found exactly what they were looking for instead of discovering new hidden sides of Italian identity. This does not imply that their travels were useless, but perhaps they learnt more about themselves than about Italy. This long tradition may be changing today thanks to a changed attitude of contemporary tourists—or shall we say ‘post-tourists’? For the first time, I believe, the leading group of trend-setters shows a deeper interest in becoming involved with local communities, pretending in a time of globalisation that to be ‘local’ is much more fashionable than reaffirming the stereotypical differences of national identities. They prefer individual travel and try to avoid the company of compatriots. Pressed out by new masses of tourists, they move further and further into Italian territories and life. Famous international tourist cities like Florence or Rome are of course not good enough for this purpose and less known destinations have become a much more favourable playground: Tuscany again, but Siena or Lucca instead of Florence or Pisa. In addition, British elite tourists ‘discover’ new Italian regions (e.g. Marche and Puglia) where they buy old houses in order to restore them, strictly following local traditions and styles. In the end, it seems that the special relationship between British travellers and Italy has been only very partially shaped by real events. The AngloItalian relation seems to be staged over and over again on the stage of tourism where each player performs a different role, creating and fulfilling images of different countries and peoples. It comes as no surprise that after this long and ever-changing Anglo-Italian relation one of the leading British guidebooks to Italy comes to the conclusion that ‘of all European countries, Italy is perhaps the hardest to classify’.11

11. Ros Belford and others, The Rough Guide to Italy (London: Rough Guides, 1999), p. xii.

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Bibliography Bacon, Francis, ‘Of Travel’, in Essays, ed. by Ernest Rhys (London: Everyman, 1928), pp. 12–14. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, Aurora Leigh, ed. by Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Belford, Ros and others, The Rough Guide to Italy (London: Rough Guides, 1999). Brendon, Piers, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991). Fussell, Paul, Abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Haight, Gordon S., ed., The Letters of George Eliot, 7 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–56 and 1978). Kenyon, Frederic G., ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols (London: Smith and Elder, 1897). Löfgren, Orvar, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Martin, Claude, André Gide par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1963). Pemble, John, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Ray, Gordon N., ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 4 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946). Tissot, Laurent, ed., Development of a Tourist Industry in the 19th and 20th Century (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2003). Urbain, Jean-Didier, L’Idiot du voyage: Histoires de touristes (Paris: Plon, 1991).

Judith Munat Bias and Stereotypes in the Media: The Performance of British and Italian National Identities On an Italian radio broadcast (Radio Three Prima Pagina), a listener called in one morning in June 2005 and remarked that he was tired of Italians being known abroad above all for ‘mafia e spaghetti’. While this is perhaps a slight exaggeration, it does call our attention to the fact that national character is often present in the public consciousness in the form of stereotypes. Naturally, there exist other, more positive stereotypes of Italians, such as that of artists or lovers of opera, or even the somewhat tired cliché of the Latin lover. But the point I wish to make is that national identities are frequently seen through the somewhat distorted lens of stereotypes. Naturally, this is equally true for the British, who are generally depicted with a series of clichés, such as the phlegmatic Brit or the excessively polite Englishman. These stereotypes are circulated via the media, as we shall see in the present study, but they also (re)surface in the form of jokes. As a case in point, I offer the following, which is neither new nor original, but a classic example of numerous rather stale European stereotypes: Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and it is all organised by the Italians.

Limiting our attention to Italian and British national character, it is interesting to note that they are each represented here as both positive and negative stereotypes: the British reputedly being dreadful cooks but kind police officers, while the Italians bear the banner of Latin lovers with zero organisational ability. Similar stereotypes emerged in an informal preliminary survey I conducted among colleagues and friends: the characteristics that the Italians most often associated with the British were, somewhat predictably, those of a polite, punctual, and phlegmatic population with an excellent sense of humour. Equally predictable were the British impressions of Italians, who were seen to be voracious consumers of pasta, eternally late to appointments, but displaying warm spontaneity. Such simplistic and naïve over-generalisations may give rise to mirth, but it is distressing to discover that many of them are firmly embedded in the media and that they are often warmed over and served up in news articles that we would expect to provide a neutral and unbiased view of the world.

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In this study I shall briefly consider how such stereotypes come to exist in the first place and what, if any, truth they hold. Principally, however, I wish to examine the presence of such entrenched stereotypes in the British and Italian national press coverage, to illuminate the way in which the media ‘perform’ national identity. Stereotypes as Group Generalisations Let me begin with a definition. The Merriam Webster online dictionary defines stereotype as follows: something conforming to a fixed or general pattern; especially: a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment.1

This is the sense that is pertinent to the discussion at hand and it can be read as a metaphorical extension of the original meaning of the word, which was that of a metal plate for printing, cast from a mould. Other more detailed definitions taken from an Internet site are: 1) a simplified and fixed image of all members of a culture or group (based on race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, national origins) 2) generalisations about people that are based on limited, sometimes inaccurate, information (from such sources as television, cartoons or comic books, minimal contact with one or more members of the group, second-hand information) 3) initial predictions about strangers based on incomplete information about their culture, race, religion or ethnicity 4) a single statement or attitude about a group of people that does not recognize the complex, multidimensional nature of human beings 5) broad categories about people that fail to differentiate among individuals, peoples and societies.2

The foregoing provide a fairly accurate picture of the nature of stereotype as a generalisation based on information received primarily through cultural mediators, rarely based on personal experience or direct observation. Some individual trait or characteristic is identified and then exaggerated and indiscriminately applied to an entire group, without considering group heterogeneity. Subsequently these ‘nutshell’ descriptions are perpetrated through stale jokes such as the one I have presented above, or through television se1. 2.

http://209.161.33.50/dictionary (accessed 23 February 2007). http://www.members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/stereo2.htm (accessed 23 February 2007).

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rials, comics, films, or the press. The main problem is that such stereotyping is notoriously resistant to change and may lead to unfair discrimination of subordinate groups. A stereotype is thus a simplistic generalisation that we fall back on when we are unable or unwilling to engage in objective critical thinking. Stereotypes are the lazy way out, relying on standardised images or mental representations without questioning the presuppositions on which they are based. Even more disturbing, they are often a reflection of widely-held biases or prejudices among the population at large. In a recent article, Thomas Kielinger openly challenged the national stereotypes adopted by the press, claiming that such commonly-held views tend to falsify reality and prohibit us from seeing a society or a population as it really is. His article contains a sharp criticism of prevailing British and German national stereotypes: Great Britain, too, is viewed in the context of some totally misconceived stereotypes: a quaintly ancient land with lots of funny traditions, funny hats and funny costumes […], afternoon tea and bowler-hats, Miss Marple and How-D’you Do […]. In real life, Britain is racing ahead to overtake most of its European rivals in economic growth, employment and gross national income. I even suspect that British people walk twice as fast as their German counterparts. They speak twice as fast too. And they work twice as hard again as the Germans. […] When you think about it, very little of our clichés about national character can stand up to closer scrutiny.3

In the study that follows I shall be examining a small corpus of press articles with the aim of verifying whether, and to what extent, the media fall victim to such facile stereotypes. Perhaps not surprisingly, I came up with a number of explicit stereotypes, in addition to a variety of more subtle, implicit stereotypes which can only be ferreted out by an attentive study of the topics which the media consider to be newsworthy and by conducting an accurate analysis of discourse structure. Stereotypes in the British and Italian Press My total corpus consisted of 100 articles, 50 each from the British and the Italian press, collected over a period of 15 months, from the beginning of 2005 to March 2006. They present news, cultural topics and comments regarding the other nation and, given the chronological period in question, covered both the British general elections of 2005 and the Italian electoral campaign of 2006. They were drawn from the British daily broadsheets (The 3.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4263755.stm (accessed 23 February 2007).

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Observer, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent), the weekly Economist, and from the Italian dailies (La Repubblica, Il Manifesto, Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa) and the weekly Espresso. The articles were chosen somewhat at random among foreign news coverage, culture, travel, and entertainment, including the occasional editorial comment. I chose not to include sports events, in that I was interested in cataloguing the variety of different topics which are considered to be newsworthy, and thus preferred to avoid a concentration on any specific area.4 While a variety of explicit stereotypes are easily identifiable in these texts, the uncritical reader may not be equally adept at recognising the more insidious covert stereotypes that are hidden between the lines. I believe these can be identified in the type of news items that are published, in which we can recognise underlying allusions to national character. In the British press I came upon one critical comment of the way in which the media views Italy through the distorted lens of a national stereotype: Nor is it appropriate to buy into the national stereotyping which one hears so much of in northern Europe: ‘What do you expect of the Italians? A lovely people, but not much idea of democracy. First they had Mussolini and now they’ve got Berlusconi.’ Such a statement does no justice at all to nearly half of the Italian population […]. (The Observer)

But, despite this critique of the media’s (in this case the culprit is the British press) tendency to deal in national stereotypes, a variety of explicit stereotypes of Italy and the Italians surfaced in the British articles, which undoubtedly reflect a lack of critical thinking on the part of the journalists: Italy’s weakness for simply-drawn, boldly assertive heroes […] This intensely political, back-biting [Venetian] society […] In Italy it is hard to eat a truly awful meal […] Italians, whose notoriously parochial approach to cuisine […] The classic knockabout Italian style [of political debate] […] Italy’s persistent post-war malaise of weak, fleeting wrangling, coalitions […]

Among the above we might observe that there is only one example of a positive stereotype, that relating to food in Italy, but this is not any more valid across the nation as a whole than the other grossly simplistic views of Italy as a back-biting, querulous, and politically unstable nation. However, the Italian press was equally guilty of dealing in national stereotypes, presenting the British as somewhat insular and phlegmatic lovers 4.

For sports events see Anthony King’s essay on football in this volume.

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of animals. In certain cases, the journalist has employed English loanwords in order to better express the national trait being highlighted: In un paese amante degli animali come la Gran Bretagna […] […] la proverbiale disaffezione degli splendidi isolati isolani nei confronti del Continente […] Quanta vecchia Inghilterra, sincera e quasi ingenua, c’è […] […] l’inflessibile ostinazione brittanica […] Questo paese, solitamente poco incline a rivelare in pubblico le proprie emozioni […] dopo secoli gli inglesi hanno iniziato a interessarsi al cibo che mangiano ‘understatement’ inglese, la caratteristica nazionale di sminuire, attenuare, ridurre […] con fare British, non hanno detto che Berlusconi è pazzo, ma solo ‘disperato’.

It is evident from the above sampling that the media of both nations tends to deal in somewhat trite and uncritical national stereotypes, often expressing negative evaluations; more significantly, these stale clichés are all gross generalisations that border on caricature. Below and beyond these explicit stereotypes, however, lie a variety of implicit aspersions tossed about between the two nations which only become evident when we look more closely at the choice of news items. Following is a general breakdown of the principal topics dealt with in my corpus of articles.5 British press on Italy

Italian press on Great Britain

Politics and politicians (of which 5 on scandals)

27

British-Ital. connections

4

Ital.-British connections

5

Economy and the euro

4

Royal family

5

Cultural topics Satire and censorship in the Italian media

14 3

Politics and politicians (of which 10 on electoral campaign)

Culture and traditions Events

26

13 2

We can see that there is a fairly even balance in the media of both nations as regards general themes that are considered as newsworthy. Newsworthiness according to Roger Fowler is determined in editorial practice by the more or less conscious application of a set of complex criteria.6 The press ultimately tends to focus on aspects of the other culture that

5. 6.

Some articles touch upon more than one topic area, so they have been counted in two or even three categories. Roger Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 13.

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are considered to be interesting or entertaining for its readers. Consequently, the Italian news in the English press confirms a variety of what may be seen as amusing Italian stereotypes or which reconfirm pre-existing or longstanding biases (e.g. political scandals and in-fighting, or the fascist shadow hanging over Italy from World War II). In addition, prior to the 2006 elections, there were numerous articles which reported Berlusconi’s antics, often stressing the comic side of his personality rather than presenting a serious discussion of election issues. He seems to symbolise for the British press the more colourful and chaotic aspect of Italian politics. Fully ten percent of the English articles dealt with Italian political scandals, and other recurring topics included the Italian economy (always on the edge of a nervous breakdown) and issues of censorship in the national media. Similarly, the Italian press focuses on those aspects of British society which reinforce existing stereotypes of the English, not always totally objective or representative of the population as a whole. However, it must be noted that the British national elections of 2005 received significantly more serious media coverage in Italy, fully 20% of the total number of articles in my corpus, which would seem to indicate a greater interest in British electoral issues on the part of the Italian public than the British coverage of the Italian elections a year later. The only other runner-up in terms of number of articles in the Italian press (10% of the total) was, as might be expected, the royal family.7 One-off events in Britain that were covered in the Italian newspapers were Elton John’s wedding ceremony and a dramatic explosion which occurred in an oil deposit north of London. If we look more closely at the topics of the articles I have classified as ‘cultural’ in the two sub-corpora, they turn out to be surprisingly similar: British press

7.

Italian press

Books

2

Books

Historical past

2

Historical past

2 1

Food

2

Food

1

Music

2

London

3

Church and the Vatican

1

Manchester

1

Family (il Nonno)

1

Betting (horse races)

1

Travel

1

Public health

1

Cocaine use

1

EU flag

1

Italian lottery

1

(Literary) brand names

1

Government clerk

1

Savile Row tailors

1

In Fowler’s words, the newspapers are interested in royalty ‘because the Royals symbolize hierarchy and privilege’, and this ultimately serves the interests of capitalism (p. 20).

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While the interest of the British press in Italian history seems to concentrate on Italy’s fascist past, the Italian press carries a reminder of the darker side of England with a BBC survey on the ten most treacherous figures in British history, from Beckett to Jack the Ripper. Food is of interest to both populations, but each country tends to focus on its own role as culinary star in the other nation, the British highlighting a Yorkshire chef’s contribution to northern Italian cuisine, while the Italian media sings the praises of Italian restaurants in England. Italian opera (as well as the scandals within La Scala Opera company) is a focus of interest for the British, while the cultural interests of the Italian press centre on the more touristic side of Great Britain, the attractions of London and Manchester. In the British media, articles on the Vatican supplant Italian coverage of the royal family (one wonders whether the Vatican is seen as Italy’s royalty), and the enduring (but perhaps somewhat outmoded) stereotype of the traditional Italian family is perpetuated in the British press with the story of an elderly Italian gentleman (now deceased) who advertised for a post as live-in ‘grandfather’ and who was, in fact, taken in by a family (though he later turned out to be a fraud). The articles on cocaine use in Italy and the financial ruin of families in the thrall of the lottery (though balanced by an Italian article on the English addiction to betting on the races) would seem to break with this more traditional view of Italy, but the report on the sacking of a Roman government clerk after being seen in a gay bar perhaps represents a British view of Italy as displaying a somewhat retrograde intolerance toward sexual diversity. The Italian press instead undermines the myth of the excellent British public health system with its article on ‘Médicins du Monde’, who have moved in to East London to provide medical care for the underprivileged immigrants. However, it reconfirms the stereotypes of the anti-European Brit with an article on public opposition to Blair’s decision to grant equal status to the EU flag and the Union Jack. The somewhat anecdotal report on the exploitation of traditional English literary figures of the past in contemporary brand names on the one hand calls to mind literary values of old Britain while on the other desecrates them. I would now like to look more closely at the four or five parallel articles which dealt with British-Italian or Italian-British connections. Attention and critical attitude seem to be fairly equally distributed in the media of the two nations regarding Berlusconi’s ‘gifts’ (wristwatches and jewellery) to the Blairs, and regarding Berlusconi’s suspected bribe to one of his British lawyers, Mr Mills, husband of a Blair minister, to buy his silence in a legal proceeding against Berlusconi.

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British press

Italian press

Berlusconi’s payment to Mills

2

Berlusconi’s payment to Mills

3

Berlusconi’s gifts to Blairs

1

Berlusconi’s gifts to Blairs

1

British terrorist held in Rome

1

Olympics in London

1

If we examine the reporting of parliamentary activity in the national press of the two countries, we can once again see a confirmation of entrenched stereotypes. British articles on parliamentary activity in Italy Proposal to award war veteran status to soldiers of Salò Republic Proposal to pay women not to have abortions Plans to apply a porn tax ‘Pro-life’ proposal to discourage abortions Obligatory license for Ape drivers Law allowing the shooting of intruders Italian articles on parliamentary activity in Great Britain Law forbidding school-time family holidays Proposal to pay hoodlums for good behaviour Law forbidding cutting of dogs’ tails Drug law Anti-prostitution bill Adoption by unmarried couples and gays Legalising the nursing of babies in public Terror Act defeated

While the British press accentuates Italy’s fascist past by reporting the proposal to rehabilitate the (historical status) of the Salò Republic, it also emphasises the influence of the church in discouraging abortion (and perhaps the long hand of the church can be seen in the proposed porn tax as well); the violence of the Latin character is evoked vis-à-vis an Italian law ‘allowing’ private citizens to kill intruders on their property. The somewhat anomalous news item reporting that Ape (small three-wheel pick-ups) drivers will now be required to have a driving license does not recall any recognisable stereotype, beyond providing a touch of humour with a report on an anachronistic and typically Italian phenomenon such as that of the little Apes (literally the name translates as Bee) in today’s SUV society. The Italian press, instead, displays particular interest in the British government’s regulation of ‘private’ life, reporting on the bill forbidding family school-time holidays and the parliamentary law allowing mothers to nurse their babies in public (perhaps reconfirming a stereotype of prudishness of the English character?). The classic ‘lover of animals’ stereotype is called to

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mind by the report of a recent law forbidding the cutting of dogs’ tails, and parliamentary bills regarding the regulation of prostitution and the adoption of babies by gays focus on social mores, whereas the parliamentary proposal to pay hoodlums for good behaviour may serve as a reminder of the everpresent image of the English hooligan in the Italian consciousness. Finally, I wish to compare two articles, one in the English press and the other in Italy (though with a time lag of several months), each dealing with the same topic: that of Berlusconi’s gifts to the Blairs. Though a linguistic analysis of texts in different languages is not easy to make, there are some interesting contrasts in the structure of the two articles which are relevant to the discussion at hand. Following are some of the key utterances in the two texts: ‘Berlusconi bounty turns Blairs into the sultans of bling’ Berlusconi showered Tony Blair and his wife with gifts… three watches, a pair of earrings, a ring, a bracelet and a necklace were given by Signor Berlusconi to the Blairs The intended target of Signor B.’s official largesse was clearly Mrs. Blair He obviously believes that the P.M.’s wife has a taste for luxurious women’s jewellery, or ‘bling’ [Berlusconi] a right-wing populist with a controversial media empire His generosity emerged… as Downing Street published details of 25 gifts given to Mr. Blair (Greg Hurst, The Times, 22 July 2005) ‘Berlusconi, pioggia di regali a Blair’ Il P.M. e la first lady ne hanno [orologi] in abbondanza grazie alla prodigalità di Silvio Berlusconi A regalare orologi a Tony e Cheri… il capo del governo [italiano] il leader ha fatto omaggio ai coniugi Blair anche di quattro collane, due braccialetti, due paia di orecchini, due anelli, un orologio a muro e una sacca da viaggio se Berlusconi non pensi di potergli chiedere un giorno qualcosa in cambio il debole di Blair per il lusso e per i ricchi talvolta Blair ha dovuto ‘ripagarlo’ andando a fargli visita in Sardegna durante le vacanze (Enrico Franceschini, La Repubblica, 31 October 2005)

The first thing that strikes us is the emphasis of the British press on Berlusconi as the corrupter, repeatedly placing him in subject position as agent, quite different from the Italian account where Tony Blair and his wife appear in theme position. Both texts present a list of the gifts (though there are numerous discrepancies; in particular, the Italian journalist lists a greater number of gifts) but in the Times article the list occupies subject position followed by a verb in the passive voice ‘were given to’, where the Repubblica’s list follows a transitive verb with the ‘leader’ (Berlusconi) as subject/agent; it

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would thus seem that Berlusconi is identified as the corrupter, but the predicate ‘ha fatto omaggio’ subtly (or perhaps ironically) suggests an act of respectful generosity made by Mr Berlusconi. For the Times, Mrs Blair is the ‘target’ of his generosity, but it is Berlusconi who ‘believes’ that she likes luxurious jewellery, thus leaving some doubt as to her active complicity and placing her in the role of passive recipient. The Italian article states more explicitly that Blair (and not his wife) has a weakness for luxury and for the rich. With more than a hint of irony, the Italian article also suggests that Blair has been forced, on occasion, to ‘repay’ these favours by going to visit Berlusconi in Sardinia, while the English text casts a heavy insult at Berlusconi, labelling him as ‘a right-wing populist with a controversial media empire’. In the British press the Blairs are placed in the semantic role of patients, being on the receiving end of Berlusconi’s ‘largesse’, and it is Berlusconi who is depicted as a somewhat crass media mogul lacking a sense of moderation, while the Italian text stresses the Blairs’ ‘weaknesses’ and makes them appear as willing corruptees. The somewhat differing roles assigned to the two Prime Ministers by the Italian and British journalists can be viewed in terms of stereotypes: in keeping with the British media’s repeated focus on corruption in the Italian political class, here Berlusconi is seen as corrupter of the British P.M. The Italian report, while not immediately traceable to any existing stereotype of the British, nonetheless casts aspersions on Blair as susceptible to material flattery. Cognitive Function of Stereotyping Andrew Tolson reports Walter Lippmann’s (1922) view of stereotyping as a ‘general and universal human activity’, what today might be seen as a cognitive psychological approach according to which stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts that allow human beings to organise their experience in categories.8 As readers we all make reference, whether consciously or not, to what are variously called, in cognitive psychology ‘frames’, ‘stereotypes’, ‘schemata’. In other words, we call upon pre-existing tacit mental categories which facilitate our processing and interpreting of new information, allowing us to fill in informational gaps. In this way the construction of meaning can be seen as an interactive process between writer and reader in which the reader engages in a silent dialectical exchange with the producer of the news. In this exchange stereotypes are, according to Fowler, ‘the currency of negotiation’, socially constructed mental pigeon-holes which enable us to sort and classify events 8.

Andrew Tolson, Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 186.

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and individuals in a comprehensible manner.9 Existing stereotypes are reinforced when the producer of news supplies information that fits these previously constructed categories. In the event that the information is in disaccord with our existing schemata, we create new stereotypical categories. Ideological Basis of Stereotypes When a person or a group has been stereotyped, they have been typified or categorised in terms of alterity, seen as a representative of another culture or way of behaving, different from us. This presupposes an underlying ideology, the implication being: my/our way is different or more civilised, more familiar and ultimately more acceptable. In this sense a stereotype is a reflection of an underlying ideology. Tolson speaks of the ‘dogmatism of the dominant ideology’ that imposes its stereotypes on those it identifies as either subordinate or deviant.10 In relation to our discussion of national stereotypes, these are not seen as intrinsically superior or subordinate, but simply as different from the models held by the culture creating and sustaining the stereotype. A stereotype may at times represent a positive model for imitation, but more frequently it is a negative characteristic, seen as deviant from the behavioural norms or the moral code of the country reporting the news. We have seen that the media of each nation chooses to present news which in some way re-enforces that nation’s ideologies. Facts, events, and human interest stories deserving a place in the news either confirm preconceptions about the other nation or, more rarely, point out a contrast with existing stereotypes. Suzanne and Ronald Scollon collocate stereotypes in the domain of cultural ideology, in that cultural groups are placed in opposition to one another, mostly based on subjective beliefs and rarely on truth criteria.11 For example, the proposition ‘Italians are politically corrupt’ is an example of a subjective evaluative belief, open to debate, and based on the underlying ideologies of the speaker, as opposed to a proposition such as ‘Rome is the capital of Italy’ based on objectively verifiable fact and not a question of opinion. Thus, in analysing stereotypes, it is necessary to distinguish between evaluative and factual beliefs.12 What is seen to be ethical or unethical, what is considered as proper as opposed to morally questionable behaviour may vary from nation

9. Fowler, p. 17. 10. Tolson, p. 186. 11. Ronald Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon, Intercultural Communication, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 167–69. 12. See discussion in van Dijk, p. 29.

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to nation in that these are ultimately a question of opinion. They are ‘fuzzy’ concepts, for which we have no objectively verifiable criteria. Codifying groups according to whether they possess characteristics such as honesty, creativity, good taste, or a sense of civil responsibility reflects evaluative opinion based on socially-determined criteria that may be viewed differently from one society to another. Stereotypes of otherness ultimately reflect our own national prejudices and ideologies. Closing Reflections In the national stereotypes we have been considering there is no inherent feature of dominance; the ideological system expressed is essentially oppositional, that of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, with the more positive characteristics generally seen as ‘ours’. Stereotypes provide an efficient and compact cognitive categorisation, serving to simplify a complex reality. They also reveal beliefs of those dominating the media, given that news reporting is the voice of socially, economically, and politically situated power groups.13 Readers are generally not trained to see through media representation of so-called ‘facts’ and therefore tend to accept the dominant stereotypes uncritically, whereas it is important to be aware that all news reporting is the end product of a process of selection and construction of facts, and that what is presented as factual may well be a distortion of reality. The criteria of newsworthiness that we have considered above as an indicator of the perspective of the institutions behind the news will, quite commonly, produce news items which reinforce existing stereotypes. Our examination of the Italian and the British media is thus more revealing of the underlying system of values of the society reporting the news than it is of the national character as reported. The lens through which the journalist observes the other is often the distorting lens of biased preconceptions. In this way British and Italian national identity is ‘performed’ as a subjective view of the other is filtered through national ideologies. Stereotypes of national character represented in the media are social constructions, determined by the socioeconomic conditions, history, customs, myths, and values of the reporting culture. While these convenient nutshell summaries may be useful to encapsulate information efficiently, they are by no means neutral or valid descriptions of a heterogeneous population.14 The altogether questionable national stereotypes that surface from this study reveal an Italy which is politically and economically unstable, with a 13. Fowler, p. 10. 14. See http://samvak.tripod.com/stereotype.html (accessed 23 February 2007).

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strong fascist vein and a somewhat undemocratic, rough-and-tumble approach to political debate. Corruption (and greed) appear to be rampant in public life, but Italian opera and cuisine are seen as positive cultural values, along with the somewhat crumbling stereotypes of the traditional extended family. British national character as depicted by the Italian press appears to cling staunchly to its traditions: they are lovers of animals and the monarchy, with a somewhat prudish, insular, and obstinate nature. The British are presented as decidedly distant from Europe and the Euro, but one of their saving graces is that of recognising the excellence of Italian cuisine. Are any of these stereotypes an accurate reflection of a majority of the citizens of these two nations, or do they simply serve as a convenient shorthand that ultimately prevents us from seeing the other population as a heterogeneous and variegated collection of individuals? Bibliography Bell, Alan and P. Garrett, eds., Approaches to Media Discourse (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). Fowler, Roger, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991). Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922). Scollon, Ronald and Suzanne Wong Scollon, Intercultural Communication, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). Tolson, Andrew, Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies (London: Arnold, 1996). van Dijk, Teun, ‘Opinions and Ideologies in the Press’, in Approaches to Media Discourse, ed. by Alan Bell and P. Garrett (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 21–63. Internet Sources http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Lippman/contents.html (accessed 23 February 2007). http://samvak.tripod.com/stereotype.html (accessed 23 February 2007). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4263755.stm (accessed 23 February 2007). http://www.members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/stereo2.htm (accessed 23 February 2007).

Sara Soncini Re-locating Shakespeare: Cultural Negotiations in Italian Dubbed Versions of Romeo and Juliet Over the last few decades, translation scholars have moved away from a purely linguistic approach to translation to focus on the socio-cultural dimension of this discursive task. Today it has become commonplace to think of translation not as a mechanical, neutral, or ‘innocent’ transposition of elements from one language to another, but rather as an act of (mis)interpretation whose impact is felt on both the imported product and the receiving culture. Therefore translation can be viewed as a space where exchanges between linguistic and cultural codes take place, hence as an ideal field for an investigation into cultural negotiations. If these tradeoffs entail some degree of manipulation, this is certainly true in the case of dubbing, a phenomenon which is very widespread in Italy, where about 98% of imported audiovisual products are dubbed and which is simply taken for granted by the vast majority of viewers (film critics included).1 Invisibility, or the impression of non-translatedness, is commonly recognised as the fundamental tenet of film dubbing. While finding its selfjustification in terms of an axiomatic principle universally true for all times, the mask of naturalness has formed the precondition for unquestioned acceptance of dubbing by the general public, and as such it has proved crucial in safeguarding a number of vested interests. A strong ideological bent is inscribed in the very history of this form of audiovisual transfer. A combination of economic and political concerns were prevalent during the establishment of the Italian dubbing industry. In the 1930s, with the advent of talkies, motion pictures ceased to speak a universal language and it became clear to American distributors that immediate corrective action was needed to safeguard an empire mainly based on export. On Italian ground, the need to en1.

In Italy, about 80% of films and 92% of TV series are imported and must therefore be translated. These figures, published by AIDAC (Associazione Italiana Doppiatori e Adattatori Cinetelevisivi), Italy’s association of dubbing translators, in 1996, were still deemed accurate by Mario Paolinelli (at the time AIDAC’s vice-president), when I interviewed him on 3 September 2003. For a further breakdown of these figures in terms of the provenance of imported audiovisual products, as well as for valuable information on market shares, box office revenue, and the national/imported ratio throughout Europe see Eleonora di Fortunato and Mario Paolinelli, Tradurre per il doppiaggio: La trasposizione linguistica dell’audiovisivo. Teoria e pratica di un’arte imperfetta (Milano: Hoepli, 2005), pp. 23–33.

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sure linguistic accessibility was compatible with fascist protectionist policies opposing the spread of foreign languages. In view of the higher scope for censorship and the necessary ideological readjustment, the regime favoured dubbing over other possible forms of film translation.2 Dubbing has therefore functioned historically, and still continues to function today, as an institutional cultural filter which is generally unperceived and unchallenged, and which significantly manipulates imported audiovisual products for the sake of naturalisation. Visual synchronisation and linguistic/cultural domestication are the two main strategies adopted to make the final product more ‘natural’, and the translation ‘transparent’.3 Because of the high degree of linguistic, cultural, and ultimately ideological manipulation which is embedded in this translation practice, dubbing appears particularly worth investigating when the product appropriated through translation is Shakespeare, a symbol of national identity, the banner of Britishness at home and abroad. This essay considers the Italian dubbed versions of George Cukor’s and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Filmed in 1936 and 1968 respectively, these screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s Italianate play provide a convenient case study to explore British/Italian cultural transactions.4 While Zeffirelli’s film aimed at restoring the star-crossed lovers’ story to its ‘original’ Italian location, the same tendency towards cultural (re-)appropriation can be found, albeit in different ways, in the translational strategies of the two dubbed versions under scrutiny, at both the lin2.

After the war, the removal of the autarchic restraints which had culminated in the ban on imported films ushered in a new wave of cultural imperialism. In the Cold War era, Hollywood producers worked hand-in-hand with the State Department to recover the monopoly on Italian cinema, in a confluence of economic and political/ideological designs. Through a shrewd protectionist policy, moreover, imported dubbed films were free to circulate in Italy although no form of reciprocity was envisaged. American producers adamantly opposed dubbing at home on the grounds of the English-speaking public’s alleged aversion to it while at the same time encouraging dubbing abroad as a means of flooding the European market with competitive audiovisual products. For a history of dubbing in Italy see Orio Caldiron and Matilde Hochkofler, ‘I signori degli anelli: Il doppiaggio in Italia. Le gloriose imprese di una calamità nazionale’, in Il Patalogo tre: Annuario 1981 dello spettacolo. Cinema e televisione, ed. by Franco Quadri (Milano: Ubulibri, 1982), pp. 109–23; Voci d’autore: Storia e protagonisti del doppiaggio italiano, ed. by Mario Guidorizzi (Verona: Cierre, 1999) and di Fortunato and Paolinelli, Tradurre per il doppiaggio, pp. 3–23. 3. See Frederic Chaume Varela, ‘Synchronization in Dubbing: A Translational Approach’, in Topics in Audiovisual Translation, ed. by Pilar Orero (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), pp. 35–52. 4 . The two films have already been examined in my article ‘Shakespeare e il suo doppio’, in Shakespeare and Scespir, ed. by Paolo Caponi and Mariacristina Cavecchi (Milano: CUEM, 2005), pp. 61–83; this essay elaborates on that article.

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guistic and the performative level. The products of very different cultural, political, and generational climates, the Italian translations of Cukor’s and Zeffirelli’s screen adaptations ultimately exhibit traces of a struggle for national and cultural ownership of the Bard. Although neither Cukor nor Zeffirelli are British, both directors were nevertheless bent, albeit in very different ways, on exploiting the cultural prestige of the source text. With its ‘high mimetic bardolatry’ the 1936 film, produced by MGM, is a typical case of Hollywood cinema seeking to draw cultural legitimisation from (British) literary authorities.5 Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet followed a very successful Taming of the Shrew (1966), and in both films the Italian director was attempting to establish himself as Shakespeare’s authorised interpreter for the international public of the dawning media age.6 The Dubbing Process The Italian version of Cukor’s movie dates back to the prehistory of dubbing. The anonymous team which created this Shakespearean dubble at MGM’s studios in Rome have left very scant traces of their doings. The vocal cast included some of the most distinguished dubbing actors of the time (Andreina Pagnani lent her voice to Norma Shearer’s Juliet, Giulio Panicali to Leslie Howard’s Romeo, and Sandro Ruffini to John Barrymore’s Mercutio) and was directed by Franco Schirato, a top professional in the field. I have been unable to identify the author or authors of the translated dialogues—a typical example of the multiple, and often invisible, subjects involved in the dubbing process. In contrast—and this is quite atypical—the revoicing of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet took place under strict authorial control. The original dia5 . Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 44. 6 . In his autobiography, Zeffirelli dwells at length on his self-appointed task of cultural mediation; see The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986). A critical discussion of the Italian director’s approach to Shakespeare can be found in Robert Hapgood, ‘Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli’, in Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. by Linda E. Boose and Richard Burt (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 80–94; Ace G. Pilkington, ‘Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare and the Moving Image, ed. by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 163–79; Deborah Cartmell, ‘Franco Zeffirelli and Shakespeare’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. by Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 212–21; and Jill J. Levenson, ‘Translation, 1960–1968: Franco Zeffirelli’, in Shakespeare in Performance: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 82–123.

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logues were scripted by Zeffirelli himself in collaboration with Masolino D’Amico and Franco Brusati, while the Italian dialogues were entrusted to D’Amico alone, although Zeffirelli carefully supervised the whole process. Zeffirelli also acted as dubbing director, using the same cast of actors which had just appeared in his recent stage production of the tragedy: Annamaria Guarnieri as Olivia Hussey/Juliet, Giancarlo Giannini as Leonard Whiting/Romeo, Giorgio Albertazzi as John McEnery/Mercutio, while Laurence Olivier’s voiceover prologue and epilogue were dubbed by Vittorio Gassman. Cukor: Mimetism and Manipulation From the point of view of textual translation, the most blatant difference concerns the linguistic gulf between the two dubbed versions. In the Italian soundtracks, it is as if the time span separating Cukor’s and Zeffirelli’s movie was much greater than just over three decades. The anonymous author of Cukor’s translated dialogues clearly based his or her text on Giulio Carcano’s nineteenth-century verse rendition, as will be apparent from this short quotation: Transcript of film dialogue

Giulio Carcano, Giulietta e Romeo (1843)

Anzi, lo scongiurerò. Romeo, cervello balzano, amator furibondo, mostrati a noi sotto la forma di un sospiro. Rispondi con una rima ed io son pago. Grida soltanto ‘ahimè’, pronuncia ‘amore’, e ‘cuore’. La nave non si scuote, e non si muove. È morto quel gorilla e rievocarlo io dovrò. Io ti scongiuro, per i fulgidi occhi di Rosalina, per l’alta fronte e le vermiglie labbra, per il suo gentil piede, per la sua dritta gamba, per i suoi lombi agili e pronti, e per le altre belle adiacenze di lei, io ti scongiuro, mostrati a noi nel tuo sembiante.

Anzi vo’ fargli uno scongiuro: Romeo! cervel balzano! […] amator furibondo!… A noi ti mostra In forma d’un sospir; dimmi una rima E pago io son: grida un oimè! Soltanto: Amor lega e candor; […] Non ode! non si scuote! non si move! Il bertuccino non è più: ch’io stesso Lo scongiuri, è bisogna—Io ti scongiuro Di Rosalia pe’ sfavillanti rai, per l’alta fronte e le vermiglie labbra, Per il gentil suo piè, per la sua ritta Gamba, per i suoi lombi agili e pronti, E l’altre belle adiacenze sue, Olà, ti mostra nella tua sembianza!7

Carcano’s translations of Shakespeare, first published in 1843, show clear traces of the translator’s perceived need to heighten and refine Shakespeare’s 7 . Giulio Carcano, ‘Giulietta e Romeo’, in Teatro di Shakespeare: Scelto e tradotto da Giulio Carcano (Napoli: Libreria Editrice Bideri, 1907), pp. 149–93 (pp. 164–65). The first edition of Teatro scelto di Shakespeare a cura di Giulio Carcano was published in 1843. A three-volume edition appeared in 1847, followed by the complete edition in twelve volumes between 1875 and 1882.

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language so that, paradoxically, the Italian version ultimately sounds more solemn and even more archaic than the original Elizabethan text. It should be noted, however, that the great nineteenth century mattatori favoured Carcano’s verse Shakespeare over Carlo Rusconi’s more accessible prose translations.8 By the 1930s, however, Carcano’s version was no longer the standard translation of Shakespeare in Italy.9 By turning to this text, instead of availing him- or herself of a more recent verse translation which would have been more in tune with the taste of a contemporary audience, the dialogue writer seems to have followed two impulses which are only apparently conflicting. On the one hand, the translator’s strategy reveals a respectful, almost reverential attitude towards the Shakespearean text. There is a clear attempt at reproducing poetic diction and the patina of age, even to the point of sounding obscure.10 From this point of view, the translated text seems to be putting accuracy before accessibility, and to be aiming to convey the linguistic otherness of the source text. On the other hand, however, it is also true that by following Carcano’s lesson, the dubbed version of Cukor’s film is also intent on perpetuating the traditional notion of the ‘Shakespearean’ as shaped by the play’s stage history in Italy. What appears to be a foreignising strategy actually turns out to be just another way of making Shakespeare sound familiar to the Italian viewing public of the time. Domestication also significantly occurs at the level of meaning. Some of the translator’s choices appear to have been informed by the perception of the potential relevance of Romeo and Juliet in the historico-political climate of the time. In 1936, when Cukor’s film was dubbed, Italy was engaged in its colonial venture in eastern Africa. The first troops had been sent in early 1935, and in May 1936, Mussolini crowned King Vittorio Emanuele III emperor of Ethiopia. In this context, Romeo and Juliet might well acquire an unexpected topicality and lend itself to supporting expansionist policies. In the premonitory dream preceding the news of Juliet’s death, Romeo imagines himself being resuscitated by his beloved’s kisses which transform him into an ‘emperor’, and even earlier, during the balcony scene, Shakespeare’s 8.

See Carla Locatelli, ‘Traduzioni ottocentesche dell’Othello in Italia: la problematica del contesto’, in Metamorfosi: Traduzione—Tradizioni: Spessori del concetto di contemporaneità, conference proceedings AIA 1986, ed. by Elizabeth Glass and others (Pescara: CLUA, 1988), pp. 293–303. 9. See Mario Praz, ‘Shakespeare Translations in Italy’ in Caleidoscopio Shakespeariano (Bari: Adriatica, 1969), pp. 156–169. 10. See e.g. the convoluted syntax of a line like ‘Ecco il peccato tolse la mia dalla tua bocca’, designed to render the preciosity of Romeo’s ‘Thus from my lips, by yours, thy sin is purged’ (1.5.105).

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verses connote Juliet as a potential colonial subject eager to shower her heart’s infinite riches onto the man who is about to win her hand: ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,/ My love as deep; the more I give to thee,/ The more I have, for both are infinite’ (2.1.175–77).11 The Italian version of Cukor’s film activates this latent meaning through both textual and performative strategies, ultimately eliciting from the audience a reading of Romeo’s courtship and conquest of Juliet in terms of a successful colonial enterprise. Textually speaking, the fact that shifts in meaning tend to coincide with translation choices that deviate from Carcano’s version would seem to point to a deliberate manipulation. The first notable departure concerns the passage in Shakespeare’s tragedy when Ethiopia is actually mentioned. During the Capulet ball, Romeo, dazzled by Juliet’s beauty, exclaims: ‘It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night/ Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear’ (1.5.44–5). Shakespeare’s ‘Ethiope’, translated by Carcano as a male Ethiopian (‘un Etiopo’), becomes in the dubbed version an ‘Etiope’, thereby sustaining identification between Juliet and the land of conquest. This forms a prelude to a much-revisited balcony scene, where the young lover’s enterprise takes on a more markedly heroic and martial slant. In keeping with Leslie Howard’s performance, Giulio Panicali, the actor dubbing Romeo, plays him as mature, self-assertive, energetic, and occasionally aggressive.12 Leslie Howard’s playful soldierly manner acquires in the dubbed version a more literal meaning, also because his courtship is recontextualised through lexical shifts (finding no match in Carcano’s version) as a military endeavour: J: How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore? R: With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls; For stony limits cannot hold love out, And what love can do that dares love attempt; Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me. J: If they do see thee, they will murder thee.

G: Ma… dimmi: come… e perché sei qui? R: Amor mi diede l’ali per varcar l’alto muro; ché amor non teme alcuna cinta di sasso, e tutto ciò ch’ei vuole audace ardisce. I tuoi parenti non mi sono d’impaccio.13 G: Se ti scoprono qui t’uccideranno.

11. ‘I dreamt my lady came and found me dead—/ Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!—/ And breathed such life with kisses in my lips/ That I revived and was an emperor.’ (5.1.6–9). 12. See e.g. the intensity with which Panicali delivers Romeo’s line ‘Io di viva forza disserro le tue fetide mascelle’ (‘Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open’, 5.3.47), while forcing open Juliet’s tomb. 13. Carcano has: ‘Io d’amor con le lievi ali varcai/ Quel recinto: ad amor non vieta il passo/ Confin di pietre; e tutto che vuole/ Amor l’ardisce. A me non fanno intoppo/ I tuoi congiunti’.

Re-locating Shakespeare R: Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity. J: I would not for the world they saw thee here. R: I have night’s cloak to hide me from their sight; And but thou love me, let them find me here. J: By whose direction found’st thou out this place? R: By love, who first did prompt me to inquire; He lent me counsel and I lent him eyes. I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far As that vast shore wash’d with the farthest sea, I would adventure for such merchandise.

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R: Più pericolo io vedo in un tuo sguardo Che in venti delle loro spade. Guardami dolcemente: forte mi sentirò contro ogni assalto.14 G: Che ti vedesser qui mai non vorrei. R: Ho il manto della notte per nascondermi a loro. E poi, se tu non mi ami, che mi trovino pure. G: Oh, dimmi, chi mai poté guidarti a questo luogo? R: Amor, che primo mi spinse a ricercarti; al suo consiglio aggiunsi gli occhi miei. Navigator non sono; ma se tu fossi nella più remota spiaggia che bagna il mare lontano per tal tesoro sfiderei la morte.

The re-italianised Juliet, too, undergoes relevant changes, coming across as a prey even more yielding than the original heroine. She surrenders of her own free will to Romeo instead of being ‘too quickly won’ as in Shakespeare and Cukor.15 Her promise to marry her lover, ‘too rash, too unadvised, too sudden’ in the source text, becomes here ‘troppo rapida, troppo improvvisa, troppo insperata’.16 In her desire to be won over, Juliet calls herself ‘troppo ardente’ [passionate, hot-blooded] instead of ‘too fond’, with a significant intensification of the erotic nature of her passion in a translation which, as a rule, tends instead to tone down or censure morally questionable expressions.17 With an innovation present in no other Italian translation of the play, 14. Carcano has: ‘Oimé! Periglio/ ben più fatal negli occhi tuoi vegg’io/ Che in venti spade lor. Dolce mi guarda,/ E saldo io son contr’essi, a tutta prova.’ 15 . ‘Ma se tu credi che troppo presto io mi sia arresa,/ sarò diversa, metterò cipiglio, ti dirò di no,/ e tu mi pregherai; altrimenti non so dirti di no.’ Carcano has a more adequate ‘vinta’. 16. Here, too, Carcano’s translation is closer to Shakespeare’s original: ‘ratta, sconsigliata e improvvisa.’ 17. In the dialogue between the two lovers at the Capulet ball, the translator suppresses several potentially blasphemous expressions. Romeo asks to be simply renamed, instead of being baptised anew (‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized’ becomes ‘Chiamami amore e novo nome io avrò’). Similarly, when Juliet proposes that Romeo should swear ‘by thy gracious self,/ Which is the god of my idolatry’, the Italian version renders ‘god’ as ‘nume’, thereby avoiding a potentially impious mixture of Christian and pagan devotions. As for sexual innuendos, Romeo’s promise after Juliet’s death, ‘I’ll lie with thee tonight’, is rendered with a rather more chaste ‘giacerò vicino a te’ [I’ll lie near you], while Carcano’s translation (‘con te io dormirò’ [I’ll sleep with thee’]) was a more exact reproduction of Shakespeare’s words.

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moreover, the moon by which Romeo should not swear according to Juliet’s injunction turns from ‘inconstant’ to ‘innocente’, as if to deny the possibility of oscillations in the love between colonised and coloniser. In Panicali’s revoicing, Romeo’s words obfuscate the more mercenary motives behind the conquest of Juliet/Ethiopia (turned from ‘merchandise’ into a loftier ‘tesoro’ [treasure]), while at the same time adding a providential dimension: Juliet’s promise to send someone on the following day so their commitment may be sanctioned through marriage is greeted by Romeo not with ‘So thrive my soul’ but with ‘Così voglia il cielo, amore’ [Thus heaven may dispose, my love]. Again, towards the end of the dubbed film, Romeo, believing Juliet to be dead, rages against the stars, accusing them of being ‘inique’ [unfair], instead of ‘inauspicious’. In this way, the stifling of the young couple’s love by their parents’ ancestral grievances resonates with the denunciation by Mussolini’s regime of the sanctions inflicted on the Italian nation as a consequence of invading Ethiopia—‘unfair’ sanctions which fascist propaganda was keen on portraying as an attempt by the old, decadent powers to strangle the ‘new Italy’ bent on securing her rightful place in the sun. It is my contention that the reverential attitude towards Shakespeare’s language pervading the translation of Cukor’s film ultimately functions as a tactical mimetic camouflage for a deliberate ideological readjustment. On the one hand, that is, the dubbed film wishes to give the impression that spectators are accessing the ‘real’ Shakespeare; while on the other, with a few strategic tricks, it exploits Romeo and Juliet as authoritative cultural capital to promote the imperialist ambitions of Mussolini’s Italy. The aura of exoticism which continues to emanate from the visuals, and in particular from the two protagonists’ definitely un-Italian features, far from undermining the attempt at national appropriation, functions as just another cover-up: ostensibly foreign, and as such above suspicion, Shakespeare proves the ideal super partes advocate for Italy’s imperialist ambitions. Zeffirelli: National or Global? In the original version of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, one prominent feature is the re-contextualisation of Shakespeare’s story to fit in with contemporary concerns. Released in 1968, the film, with its insistent underscoring of generational conflict, was immediately connected to the student protests and the political and cultural turmoil of the time. As several critics have remarked, in terms of contemporary audiences the tragedy of two innocent young people immolated on the altar of the adults’ warmongering policy resonated with the Vietnam War which was raging at the time. Interestingly, though, the Italian

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dubbed version gives prominence to another kind of conflict that is more of a sexual nature and has to do with Juliet’s adolescent rebellion against an authoritarian, repressive father. This shift in focus begins as early as the Capulet ball. In Zeffirelli’s interpretation of the scene, among the entertainments is a neo-Elizabethan ballad sung by an actor. The song is relevant thematically, since its tune recurs throughout the film to underscore salient moments, and is again played during the film’s final shots and the closing credits. In the English-language version, the lyrics articulate a carpe diem theme, identifying youth as the brief season of love with death’s shadow already incumbent upon it.18 From this moment on, the melody acts as a dark foreboding of tragedy which is repeatedly cast upon the developing love story. In the balcony scene, the shadow of doom would appear to take on specific political connotations: the sweet-sour notes of the ballad underscore a long panning shot of a high stone wall separating the two lovers, possibly a visual reference to another emblematic wall during the Cold War. It should be remembered that the film premiered in the USA in September 1968, about one month after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the Italian version of the ballad, in contrast, death is never mentioned, and the main addressee of the lyrics is Juliet, who must say farewell to childhood games now she has been touched by adolescent love: Ai giochi addio, per sempre di’/ Non sono più cose per te/ Ai giochi addio./ Chissà perché? Nemmeno tu/ ancora spiegartelo non puoi./ Tu attendi un ospite/ favoloso e incognito/ non sai che nome ha […]./ Tu vuoi scoprire i suoi misteri/ al suo confronto tutto t’annoia/ i suoi regali fantastici attendi/ Come le notti dell’Epifania/ rimani sveglia pensando chissà/ che mai ti porterà. Bid farewell to games forever/ You are past them/ To games farewell./ Who knows why? Not even you/ can yet tell./ You are expecting a guest/ marvellous and disguised/ whose name you do not know […]./ His mystery you want to unveil/ everything else bores you/ you long for his wonderful presents/ Like on Twelfth Night/ you stay awake and wonder/ what he’s going to bring you.

The new soundtrack distils the story’s theme as a young woman’s awakening to passion and sensuality, a re-interpretation further enforced by Annamaria Guarnieri’s vocal interpretation which, compared to the original performance by Olivia Hussey, projects a more mature Juliet and hence one who is more aware of her own desire. The shift in focus is particularly evident in the scene where Juliet is con-

18. For further details on the original ballad see Rothwell, pp. 125–142.

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fronted by her infuriated father who threatens to disown her if she refuses to comply with his injunction to marry Paris. In the exchange between Lord Capulet and his wife, before he bursts into Juliet’s chamber, the characters’ language and tones are the ones of a contemporary bourgeois couple whose parental authority has been challenged. Similarly, in the violent confrontation with his rebel daughter, Lord Capulet sounds like a modern-day patriarchal despot who goes mad at finding that his daughter, still lying in the nuptial bed where she has consummated her love with Romeo, is refusing to obey him. Young viewers in Italian cinemas could hardly have failed to recognise their own fathers’ voices in old Capulet’s outbursts: Sciagurata ribelle disgraziata, ascoltami bene: tu giovedì fili in chiesa o non ti farai più vedere da me, sai? Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch!/ I tell thee what: get thee to church o’ Thursday,/ Or never after look me in the face. [3.5.160–62] Non rispondermi! Mi prudono le mani! Guai a te! Speak not, reply not, do not answer me./ My fingers itch. [163–64] Sangue di Giuda! Ti fanno diventar matto! God’s bread, it makes me mad. [176] Hai capito? Ricordati. E guarda che non scherzo! Trust to’t. Bethink you. I'll not be forsworn. [195]

By foregrounding the sexual nature of Juliet’s rebellion, Zeffirelli’s film reexplores the generational conflict at the heart of Romeo and Juliet in protofeminist terms. This can arguably be seen as an attempt to make the Shakespearean tragedy relevant and meaningful to the film’s target audience, i.e. the young generations for whom the revolution in sexual mores constituted the most disruptive aspect of the new counterculture against a backdrop of prudery and repression in the Italy of the 1960s. An equally strong drive towards relocation can be detected on the stylistic level. Zeffirelli’s attitude to the treatment of Shakespeare’s language differs markedly in the original and in the dubbed version of the film. As is well known, when Romeo and Juliet was released purists railed against the extensive cuts Zeffirelli’s team had made in the original screenplay; in particular, much criticism was levelled at the suppression or maiming of the long poetic speeches which would fit awkwardly in the mouths of Zeffirelli’s adolescent lovers and which, with their linguistic otherness, would risk compromising

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the intended aim of making Shakespeare ‘our contemporary’.19 However, while in the English version Zeffirelli stopped half-way, in the Italian one he took the modernising process to its logical conclusion. The original film, for instance, retains a few archaic forms in pronouns (‘thee’ and ‘thou’) and verbs (‘hath’), whereas in the dubbed version the language is thoroughly contemporary: the translator must have reckoned that for an Italian audience, accessibility would be a more marketable quality than any Shakespearean aura. The Italian film, moreover, goes one step further than the original version in rejuvenating the tragedy not only through casting but also through lexical choices—for example, when the nurse tells Romeo that Paris ‘è cotto di’ [has a crush on] Juliet.20 Another substantial difference between Romeo and Juliet and its Italian counterpart concerns accents. In the English version, Zeffirelli’s declared aim of restoring Shakespeare’s tragedy to its proper national setting is only pursued visually. In spite of the central role played in the film by its realistic Italian location—real Italian surroundings, real Italian faces—there is no trace of an ‘ethnic’ accent in the acting.21 Indeed, as Zeffirelli himself informs us in his autobiography, some characters that had been played by Italian actors were revoiced by no less than the likes of Laurence Olivier. The Florentine director explains that during a break in the shooting of The Shoes of the Fisherman, the Shakespearean icon happened to walk into the adjacent studio where Romeo and Juliet was undergoing post-synchronisation. ‘Naturally he felt an almost proprietary interest in any film of a Shakespeare play. […] Eventually he asked me if there was any way he could join in, and I, delighted at the chance, asked him if he would voice the prologue.’ Not yet satisfied, ‘Larry’ (as Zeffirelli calls him) then went on to dub ‘Lord Montague, who’d been played by an Italian with a thick accent’, as well as ‘all sorts of small parts and crowd noises in a hilarious variety of assumed voices’.22 Shakespeare’s language, mangled by culturally alien, non-native diction, was thus restored to its ‘original’ national identity through the voice of an authoritative British mouthpiece. In the Italian version, on the contrary, Zeffirelli allows his actors to use regional inflections, thereby achieving a higher degree of linguistic realism. 19. A thorough account of the making of the screenplay is provided in Jill Levenson’s chapter on ‘Translation, 1960–1968: Franco Zeffirelli’. 20. Paradoxically, the nurse verges on (youthful) contemporary Italian slang far more often than Romeo and Juliet: Zeffirelli probably felt that the latter were already modern enough thanks to Whiting’s and Hussey’s looks and diction. 21. The camera often lingers on extras who were obviously picked because of their unmistakable Italian features, although they look rather Tuscan than Veronese. 22. Zeffirelli, p. 229.

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Giancarlo Giannini plays Romeo with a slight Emilian accent, whereas young Peter reacts to a kick on the bottom from the nurse by yelling the Roman demotic exclamation ‘aho!’. The discrepancy between the reverential attitude displayed in the original version compared to the more manipulative one in the dubbed film might be explained in terms of Zeffirelli’s perception of language as the main seat of Shakespeare’s authority—and this authority, closely connected with Shakespeare’s Britishness, must have seemed of crucial importance to a cultural outsider intent on playing the role of the Bard’s legitimate international interpreter. Conversely, when he has an Italian audience in mind, Zeffirelli feels he can re-appropriate Romeo and Juliet not only visually, but also verbally. In this respect, there are some very telling instances of textual changes through which Shakespeare’s verses are bent to the needs of the medium of film. A case in point is the duel scene between Mercutio and Tybalt (3.1.) which, in Zeffirelli’s movie, takes place in Verona’s main square. Mercutio is walking on the edge of a fountain when a worried Benvolio announces that the Capulets are approaching. In the English soundtrack, John McEnery speaks the line ‘By my heel I care not’ with a pause in the middle, during which the actor looks at his heel before jumping into the fountain. In the dubbed version, Zeffirelli’s manipulates Shakespeare’s words to match his visual transcription. The line is rephrased in such a way that the actor’s gesture becomes more meaningful as an expression of scorn to a contemporary audience: ‘Con quelli là, io, le scarpe mi ci pulisco’ [I’m going to polish my shoes with that lot]. The same occurs later in the scene when Tybalt, seeing Romeo approach, dismisses Mercutio with these words: ‘peace be with you, sir. Here comes my man.’ In Italian the line has been adapted to match Zeffirelli’s visual rendition of the scene: ‘buon bagno [have a nice dip], caro signore. Ecco il mio uomo’— Mercurio has been playfully bathing in the fountain throughout the preceding verbal exchange with Tybalt. Here and elsewhere in the dubbed film, the cohesion between the verbal and the visual dimension has been preferred to an accurate translation of Shakespeare’s text.23 23. Interestingly, verbal/visual cohesion is by no means prioritised in the dubbed version of Cukor’s film. In the scene where Lady Capulet, with the nurse’s mediation, informs her daughter of Paris’s proposal (1.3), Juliet’s conclusive promise to ‘look to like, if looking liking move:/ But no more deep will I endart mine eye/ Than your consent gives strength to make it fly’ (99–101) is rendered as ‘Mi proverò a guardarlo, se amor nasce dal guardare. Ma non lo guarderò più di quello a cui mi incoraggia il vostro consenso, madre.’ The loss of the eye/dart metaphor in Italian produces incongruous effects, as Cukor has Juliet deliver her lines, Cupid-like, with bow and arrow in hand: a playful visual reminder of the love/war leitmotif which in the Italian film, lacking support from the verbal text, strikes the viewer as unwarranted and slightly ludicrous.

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The Italian translator has no scruples in manipulating Shakespeare’s lines in such a way that they enhance Zeffirelli’s visual translation of the tragedy. The modernisation of language discussed earlier also fulfils a similar function. The striking contemporary flavour of Shakespeare’s verse in the dubbed soundtrack allows the director to overcome the incongruity, pointed out by several early reviewers, between the realism of the setting, casting, and acting of the film and the residual aura of Shakespeare’s language.24 Whereas in the English-speaking version Shakespeare’s language somehow resists Zeffirelli’s directorial concept and, more generally, the dramatic text resists appropriation by cinema as a realistic medium, its Italian equivalent witnesses a radical reversal of hierarchies; and in the tense confrontation between Shakespeare and ‘Shakespirelli’, as the Florentine director has been jokingly renamed, it is definitely the latter who has the upper hand. With its more radical subordination of the Shakespearean word to the picture, the dubbed version of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet would seem to construct the Italian viewing public, historically accustomed to accessing the ‘holy text’ in a mediated form, as its ideal receiver, one which would be culturally better disposed towards Shakespeare made fit for the then dawning media age. Each in their own way, the two dubbed versions of Romeo and Juliet under scrutiny share a common impulse towards cultural relocation. Where they differ is in the agenda behind this process. In the case of Cukor’s film, an apparently reverential attitude masks a strategic reorientation of the tragedy’s meaning, with specifically local political concerns in mind; whereas with Zeffirelli, paradoxically, a much more overt and declared tendency towards national relocation is ultimately subservient to the appropriation of Shakespeare by global media culture. Bibliography Boose, Lynda E. and Richard Burt, eds., Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video (New York: Routledge, 1997). Caldiron, Orio and Matilde Hochkofler, ‘I signori degli anelli: Il doppiaggio in Italia. Le gloriose imprese di una calamità nazionale’, Il Patalogo tre: Annuario 1981 dello spettacolo: Cinema e televisione, ed. by Franco Quadri (Milano: Ubulibri, 1982), pp. 109–23. 24. See e.g. John Russell Taylor’s observation that ‘the more literally believable [Romeo and Juliet are], the more flagrantly unlikely it is that they will speak to each other or anyone else, in the way they do. Paradoxically the whole thing was more acceptable on screen with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard.’ John Russell Taylor, review of 5 March 1968, Shakespearean Criticism, 11, ed. by Sandra L. Williamson and James E. Person Jr. (1990), 471–83 (pp. 471–72).

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Caponi, Paolo and Mariacristina Cavecchi, eds., Shakespeare and Scespir (Milano: CUEM, 2005). Carcano, Giulio, ‘Giulietta e Romeo’ [1843], Teatro di Shakespeare: Scelto e tradotto da Giulio Carcano (Napoli: Libreria Editrice Bideri, 1907), pp. 149–93. Davies, Anthony and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare and the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). di Fortunato, Eleonora and Mario Paolinelli Tradurre per il doppiaggio: La trasposizione linguistica dell’audiovisivo. Teoria e pratica di un’arte imperfetta (Milano: Hoepli, 2005). Glass, Elizabeth, and others, eds., Metamorfosi: Traduzione—Tradizioni: Spessori del concetto di contemporaneità, conference proceedings AIA 1986 (Pescara: CLUA, 1988). Guidorizzi, Mario, ed., Voci d’autore: Storia e protagonisti del doppiaggio italiano (Verona: Cierre, 1999). Jackson, Russell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Levenson, Jill J., Shakespeare in Performance: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Orero, Pilar, ed., Topics in Audiovisual Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004). Praz, Mario, Caleidoscopio Shakespeariano (Bari: Adriatica, 1969). Rothwell, Kenneth S., A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Varela, Frederic Chaume, ‘Synchronization in dubbing: A Translational Approach’, in Topics in Audiovisual Translation, ed. by Pilar Orero (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), pp. 35–52. Williamson, Sandra L. and James E. Person Jr., eds., Shakespearean Criticism, 11 (1990). Zeffirelli, Franco, The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986).

Mariangela Tempera Something to Declare: Italian Avengers and British Culture in La ragazza con la pistola and Appuntamento a Liverpool The Italian vendetta culture has been a source of sensational plots to British writers since the Renaissance. The garish protagonists of Jacobean revenge plays and Gothic novels owed more to literary conventions than to observation of real life models. The Italian avenger who bypasses the law in his pursuit of private justice does not, however, only appeal to foreign writers in search of cheap exoticism. Instead of demolishing such an unflattering portrait of their national character, Italians have contributed to validating it, for example, in nineteenth-century operas (where cries of ‘vendetta, tremenda vendetta’ were expected to bring the house down) and twentieth-century action movies (where killing off your enemies was often seen as compatible with religious piety and family values). Like so many national stereotypes, that of the vengeful Italian has a basis in fact. Reports of revenge killings still appear in newspapers, and the research into motivation and remedies keeps sociologists in business. Because of a general consensus that role models can contribute to marginalising antisocial behaviour, film-makers have always been encouraged to abandon the glorification of vendettas and to promote non-violent ways of addressing grievances. The majority of those who have accepted the challenge of contrasting the message of violence conveyed by Italian action movies have directed films that are quintessentially Italian in plot, location, and characters. Mario Monicelli’s comedy La ragazza con la pistola (1968) and Marco Tullio Giordana’s drama Appuntamento a Liverpool (1988) belong to the category of anti-revenge films, but they are unusual in two ways. Their protagonists are female avengers, and most of the action takes place in Britain. The two films position Britons no longer as the target audience but as coprotagonists of Italian revenge plots. As such, they are subjected to a process of representation conducted through the eyes of foreign directors for a foreign audience. Although comic stereotypes abound in Monicelli’s film, Giordana tries to treat his Liverpudlians as individuals, albeit not very convincingly. This is to be expected, since neither director is interested in presenting a carefully nuanced picture of a foreign culture to his Italian audience. After all, the two avengers do not choose to travel abroad, have no interest in British culture, and are completely focused on their mission. And yet, the interaction between the girls and the natives offers illuminating insights into cultural misunderstandings and into the ways Italian and British

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identities are constructed by the directors for two different types of Italian audiences. Britain as Model: La ragazza con la pistola In 1962, Pietro Germi directed Divorzio all’italiana, a scathing satire of Sicilian customs and a stark reminder of the consequences of the notorious article 587 (which allowed people responsible for honour killings to receive token prison sentences). In 1965, a Sicilian girl had made the headlines by taking her kidnapper and rapist to court, instead of marrying or killing him. In 1968, when Mario Monicelli, a great admirer of Germi’s film, started shooting La ragazza con la pistola, change was very much in the air but not yet on the statute book (divorce legislation was introduced in 1974; article 587 was only repealed in 1981). Monicelli was at the time one of the bestknown directors of ‘comedies Italian style’, a genre that, at its best, holds a mirror up to Italians and forces them to acknowledge the narrow-mindedness and corruption that often lurk just beneath the jovial surface of the Italian way of life. ‘What I had to say about Italian society’, Monicelli says, ‘I expressed in ways that were tough and harsh, but that always contained an element of humour […]. If Italians evolved, this was also thanks to comedy Italian style […].’1 His films usually followed the stories of a small group of people in their hometown; La ragazza con la pistola is, therefore, quite unusual as the protagonists travel abroad. In a Sicilian village, a young girl, Assunta (Monica Vitti), is mistakenly kidnapped and delivered into the hands of Vincenzo (Carlo Giuffré), the local Lothario. Since she is actually in love with him, her resistance is totally perfunctory. After spending the night with Vincenzo, she would be quite happy to marry him, but he returns her to her family and escapes to Britain. As there are no men folk in the family, Assunta’s mother packs her daughter off to Edinburgh, armed with a gun and the scoundrel’s address. After a first failed attempt on Vincenzo’s life, Assunta finds work as a maid for a Scottish couple, then moves to Sheffield in hot pursuit of the man she wants to marry (or, alternatively, kill). Here, she starts to mingle with Britons. A young mechanic takes her to Bath for his rugby team’s away game. At the stadium, she recognises a stretcher-bearer as Vincenzo and follows him to the local hospital where she meets Dr Tom Osborne and gives blood for Frank (Corin 1.

Interview with Mario Monicelli, quoted in Stefano della Casa, Monicelli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1986), p. 4: ‘Ciò che ho voluto dire della società italiana, l’ho espresso attraverso dei modi duri ed aspri, ma che avevano dentro anche qualcosa di umoristico. […] Se c’è stata una crescita degli italiani, ciò è dovuto anche alla commedia all’italiana […].’

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Redgrave), a young man who has just attempted suicide. Frank helps her in her search for Vincenzo and, when his Italian friends manage to convince her of his death, offers marriage. Dr Osborne convinces her to refuse the proposal and start training as a nurse. Assunta seems to adjust to life in Bath but, on spotting Vincenzo with an Englishwoman, attempts to shoot him, wounding the lady. Dr Osborne is furious but helps her get away from Bath. Instead of returning to Sicily, however, she stops in London. When Tom himself moves to the city he meets her again. She is a different woman: she is an anti-war protester, a billboard model, and a folk singer. They are clearly in love with each other but they separate for the moment because Assunta cannot handle Dr Osborne’s amicable relationship with his ex-wife and her new partner. Now it is Vincenzo’s turn to pursue her. He is ready to take her back, provided she gives up her newly-found freedom. They could go to live in Catania where nobody would know about her redoubtable past. She spends one night with him in Brighton, and then abandons him to join Dr Osborne in Jersey. While watching the ferry pass by, Vincenzo has the last word: ‘She was a whore and still is a whore.’ The opening sequences of La ragazza con la pistola are packed with negative stereotypes about Sicily: the party where boys dance with boys and girls with girls, the reluctance of the villagers to help prevent the kidnapping, the public shaming of the victim. Filmed in surrealistic tones, the village and its people resurface from Assunta’s subconscious to haunt her throughout the film. The gun that she receives from her mother, however, is very real and alerts the spectators to a change in the mode of the film that is completed when she reaches Britain. While Assunta remains absorbed in her mission and indifferent to her new surroundings, the spectators are made to note the effect the British way of life, filmed in realistic sequences, has on her. At Edinburgh station, a Scottish lady from an employment agency is waiting for the arrival of a group of Italian maids. One of them informs Mrs McIntosh, another lady waiting at the platform, that her maid is getting married and will not be coming after all. On being asked by Assunta for directions, Mrs McIntosh tries to hire her, but is haughtily dismissed. Cross-cultural misunderstandings abound in this brief scene. Unlike the audience, Mrs McIntosh is totally unfamiliar with the nuances of regional stereotyping. In Italian comedy, a maid is invariably from Veneto and is immediately recognisable through her accent, her perkiness, and her clothes (inexpensive, but moderately fashionable). The first girl who approaches Mrs McIntosh is indeed a typical maid, but Assunta is definitely not. The long-sleeved black suit that made her indistinguishable from the other women in Sicily singles her out among the Italian girls at Edinburgh station. She ignores them and is ignored. While her long tress of black hair signals that she is single, her

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‘leave me alone’ clothes are supposed to deflect the attention of men from her body. Mrs McIntosh’s offer of time off for English lessons and dancing is, therefore, hardly enticing for a girl who keeps repeating that she is merely in Edinburgh to ‘run an errand’ and return to Italy immediately afterwards. After Vincenzo eludes her, Assunta agrees to work for the McIntoshes while waiting for him to resurface. Now it is her turn to misread local customs. Mrs McIntosh bewilders her by going to the cinema without her husband, who, in turn, astonishes her by not taking this opportunity to make a pass at her. Assunta settles down quite well but refuses to give up her tress at her employer’s request. When the couple gives a party, first the camera focuses on the tress, which ends up in the glass of a guest, who does not bat an eyelid at this mishap. Then it shows the girl in medium shot. She keeps tugging at the hem of a light-coloured uniform she obviously finds uncomfortably short. The camera pans over a relaxed, soft-spoken group of people where the two sexes mingle effortlessly. Assunta is totally absorbed in her tasks, refusing to engage with the guests at any level. Only the arrival of a man in a kilt momentarily arouses her amused incomprehension. She becomes the centre of attention when she receives a phone call from Vincenzo. Mrs McIntosh offers her guests a running translation of Assunta’s outpouring of unrequited love and of her death threats (which they all assume to be strictly metaphorical). The Italian spectators are expected to side with the Scots in finding the girl’s very real feelings funny only because of her inappropriate mode of expression. It is an experience akin to watching the Athenian court laugh at the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The guests come into their own when Assunta asks them where Sheffield is. They all have different opinions about distance and the best way to get there—a well observed example of British small talk. In Sheffield, Assunta is introduced to working class Britain, represented by a good-humoured young mechanic, who takes her around the pubs frequented by Italian men and by the English women who seek their company. Unlike the McIntoshes, who saw her as a conversation piece, he tries to challenge her views. For example, he firmly maintains that a woman who shares her apartment with a man is not automatically a whore. He takes her home to a neighbourhood of soot-covered cottages. As he proudly tells her that his house is the black one in the third row, she looks puzzled and comments ‘they are all black’, voicing the baffled response of Italian visitors to the sameness of so many English streets. Inside, their mores clash again. He makes it clear that he would like to make love to her, she refuses in a huff, and he starts watching a rugby game on television. She complains, he jumps on her; she fights him off and explains that the rules of the game are that he must try to seduce her and she must resist. Too complicated—he locks himself in his

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bedroom. He does not, however, hold a grudge and takes her to Bath where she abandons him to pursue Vincenzo. In Bath, Assunta has a brief encounter with the upper classes. Convinced of Vincenzo’s death, she now needs a husband and agrees to marry Frank, the sweet boy for whom she had donated blood at the hospital. He is no longer suicidal and is fascinated by her assertiveness and energy. Unable to understand the function of accent as a marker of social class and to distinguish between old and vintage cars, between flashy and expensive clothes, she is taken completely by surprise when he drives her to his family mansion and turns out to be very rich. Frank’s impassive mother responds to the news of her son’s imminent marriage with an offer of tea. Her aplomb is all the more amusing since the spectators, but not the bride-to-be, have already understood that the boy is not exactly husband material. When she asks Dr Osborne to give her away at the wedding, he feels duty-bound to enlighten her. To do so, he takes her to a gay bar. Italian film directors have an abysmal record in portraying gays. In this film, however, the need to offer a positive picture of the British way of life results in a remarkably restrained approach to the scene. Besides, Dr Osborne is already being singled out for the audience as the man Assunta should marry, so the gay couples are little more than a backdrop to his fatherly advice that she should stay in Britain and get a job. When we next see her, Assunta has abandoned her Sicilian attire, but she still thinks like a Sicilian. One glimpse of Vincenzo courting an Englishwoman is all it takes to put her in revenge mode. Since the lady whom she has accidentally wounded while aiming at Vincenzo is eager to keep things quiet, Dr Osborne rushes to the police station to stop the girl from turning herself in. He does not understand why he has to drag her away kicking and screaming, but of course, the Italian audience does. Honour is only restored after the killer’s public confession. He informs her that Vincenzo is not dead and, before putting her on the first flight home, violently berates her. Having fleshed out Dr Osborne’s character as that of an upstanding man, a father figure that is on the verge of becoming an attractive lover, the director has him deliver the message that is at the core of his film: honour killings are unacceptable and those who practice them are unfit for civilised society. Spoken by a foreigner, the message will hit the Italian spectators with added force because of their xenophilia and fear of brutta figura. A seasoned professional like Monicelli knows that the British way of life cannot be shown as superior to the Italian in every aspect in a film that aims at commercial success in Italy. Having made his point, he therefore goes to some length towards redressing the balance in a subjective camera scene that presents the aftermath of Dr Osborne’s divorce proceedings from Assunta’s point of view. Unseen, she watches him come out of court with his ex-wife

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and her new partner. They are chatting amicably, something she obviously cannot understand. Dr Osborne spots her and introduces her to his ex-wife, who suggests they all go for lunch at the zoo. The Englishwoman is impeccably turned out. Assunta appraises the details of her outfit, which fill the screen in close-ups, and perceives that she is being challenged to meet standards of coolness and fair play that she is unable to match. Then she realises that she does not have to embrace everything British as superior and declines the invitation. When Dr Osborne asks her to explain why, she tries to make him see the absurdity of the request and leaves him to mull it over. For once, Monicelli allows his protagonist to represent his own point of view and encourages the audience to concur with her. Assunta must acknowledge that divorce is a viable and civilised alternative to killing off an estranged spouse, but she has every right to feel that compulsory socialising among ex- and new partners is not civilised, but masochistic and plain stupid. Dr Osborne will have to accept that he too needs to change if their relationship is to make real progress. There is never any sense in the film that Assunta may actually kill Vincenzo. She explodes the idea of vendetta by being so totally inept at it. The sheer repetition of attempts on his life heightens the comic effect. What matters is that, eventually, she stops wanting to kill him and it is only at that point that her transformation into a modern, independent woman is completed. In their last meeting, she waves the gun at Vincenzo one more time, but then reassures him: it is not loaded and only kept as a memento. They have taken the same journey, but he has not changed. Totally self-centred, he finds confirmation of his irresistible charm over the women that surround him. Monicelli shows several shots of Englishwomen, young and middleaged, elegant and dowdy, who gaze adoringly into the eyes of Vincenzo and his equally untrustworthy friends. He does not, however, explore the reasons why they seek Italian men out, except for the catty remark of a young nurse: ‘No, it’s not for housekeeping.’ Although Assunta has chance encounters with a staggeringly high number of Britons who speak fluent Italian, one should not wonder how and why they learnt it. Monicelli is simply catering to the needs of the average Italian audience that would find subtitles unacceptable but is quite amenable to major suspensions of disbelief. After all, Italian-speaking Britons are only marginally more improbable than the 37-year-old Monica Vitti playing the role of an inexperienced Sicilian girl. Monicelli places a particularly heinous relic of the vendetta culture under the magnifying glass of satire. The didactic purpose is so carefully kept in check that many spectators may have missed it completely. Nearly forty years on, La ragazza con la pistola still has a didactic effect that the director could

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not possibly have foreseen. It can be watched as a sobering reminder of how Italian emigrants were perceived abroad, something that, in the light of our approach to immigrants, we seem to have thoroughly forgotten. The film is quite entertaining and well acted. As a study in cultural misunderstandings, it scores some interesting points, but it scarcely seems credible that it received an Academy Award Nomination for best foreign film. Britain as Enemy: Appuntamento a Liverpool The Venice Film Festival has a reputation for controversy, but it is a rare film that manages to be booed while the opening credits are still running. This was the case with Giordana’s Appuntamento a Liverpool. The snobbish audience of film critics objected to the director’s choice of leading actress, because Isabella Ferrari had achieved popularity with such light-weight crowd-pleasers as Sapore di mare (directed by Carlo Vanzina, 1982). In fact, she acquitted herself rather well in her first dramatic role. If the film was ultimately flawed, it was because of the director’s rather heavy-handed treatment of a plot centred on what was still, in 1988, a very topical subject, the consequences of the Heysel Stadium disaster. Caterina is a young girl from Cremona who is deeply traumatised because, in 1985, she witnessed her father’s death at the hands of a hooligan (Nigel Court) during the ill-fated Liverpool vs. Juventus football match at the Brussels stadium. Three years later, the assailant still haunts her dreams. Closure is made even harder by the visits of an English inspector (John Steiner) who demands that she watches harrowing TV footage of the incident and examines mug shots of suspects. On one occasion, she recognises her father’s attacker but does not tell the inspector. She steals the photograph and sets off by car for Liverpool. At a cheap hotel, Caterina befriends a Spanish chambermaid who tells her where she can buy a gun. Having secured a weapon, she starts wandering through the roughest parts of Liverpool at night, showing the hooligan’s picture to the team supporters. Predictably, she gets into trouble. A group of yobs starts threatening her but she is rescued by a policeman. The inspector had noticed the missing photograph and has had her followed. He takes her to an all-night café where her quarry, now a taxi driver, is drinking alone, tortured by remorse. The inspector wants her to forgo her revenge plot and follow the legal route. The next day, however, she does not identify the suspect at the police station, and the inspector has to let him go. Reunited with her mother, who has followed her to Liverpool, Caterina abandons her hotel room in the middle of the night and asks her father’s killer to drive her around in his taxi. During the ride, she aims the gun at the back

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of his head and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Having managed to steal a piece of identification with his home address, she rushes off. She goes back to the dealer and complains about the malfunctioning gun. He shows her how to move the safety catch to the firing position. She practices a bit and then posts herself outside the hooligan’s house. She fantasises about shooting him Western style but when he comes out he is followed by a very young child— his daughter. Caterina drops her gun and starts on her return journey to Italy. In reviewing his earlier films, some critics had accused Giordana of being involuntarily funny. They found his plots melodramatic, his dialogues stilted and unrealistic, and his footage of famous Italian sights as predictable and banal as postcards.2 In Appuntamento a Liverpool, the director is at least partially successful in overcoming his previous problems. The character of the protagonist and the mental processes that transform her into an avenger are sensibly and convincingly portrayed. In Liverpool, her encounters with the locals give Giordana the opportunity to introduce some interesting secondary characters, although most of them are not fully developed. In the second part of the film, unfortunately, the dialogues remain emphatic and ultimately involuntarily funny. On the plus side, the presentation of Liverpool is altogether different from his previous half-hearted portrayals of Italian cities. For Giordana’s audience, Liverpool is synonymous with the Beatles and the Heysel Stadium disaster. Almost none of them would have had first-hand experience of a city that does not rank very high on the list of British tourist attractions. Before following Caterina on her journey towards the point of origin of her personal tragedy, the director shows her in her hometown, Cremona. It is almost impossible to avoid giving postcard quality to the timeless elegance and beauty of the monuments that form the backdrop of Caterina’s tortured wanderings. Lost in her thoughts and evidently brought up among such sights, she is totally oblivious to their appeal. The panoramic views of Cremona, however, serve a specific purpose in a film that revisits ‘Liverpool vs. Juventus’ in the wider terms of ‘them vs. us’. This is ‘us’, the victims, the camera says, before starting its exploration of the city that gave birth to ‘them’, the hooligans. In Cremona (not Juventus’s hometown), the camera does not find any reminder of its citizens’ passion for soccer. In Liverpool, it finds many and lingers on them, from the poster of the team that adorns Caterina’s hotel room (and that she angrily destroys), to the billboard extolling ‘Britain’s Best for Soccer’, to the stadium itself. The imposing, empty building dwarfs the girl who looks at it apprehensively, as if it were a modern day Colosseum from 2.

See for example Paolo Berretto, ‘Marco Tullio Giordana: Il comico involontario’, in Il più brutto del mondo: Il cinema italiano oggi (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), pp. 145–49.

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which violence could erupt at any moment. Filmed in grey daylight, the scene of Caterina’s progress towards the stadium is realistic, in stark contrast with her next encounter with the landmarks of football, which has surrealistic, nightmarish overtones. At night, the girl is seen walking through a dilapidated warehouse, where bonfires reveal the shapes of huddled dossers, towards a small, brightly lit shed where male shapes are silhouetted behind a glass door. It is a branch of the team’s fan club, the lair of the beast for Caterina. The proudly displayed motto—‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’—acquires a deeply ironic meaning for the girl who looks frightened and forlorn. The whole city is seen through the unsympathetic eyes of the young avenger. While the centre of Cremona was bustling with shoppers and thriving commercial activities, Liverpool is presented as a fugue of derelict docks and boarded-up shop windows that speak of economic and cultural decay. The night scenes bathe the city in openly unrealistic lights. The sky is always grey and threatening rain. In her only visit to what could be considered a tourist sight (the roofless remains of the cathedral), Caterina launches into an uplifting monologue. Now it is the turn of her local police escort to show complete indifference to the monuments that attract a foreigner’s attention. The sun, that had disappeared as Caterina approached the stadium, only comes out again on the last morning when she does not go through with her plan, as if her forgiveness could herald in the city’s rebirth—not the subtlest of images. The ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ contrast, so clear in the presentation of settings, is even more marked when it comes to portraying people. In Cremona, Caterina is cocooned by loving relationships and by the kindness of strangers. Her mother, her employer, her friends are full of concern for her. A mechanic devotes his time and skills to her sports car, and a police officer tries to protect her from the relentless questioning of the English inspector. Unwittingly, they all contribute to making her revenge possible. In Liverpool, she meets a series of nameless people who are either openly hostile or ambiguously friendly. Among them, only the inspector is a fluent speaker of Italian. The others belong to the social underclass. Giordana rightly concluded that he could not demand of his art house spectators the same suspension of disbelief that Monicelli’s less discriminating audience was willing to make. So his Caterina speaks very good English (unlikely, given her background, but not impossible). Caterina’s exchanges with the Liverpudlians are subtitled. They are kept quite short because otherwise Italian spectators, used to dubbed films, would mentally switch off. Considering how bad Giordana is at dialogue, this actually turns out to be an advantage. When Caterina travels to Britain, twenty years have passed since Assunta stepped off the Edinburgh train with its cargo of Italian maids. Now a shopassistant from Cremona can pass for an icon of style in dowdy Liverpool. The

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hotel maid admires her coat so much that Caterina suggests a swap, the gun dealer is determined not to sell her anything until he spots her sports car, and then he too is eager to swap. The vacuum left by Italians at the bottom of the social ladder has been filled by other ethnic groups. The black hotel manager, the Spanish maid, the Middle Eastern waiter, the Asian dealer—they are all part of a complicated cultural mix that would have been totally unfamiliar to an Italian girl in the 1980s. Caterina sees them as natural allies in her quest for revenge against the English youth of the photograph. Each of them contributes something that helps her keep her ‘appointment’ with her father’s killer and then disappears from the film, except for the gun dealer. He reappears towards the end, teaches Caterina how to fire the gun, and then tries to convince her to give up her revenge. Although unsuccessful, he proves a better psychologist than the inspector, as he has a better understanding of the mental processes of an avenger. By killing the cabby, he says, Caterina would be doing him a favour because the man really wanted to die; it was written in his eyes. The English inspector starts out as a stern, upright father substitute who forces Caterina to do the right thing: identify the hooligans using their photographs so that they can be legally prosecuted. When they meet again in Liverpool, however, he has turned into an obsessive automaton, totally incapable of empathy. He urges Caterina to abandon her revenge plans but, after she refuses to identify her father’s killer at the police station, does nothing to make sure that she will heed his advice. When she bursts into tears and seeks comfort in his arms he is incapable of a response and remains perfectly still, a conventional monument to Anglo-Saxon embarrassment in the face of Latin displays of emotions. He seems to have fallen prey to the same sort of moral paralysis that appears to have infected all Liverpudlians. Seen through Caterina’s eyes, the streets of Liverpool are populated by silent, grey figures that would not be out of place in George Orwell’s 1984. The policeman who rescues her and then escorts her could effortlessly step back into this crowd: like them, he is uninterested, silent, and disengaged. The young men she approaches in her quest for the hooligan are unhelpful, derogatory, or downright threatening. While she drives through the docks, they try to vandalise her car. Outside the fan club, they crowd her and want to know why she is looking for one of them. Social class rather than nationality appears to be at the root of their hostility because their English exposes them as members of an underclass. They form the indistinct mass of hooligans from which her target will eventually be singled out. Caterina’s quarry is a silent presence that haunts the first two thirds of the film. The savage attacker of her recurring nightmares turns into the rather good-looking lad of the photograph, into the solitary drinker lost in thought,

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into the sullen object of police attention during the identification scene. Having found in his taxi a girl who demands to be taken on a night tour of Liverpool and refuses to take no for an answer, the cabby comes up with a line bound to make Italian spectators smile in recognition of a familiar scam: ‘The meter’s bust.’ He is a petty crook rather than a hardened criminal. He mistakes her for a tourist and clearly has no notion of what tourists want to see in an unknown town, his foreign travel being merely a by-product of his passion for the team. When she asks to be taken to the ‘Cavern Club’ he tries to engage her in conversation, wondering why she should be interested in the Beatles. In his heavily accented local English, he expresses his resentment for the group that has made Liverpool a household name throughout the world. In front of the boarded-up club, another symbol of the city’s decay, he gets out of the car and stands in front of the headlights. Utterly unaware of having been very close to death, he then treats Caterina to a ludicrously bad rendition of ‘All You Need Is Love’. Clearly, the magic of the Beatles has not rubbed off on their hometown. The next morning, she sees yet another facet of the hooligan: the concerned father on school duty. Unlike Vincenzo, who is every inch a cardboard womanizer, the hooligan has the complexity of a human being. It is a difference that impacts on the behaviour of the avengers. Whereas Assunta needs to be taught by Britons that honour killings are always unacceptable, even in the case of a totally unworthy man, Caterina can see for herself that her revenge would annihilate the little girl’s father along with her own father’s killer. One of the girls evolves into a positive character thanks to Dr Osborne’s influence, the other finds within herself the moral guidance that the inspector had been unable to give. In the hands of a director who did not equate seriousness with unrelenting gloom, Appuntamento a Liverpool could have been far more intriguing than La ragazza con la pistola. National Identities and the Eye of the Beholder ‘German? French? Spanish?’ When the hooligan tries to make conversation with the despondent girl who wants a night ride through Liverpool, he shows that the experience of meeting foreigners in the course of international football games has not made him an expert in national identities. To be fair, Caterina’s nationality is harder to pinpoint than Assunta’s, who, in her black dress and long tress, could never have been mistaken for a German or a French. Well dressed and well travelled, perfectly confident at the wheel of her sports car, Caterina could be a candidate for that most elusive thing—a European identity. Only superficially, though. Her English is good enough for her interaction with the Liverpudlians to become a study in what can go

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wrong in Anglo-Italian communication when there is no language problem. Giordana presents her as withdrawn, obsessive, and quietly unwavering in her requests for information or help. Her body language signals that she does not welcome physical contact, nor does she feel the need to punctuate her words with gestures. His Italian audience has no problem interpreting this combination of behavioural patterns as tell-tale signs of severe psychological problems. ‘Deeply traumatised, potentially unhinged—handle with care’ would be their diagnosis. To the Liverpudlians in the film, however, she is displaying standard signs of good up-bringing. ‘Soft-spoken, well-behaved, typical middle class’ would be their assessment. Like the boys at the fan club, the hooligan is made acutely aware of class difference on hearing her speak, but does not find her disquieting. When she tells him she is Italian, he hesitates for a moment, obviously remembering Liverpool-Juventus, and then carries on with attempts at small talk to which she is totally unresponsive. Unaware that in a noisy culture, like the Italian, silence is often a danger sign, he very nearly pays with his life for his inability to read a foreign culture, as the girl silently aims and fires. No Italian cab driver on night duty would feel so confident around a customer who behaved the way Caterina does. Foreigners frequently overlook the regional characteristics that complicate any definition of national identity and that are fairly obvious to natives. Her countrymen from other regions would recognise Caterina as Italian but also as a product of the ‘deep North’. Her native Lombardy, which Giordana presents in such an idyllic light, is the world of small businesses often run by deeply conservative individualists whom the people from neighbouring red Emilia, for example, would not see as representing Italy at its best. As for Assunta, Monicelli does not expect his audience to see her as typically Sicilian, let alone typically Italian. The surrealistic Sicilian scenes and her overthe-top behaviour during two thirds of the film are meant to trigger laughter and ensure box office success. She would be perceived as coming from ‘Sicily’, not an existing place but a cultural construct that puts the most objectionable aspects of the Sicilian ethos under the magnifying glass of slapstick comedy so that even real-life Sicilians can laugh at the opening scenes rather than being offended. The performance of British identities is subject to some unusual constraints in both films. Two Italian directors cast British actors to perform what they and their Italian script-writers perceive as typical British behaviour for films that are primarily but not exclusively aimed at Italian audiences. In the case of La ragazza con la pistola, a further level of complication is added because the performances of the British actors are dubbed into a sort of standard Anglo-Italian which eliminates any distinguishing marker of region or social class. Clearly, it is not the stuff masterpieces are made of. It is to the

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credit of the British actors that they acquit themselves with a remarkable degree of professionalism. In both films, the British characters only exist when they interact with the Italian protagonists or are under their gaze. Not surprisingly, they are fairly one-dimensional, reduced to the few traits of their personality that are useful to advancing the plot. Giordana tries to avoid the shorthand of stereotyping in favour of the longhand of characterisation, but he does not know enough about Liverpudlians to pull it off. At the other end of the scale, Monicelli unabashedly takes stereotypes as his starting point and manages to build at least a couple of convincing characters (the young mechanic and Dr Osborne). British culture is essential to Assunta’s transformation into a new woman but is merely a backdrop to Caterina’s process of selfhealing. It is at Monicelli’s film, therefore, that we must look for performances of British identity. His camera covers many lifestyles with an approving eye, although it does not really in-depth any of them. Regional differences do not really matter in La ragazza con la pistola. When Mrs McIntosh informs Assunta that the kilt is ‘our costume’, the girl has no way of knowing that she is referring only to Scots. The director is keener on portraying what he perceives as major differences between British and Italian society. All the people Assunta meets seem to be unburdened by family ties. The McIntoshes are married but not joined at the hip (he does not appear to mind that his wife goes to the cinema without him). The Osbornes are in the midst of a perfectly amicable divorce. The young mechanic lives alone (which would have been very unusual for Italian men in 1968, and still is far from common). Frank does have a room in his mother’s country house, but she inquires whether he will be staying for the week-end: the director is making the point that not even gay men live full time with mummy in Britain. Living alone in her own apartment becomes for Assunta a rite of passage she must go through before she is ready for a relationship with Dr Osborne. The nightmare sequences that feature a crowd of screeching, meddling villagers, all dressed alike, all urging Assunta to kill Vincenzo are presented as a grotesque counterpoint to her interactions with Britons. Monicelli carefully conveys the notion that the common denominator of all the cities the girl visits is the trouble-free coexistence of different lifestyles. As Assunta walks through Edinburgh, the camera highlights middle-aged women in bright, stylish clothes and Queen Mother look-alikes, men in conservative suits and long-haired hippies with their guitars, lovers kissing in the street and jolly drunks. Nobody stares at anybody else. The people Assunta asks for directions are momentarily disoriented at being tapped on the shoulder, but quite courteous once they realise the person invading their private space is a foreigner. Brought up in a place where there is only one acceptable way of doing things, Assunta is very vocal, throughout the film, in her disapproval of

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anybody who does not live by her rules—which means everybody she meets in Britain except for a handful of Sicilian expats. Until Dr Osborne disabuses her, she has no notion that her behaviour may appear as objectionable to the natives as theirs is to her, because they either abstain from judging or express their disapproval so subtly that it registers with the audience but not with Assunta. Her inability to read British reactions becomes evident when she tells Dr Osborne that she is going to marry Frank and completely misses the silent confrontation between the two men. The doctor finds it unacceptable that the young man should marry Assunta without telling her that he is gay. Frank understands, is ashamed but shows no intention of coming clean. Osborne backs off and tries to refuse the invitation to the wedding with some flimsy pretext. Frank knows that Osborne’s excuses should be promptly accepted just because they are so weak, but Assunta obviously does not. She switches on the irresistible charm of a Sicilian hostess reeling in a reluctant guest and poor Dr Osborne does not stand a chance. Collectively and individually, Monicelli’s Britons are essential to redefining Assunta’s identity, but only Dr Osborne’s is partially redefined by her. Most of the other characters are clearly uninterested in the world she comes from and are unwilling to establish with her the kind of close personal relationship that makes negotiation and compromise inevitable. The only Briton who is not portrayed in a positive light is also the only one who is in awe of her fierce determination to live by her exotic honour code. Frank proposes to her in the hope that her strength of character may rub off on him. His exchange with Assunta about how to respond to rejection is funny because she clearly misunderstands the sex of the lover for whom he tried to commit suicide. But he understands perfectly well that when she talks of killing Vincenzo she is speaking literally and, unlike Dr Osborne, he reacts with childish admiration and a total lack of moral scruple. A positive portrait of a gay man would have been too much for Monicelli’s 1960s audience. Revenge is so central to the plots of the two films that it takes priority over the performance of national identities for both directors. They never allow the spectators to be sidetracked for very long by overdetailed representations of intercultural exchanges. Guns are powerful attention pullers in both films. Ritually handed over by Assunta’s mother or coolly swapped for a car by Caterina, they are very often in the shot. Through close-ups, visual and verbal allusions, and actual firing incidents, both directors make sure that the spectators never forget that the apparently harmless protagonists are avengers in pursuit of their targets. Neither went to great lengths to find original ways of portraying Anglo-Italian relations. The commercial and critical success of Monicelli’s film was far greater than Giordana’s. This may have as much to do with genre as with the calibre

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of the two directors as a lack of in-depth knowledge of a foreign culture is more effectively disguised in comic rather than in dramatic scenarios. Bibliography Della Casa, Stefano, Monicelli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1986). Berretto, Paolo, ‘Marco Tullio Giordana: Il comico involontario’, in Il più brutto del mondo: Il cinema italiano oggi (Milan: Bompiani, 1982).

Anthony King English Fans and Italian Football: Towards a Transnational Relationship From National to Local Identity Since the early 1970s, English fans had been involved in a series of violent confrontations in Europe. There were a very large number of minor incidents of fan violence at European games during the 1970s, but four dates are widely cited as being the most significant events in the litany of European football violence: the European Cup Winner’s Cup Final between Glasgow Rangers and Dynamo Moscow in 1972, the UEFA Cup Final between Tottenham Hotspur and Feyenoord in 1974, the European Cup Final between Bayern Munich and Leeds in 1975, the European Cup Winner’s Cup tie between Manchester United and St Etienne in September 1977. In 1984, Manchester United played Juventus in the European Cup Winner’s Cup. With its extremely large away following, Manchester United’s visit to Turin was to be added to this litany of violence. Bill Buford has described the scene as the plane carrying the Manchester United fans arrived in Turin: The effect was immediate: these were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English nation […]. People stood up, while the plane was taxi-ing, amid protests from a stewardess to sit down again, and, as if on cue, began changing their clothes, switching their urban weekday dress for a costume whose principal design was the Union Jack […]. Meanwhile, everyone had started singing ‘Rule Britannia’ […]. The Italians, too, had changed their identity. They had ceased to be Italians: they were now ‘Eyeties’ or ‘wops’.1

As they drove into Turin, Buford describes how the fans threw bottles out of the bus at pedestrians, one of whom eventually hurled a stone back.2 The effect on those inside the buses was immediate. To be, suddenly, the target came as a terrible shock. The incredulity was immense: ‘Those bastards’, one of the supporters exclaimed, ‘are throwing stones at the windows’ […]. Looking around me, I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants: I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants in

1. 2.

Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (London: Mandarin, 1992), pp. 38–39. Buford, p. 44.

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a frenzy. They were wild, and anything that came to hand—bottles, jars of peanuts, fruit, cartons of juice, anything—was summarily hurled through the windows.3

Buford’s writing displays some tendentiousness, but he graphically details the trip to Turin, involving confrontations before, during, and after the game, high levels of violence, vandalism, and theft. Manchester United fan culture at this point displayed some recognisable features. Groups of young, predominantly white men from inner city areas travelled to foreign cities for very short periods of time. They gathered in large groups in central areas of European cities, drank heavily, and sought to demonstrate their national pride through the performance of intimidating physical displays, provocative acts, and the singing of nationalist songs. Through these acts, English fans constituted themselves as an imagined national community which had to be protected from insult and assault.4 Moreover, to allow the reputation of the English nation to be impugned was not only an affront to England but it also questioned the masculinity of these fans who created this little imagined community for themselves. Since their extreme national pride often encouraged a negative view of the countries to which these individuals were travelling, promoting unruly, uncivil if not outright provocative behaviour, the violence which occurred between English and other European fans or local police was common. As Buford demonstrates, Manchester United fans had a facile nationalist view of both themselves and their European rivals. Similar nationalist motifs framed the understanding of Italians by other English fans. Thus, in his discussion of his trip to Turin in 1979 with Arsenal fans, Colin Ward usefully records English fans’ perception of Italian fans. He describes how some Italian males attacked the Arsenal fans’ coaches as they left the city: ‘One threw a stone at the window and the others jumped at the windows, foaming at the mouth like rabid dogs and unable to contain their anger. Their eyes bulged from their sockets. It was a terrifying sight.’5 Like Manchester United fans, these Arsenal fans also understood Italians in crude racial terms, universalising them as irrational, inhuman, and even bestial. Significantly, there is little evidence to suggest that this Italian assault was any different from any number of attacks staged by English fans. However, the actions of the Italians are interpreted quite differently by English fans. While the performance of English fans remains human, if aggressive, Italians are incapable of controlling themselves. In her celebrated essay of gender relations, Sherry Ortner proposed that women’s inferior status across human 3. 4. 5.

Buford, pp. 44–45. See Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1990). Colin Ward, Steaming In (London: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 81.

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cultures was a product of their being equated with nature in contrast to men.6 Similarly, the Italian fans, as rabid dogs, are equated with nature and, thereby, denigrated and subordinated in comparison with the English. Nationalist selfconceptions framed the interactions between English fans and Italians in the 1970s and 1980s, producing a predictably xenophobic and aggressive performance from the English. A year after Manchester United’s trip to Turin, Juventus played another English team, Liverpool, in a now fateful European Cup Final on 29 May 1985 in the Heysel Stadium, Brussels. Events in the stadium are now wellknown. Liverpool and Juventus fans stood together at one end of the ground, separated only by a flimsy fence with police ineffectually stationed on the perimeter of the pitch rather than on the terraces. Mutual antagonism arose between the fans before the start of the match, which led to scuffles and finally a full ‘charge’ by Liverpool fans from which the Juventus fans, most of whom were unused to hooligan confrontations, fled, causing a crush at the far side of the terrace. At this point, a wall collapsed, causing most of the 39 deaths. Significantly, although the results of the Liverpool fans’ action were incomparably more serious than those of Manchester United fans in Turin, the cultural patterns which they displayed were similar. Like the United fans, the Liverpool fans, consisting predominantly of young white men, had gathered in large numbers in Brussels, had drunk heavily, and engaged in nationalist displays. Moreover, they demonstrated a similar nationalist understanding of their European opponents. Following the assaults on Liverpool fans by Roma fans after the 1984 European Cup Final in Rome, when a number of Liverpool fans had been stabbed, Liverpool fans popularised a terrace chant which demonstrated the salience of this nationalist consciousness: He’s only a poor little wop His face all tattered and torn He made me feel sick So I hit him with a brick And now he don’t sing anymore.7

Commenting on the Heysel disaster, Brian Glanville also noted the nationalist consciousness of the Liverpool fans in the 1980s.

6.

7.

Sherry Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in Women, Culture and Society, ed. by Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 68–87. Steve Redhead, Sing When You’re Winning (London: Pluto, 1986), p. 100.

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Italy is still less a country than a collection of mutually suspicious city-states, but it would be of little use to tell a Scouser how much difference there was between a plebeian Roman and a supercilious Torinese. All were simply ‘Italians’ and I am convinced that this misconception played a part in what so tragically happened at Heysel, a year later.8

Clearly, there were other factors involved in the Heysel stadium disaster but, in the 1980s, Liverpool fans like other English supporters remained wedded to nationalist understandings of other European nations in general and Italy in particular. Twenty years later and there have been very significant changes in the conception of Italy, Italian cities, and Italian football clubs among the same English fans who marauded through the narrow streets of Turin in the 1980s. Thus, the same group of masculine Manchester United fans that, in the past, was at the forefront of trouble now conceive of themselves and their Italian rivals quite differently and seek to perform in quite different ways when visiting Italy. Interestingly, the very kinds of behaviour which were regarded as typical and even appropriate by Manchester United fans in the 1980s are now disdained: ‘Acting up as Jack Large in a foreign bar doesn’t mark you down as a leading face [a well-known hooligan], likewise ripping Italian cab drivers doesn’t mark you down as jib master general.’9 Indeed, the rejection of those Manchester United fans who still employ nationalist self-understandings when traveling in Europe has often been ferocious: ‘Why do certain United fans feel they have to behave like cretinous arseholes every time they step foot on foreign soil? All this chanting “Engerland, Engerland” and “No surrender to the IRA” etc. has no place on a United away trip.’10 Nationalist Manchester United fans have now adopted a specious identity when abroad, which they believe gives them status in foreign cities but which, in fact, only demonstrates their backward insularity. By contrast, those masculine fans who consider themselves authentic have adopted new ways of demonstrating their status in Europe. True Manchester United fans seek to denote both their status but also to demonstrate that they are thoroughly familiar with the Continent and do not feel the need to assert themselves publicly when in foreign cities: ‘We are talking about the great cities of Europe here, playing the great clubs of Europe and yet an increasing Brian Glanville, Football Memories (London: Virgin, 1999), p. 154. To jib means to gain access to facilities without paying for them. One element of Manchester United’s hooligan firm called itself the ‘Inter-City Jibbers’, whose central ethos was to pay for nothing on their trips. Their motto was ‘To pay is to fail’ (Anon., ‘A Tale of One City’, United We Stand, 81 [May 1999], 23). 10. Anon., ‘Editorial’, Red Issue, 9, 10 (April 1997), 1.

8. 9.

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number of Reds insist on playing the village idiot that we accuse so many of our rivals of being.’11 The nationalist consciousness of Manchester United fans has undergone a profound transformation. Italians are no longer mere ‘wops’ to be denigrated and despised but are seen as rivals of equal status. Moreover, Italians are no longer a homogeneous category. Manchester United specifically understands Italy (and the rest of Europe) in terms of its cities and the clubs located in them. This group of United fans claims that they are not interested in asserting their masculine status on a parochial and insular level like nationalist fans by abusing all foreigners, but want to establish their status as representatives of Manchester United by acting in a way which demands the respect of the locals, not merely their hatred. They understand their performance as fans in Italy in a novel way. Random abuse of innocents is dishonourable and brings Manchester United into disrepute. For United fans today, Italy is no longer understood as a unified nation but the cultural and economic differences between cities and clubs are now well recognised. Juventus fans may still be unpopular with Manchester United fans but this is not because they are Italians and Manchester United fans are English but because they support a major rival to Manchester United and display certain distinctive forms of aggressive fan culture, which is the product of living in a major industrial city in the North of Italy. A similar process of transnationalisation of fan understanding is also apparent among Liverpool fans. Although there were large numbers of Liverpool supporters in Istanbul in May 2005, the aggressive, alcohol-fueled demonstrations which had preceded Heysel were generally absent. Supporters adopted a more conciliatory attitude to Milanese fans and Turkish locals, physically dispersing themselves across the city. Liverpool fans no longer required to stage mass displays of insularity. They have begun to understand the Italians differently. Thus, the author—named ‘Prometheus’—of a review of the 2004–5 season, which culminated in the Champions League victory, described how a Liverpool European Champions T-shirt engendered diverse reactions in Italy, thereby revealing the complexity of Italian fan culture. You have to understand the nature of support in Italy. It is deeply ‘tribal’—everybody in Rome supports Roma or Lazio. There are no Lazio supporters in Turin, just as there are no Roma supporters in Naples. It’s not like here where the boundaries of support are blurred across the whole country. In Italy, nowhere is the boundary more pronounced than the football fault line that runs between Turin and Milan. Physically further apart than Liverpool and Manchester, the divide between Juve and Milan is at

11. United We Stand, 81 (May 1999), 23.

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least as deep and bitter. The fact is that in most of Italy, Milan are loathed as much as the Mancs are here—and as Chelsea have just become. Our victory was very popular across much of Italy.12

The writer manifestly overstates the case that fan loyalties are so circumscribed in Italy: there are, in fact, large and thriving Juventus fan clubs in Milan and vice versa. It would also be wrong to suggest that English football fans never understand themselves and Italians in nationalist terms anymore. Moreover, it would be wrong to claim that, as a consequence of Heysel, no friction exists between Liverpool and Juventus or other Italian fans. Indeed, during the final, Milanese fans sought to exploit Heysel against Liverpool, displaying a banner in the stadium which read, ‘15. 4. 89 Sheffield: God Exists!’. The banner suggested that the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool fans had died was divine retribution for Heysel. Rivalries and hatred still exist. In the context of Italian-English football rivalry, Heysel remains a defining moment which mediates interactions between fans. For Italian fans of all clubs, it remains a reference point which influences their understanding of English fans. However, Prometheus’ commentary shows that the context in which conflict now occurs has begun to be de-nationalised. A profound transformation has taken place whereby the self-understanding of those groups of masculine football fans who once displayed facile and sometimes aggressive forms of nationalist consciousness now looks upon Italian fans quite differently. These fans increasingly see themselves not as actors in an international situation, in which they represent one nation against others. Rather, they see themselves in more localised terms, representing a particular club and city, and competing with other fans from other cities. Fans have begun to understand themselves in transnational terms in which the primary mode of interaction with other European fans is not national but local. Football clubs and their fans are increasingly differentiated from the national context and understood to be in transnational competition with each other. The relationship of English fans to Italian football clubs and their supporters is changing. They are increasingly understanding themselves and these clubs in localised terms. Quite new kinds of fan performances are now evident around English and Italian football. The question is, of course, how has this shift in fan culture in England been possible?

12. Prometheus, ‘Looking Down on Cloud 9’, Through the Wind and Rain, 69 (2006), 14–16 (p. 4).

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From International Competition to Transnational Spectacle13 It would be possible to explain the transformation of fan culture in a number of ways, emphasising social and economic change in Britain and new patterns of travel and work. However, since football is a partially autonomous sphere of activity, it may be most convincing to connect changes in fan culture with parallel developments within European football itself. External factors outside of football are not denied. Indeed, the transformation of this European football—and fan culture within it—is an integral element in the wider dynamics of European integration, dovetailing with and matching changes in other spheres. Yet, the changes within European football have been in themselves so dramatic over the past two decades that they provide at least an adequate framework in which to understand this revision of the fans’ understanding of Italy. As various commentators have noted, the process of European integration can be usefully periodised into three distinct phases: 1950 to 1970, 1970 to 1986, and 1986 to the present. In the first era, European integration proceeded very successfully but without jeopardising the sovereignty of the member states. As Alan S. Milward and Andrew Moravscik have shown, it was an international order in which the nation remained uncompromised.14 In the second era, integration faltered as the post-war states faced economic crisis especially as a result of the inflation of oil prices. Finally, after 1986, the process of integration was once again re-invigorated. However, although states remain dominant in Europe, neo-liberal measures which aimed at the creation of genuinely pan-European markets were implemented vigorously by the Commission. In this neo-liberal Europe, companies, regions, and cities have become more autonomous from the state and have sought to interact with other agencies in other European member states more closely. Firms, in particular, have sought to exploit the opportunities of the increasingly borderless Europe. A new transnational network has emerged in Europe subverting old national boundaries and, indeed, states themselves are part of this network as they co-operate with each other on areas which were once the preserve of sovereign states. Although often separated in popular imagination from mundane reality, European football—as an economic enterprise—has reflected this wider process of integration. It, too, can be periodised into three main regulatory periods paralleling the wider contours of European integration. In the first 13. For a longer discussion of this transformation, see Anthony King, The European Ritual: Football in the New Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 14. Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1992). Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe (London: University College London, 1998).

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period from 1955 to 1970, European competition was successfully established within a structure which did not threaten the national leagues. Although the clubs of different nations played each other, the national leagues were still secure with the authority of the national federations, supported by UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, remaining unchallenged. Although the Spanish and Italian leagues were open to foreigners in the 1950s, from the early 1960s national leagues excluded or severely limited the number of foreigners who could play for domestic clubs. The teams which competed in Europe from 1955 until the 1980s were comprised of indigenous nationals. It was interesting that reflecting the national constitution of the teams, the press coverage viewed European football as vicarious international fixtures in which the clubs unproblematically represented their nations. Thus, in 1968 when Manchester United played Benfica Lisbon at Wembley in the European Cup final, the match was viewed as an international between England and Portugal, even though several of the United players were in fact Scottish or Irish: ‘For this is a national occasion make no mistake. It is seen as revenge for Portugal’s World Cup defeat and Benfica’s humiliating 5–1 defeat by Manchester United […] two years ago.’15 Between 1955 and the early 1970s, European football was organised as an international regime in which the different national leagues were separate and sovereign. European competition was analogous to the developing Economic Community since it involved increasing cross-border trade in a particular commodity, football matches, but not in services or labour. The basis of production was still national though the market for games was expanded across national boundaries. From the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, European competition was compromised by hooliganism, corruption, and poor play, echoing the wider crisis in the post-war settlement. European football went through its own period of Eurosclerosis. From 1986, however, after the nadir of the Heysel stadium disaster, European football began to organise itself on a new basis, like the European Union. The international regime was gradually replaced as European football experienced de-regulation which paralleled Project 1992 more widely. The de-regulation of European football involved two major developments. From the early 1980s, the state control of broadcasting began to collapse in the face of technological developments and increasing competition. Neo-liberal policies in each country undid this state broadcasting system and allowed for the development of new television companies often delivered 15. Geoffrey Green, ‘Seven Magic Minutes That Gave Manchester United the Cup’, The Times, 30 May 1968, 15.

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through new cable and satellite technology. The viability of these new private companies was dependent on attaining programming of sufficient quality that viewers would be willing to pay subscription fees for exclusive access to these channels. Sport, and above all football, was recognised as a prime form of content. ‘Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre [and] football, of all sports, is number one’, as Rupert Murdoch stated.16 Sport, and football in particular, became, to use Murdoch’s term, a ‘battering ram’ by which new networks could break into and indeed create new markets for themselves.17 Consequently, from the late 1980s but particularly in the early 1990s, satellite, private, and state broadcasting companies began to compete ferociously for exclusive rights to domestic and European football, inflating the value of football dramatically. At the forefront of this new relationship between football and television was Silvio Berlusconi, who purchased a majority stake in AC Milan in 1986 in order to exploit this burgeoning market for football. He was instrumental in propelling the de-regulation of European football and initiating a new transnational regime. As a result of the intervention of Berlusconi and other media interests, there was a dramatic increase in revenue for football clubs but this revenue was not distributed evenly. Rather, consistent with the new neo-liberal hegemony, the biggest football clubs across Europe were able to demand a greater share of this revenue. The big clubs—like AC Milan—attracted the large television audiences. The de-regulation of football precipitated a rapid concentration of financial and playing capital at the biggest clubs in Europe. The emergence of a transnational regime was propelled by a second piece of de-regulation. From the 1960s, European football had been organised on an international basis. Each national league was sovereign and the player market was limited or restricted to indigenous players. From the 1970s, the biggest clubs sought to employ one or two foreign stars and the European Commission itself began to express concerns about the restrictiveness of UEFA’s regulations regarding foreign players. Gradually, in the course of the 1980s under pressure from the Commission and the clubs, UEFA reduced the restrictions on foreign players until in 1992, three foreign players and two ‘assimilated’ players were allowed to play for a club team in a European competition. However, in 1995, a Belgian footballer, Jean-Marie Bosman, took his club to the European Court of Justice to challenge the legality of Belgian transfer arrangements. In December 1995, the European Court of 16. Cited in Lynton Guest and Paul Law , ‘The Television Revolution: Part 2’, World Soccer (February 1997), 24–25 (p. 24). 17. Patrick Harveson, ‘It’s a New Ball Game as Takeover Talk Hits Fever Pitch’, Financial Times, 16 October 1996, 31.

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Justice ruled in favour of Bosman. Out of contract transfer fees were abolished but, far more significantly, foreign player restrictions were outlawed. The Bosman ruling abolished all restrictions on football players who were nationals of European member states. In abolishing the restriction on member state players, the Bosman ruling created a pan-European market for professional footballers at a stroke. Funded by de-regulated television rights, the biggest clubs were able to exploit this new market situation to their advantage. They could hire star players from any part of the Union and since 1995, the biggest European clubs have been able to create unprecedented squads of international stars unfettered by national boundaries. As a result of the twin de-regulation of broadcasting and the player market, the biggest clubs have been able to accumulate playing talent in a way which was impossible previously. The result is that these clubs have differentiated themselves from their former domestic rivals while forming an increasingly coherent transnational European elite. You have an elite within the Premier League. You have exactly the same in the other countries. The Champions League is exacerbating it. There is a huge gulf between clubs in the Champions League and those that are not. So it is bound to be the case that those clubs will basically stay in the Champions League. It is very difficult to break into as we are finding. Once you are in it, the stakes are so high that you have to develop your commercial basis rapidly in order to sustain it. There will be twelve to sixteen global brands—bound to be […]. The important thing to recognise is that the major economic players in the game are, increasingly, the clubs, the major clubs […]. I’m not going into a battle about club vs. country but I am just stating basic economic fact; the major clubs are the big drivers […].18

The de-regulation of European football has initiated a self-propelling process of concentration and as the economic and playing resources are concentrated at the biggest clubs, they have come into closer and closer contact with each other. The de-regulation of European football in the 1990s has transformed the geography of European football. European football no longer consists of a series of discrete national markets each with its own internal hierarchies from the smallest to the biggest clubs. Instead, there is a single European market dominated by the biggest clubs. These clubs have formed themselves into a legally recognised transnational network. In 1998, in response to a proposal to create a European Superleague by a Milan-based company, Media Partners, the largest clubs in Europe established themselves as an alliance, called the G-14 which represented the clubs politically in discussions with UEFA

18. Rick Parry, Liverpool Football Club, personal interview, 9 February 2000.

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and media companies.19 As Umberto Gandini, one of the directors of AC Milan, has economically put it: ‘We are the ones who make the show and therefore we are the ones who should get the profit.’20 The G-14 has now expanded to include 18 clubs and has continued to represent the interests of this nascent transnational grouping, establishing itself as the first ever European Economic Interest Group in football.21 It has made regular formal and informal interventions into recent decisions about European football, though its long-term vision is more strategic: We want a European League one way or the other to take place. We want a league which would not be detrimental to the national leagues and national associations. I think they can be complementary. They don’t have to be alternatives. And the aim of our activities is to get to that point. 22

A new transnational hierarchy has emerged in which the biggest clubs are predominant. The biggest clubs compete with each other for all the stars from within the European Union, seriously disadvantaging smaller clubs in their own leagues and even big clubs in small markets such as Ajax of Amsterdam which are no longer protected from the transnational market. A dual process is occurring where there is a concentration around certain key sites in European football from which points of concentration new transnational networks extend. Significantly, the new geography of European football parallels wider developments in the post-Fordist, globalised era in which the forces of multinational capital have increasingly subverted the former unity of Keynesian national economies. The developments in European football match the wider processes of uneven regional development and the incipient fragmentation of formerly unified nations. As resources are concentrated at the biggest clubs and they transcend their national leagues, they are coming into increasingly close contact with each other. They are forming a new transnational network which is an increasingly 19. Media Partners is directed by Rodolfo Hecht Lucari who used to work in Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset television company. British journalists assumed that there was, therefore, a strategic link between AC Milan and Lucari but this has been denied both by Lucari himself and AC Milan, both of whom claimed that certain English clubs were much more interested in the project. The G-14 originally consisted of AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Porto, Marseilles, Paris St Germain, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Ajax, PSV Eindhoven, Liverpool, and Manchester United but has recently expanded to include Valencia, Arsenal, Bayer Leverkusen, and Olympique Lyonnais. 20. Umberto Gandini, director AC Milan, personal interview, 15 March 2000. 21. See webpage: http://www.g14.com (accessed 23 February 2007). 22. Umberto Gandini, personal interview, 15 March 2000.

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constitutive feature of contemporary European football. In response to deregulation, European football has been transformed. The international regulatory order has been replaced by a transnational regime in which the power has concentrated at the biggest clubs who have outgrown their leagues and have come into increasingly close contact with them. At the level of the clubs, the context in which Italian and English clubs are operating has changed profoundly and their interactions have altered accordingly. There are now dense co-operative and competitive connections between Manchester United, Liverpool, Milan, and Juventus where in the past these clubs merely played each other infrequently. These clubs compete more frequently on the pitch with each other and struggle to sign players in a borderless market. At the same time, they share substantial collective interests and interact with each other in new ways to promote them, as the G-14 shows. The Development of Localised Fan Cultures Many contemporary commentaries on football focus either on fan culture or on the business side of football.23 There is nothing wrong in limiting the focus to either the production or consumption of football. However, the two sides of the game are actually indivisible. The business of football is possible only because fans are willing to pay to see games, while fan culture is patterned by the economic organisation of the clubs and the leagues in which their teams play. Significantly, the transformation of fan culture—from nationalism to a localised transnationalism—has paralleled the emergence of the transnational regime at the level of the clubs. As the biggest clubs have formed themselves into a European network which transcends national leagues, fans have also begun to think of themselves as the localised representatives of a particular club competing with similarly localised opposition. Liverpool and Manchester United fans no longer face generic Italian supporters but Juve, Milan, and Inter. It is possible to identify mechanisms by which this new transnational regime has engendered a transformation of fan culture, thereby connecting changes at the level of the boardroom in Italy and England with those in the stands and curvas. All supporters want their club to be successful on the pitch and therefore will favour and indeed demand strategies which result in the hiring of the players and managers capable of bringing success. For many fans, success is not unreasonably the priority. In the post-Bosman era, they fully understand 23. For fan culture, see Garry Robson, No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom (Oxford: Berg, 2000). For business aspects, see Stephen Morrow, The New Business of Football (London: Macmillan, 1999).

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that their club can be successful only by competing with the other major European powers for players. As players circulate between the biggest clubs and as fans, therefore, gain a more refined understanding of other clubs and leagues, national frames of understanding, adequate up to the 1990s, no longer remain relevant. As these understandings have changed, so has the performance of English fans in Italy; they have mobilised themselves in quite new ways. Nationalist frames of reference have become less meaningful to many fans. As a consequence of the de-regulation of broadcasting and the rise of the biggest clubs, the old European Cup expanded to form the Champions League. With its increased number of clubs and matches, the competition has given fans a much greater opportunity to travel abroad. In the past decade, English fans have, consequently, travelled far more extensively in Europe than in the past. Moreover, partly as a result of cheap air flights (themselves a product of de-regulation), instead of the very brief drunken visits of the 1970s and 80s, fans now stay in European cities before and after the game. They have become familiar with the European transport network and have developed detailed knowledge of many of the major cities of Europe. The fans go out there and in three days in a foreign city, you cannot help but pick up certain things. And those who go to every game, they have racked up a really good list of away trips. They have become what we would now call European citizens. They are at ease in all the capitals, they know the different cultures, what you can do with a woman in one place, what you can’t in another. That is a socialisation process and that is very new. 24

The range of experiences in which fans are interested may be narrow. However, the potentially provocative mass gatherings of the past have given way to a dispersed integration into the city. The differences between cities, regions, and national cultures have become ever more obvious to English fans travelling in Europe and Italy: ‘They are more cosmopolitan, more clued-up, they’re more hospitable and less antagonistic to foreign supporters.’25 As their own club interacts on a transnational stage, English fans have begun to understand themselves in terms of a transnational competitive network. Their concept of the Italian has been problematicised and they have developed a differentiated account of Italian fan culture and Italy itself. It is important to recognise the limitations of this revised, transnational interpretation of Italian fans. Even the fans of the currently most successful English clubs, like Man-

24. Manchester United fan, personal interview, 12 May 1998. 25. Manchester United fan, personal interview, 15 May 1998.

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chester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, or Chelsea, play only relatively few matches against Italian opposition in comparison with domestic league games. Consequently, although a more refined understanding of Italian fan culture is developing, fans emphasise that they simply do not interact with the fans of Milan or Juventus enough for the dense rivalries which exist between the fans of English clubs to develop. Those intense cultural interchanges, which occur between Manchester United and Liverpool fans throughout the year both at matches and in the course of a diversity of other interactions, do not occur between English and Italian fans. Nevertheless, cultural awareness is growing. For instance, as a result of Channel Four’s coverage of Serie A football in the early 1990s and, subsequently, with the Champions League, English fans are more attuned to Italian styles of play: the slower pace of possession play with longer buildups and greater levels of skill. Fans have also sought to adopt Italian fashions in order to assert their status over their English rivals whose clubs are unsuccessful or who lack the resources to acquire expensive designer clothes. Transnational cultural interchange is altering the understanding of English fans and their performance of fandom. There are signs of deepening interchange. For instance, the latest edition of the Manchester United fanzine, United We Stand, includes a piece on the Milan derby by British journalist Jim White. The piece demonstrates that Manchester United fans are not only intrinsically interested in Italian fan culture but also that, in the light of the ‘sanitised’ atmosphere of English all-seater stadia, they are actively looking to Italy as a model of how to re-create the intense collective celebrations of the 1980s.26 Thus, the piece highlights some important differences between English and Italian football culture. In contrast to the strictly administered order of English all-seater stadia, White emphasises the laxness of Italian crowd control on the Inter curva where he stood: ‘Here, there were no stewards, no police, no community liaison officers; the fans were totally in charge.’ Significantly, White draws a historic parallel with England: ‘the place was heaving in a way I have not seen in England for 20 years. Everywhere people stood on the small bucket seats; aisles and staircases were lined with fans.’ White goes on to describe the extraordinary display which the fans orchestrated with huge banners, flares, and singing. The descriptions are intended didactically, providing examples of how the atmosphere in English grounds might be improved. However, White’s description is intended to be not merely instructional. The comparison he draws between contemporary English and Italian fan culture sketches the outline of a comparative sociology, illustrating the social 26. See Jim White, ‘The Milan Derby’, United We Stand, 156 (December 2006), 14–15.

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origins of these different forms of support. Thus, White describes how, after celebrating a goal, ‘the first inkling of trouble started’. A stocky, aggressive teenager armed with a stick came pushing up the terrace, accompanied by an older man, whom White recognised as one of the chant leaders. White himself became the object of a tirade of abuse from the teenager, which eventually culminated in the teenager striking the Inter fan, standing next to White, on the nose with his stick: ‘The bloke went down like a towerblock under dynamite.’ White was mystified by the whole exchange until a fan, behind him, informed him, ‘Meester, it is necessary you must clap’. The teenager and the chant leader were apparently unhappy about the contribution from White’s section of the crowd. White’s piece records a profound distinction between English and Italian football culture. In England, English fan culture is closely controlled and surveilled by the authorities, the club, and the police. Fans are disciplined and ordered within the ground. They are assigned designated seats and their supporting performances are monitored by stewards and close-circuit television cameras to discourage excessively masculine displays. However, the fans themselves exert almost no control over each other. Their culture is liberal and democratic. Even before the transformation of English football, English fans developed a collective culture which was extremely tolerant of individual initiative. From the 1960s onwards, there were no chant leaders or orchestrated choreographies and pressure to participate was informal and, often, weak. Fans could not, of course, be part of the masculine core group if they did not contribute to group displays and, potentially, also to their collective acts of violence but other fans were allowed generally merely to spectate. In Italian football, by contrast, where the club and police exert little everyday authority over the fans in the ground, the supporters organise themselves into ordered collectives. Fans are administered not by the club or police but by established Ultra groups with their formally appointed leaders—White’s teenager and the chant leader—who enforce contributions from all those on the curva. White’s experiences point not only to profound differences between English and Italian football culture but potentially between national cultures more generally. In British society, formal authority and the law play a critical role in framing interactions in civil society, while professional status groups themselves exert only relatively weak and liberal control over their members. Within a legal framework, individuals are free to pursue their own initiative. In Italy, by contrast, although state bureaucracy is cumbersome, its authority is contested and the application of the law is more diffuse and localised. Here professional status groups, business communities, political parties, kin groups, and localised interest groups (including criminal ones) are critical to

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social order and the regulation of conduct.27 White’s piece points only briefly to the profoundly different social geographies of British and Italian society and, given the relative infrequency of cultural interchange, few English fans would develop a deep comprehension of either Italian football culture or of Italian society more generally. However, White’s piece denotes an important shift in English understandings. These fans no longer merely denigrate Italians as a bestial other, as they did in the 1970s and 80s. They are beginning to recognise the social and historical origins of the variations in Italian fan culture. As a new transnational regime appears, English fans are re-negotiating their understanding of Italian football. This cultural interchange is being conceptualised and performed in new ways. There is a second dynamic which has localised the consciousness of fans in England, and especially Manchester United, and led them to re-interpret their relations to other European clubs, including Juventus and Milan. In the 1990s, Manchester United became a public limited company and, in order to increase profit, expanded their merchandising branch dramatically. This had serious repercussions. One of the consequences of Freedman’s marketing revolution and United’s success on the field, was that the club everybody loved and regarded as their second club if they did not already support United, became one of the most hated clubs in the country.28

Bose may overstate the case when he claims that United was loved by everybody but his general point is sustainable. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, at the height of Manchester United’s success, United fans were subject to a high level of abuse from opposing fans but, even more strikingly, Manchester

27. Interestingly, in his work on ‘closed and open evidential cultures’ in American and Italian laboratories, Harry Collins has recorded a similar difference. While American laboratories organise themselves by reference to established general principles which individual teams of scientists follow alone, Italian laboratories demonstrate a collective, communitarian approach where institutions and scientists take their cues from their peers. Amusingly, Collins uses the metaphor of Italian and American driving patterns to illustrate the point. While American (and British) drivers defer strictly to the law so as not to upset other drivers (who are abiding by the rules), Italian drivers co-operate with each other. They move out of the way to allow cars to enter the highway or drive around randomly parked cars, which in Britain and American would cause outrage. In Italy, drivers constitute a self-policing community which takes collective responsibility for the individual driver. In Britain and America, driving has an individualist ethos. Harry M. Collins, ‘Open and Closed Evidential Cultures in the Search for Gravitational Waves’, American Journal of Sociology, 104, 2 (1998), 293–338. 28. Mihir Bose, Manchester Unlimited (London: Orion Business Books, 1999), p. 201.

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United players such as Gary Neville and David Beckham were booed when playing for England. This vitriol inspired an interesting reaction from United fans. As one fan commented: ‘“Stand up if you hate Man U” at England game—that’s happened this year, hasn’t it?’29 In rejecting the England football team, these United fans make an interesting and potentially important critique of English nationalism which they no longer see as a universal identity which encompasses all English people but rather only as an expression of the particular interests of regionally located groups. For these United fans, English nationalism is the appropriate identity of the South (which has benefited from the free market policies of national governments, particularly under Margaret Thatcher) or of those small clubs (also often in the South) whose fans’ only hope of foreign travel (and status) is with the England team. ‘Most cities in the North of England have got less reason to feel a national identity than down South.’30 The national team is there to give supporters of small time crap little clubs—West Ham, Millwall, Leeds, City etc.—the chance to lord it up abroad watching a team that at least has a chance of winning, unlike their own tin-pot lowly outfit. This is the view of the majority of United fans and indeed supporters of other big clubs, usually in the North (Liverpool and Everton), subscribe to firmly.31

As Manchester United has grown in power and influence, provoking a wave of antipathy against the club and its fans, Manchester United fans have responded by rejecting English nationalism as an appropriate means of mobilisation. A similar phenomenon is discernible at Liverpool, beginning in the early 1980s in the period of their dominance. Consequently, for the fans of major clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United, the national frame of reference has been actively rejected. They reject the reductive xenophobia so characteristic of the British nationalism of the 1980s. In order to distinguish themselves from the fans of smaller English teams who are still apparently wedded to these concepts, these supporters actively seek to behave differently in Italian cities and to interact with locals and fans in a distinctive fashion. Liverpool and Manchester United certainly want to assert their status over these fans but in a transnational Europe, crude expressions of nationalist pride are clear signs of inferiority and exclusion from the new networks of European power. The new political economic realities of transnational Europe have propelled the development of new relations and new understandings among English fans of Italian football. 29. Personal interview, 30 April 1998. 30. Manchester United fan, personal interview, 30 April 1998. 31. Anon., ‘UWS Letters: England for Me Means Nothing’, United We Stand, 67 (1998), p. 8.

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Conclusion At the end of the 2005/6 season, a corruption scandal involving Juventus Turin, AC Milan, Fiorentina, and Lazio Rome erupted. It emerged that in the 2004/5 season, these clubs, with Juventus at their heart, had been manipulating the selection of referees for Serie A games. It is not the first time that Italian clubs have been involved in corruption. In the 1980s, several clubs and some famous players were involved in a betting scandal but paralleling the current case more closely, Juventus and Inter Milan were exposed for a series of bribes to referees in European Cup games in the 1960s and 70s. Interestingly, although the method and purpose of the 2006 and 1960 and 70s scandals were similar, the patterns of corruption usefully illustrate the differences between the international and current transnational regimes of European football. In the 1960s and 70s, Juventus and Inter bribed individual referees monetarily in European Cup games in return for success on the pitch and the financial rewards which came with it. The European Cup was open to abuse because it was administered by a small and un-commercial UEFA . By 2006, the European Cup, transformed into the Champions League, has become a difficult competition to suborn. Although it has lost power to the bigger clubs, UEFA has huge financial interests in the competition and, therefore, every concern in ensuring that its integrity is rigorously sustained. It is, consequently, now managed much more professionally. Similarly, the television and sponsoring companies, for whom authenticity is paramount, are further insurance against the corruption of the competition. While the European Cup is now difficult to corrupt, the national leagues, organised by federations whose authority is declining dramatically in the face of the big clubs, have become more susceptible. Emphasising this changing balance of power, Juventus and the other major clubs were able to subvert and indeed partially co-opt the Italian federation into their schemes. The concentration of power at the biggest clubs in Italy facilitated this scandal. Moreover, the motivation to engage in this nefarious activity was also a product of the new transnational arena in which clubs are operating. As football has been de-regulated, even the biggest clubs are subject to ever greater economic competition. The rewards of success are greater than ever but the competition for these rewards is high. For a club like Juventus which, unlike Milan, operates independently of the Agnelli family, it is very difficult to sustain these pressures. Like Bernard Tapie at Marseille in the early 1990s, Juventus have engaged in illegal business practice as a mitigating strategy against intense market competition. Through manipulating referees, they have sought above all to guarantee their place in the Champions League and therefore a critical revenue stream and an international stage for their players.

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Milan, Lazio, and Fiorentina have been drawn into this scandal because, given the increasingly dense relationships between the biggest clubs in the transnational era, it was very difficult for them to expose Juventus without undermining their own business interests. In place of isolated acts of bribery, this corruption scandal involving groups of clubs, acting as a cartel, reflected the emergence of new club networks in European football. Interestingly, the scandals of the 1960s and 70s were comprehended in England in nationalist terms. After a game against Juventus in 1973 in which the referee had clearly been bribed, Brian Clough, the Derby manager, memorably declared to gathered Italian journalists: ‘No cheating bastards will I talk to. I will not talk to any cheating bastards.’32 In English nationalist understanding, Italians were congenitally predisposed to cheating and despised for it; this predilection was part of their irrational national character. In the latest scandal, a quite different interpretation has been forwarded. The actions of Juventus and others have been roundly condemned but the financial rationale behind the bribery has been fully understood. The Italian clubs have not engaged in corruption because of a failure in national character; they have been driven into not always pre-meditated courses of action by the intense economic environment in which they—and English clubs—find themselves. The 2006 corruption scandal illustrates the new landscape on which European football is now played and it is on that distinctive transnational geography which English and Italian clubs and their supporters interact. Heysel constitutes an unignorable event for both English and Italian fans and nationalist understandings and performances remain valid at certain moments, such as the World Cup, although they have themselves often been localised.33 Moreover, they have been compromised and joined by competing localised identities around clubs and their cities. There is still rivalry, even hatred and fighting, between the fans of Manchester United and Juventus. Hostility and aggression still figure in interactions between English and Italian fans in specific performances. Violence remains part of a key resource for the performance of these rivalries. Transnational Europe certainly does not mean an end to conflict. However, the relations between the fans have changed and the mass disorder and xenophobic ignorance of the 1980s so graphically described by Buford is being replaced by denser interactions between groups who fully recognise themselves to be part of a New Europe. The hostility between English and Italian fans has been replaced by the rivalry between Manchester United and Juventus or Liverpool and Milan fans. 32. Glanville, p. 82; King, The European Ritual, p. 54. 33. See my essay ‘Nationalism and Sport’ in The Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, ed. by Gerard Delanty and Krishan Kumar (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 249–59.

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That apparently trivial transformation represents a significant transformation reflecting the deep processes of European integration. Bibliography Anon., ‘Editorial’, Red Issue, 9, 10 (April 1997), 1. Anon., ‘A Tale of One City’, United We Stand, 81 (May 1999), 23. Anon., ‘UWS Letters: England for Me Means Nothing’, United We Stand, 67 (January 1998), 8. Anderson, Benedict R., Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1990). Bose, Mihir, Manchester Unlimited (London: Orion Business Books, 1999). Buford, Bill, Among the Thugs (London: Mandarin, 1992). Collins, Harry M., ‘Open and Closed Evidential Cultures in the Search for Gravitational Waves’, American Journal of Sociology, 104, 2 (1998), 293–338. Glanville, Brian, Football Memories (London: Virgin, 1999). Green, Geoffrey, ‘Seven Magic Minutes That Gave Manchester United the Cup’, The Times, 30 May 1968, 15. Guest, Lynton and Paul Law, ‘The Television Revolution: Part 2’, World Soccer (February 1997), 24–25. Harveson, Patrick, ‘It’s a New Ball Game as Takeover Talk Hits Fever Pitch’, Financial Times, 16 October 1996, p. 31. King, Anthony, ‘Nationalism and Sport’, in The Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, ed. by Gerard Delanty and Krishan Kumar (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 249–59. King, Anthony, The European Ritual: Football in the New Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Milward, Alan S., The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1992). Moravcsik, Andrew, The Choice for Europe (London: University College London, 1998). Morrow, Stephen, The New Business of Football (London: Macmillan, 1999). Ortner, Sherry, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in Women, Culture and Society, ed. by Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 68–87. Prometheus, ‘Looking Down on Cloud 9’, Through the Wind and Rain, 69 (2006), 14–16. Redhead, Steve, Sing When You’re Winning (London: Pluto, 1986). Robson, Garry, No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Ward, Colin, Steaming In (London: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

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White, Jim, ‘The Milan Derby’, United We Stand, 156 (December 2006), 14– 15. Internet Sources http://www.g14.com (accessed 23 February 2007).

Greg Walker Selling England (and Italy) by the Pound: Performing National Identity in the First Phase of Progressive Rock: Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and PFM1 This paper will look at the performance of national identities in one particular sub-field of late twentieth-century popular culture: a genre of popular music usually seen as idiosyncratically English: progressive rock.2 It will look in particular at the various forms of Englishness encoded in the works of two of the most significant English progressive groups, Jethro Tull and King Crimson, and their reception and translation in Italy, most obviously in the work of the leading Italian progressive group, Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), and then at the ways in which the Italianness of this most ‘Mediterranean’ of Italian groups was in turn received and translated (in part quite literally) in England and America.3 I shall begin, however, with a glance at a concert that unites all three bands vicariously in the birth of the progressive project in Italy. It is October 1971, and PFM, the quintessentially Italian progenitors of the ‘Mediterranean’ progressive sound (a band after all named after ‘The Award-Winning Marconi Bakery’ in Chiari, a small town near Brescia) are playing in Milan. 1. 2.

3.

I am very grateful to both Kevin Jacklin and Dr Orietta Da Rold for their help with matters musical and linguistic during the writing of this paper. For progressive music’s Englishness see, for example, Paul Stump, The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (London: Quartet, 1997), pp. 5 and 10; Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 91; and especially the extended, stimulating discussion of the issue in Bill Martin, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock (Chicago: Open Court, 1998), pp. 104–112. The ‘archetypal’ Englishness of Jethro Tull in particular has long been a theme in critical discussion of the band, especially since their overt adoption of rustic themes and folk idioms in the Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses albums of 1977–8. As early as January 1970, however, a New Musical Express journalist wrote that ‘there are few bands more intrinsically English than Jethro Tull’ (NME, 19 January 1970, p. 20). For PFM’s ‘Mediterraneanness’ (a concept helpfully problematised in Claudio Visentin’s essay in this volume), see a number of the articles on the PFM website: http://www. pfmpfm.it/eng/main.htm (in particular under the link ‘curiosities’ in the ‘anni 70s’section; accessed 23 February 2007), the comments of drummer Franz Di Cioccio recorded at http://www.gaudela.net/pfm/index2.html (accessed 23 February 2007), and Paulo Barotto, The Return of Italian Pop, 2nd English edn (Milan: Vinyl Solution Music, 1998), pp. 4 and 121–24. The key elements would seem to be the prominent use of warm acoustic guitar sounds to texture the songs, the deployment of motifs from vernacular folk songs and classical music, and, primarily, singing in Italian.

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Their set, however, consists of few of their own songs: its highlights are covers of English progressive classics: King Crimson’s abrasive rants against modernity ‘Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man’ and ‘Picture of the City’ and Jethro Tull’s ‘Nothing is Easy’, ‘Bouree’, and ‘My God’. The stark, staccato imagery of Pete Sinfield’s lyrics for King Crimson might not seem too out of place in this new context, drawing as it does on European surrealist and modernist traditions as well as echoing the concerns of the contemporary British Poetry Revival.4 But ‘My God’, released on the Aqualung album only months earlier, seems a more curious importation, given that it is a very English rumination on the hypocrisies of organised religion, and the social roles of the Anglican church, school system, and class structure in Britain.5 Quite what Italian audiences made of it (somewhat mangled as it was in delivery) is difficult to tell from the surviving recordings. Similarly, one can only speculate about how much of the jaunty, idiomatic articulacy of a song like Jethro Tull’s ‘Nothing is Easy’ (taken from the Stand Up album of 1969), with its casual allusions to the austerities of the Harold Wilson government’s economic ‘squeeze’, and its deployment of banal English vernacular expressions such as ‘worse things happen at sea’, survived the various translations involved in the live performance. What is perhaps more significant for our purposes, however, is not so much whether either the musicians or the audience fully understood the nuances of the songs being performed, but the fact that PFM saw the need to play them at all. Here, seemingly counter-intuitively, was an Italian band performing indigestibly English material as a means of becoming better known in Italy. It could, of course, be objected that this was no more than countless British groups had done in the past, as when the Rolling Stones or Jethro Tull themselves had established reputations in England by playing covers and adaptations of American soul and blues material. But the situation here was rather different, for this was no stereotyped or clichéd image of Englishness that PFM were performing, but a version of national identity as carefully and recently constructed in its basic elements as it was idiosyncratically vernacular in its expression. And an understanding of how this came about reveals much about the nature of progressive rock itself and its relationship to the other culturally-approved forms of musical self-fashioning available to English and Italian performers at this time.

4. 5.

Pete Sinfield’s lyrics for both King Crimson and PFM can be consulted on-line at http://www.songsouponsea.com (accessed 23 February 2007). The lyrics to all of the Jethro Tull songs cited can be consulted on-line at http://www. cupofwonder.com (accessed 23 February 2007), or in Jethro Tull: Complete Lyrics, ed. by Karl Schramm and Gerard J. Burns (Heidelberg: Palmyra Publishers, 1993).

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The Progressive Moment The ‘long 1970s’ from the radical European spring of 1968 to the reactionary British autumn of 1980 witnessed a period of highly condensed and extraordinarily intense innovation and creativity in the field of popular music across western Europe.6 It saw the rise—and in some cases the apparent decline—of a number of movements now seen as powerfully influential in the history of popular music: folk rock (short-lived in its popularity but important for later developments such as Celtic rock and world music), heavy metal, disco, punk, and the globalisation of reggae. It was also the decade par excellence of the movement that I am particularly interested in here, progressive rock. Progressive rock (or ‘prog’) was, in its heyday, roughly from 1968 to 1978, popular music at its most ambitious and its least inhibited (and also, occasionally, at its most pretentious). It was a movement—or perhaps more accurately a moment, as most serious contemporary musicians were touched by the agenda of ‘progression’ in one way or another, whether they acknowledged it or not—that saw no limits to the potential of rock music to accommodate, collaborate with, or even surpass other artistic and creative forms. As Peter Hammill, the singer-songwriter of the seminal English group Van Der Graaf Generator recently reminisced, the late sixties in London were ‘an open era […]. There was the feeling that anything was possible, and the world might genuinely change as the result of music or […] art.’7 Hence the period saw colossal, spectacular ventures, acts of both hubristic over-reaching and

6.

7.

The chronological parameters of the progressive era are a moot point for critics. Kevin Holm-Hudson has recently suggested ‘1969 to about 1977’ (Kevin Holm-Hudson, Progressive Rock Reconsidered [New York: Routledge, 2002], p. 2), but most accounts cite the origins of the movement in 1967 or 1968, the significant event of the first year being the release in June of the Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, that of the second the release of The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, two records with plausible claims to be the first progressive ‘concept album’. At the latter end of the movement, Sounds, the weekly music paper formed primarily to celebrate all things progressive, prematurely heralded its demise in 1979 by pointedly turning on two of the bands it had formerly championed, dismissing Pink Floyd’s double concept album The Wall as their worst release to date, and pronouncing the end of Led Zeppelin’s period as a creative force in a review of their final ‘proper’ studio album, In Through the Out Door, under a headline that mercilessly quoted the band’s early lyrics back at them, ‘Close the door, put out the light’. A more generous reading of the vital signs might allow the patient to have lingered on until 1982, when Jethro Tull undertook their last major production tour of America, promoting the album The Broadsword and the Beast, and the seminal groups Yes and ELP ‘went supernova and collapsed into the black hole that was [the stadium-rock “super-group”] Asia’ (Stump, p. 258). Peter Hammill, interviewed on the German TV programme Rockpalast, recorded 5 November 2005.

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startling innovation and genius.8 Progressive rock was ‘progressive’ because it favoured innovation, exploration, and ‘authentic’ individual creativity over what it denounced as the manufactured, commercial clichés and conventionality of ‘pop’, defining musical virtuosity and compositional complexity as the hallmarks of its own difference from all that had come before. It moved forward because it was fundamentally aspirational (in more senses than one, as we shall see).9 Near simultaneous developments in studio technology (stereo and multitrack recording, increasingly sophisticated and sensitive microphones, greater possibilities for phasing and editing) and instrumentation (the invention of the mellotron, and above all the Moog synthesizer) made this greater musical ambition possible, symbiotically driving and being driven by the work of musicians at the cutting edge of experimentation.10 In addition the popularisation of stereo record-players created a viable commercial market for serious experimental music at the same time as musicians, in the wake of the phenomenal success of the Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, were beginning to explore the artistic and financial possibilities of breaking the mould of the three or four minute ‘single’ song as the principal vehicle for musical creativity.11 The long-playing album (LP) became the principal form of output for experimental musicians, and suites of linked songs, or single extended pieces of music comprising of various movements, with or without lyrics, began to feature more frequently, pushing the possibilities of the form, and culminating in the now much derided ‘concept album’—the signature output of the progressive era. Progressive rock, then, was popular music as art, clamorously claiming a place alongside classical music and literature as a vehicle for exploring the human condition, life, the universe, and everything. As Iain Chambers has suggested, this was music that was ‘neither a simple “background” nor dancing music. It [was] […] a central “experience” in the counter-culture, refracting its deepest investments and contradictions, it […] called for close atten-

8. 9.

Stump, p. 9. Note, for example, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull’s observation in a Rolling Stone interview published on 22 July 1971: ‘I don’t think it [the band’s music] should be easy to listen to. […] I think music of all kinds should require an effort for everyone involved. Both musicians and audience should be struggling toward […] communication, they should both be growing and climbing toward something.’ Quoted in Allan Moore, Aqualung (London: Continuum, 2004), p. xiii. 10. Iain Chambers, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), p. 109; Stump, p. 20. 11. Chambers, p. 109; David Hatch and Stephen Millward, From Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 148.

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tion and listening, these were not mere sounds but cultural “texts”, as rich and solid as any book.’12 This new ambition found various forms of expression. Rock songs, or whole albums of songs, reputedly ‘inspired by’ literary classics began to appear, rock groups collaborated with classical musicians, updating classical pieces for modern youth audiences, or produced new work which they called (with more or less justification or sense of irony) rock ‘operas’, ‘symphonies’, ‘suites’, or ‘fugues’.13 More innovatively others sought to merge and adapt the languages of rock, pop, jazz, and folk music themselves into new ‘symphonic’ forms.14 These seemingly limitless aspirations, coupled with recording and touring schedules that seem unthinkably demanding in twentyfirst century terms (Jethro Tull, for example, recorded and released thirteen albums between 1968 and 1978), inevitably led to burn outs, underdeveloped ideas, and the occasional aesthetic faux pas; but they also created the pressures under which real talent could and did prosper. If a band had only two or three weeks in the studio to produce forty or eighty minutes of fully formed music, then the possibilities for self-censorship, caution, and over-intellectualisation were inevitably reduced. An idea had to be picked up and developed to its full potential, even if it was one about which further reflection might have suggested caution. Progressive rock deserves, then, to be treated seriously and in its own 12. Chambers, p. 96. Note the sleeve note to the first album by the band Egg (1970): ‘The music on this LP is not dancing music, but basically music for listening to. It is harmonically and rhythmically complex, designed to be as original as possible within the confines of the instrumental line-up; so it’s pretty demanding on the listener’s attention.’ Quoted in Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 48. 13. For songs and albums ‘inspired by’ literary texts note, for example, King Crimson’s ‘Formentera Lady’ and ‘The Sailor’s Tale’ (both from Islands, 1971), which reflect passages in Homer’s Odyssey, and Starless and Bible Black (1974) with its nod to Dylan Thomas; the Irish band Horslips’s reworking of the legends in The Tain (1973) and The Book of Invasions (1976); Camel’s The Snow Goose (1975), and Yes’s ‘Gates of Delirium’ (Relayer, 1974), conceived as a musical reflection upon War and Peace. HolmHudson, p. 14; Macan, pp. 42–44. For the influence of classical music see, for instance, the Nice’s Ars Longa, Vita Brevis—which consisted of a ‘prelude’, four ‘movements’, and a coda, and included an adaptation of Beethoven’s Concerto number 9—or ELP’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The Moody Blues famously went into the studio with an orchestra to record a rock version of Dvoák’s New World Symphony but emerged with Days of Future Passed instead. The clearest example of a ‘rock opera’ is perhaps Deep Purple’s Concerto for Band and Orchestra; Stump, p. 78; Hatch and Millward, pp. 148– 49. 14. Examples here include ELP’s ‘Karn Evil 9’ (Brain Salad Surgery, 1973), Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick (1972), and A Passion Play (1973), and Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974).

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terms (rather than being seen as either the decadent end of the sixties’ counter-cultural revolution or the overblown sufficient cause of the next creative explosion: the rise of punk and New Wave). But it warrants particular attention in the current context not least for the deep imprint of ideas of national identity that it carries with it. Progressive rock is frequently described as a uniquely British—or more properly English—musical genre, consciously lacking or denying roots in the Afro-American traditions of the blues, gospel, or soul music, and it is this claim that I wish to explore in more depth here. The claim is not in itself unreasonable. The progressive project did seem to consciously set itself apart from the American traditions and idioms that had provided the templates for the first waves of popular music in the 1950s and 1960s, stressing instead the vernacular traditions of folk music and European jazz and Romantic classical conventions.15 Critical accounts have thus often stressed the untranslatably British nature of the progressive venture. Such accounts have, however, almost always been facing westward as they spoke, thinking only of America, where progressive rock did indeed find an at best only partially comprehending audience and welcome. Vernacular American traditions, with their roots in blue-collar traditions of manual labour and hoboism, and ultimately the racial underclass resistance narratives of the blues, were all in their own ways resistant to—or uncomprehending of—the self-consciously intellectual, artistic (as opposed to artisan), and seemingly elitist self-image of the progressive groups, with their stress on individual creativity and virtuoso instrumental talent. Hence, perhaps, the relative dearth of American bands willing to adopt overtly progressive styles. Where the American media, and the vast audiences they delivered, did take to progressive rock, they did so as a sub-genre of ‘rock and roll’ (more latterly ‘classic rock’), an omnivorous category that saw no distinction between bands that were clearly working in a blues-based tradition such as Cream, Fleetwood Mac, or Led Zeppelin, and those with wholly more idiosyncratic methodologies. Hence American commentators have no hesitation in referring to Yes, Genesis, or Jethro Tull as ‘rock and roll’ bands, an appellation that still sounds awkward to British ears. Imagine the view from America, then, and progressive rock can appear a curiously British eccentricity: almost exclusively white and male in inspiration and appeal, and steeped in a largely incomprehensible or (insofar as it can be comprehended) pernicious class system wholly antipathetic to crosscultural translation.16 Look eastwards, however, and the situation is quite 15. Chambers, pp. 84–85, and 95; Holm-Hudson, p. 5; Martin, pp. 128–29. 16. Chambers, p. 96; Stump, pp. 133–35.

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different. In Western Europe the ideals and practises of the progressive movement found highly receptive audiences and, as we have seen in the case of PFM, swift and eager local adaptation. The Englishness of the form either did not appear so important or was not seen as a problem, hence the work of those quintessentially ‘English’ bands King Crimson and Jethro Tull was taken up in the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, and most enthusiastically of all, in Italy, where it influenced not only PFM but, following their example, other seminal bands such as De De Lind, Capitolo 6, Jumbo, Biglietto Per L’Inferno, and Anonima Sound Limited.17 There is, I think, an interesting study to be written on the relationship between social class and the assumptions and implications of progressive rock music.18 At first glance it is striking that, whereas the paradigmatic voice and viewpoint of all previous popular musical forms from folk and the blues through country music and rock and roll to heavy metal, commercial pop, and disco were those of the native working (or in some cases unemployed) man, those of progressive rock (however ironic in tone) were self-evidently those of an aspirant musical aristocracy. There is a temptation to see this as reflecting actual class conditions (all the members of Genesis, for example, save the former child-actor Phil Collins, were schoolboys at Charterhouse, enclave of the very rich). But this would be misleading. Most practitioners of progressive music were lower-middle or working class, rather than scions of the gentry. What did distinguish them as a group, however, were their educational experiences. Progressive rock was a movement made up of primarily grammar school educated boys, many of whom also went on to experience a measure at least of further education, whether at art or music school or university or polytechnic (although many did not stay on to finish their courses). The progressive moment was thus, it might be argued, so very English because it was forged in the unique and short-lived conditions of English secondary and tertiary education in the 1960s. The progressive musicians came from among the last cohorts of working 17. Dag Erik Asbjørnsen, Scented Gardens of the Mind: A Guide to the Golden Era of Progressive Rock (Wolverhampton: Borderline, 2000), pp. 12–50. Note, for example, the Jethro Tull influences on Osanna’s Palepoli (1972), Capitolo 6’s Frutti per Kagua (1972), Jumbo’s Vietato ai minori di 18 anni (1973), Io non so da dove vengo, by De De Lind (1973), the eponymous debut albums by Eneide (1971) and Biglietto Per L’Inferno (1974), and the re-formed Dalton’s Riflessioni: Idea d’infinito (1973). 18. There is a substantial discussion of the social roots of progressive rock in Macan, pp. 144–58, but the assumptions on which it is based (for example, that the south of England is a predominantly middle-class region, that attendance at a university or polytechnic is in itself evidence of middle-class status, and that the Anglican church dominated the south and not the north of England) are too loose for the analysis to be wholly convincing.

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class English teenagers educated in the traditional humanist, liberal arts curriculum of the British grammar schools, schools which were soon to be swept away by the ‘comprehensivisation’ of the early 1970s. They were also among the first cohorts of young people able to benefit from the massive expansion of the university and polytechnic sector brought about in the 1960s. It is thus no accident that they created the last mainstream popular musical movement unashamedly influenced by a broad liberal arts agenda, and the first to be nurtured and sustained by the new, and for a time very prosperous, students’ union circuit. In the halls and bars of the new universities and polytechnics, grammar school educated musicians could earn a steady living performing to grammar school educated audiences who could understand and share their values.19 It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that they chose in many cases to express themselves in idioms, themes, and forms that reflected a shared experience of English, French, or Latin literature and classical music lessons rather than the imported traditions of the blues. In some cases the general principle had a more personal and pragmatic basis. Ex-Blackpool grammar schoolboy Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull had more pressing reasons for distancing himself from the working class, Americanised vernacular idiolect, and subject matter of the blues. His own band had made its name as a small part of the late 1960s blues revival, but differences of opinion with lead guitarist Mick Abrahams over the wisdom of continuing to record in that idiom (which was for Abrahams an article of faith, for Anderson simply a first step on a musical journey) had led to a parting of the ways after the release of their first, primarily blues-based, album This Was (1968).20 Abrahams left to form Blodwin Pig (who are still periodically touring and recording blues material), leaving Anderson gradually to remake Jethro Tull in his own image as an eclectic progressive group open to folk and world music influences. For Anderson, then, the impulse to refashion his own persona and the group’s collective image was strong. Strikingly, he jettisoned not only the Americanised diction and syntax of his earlier, rather for-

19. Macan, p. 148. Many of the ‘independent’ record labels that produced and released the work of the early progressive bands also stemmed from this same environment. Chrysalis, the offshoot of Island Records that released all of Jethro Tull’s ‘progressive’ records, was formed by two former university students’ union social secretaries, Chris Wright and Terry Ellis (hence ‘Chris-Ellis’). Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 3rd edn (London: Souvenir Press, 1996), p. 398. 20. Anderson would later recall that ‘I pushed for the name This Was to make some kind of statement regarding the temporary nature of the band’s then musical style, and in the hope that we might move on from the musically limiting, blues-based tunes to incorporate the other influences which I was assimilating from various sources.’ This Was [Remastered] (EMI, 2001), sleeve-notes.

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mulaic blues compositions and the viewpoint of the hard-pressed underdog that went with them (see, for example, ‘It’s Breaking Me Up’ on This Was), but also steadily lost the strong Lancashire brogue in his spoken voice that can be heard on early recorded interviews and live shows. In its place came a marked version of received pronunciation, and a social perspective that was at best classless and at times positively patrician, not least on the admittedly tongue-in-cheek ‘concept album’ Thick as a Brick (1972) where he could sing of coming down from the upper class and having a father ‘whom everyone obeyed’: the punctiliousness of that ‘whom’ a seemingly clear reaction against the grammatical sloppiness of Americanised blues and pop diction. The first signs of this remaking of the Anderson linguistic persona had, however, surfaced on the song ‘Back to the Family’ on the group’s second album, Stand Up (1969)—the first record to embody the post-Abrahams incarnation of the band, with Martin Barre now playing lead guitar. In lines such as the carefully pitched ‘It was they who were wrong and for them here’s a song’ (‘For a Thousand Mothers’) one can detect a sense (whether consciously acknowledged or not) that what Anderson was now doing was something that could be done in his own voice, freed from the protocols of the blues, and also something more substantial, more serious and important than his earlier work, an endeavour that merited higher standards of diction, and more stringent attention to forms of expression. The form of ‘Englishness’ that Anderson, like many of the other progressive auteurs was presenting to the world was thus not a simple reflection of his own regional and class origins (not least as he was a Scot by birth who had moved to Blackpool in his teens) but a very consciously crafted projection of his artistic aspirations: a new, refined, articulate voice clearly distinguishable from the raw, passionate inarticulacy of the bluesmen and the transatlantic pop mainstream. It was thus both more and less ‘authentic’ than the imported persona of the blues singer performed by artists as diverse in social background as Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Eric Burden, Peter Green, or Robert Plant. Progressive Idiolects In addition to their unashamed vocal articulacy, the progressive bands quickly established a rudimentary musical vocabulary in which the harsher sounds of ‘heavy’ electric guitar, drums, and Hammond organ connoted modernity and the urban experience, while the softer tones of acoustic guitar, strings, and reed instruments suggested pastoral themes and more reflective emotional states. The contrast can be heard in its most extreme form in the first two tracks of King Crimson’s seminal In the Court of the Crimson King, where the

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multi-tracked flute of ‘I Talk to the Wind’ retrospectively emphasises by contrast the abrasive electric guitar and drum assault of the preceding ‘TwentyFirst Century Schizoid Man’. Jethro Tull, however, complicated matters by using the flute equally in both pastoral and ‘heavy’ passages, with Anderson switching from lilting melody or background filling to over-blowing, snorting aggression and back again within a single song—an idiolect that was quickly taken up by Mauro Pagani of PFM and a number of other fledgling Italian progressive bands, and which suggested in Anderson’s writing at least, an unwillingness to settle for a simple dichotomy of one thing or the other: a theme that would become central in much of the band’s later material.21 Jethro Tull were idiosyncratic in other ways too. In most progressive bands the virtuoso group-leader was either the guitarist (one thinks of Robert Fripp of King Crimson, Andy Latimer of Camel, or Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple) or still more frequently the keyboard-player (Keith Emerson of The Nice and ELP, Gary Brooker of Procul Harem, Robert John Godfrey of The Enid, or Peter Hammill, who played both keyboards and guitar in Van Der Graaf Generator). For these groups the instrumental music, the scored ensemble passages, solos, and group improvisations, were the central elements in both composition and performance, with the lyrics (where they existed) either performing a supplementary role to the music, or, where something more ambitious was attempted, being ‘bought in’: provided by an external poet or professional lyricist who had relatively limited input in the compositional process as a whole. (This was the role played by Pete Sinfield in early King Crimson, ELP, and briefly with PFM).22 Alternatively, where a group did possess a creative lyricist, he (and it was an almost exclusively male role) was generally only one of a number of creative elements in the band, vying with a lead guitarist or keyboardist, or sometimes both, for the creative initiative. This was the case par excellence in the notoriously fractious band Yes, where singer-lyricist Jon Anderson competed at various points with not only a virtuoso lead-guitarist and a keyboard-player (Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman respectively), but also a virtuoso bass-guitarist (Chris Squire) and drummer (Bill Bruford). The band’s lengthy history of splits, law-suits, reunions, and re-formations is telling testimony to the creative ferment and clashes of egos that their unique mix of musical forces generated. Other groups who shared the same split-focus dynamic included Genesis, Gentle Giant, ELP, and, as we shall see, PFM. 21. Ian Anderson talked of his desire ‘to be not pigeonholed into a style’ in an interview in Sounds in March 1971 (quoted in Moore, Aqualung, p. 23). 22. As Sinfield told Melody Maker in 1973, ‘Usually the music’s [already] done, ELP do everything at the last minute, especially the words’. Melody Maker, 15 December 1973, p. 8.

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It was far rarer for a group to be driven entirely by a charismatic singersongwriter who was not himself an instrumental virtuoso, yet who still performed the role of principal composer. This was, however, the case with Jethro Tull after the departure of Mick Abrahams left Ian Anderson in prime creative control, resulting in a group ‘sound’ in which the usually signature elements of electric guitar and keyboards were given a subsidiary role to the vocal line and the ensemble playing of riff and melody.23 It is this difference in their group dynamic that makes the band’s music so distinct in the history of British progressive rock. Unlike the other groups that I have mentioned so far, the music of Jethro Tull is essentially the music of Ian Anderson, with additional instrumental contributions from Martin Barre and the other group members: a fact increasingly recognised in the marketing of the group, in which Anderson gradually came to be identified with the persona of ‘Jethro Tull’ in the media and public imagination. The early album covers, This Was (1968), Stand Up (1969), and Benefit (1970), featured images of the group as a whole in a variety of poses, but from Aqualung (1971) onwards they began to feature only a single, recognisably Andersonesque figure in guises evocative of the themes or motifs of the album: tramp (Aqualung); pseudo-medieval minstrel (War Child, 1974); biker (Too Old Too Rock and Roll, 1976); poacher-gamekeeper (Songs from the Wood, 1977); or gentleman farmer (Heavy Horses, 1978). Thus the viewpoint of the ‘I’ of the lyrics, while not always literally autobiographical, nevertheless closely reflected the experiences and outlook of Anderson himself: a situation that was the band’s greatest strength in its early years and ultimately, arguably, its most significant limitation, once Anderson’s increasingly predictable lifestyle (touring, recording, holidaying, domestic life with wife, children, and family pets) furnished a correspondingly restricted repertoire of themes to write and sing about.24 23. See, for example, Allan Moore’s perceptive analysis of the ‘soundstage’ of the recording of the song ‘Aqualung’, where even during the guitar solo, the traditional opportunity for the soloist to take the spotlight, ‘the guitar sits to one side of the stereo spectrum, balanced at the other by the strummed [rhythm] guitar and piano. The guitar is not centrestage, does not take the limelight—it remains part of the communal effort.’ Moore, Aqualung, p. 18. 24. For songs about trains, aeroplanes, travel, and touring, see: ‘Cheap Day Return’ (Aqualung); ‘To Cry You a Song’ (Stand Up) ‘Journeyman’ (Heavy Horses); ‘Trains’ (Walk into Light), ‘Home’ (Stormwatch, 1979); ‘Black Sunday’ (A, 1980); ‘Ears of Tin’ (Rock Island, 1989); ‘Rocks on the Road’ (Catfish Rising, 1991); ‘Far Alaska’, ‘The Dog-Ear Years’ (Dot Com, 1999), ‘First Snow on Brooklyn’ (The Jethro Tull Christmas Album, 2004). The ever-increasing repertoire of songs about cats includes, ‘The Mouse Police Never Sleeps’ (Heavy Horses); ‘Sanctuary’ (Anderson’s solo album The Secret Language of Birds) ‘Hunt By Numbers’ (Dot Com), ‘Rupi’s Dance’, and ‘My Old Black Cat’ (both on the Anderson solo album Rupi’s Dance, 2003). ‘Jack-a Lyn’ (on the 25th Anniversary

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In the first, astonishingly productive decade of the band’s life, however, the fusion of musical and lyrical creativity in a single auteur generated a genuinely integrated vision in which each instrumental element (flute, acoustic guitars, electric lead and bass, drums, and latterly one or two sets of keyboards) was subservient to the overall composition, hence the limited number of seemingly gratuitous instrumental solos in the recorded repertoire, and the greater emotional and aesthetic impact of those solos that do appear. Whereas in the work of those groups where the lyrical content was added to already formulated musical structures the effects created can appear merely ornamental (even some of the best juxtapositions of light and dark in the King Crimson repertoire, for example, can appear to be primarily formal exercises, experiments with musical structure and effect that are satisfying on an intellectual and perhaps visceral level, but do not appear to have a necessary and organic relationship with the lyrics), the work of early Jethro Tull does possess a wholeness, a symbiotic relationship between word and music that partakes of both the personal dimension of Bob Dylan’s solo work and the ensemble power of the progressive bands. In songs such as ‘Back to the Family’ or ‘We Used to Know’, both on Stand Up, for example, the transitions from acoustic to electric passages seem, for want of better words, organically and psychologically connected to the dilemmas voiced in the lyrics, giving the songs a compelling sense of interiority that seems to invite psychoanalytical analysis. The explosions into electric and percussive fury in the former seem, for example, to grow from the unresolved tensions of the lyrical structure, underlying and displacing the frustrated energies generated by the sense of being ‘at home’ neither in one place nor the other. In the economically crafted masterpiece, ‘We Used to Know’, the slowly building volume and textures of the acoustic and electric guitars underwrite the sense of scarcely restrained excitement in the minimalist lyric, as the narrator looks back upon the quotidian austerities of past times (empty gasmeters and chilly bed-sits) only as a prelude to acknowledging the unexpected scale of his current material success. When, at the reference to poverty giving way to ‘fruitful years’, the mounting musical tension is finally released in a burst of flute and electric guitar, the effect is of a genuine epiphany, an impolite moment of exultation at the speaker’s own good fortune before he remembers himself and returns to more sober and conventional reflections on the brevity of life and the mutability of fortune, and a formal resolution to part on good terms with the unnamed addressee, who by implication has not shared the same translation to a richer life. Boxed Set, 1983), remarkably, manages to combine hotels, planes, and cats, yet still be a very good song. For reflections on ‘the train obsession’, see Moore, Aqualung, p. 85.

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The early history of PFM is also coloured by tensions between the internal dynamics of the band and the projection of their musical identity: tensions generated (surely unnecessarily) by anxieties about the lack of a defined ‘front man’ in the group, and the relationship of the lyrics to the instrumental content of their songs. The group’s Italianness was seen as a source of both strength and awkwardness, especially once they attempted to court popularity beyond their native country. The fact that their lyrics were in Italian was felt from the outset to be a problem in a largely anglophone market. But the lack of a strong tradition of Italian bands ‘making it’ in England or America also made for more general cultural difficulties. PFM were billed as ‘Italy’s top band’ on their first tour of the UK: an exercise in self-promotion, perhaps, but also a tacit acknowledgement of marginality—a hint that anything less than Italy’s best might strike British audiences as not worth watching.25 (One cannot imagine Jefferson Airplane or Rush, for example, having to market themselves in the 1970s as America’s or Canada’s ‘top band’: such was the exposure to north American music in the UK that, if they were, British audiences would not need playbills to tell them about it.) Concern about the lyrical content of the songs ran deeper than this, however. The band members had always felt that the lack of a single specialist vocalist was a limitation on their potential appeal rather than a democratic strength. Guitarist Franco Mussida’s ‘gentle, melodious tenor’ was thought to be insufficiently powerful to project the strong identity that the group was trying to develop to appeal to audiences in the UK and America. Hence for the 1976 album Chocolate Kings Bernardo Lanzetti was recruited to bring a ‘deeper and more forceful’ delivery to the songs, significantly with a view to ‘present[ing] a more “English” sound, capable of being performed in larger venues in the United States’.26 Still more fundamental changes had been made earlier, however. As a result of discussions with Greg Lake, the bassist and singer with Emerson Lake and Palmer (who had taken the band under his wing and signed them to ELP’s Manticore label after seeing them perform in Italy), the poet Pete Sinfield, who co-wrote ELP’s material with Lake and had written the lyrics for early King Crimson, was recruited to produce PFM’s first release for Manticore, The World Became The World, and to provide new English lyrics for the suite of songs gathered from their previous Italian lan-

25. Plymouth Guildhall concert bill, reproduced in the booklet accompanying the 10 Anni Live CD boxed-set, p. 24. 26. See Pete Sinfield’s views on the website http://www.songsouponsea.com, and Franz Ciocchio’s at http://www.gaudela.net/pfm/index2.html (accessed 23 February 2007). Here again the band’s apparent sense of audience expectations led to an awkward contortion: an Italian band seeking to sound more ‘English’ in order to appeal in America.

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guage releases which would make up the album. The result was a curious, and not wholly successful, re-branding of PFM as an English language band able to appeal to a world market. These new lyrics were not simply translations of the existing Italian words, but wholly new compositions, often markedly different in theme and tone, written to the original melodies by Sinfield. (Most strikingly, perhaps, the wistful, melancholic ‘Impressoni di Settembre’, with its reflections on breathing in the early autumn mist and thinking of an absent lover, becomes a strident anti-venality satire, ‘The World Became the World’.) Consequently, the group’s material came to exist in two strikingly different forms, an Italian original and a new ‘international’ English version, and those listeners who knew one could be forgiven for experiencing a sense of disorientation when encountering the other for the first time. The re-branding of PFM was not universally welcomed either in Italy, where the band’s perceived ‘selling out’ of their national roots in pursuit of the American dollar was resented in some quarters, or in Britain and America, where Mussida’s heavily accented (at times almost indecipherable) pronunciation of the English lyrics served if anything to emphasise the group’s ‘foreignness’, rendering the vocals still more of a problem.27 His imperfect command of the new medium thus created the paradoxical situation in which, while the band did now register on the international market, they appeared to be a ‘foreign’ act wherever they played, seemingly estranged—at one remove from their own material—even in their native Italy. For a period in the mid-1970s, then, PFM were suspended in limbo (in terms of their musical national identity), seeming neither wholly and authentically Italian nor sufficiently plausibly anglophone to be embraced by British or US audiences as one of their own. They were in danger of becoming a stateless ‘international’ act, cut free from a clear sense of national identity. Even the resonant Italianate name Premiata Forneria Marconi (apparently so difficult for radio presenters to pronounce or for promoters to spell), was replaced at Lake’s suggestion by the more anodyne ‘PFM’ in the band’s marketing, thus reinforcing the impression that they were seeking to mimic the English identity of ELP.28 With nice, and possibly unintentional, irony, Sinfield’s lyrics for the song ‘Is my Face on Straight’ (which appeared in English both on L’isola di niente and The World Became the World), was a bitter critique of precisely the kind of homogenising re-branding of difference as conformable sameness that was being offered to the group: ‘We can fit you with a suit of clothes/ That will 27. See the account of the band’s early history on their website, http://www.pfmpfm.it/eng/ main.htm (see the section ‘history/ the 70s’; accessed 23 February 2007). 28. http://www.gaudela.net/pfm/index2.html (accessed 23 February 2007).

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make you look like us […]/ Come on, what have you got to lose […]?’ What PFM had to lose, of course, as the song tacitly acknowledges, was identity: an unselfconscious relationship with themselves. What was gained in return was a conscious sense of recording and playing live as an inauthentic and potentially challengeable performance of identity (‘Is my face on straight?/ Will they let me through the gate?’). Alongside this performance came a, perhaps unacknowledged, sense of estrangement—both from self and from place—that was not evident in the band’s earlier Italian language recordings. And the attempt to rectify this problem, by bringing in the anglophone Lanzetti, only added new difficulties, as his vocal style was read in some quarters as mimicking that of Peter Gabriel, the singer with the established English band Genesis, thus prompting further allegations of unoriginality. Performing nationality was, and is, then, a tricky business, as we will see from one further brief example of how estrangement and performed identity informed the work of Jethro Tull and PFM, focusing on a key theme in the English progressive repertoire: the urban experience. London Fields: They Do the Polis in Different Voices The remarkably swift achievement of musical success, and the radical changes in lifestyle that it involved, seem to have created a marked sense of dislocation for a number of groups and performers in the first phase of the English progressive experiment. This dislocation was in many cases also a literal one, involving relocation from the provinces to London, the centre of the underground music scene, and the home of the major record companies and studios. The experience of ‘making it’, or of struggling to do so, was thus fused for many artists with a first sustained encounter with the alterity of London as a location—its unfamiliar anonymity, confusing geography, and unfamiliar social codes. Hence the city itself became a key theme and site of exploration in their work: a symbol for modernity and social change in the abstract (as it had been for earlier generations of poets), but also for their own personal situation and development: a potentially disorienting experience to be negotiated in its own right. One can see in the early work of the newly ‘progressive’ Jethro Tull a number of pointed reflections on the disorientation involved in the pursuit of a musical career; the lack of a clear sense of belonging or personal identity involved in newly acquired material success. This experience is frequently played out in geographical terms, in narratives of travelling between the old family home in Blackpool and the new base in London, in choices between old friends and family and new associates in the capital (choices which are not really choices at all because the very experience of success has already

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cut the speaker off from the notionally safe but limited certainties of the old life). Hence in the archetypal exploration of this motif, ‘Back to the Family’, the demands of the new career, symbolised by the ever-ringing telephone, drive the speaker back to his parental home, where ‘no-one can ring me at all’, but the limitations of a life with a family with whom he is all-too familiar—yet from whom he is now crucially estranged—quickly prove equally intolerable. So he returns again to London resolved to ‘get some action’; at which point the cycle will presumably start all over again.29 This experience of displacement and alienation found its most eloquent expression in the suite of songs on side one of the Aqualung album, a record that is both intensely rooted in the individual experiences of Anderson in a very particular part of London (bounded by Hampstead Heath, Highgate, and Kentish Town), and yet which, paradoxically, was to be the band’s most immediate and obviously translatable commercial and artistic success, not least in Italy where its songs, as we have seen, were rapidly covered and its musical and lyrical themes copied and adapted by local progressive bands.30 Side one of Aqualung is a suite of loosely linked songs about coming to terms with—and trying to navigate around—the metropolis that Anderson, still relatively fresh from Blackpool via a Luton bed-sit, was just beginning to think of as ‘home’. It is full of the redolent sights, sounds, and idiolects of a disorientingly complex metropolitan environment, whose apparent oases of pastoral tranquillity (parks, playgrounds, schoolyards, and heath-land) turn out to be more dangerous than the urban streets themselves. This world is never quite what it seems: paedophile tramps leering through playground railings evoke grudging sympathy while child prostitutes, wise beyond their years, dispense rudimentary social justice to the adult world, and the unwary outsider is as likely to be cursed as thanked for naïve acts of generosity.31 In the surreal vision of Hampstead Heath in ‘Mother Goose’, for example, municipal workmen are transformed into pirates, lachrymose schoolgirls lament unstated woes, and bemused foreign students ask whether there are really elephants and tigers in Piccadilly Circus. The flaneur persona who observes all this, wandering around the social spaces of the city, is driven by a curious—yet perhaps explicable—mixture of laddish self-confidence and insecurity (‘Oh I don’t believe they knew […] I was a schoolboy’). Again the narrative stance is more 29. A similar acknowledgement of estrangement colours the speaker’s awkward, abrasive, flaunting of his new found status in ‘For a Thousand Mothers’. The idea that departure from home and wider experience are corrosive of relationships on both sides would find its most economic expression in the allusion to the ‘Eve-bitten apple’ returning to destroy the tree in the song ‘Wond’ring Again’ (Living in the Past, 1972). 30. Moore, Aqualung, pp. xiv, 6, 25–26. 31. Moore, Aqualung, p. 45.

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than simply a poetic conceit. For the Anderson of 1968, a single young man with little money, working part-time as a cinema cleaner to earn enough money to pay the rent, walking the streets between practicing and gigs was about the only affordable recreation available. The experiences of that period would colour the urban narratives of early songs such as ‘Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square’ as well as many of the songs on Aqualung and the later ‘London’ suite, ‘Baker St. Muse’ on the Minstrel in the Gallery album (1975). This kind of concern with modern cities, urban alienation, and the mechanical existence brought about by commuting and working ‘in the City’ was seemingly a peculiarly British obsession, rooted in personal experience, but inflected by the modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land in particular) and his successors, and filtered through the naïve desire to rebel against ‘the system’ so important to the hippy generation, for whom the bowler-hatted businessman was the epitome of all they claimed to reject and despise. PFM, strikingly, imported that attitude wholesale, playing live, as we have seen, King Crimson’s modernist vision of alienation ‘Picture of the City’, and recording and performing Pete Sinfield’s cynical lyrics to ‘Mr 9 to 5’ (the English ‘version’ of the instrumental ‘Generale’ on Per Un Amico). But their interest in the theme did not, I think, grow from lived experience. It was one of the themes imported as part of the ‘internationalising’ process. The dominant modes of their Italian albums were celebratory or nostalgic: lush symphonic rock with few hints of the cynicism or anger that drive satire, that found its definitive expression in the pastoral tones of ‘Impressioni di Settembre’. Urban spaces and urban life, when they appear, play very different roles in songs written by the group themselves, whether in Italian or (as on the subsequent album, Chocolate Kings) in English. The allusions to dancing with ‘the ghosts of freedom square’, to ‘the town bloom[ing] like a […] night fair’ (‘Harlequin’), or to streets on which the speaker and his lover embraced in ‘sei’ (Ulisse, 1997), suggest a far more comfortable relationship between the human subject and the cityscape, a sense of cities as living space rather than the deadening ‘other’ to individualism or a rural ideal they were for the English bands cited here.32 Why the Italian and British bands should represent the city so differently is a good question. Answering it would involve exploring urbanisation and civic communitas in Italy and England as well as their respective receptions of both literary modernism and the late ’60s counter-culture, none of which is 32. One might contrast the citation of one’s native city as an aspect of one’s own identity, something to be desired and regretted when it is lost, in PFM’s ‘My Name is Nobody’ (‘Il mio nome é Nessuno’) on the Ulisse album, with the juxtaposition of dying city and living horseman in Jethro Tull’s song ‘Heavy Horses’ (Heavy Horses).

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there space for here. But it is useful to note simply that their treatment of the urban does reflect deeper cultural differences, differences suggestive of national identities reflected in their performance of their own and other’s material. Both Jethro Tull and PFM consciously re-crafted their lyrical and musical identities in the course of the first five years of their existence, and both enjoyed a substantial degree of commercial success as a result. But the greater international appeal was enjoyed not by the band which sought to internationalise itself but by the one that remained parochially, idiosyncratically untranslated. Jethro Tull, whose brand of Englishness seemed to make few concessions to overseas audiences, became the biggest live act in the world in 1972. The songs written and sung by Ian Anderson during the period of the group’s greatest success (roughly 1969–77) were littered with casual allusions to people and things (Biggles and Ernie, jam sarnies and bog-handles, fag ends, wet drawers, and brew ups) whose identity must have troubled even the most anglophile of American or Japanese listeners, as must the regular use of colloquial regional idioms such as ‘thick as a brick’ and ‘well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs’. It would be still more interesting to chart international responses to the stubborn insularity of Anderson’s lyrical geography, with its journeys along the A1 by Scotch Corner, or ‘up the pool’ from ‘the Smoke’, and its rootedness in the Golden Mile of Blackpool and the b-list streetscapes of London (The Fulham Road, Blanford Street, Kentish Town) from global audiences raised on the redolent litany of American place names that triangulate the canons of the blues, soul, and rock and roll (from Route 66, Memphis and Nashville way down to Mississippi and New Orleans, and where ‘calling out all around the world’ involves hailing nowhere outside the north east corner of the USA [‘Dancing in the Street’]). Such audiences should have been thoroughly disoriented, yet clearly they were not, or if they were, it did not stop them buying the records and attending the concerts, which suggests something about the performability of national identity in the age of global popular music beyond the observation that one culture’s parochial detail is another’s exotic enticement. Under similar circumstances, albeit in a different media, the Jewish Hungarian film-maker Alexander Korda, who is the subject of Pamela NevilleSington’s essay in this volume, had attempted to define the ingredients of the successful ‘international film’ in the early 1930s. His conclusions might also apply to the work of the first wave of English and Italian progressive rock groups. [P]erhaps the phrase ‘international film’ is a little ambiguous. I do not mean that a film must try to suit the psychology and manners of every country in which it is go-

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ing to be shown. On the contrary, to be really international a film must first of all be truly and intensely national. It must be true to the matter in it […]. The greatest folly is to set out to try to suit everybody. It is the sure road to insincerity and artificiality. The result will be a mongrel film which belongs to no country.33

In yoking their ‘Mediterranean’ instrumental identity to English lyrics in search of international markets, PFM were only partly successful. North America was initially intrigued, but soon lost interest in the ‘English’ material (most obviously after the group released as their first really intelligible English song, ‘Chocolate Kings’, a snipe at American cultural imperialism). Since then the group has reverted to writing and performing in Italian at home and abroad. By contrast the ‘intensely national’ Jethro Tull, rooted in vernacular idioms, enjoyed prolonged global success, and still regularly tour America, Asia, and Europe, if not exactly selling England by the pound, at least performing Englishness to audiences who seem more than happy to accept the authenticity of what they offer. Bibliography Asbjørnsen, Dag Erik, Scented Gardens of the Mind: A Guide to the Golden Era of Progressive Rock (Wolverhampton: Borderline, 2000). Barotto, Paulo, The Return of Italian Pop, 2nd English edn (Milan: Vinyl Solution Music, 1998). Chambers, Iain, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). Gillett, Charlie, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 3rd edn (London: Souvenir, 1996). Hatch, David and Stephen Millward, From Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Holm-Hudson, Kevin, Progressive Rock Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2002). Macan, Edward, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Martin, Bill, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock (Chicago: Open Court, 1998). Moore, Allan F., Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993).

33. Stephen Watts, ‘Alexander Korda and the International Film’, Cinema Quarterly, 2, 1 (Autumn 1933), 12–15 (pp. 13 and 14). See Greg Walker, ‘The Roots of Alexander Korda: Myths of Identity and the International Film’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37 (2003), 3–25.

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Moore, Allan F., Aqualung (London: Continuum, 2004). Schramm, Karl and Gerard J. Burns, eds., Jethro Tull: Complete Lyrics (Heidelberg: Palmyra, 1993). Stump, Paul, The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (London: Quartet, 1997). Walker, Greg, ‘The Roots of Alexander Korda: Myths of Identity and the International Film’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37 (2003), 3–25. Watts, Stephen, ‘Alexander Korda and the International Film’, Cinema Quarterly, 2, 1 (Autumn 1933), 12–15. Internet Sources http://www.cupofwonder.com (accessed 23 February 2007). http://www.gaudela.net/pfm/index2.html (accessed 23 February 2007). http://www.pfmpfm.it/eng/main.htm (accessed 23 February 2007). http://www.songsouponsea.com (accessed 23 February 2007).

Gisela Ecker Zuppa Inglese and Eating Up Italy: Intercultural Feasts and Fantasies If Aldo Buzzi, Italian architect and film critic, states: ‘The writer who never talks about eating, about appetite, hunger, food, about cooks and meals, arouses my suspicion, as though some vital element were missing in him’, he clearly writes from the position of a cultural identity which cherishes as one of its pillars and values the joys of eating and an attentiveness on all things concerning food.1 If we talk about intercultural relations between English and Italian culinary cultures, we have to keep in mind that there exists a basic asymmetry between the two which is even reflected in idiomatic expressions. Whereas in English one would say ‘to call a spade a spade’, in Italian you say ‘dire pane al pane e vino al vino’; a weakling is an ‘uomo di pasta frolla’; ‘to pay like with like’ would translate as ‘rendere pan per focaccia’; of a person who has made it one would say ‘ha trovato la pappa pronta’, and, to add one more example, in the Italian language it is possible to make a joke on a gravestone like the one inscribed on the tomb of Aldo Fabrizi: ‘tolto da questo mondo troppo al dente.’ Italian idiomatic language very frequently draws on matters of food, whereas English language draws upon other archives of expression and imagery that relate to everyday experience of people.2 The simple case of a dish which, in its name, seems to contain some intercultural aspects, turns out to be quite telling in unexpected ways. A quick internet research on the recipe of Zuppa Inglese neither produces a basis of invariable ingredients nor any consensus about the origin of the dish.3 Only the fact that Zuppa Inglese is a dolce and not a soup seems to be indisputable. One author places the origins of the dish at the court of Naples where the cook is said to have pleased the expectations of Lady Emma Hamilton who was said to be extremely fond of alcohol and homesick for English trifle.4 Another source places the dish at the court of Ferrara where the Duchi d’Este introduced English dishes and made their cooks adapt trifle to Italian standards.5 The dessert is either defined as ‘very Italian’ or as throughout ‘Eng-

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Aldo Buzzi, The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 26. For further information see the appendix. Many thanks to Brigitte Bartha, my secretary, who selected one version of Zuppa Inglese and prepared it with great expertise. http://www.cimolelli.com (accessed 23 January 2006). http://www.taccuinistorici.it (accessed 5 March 2007).

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lish’. Whereas one author explains the dish as a fantasy of ‘[h]ow Italy believes a classic English trifle should be made’, another speaks of an Italian ‘dessert that was very popular with English tourists. They love sweets with liquor.’6 Significantly, the sweet is placed in a collection called ‘forever sun’ or simply ascribed to the desires of rich British villeggianti in Tuscany. And, in a most curious version, ‘chef Giuliano Bugialli suggests that this came about because the liqueur originally used in the recipe, Alkermes di Firenze, has precisely the same colour as that used in the British flag’.7 Thus, Zuppa Inglese loses its innocence as simply a dish which is supposed to complete a good dinner.8 Although in my enquiry ‘the endless plasticity of food in representing other things’ is cut down to representations of national identity, there is still a great variety of possibilities left to consider.9 The material I have selected for this paper has been deliberately chosen from different categories: travel literature, cookery books of different kinds, the combination of both, in the formation of so-called ‘gastro-travelogues’, letters, essays, some contemporary novels in which intercultural relations via food play a decisive role (including a sort of ‘epistolary novel’), and in addition some profound theoretical works on Italian food. Altogether, it is not surprising that we find many more texts by British writers which relate to travel and eating in Italy than the other way round, and it is also not surprising that—in contemporary literature—there is an overwhelmingly positive evaluation of Italian food and culinary rituals as opposed to rather negative accounts of ‘English’ food.10 The bibliographical situation appears even more asymmetrical due to the fact that—this we take from Loredana Polezzi’s study Translating Travel—Italian travel writing is quasi invisible as a genre. We have to remind ourselves that the great esteem of Italian food is a relatively recent development, for many narratives of the Grand Tour and before warn of bad Italian food, and, in the eighteenth century, there was a high esteem of English cooking at the various courts in the territories of what was 6.

http://www.deliciousitaly.com and http://www.cookingwithpatty.com (accessed 5 March 2007). 7. http://www.stratsplace.com (accessed 5 March 2007). 8. On questions of identity via food, see for example Gisela Ecker, ‘Eating Identities—From Migration to Lifestyle: Mary Antin, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Ozeki’, in Wandering Selves: Essays on Migration and Multiculturalism, ed. by Michael Porsche and Christian Berkemeier (Essen: Blaue Eule, 2001), pp. 171–183 and Ralf Hertel, Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2005). 9. Sidney W. Mintz: ‘Eating Communities: The Mixed Appeals of Sodality’, in Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. by Tobias Döring and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), pp. 19–34. 10. See for example a classic which is supposed to be re-edited in 2006: Janet Ross, Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen or How to Cook Vegetables (London: Dent, 1911).

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to become Italy.11 One of the explanations for the name of Zuppa Inglese, for example, suggests that dishes were supposed to be nobilitated and to sound more elegant, ‘fuori dall’ordinario’, by adding Inglese to their names. Performing Prejudice: England Made in Italy, Italy Made in England In exploring intercultural relations that find expression via food, we inevitably enter the field of prejudice and cliché, for, as for example Gian-Paolo Biasin puts it, ‘[o]ne of the most persistent forms of prejudice has to do with the attitude persons and peoples have toward the food of others—the choices of the foodstuffs to be cooked, the alimentary taboos, the ways of eating and drinking, the ways of speaking about what is eaten’.12 At first sight, reports by Italians about British food look much more like prejudice than British reports about Italian food, but if Jamie Oliver with admiration states ‘every Italian is a cook’ does this not still remain prejudice?13 There are scathing reports on English food by Italian authors like Italo Svevo, Anna Maria Ortese, or Natalia Ginzburg, the very notions of which are still in operation.14 Natalia Ginzburg, who accompanied her husband to London in 1960, deals 11. See T. G. Olsen, ‘Poisoned Figs and Italian Sallets: Nation, Diet, and the Early Modern English Traveler’, Annali d’Italianistica, 21 (2003), 233–254. The topos of ‘strange food’ and especially of ‘strange water’ is still virulent, but has of course in general shifted to other cultures; see e.g. Gisela Ecker, ‘“Fremdes Wasser”: Reisesteuerungen in Prosatexten der Gegenwartsliteratur’, in Wege des Kybernetes: Schreibpraktiken und Steuerungsmodelle von Politik, Reise, Migration, ed. by Anja K. Maier and Burkhardt Wolf (Münster: LIT, 2004), pp. 218–234. There is an interesting passage in Keates, though: ‘English attitudes towards Italy show a remarkably sturdy refusal to accept the almost total reversal of socio-economic realities which has taken place during the halfcentury since Mussolini’s overthrow. Staying recently with some friends who had taken a villa in the Chianti, I was amazed to hear one of them warn the children’s nanny not to trust the tap water. In vain I pointed out that Tuscan piped water is a good deal healthier and more efficiently treated than the effluent oozing through the conduits of Hampstead or Islington.’ Jonathan Keates, Italian Journeys (London: Picador 1992), p. 48. 12. Gian-Paolo Biasin, ‘Other Foods, Other Voices’, MLN, 109 (1994), 831–846 (p. 831). On stereotype see Judith Munat in this volume. 13. Stated by Jamie Oliver in his TV series. 14. ‘La vita di un inglese si compone di due parti: Nella prima conquista il denaro e la seconda è dedicata a fare testamento. Oppure (e questa è una calunnia): “L’inglese è un uomo che ha bisogno di una tazza di tè ad ogni ora”. Ci sono molti inglesi che per un’intrapresa rinunziarono alla tazza di tè, al pane e alla vita.’ Italo Svevo, ‘Soggiorno Londinese’ in Opera omnia: Racconti, saggi, pagine sparse (Milan: Dall’Oglio 1968), p. 692. (‘The life of an Englishman consists of two parts: in the first part he strives for money, in the second part he makes a testament. Or (and this is a false allegation): “The Englishman is a man who craves for a cup of tea every hour.” There are many Englishmen who in search of business do without their cup of tea, without bread and without life.’)

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with British culinary habits in two essays of her fascinating volume Le piccole virtù. Her reports which diagnose a deep melancholia in Inghilterra, are not really flattering: Anche nei caffè, nei ristoranti, l’Inghilterra esplica il suo estro. Suole dargli nomi stranieri, per renderli più attraenti: ‘Pustza’, ‘Chez nous’, ‘Roma’, ‘Le Alpi’. […] D’altronde le bevande e i cibi che si trovano all’interno di queste pustze, di queste Alpi, di questi sepolcri, hanno lo stesso, miserando sapore. La fantasia non ha raggiunto le bevande e i cibi, è rimasta impigliata nei cortinaggi, nei tappeti, nei lumi.15 Gl’italiani a Londra, quando si incontrano, parlano di ristoranti. Non esiste, in tutta Londra, un ristorante dove sia piacevole riunirsi a chiacchierare e a mangiare. […] Ci sono ristoranti dove si mangia solo pollo arrosto. Schiere e schiere di polli girano sullo spiedo. I camerieri passano a gran corsa da un tavolo all’altro reggendo caldi piatti di pollo. Non si scorge, all’intorno, traccia d’alcuna altra specie di cibo. Usciamo con una tale nausea di polli che sembra di non poter assaggiare mai più un pezzetto di pollo per tutta la vita. Ci sono anche ristoranti che si chiamano ‘The eggs and I’ (le uova e io). Lì non c’è che uova, uova sode gelate e marmoree, su cui è stato proiettato un piccolo spruzzo di maionese.16

Alberto Savinio, in his encyclopedia, makes biting remarks about a lack of respect for bread which in his opinion is displayed by English eaters. He accuses them of barbarian practices, calling them troglodytes who eat smoked herring, pieces of speck, raw meat without using the civilised corrective of bread: ‘Che gl’inglesi divorino salacche affumicaste, pezzi di lardo e carni crude senza frapporre a questi cibi trogloditici il civile corretivo del pane, denuncia una persistente barbarie dietro quella speciosa civiltà.’17 His heterostereotype is matched with an idealising self-image wich stresses the superiority of Italian civilisation basing this claim on its culture of food: ‘Che 15. Natalia Ginzburg, ‘Elogio e compianto dell’Inghilterra’, in Le piccole virtú (Turin: Einaudi, 1962/1998), pp. 27–35 (pp. 30–31). According to Ginzburg English restaurants are given fantastic names like “Pustza”, “Chez nous”, “Roma” and “The Alps” to render them more attractive, yet this does not reach as far as the food which is served there. They all miserably taste the same, as fantasy and inspiration have not reached the food but remain stuck in the curtains, in the wallpaper, the lamps. 16. Natalia Ginzburg, ‘La Maison Volpé’, in Le piccole virtú, pp. 37–43 (pp. 38–39). Italians, when they meet in London, writes Ginzburg, talk about restaurants. In London there does not exist a single restaurant where one can peacefully get together, chat, and eat. There are, she states, restaurants where one only gets grilled chicken, where rows and rows of chicken turn round and round, and where waiters move from table to table handing over plates of chicken. No other eatables can be traced there. They (the Italians) emerge from this with such a disgust of chicken that they do not want to taste it for the rest of their lives. There are also restaurants that call themselves ‘The eggs and I’, and there you get nothing besides eggs, boiled, chilled, marble coloured (which means that they have been boiled too long) eggs with some mayonnaise sprayed upon them. 17. Alberto Savinio, ‘Dolci’, in Nuova Enciclopedia, 4th edn (Milan: Adelphi, 1991), p. 112.

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l’Italia oltre a tutto abbia una sua propria e caratteristica civiltà alimentare, è una testimonianza supplementare che la civiltà italiana è la più provata e legittima di tutte.’ And after comparing the alimentary culture of Italy with that of Britain and Germany, he not only declares Italian cuisine as the most logical one but also the most humane one: ‘E io che ho assaggiato le cucine di questo e dell’altro emisfero, posso assicurare che la cucina italiana è la più logica e “umana” di tutte.’18 Prejudice finds a special platform in the field of eating and cooking, presenting formulations which would not be made explicitly about the ‘other’ by these civilised speakers. Moreover, in respect to Britain, it is striking to see, though, that even recent notions of ‘unexciting’ British food expressed both by British and Italian writers are strangely dated in not acknowledging the fact that in the last twenty years both cooking habits and the restaurant scenes in British cities have been radically changed by the immigrant population. Performing Incorporation: ‘Eating Up Italy’ The title of Matthew Fort’s so-called ‘gastro-travelogue’, Eating Up Italy, is a telling title in many ways. At least one of the several meanings of Eating up Italy points towards incorporation as a notion and fantasy which comes up when food and identification are paired together. Incorporation has a decidedly performative side which points beyond symbolic representation and which displays an ambivalent psychological energy. On the one hand, by fantasies of incorporation the subject joyfully invites the other into the boundaries of self; on the other hand, the other becomes destroyed, annihilated as a separate entity and guarded within the incorporating subject. The author of Eating Up Italy travels geographically upwards, that is from south to north Italy, eating his way through the Italian regions, through a ‘land of milk and honey’, re-tracing the path of the unification of Italy by travelling from Melito di Porto Salvo, the landing place of Garibaldi (after his conquest of Sicily) in 1869 all the way up to Turin. He stages himself effectively in his bodily presence as an aging, balding, well-nourished Englishman who makes his way slowly by riding a Vespa (upright because of his growing belly) and by displaying two decisive motives: his curiosity towards everything strange and exotic and his huge but discriminating appetite. Incorporation, according to Sigmund Freud and others, can be seen as the performative side of identification centred on the body of the subject; it tends to ritual which in our context is the ritual of the meal, pursued in dinner scenes of ‘intact’ Italian 18. Alberto Savinio, ‘Civiltà (alimentare)’, in Nuova Enciclopedia, 4th edn (Milan: Adelphi, 1991), pp. 93–94.

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families and conjured up in the intertextually omnipresent model of the Last Supper.19 Initiation rites are part of the incorporation pattern. Thus, Jonathan Keates, in his volume Italian Journeys in which he posits himself as the sophisticated connoisseur of Italian art and eating, has to undergo two initiations—one into polenta, whose ‘savour’, in his words, ‘is nonexistent unless you count a certain rubberiness which derives from the consistency’, the other one into stoccafisso.20 The stoccafisso test he has to undergo twice before passing it under the eyes of a stern waiter in Ancona. Far reaching identification also rings through Jamie Oliver’s most recent cookbook, Jamie’s Italy, if he states ‘I should have been bloody Italian’ or ‘when I’m in Italy I feel Italian’ and when he mixes with the crowd in many of the wholepage photos which try to capture different milieus of regional Italy.21 In novels, which allow for a greater degree of fantasy and wish-fulfilling, fantasies of incorporation play an interesting role. In Lily Prior’s success novel La cucina (I must admit I do not quite understand its success), which was published in Britain in 2001, has since been translated into many languages, and is being made into a film, culinary and erotic desires merge when Rosa, a full-busted, voluptuous Sicilian woman and epitome of a passionate cook unites with her lover who significantly is never allotted a name but throughout called l’Inglese.22 They make love on the kitchen table by eating skilfully and deliciously prepared dishes from each other’s bodies (of course there are cineaste models for this idea). Look at this triangulation: Prior, the author, who is a London schoolteacher, produces a saucy fantasy in which auto- and heterostereotypes successfully come together. Significantly, in Tim Parks’ recent novel Destiny, the protagonist suffers from extreme problems with his digestion which arise from his split identity between his British roots and Italian affiliation. Performing Nostalgia: Regional / National / Authentic Whoever wishes to write seriously about Italian cooking has to position himor herself in relation to the issue of regional versus national. In his book The New Italians, Charles Richard uses the culinary system as a central metaphor to explain the tensions between the regional and the national, starting with 19. See Jochen Hörisch, Brot und Wein: Die Poesie des Abendmahls (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992). 20. Keates, p. 245. 21. Jamie Oliver, Jamie’s Italy (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. x and xiv. 22. See also Fort, who speaks of a love affair with Italy which he ‘consummates’ as often as possible. Matthew Fort, Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 5.

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well-known statements that there is no such thing as ‘Italian cooking’ but only regional cuisines. Starting from this he discusses the multiple internal differences within Italian culture and politics and finally comes back to his all-encompassing image: ‘Each pasta dish may have its regional sauce. But every Italian eats pasta.’23 Food historians would certainly find offence in this statement and point at the relative short history of pasta dishes, but still pasta, in fact, serves as a powerful token of Italian cuisine both for outsiders and for Italians. Filippo Marinetti’s pamphlet La cucina futurista, for example, with its appeal to abolish pasta in order to turn Italians into passionate, sharptongued citizens who are apt to fulfil heroic and virile actions would not make sense if this token could not be recognised.24 It would be worthwhile to look at the detailed discussion of the regional/national problematics, but here I have to be content with pointing out that food plays an absolutely central role in the respective discourse. It is widely acknowledged that Pellegrino Artusi’s great, all-encompassing cookery book La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene: Manuale pratico per le famiglie, first published in 1891, has achieved more in the process of unification than any other effort on the political plane; it has, in the words of Piero Camporesi, ‘unified and blended the motley collection of peoples only formally identified as Italians’.25 Camporesi who wrote the introduction to the Einaudi edition of Artusi, points at the convergence of scienza, arte, and manuale pratico, i. e. science, art and instruction, which holds a strong performative imperative. Massimo Montanari, in his wide-ranging and both theoretically and historically based writing on Italian culinary systems and most recently in his series of lectures, Il cibo come cultura, makes clear that regionality is the strength of la cucina italiana, but at the same time regional diversity is already syncretistically encompassed in the notion of national cuisine as an artifact; at the same time, he argues, the very notion of territorialità is a recent invention.26 It is this kind of regionality as a ‘recent invention’ which British writers of gastro-travelogues—assisted by local tourism managers—prefer to run after, mistaking it not only for the only authentic expression of cooking and eating habits but also ascribing to the dishes they seemingly dig up and discover and present in their books an uninterrupted historically far-reaching

23. Charles Richard, The New Italians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 107. 24. Filippo Marinetti, La cucina futurista (Milan: Sonzogno, 1932). 25. Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene: Manuale pratico per le famiglie (Florence: Landi, 1891). Piero Camporesi, The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), p. 115. 26. ‘[…] la territorialità come nozione e come dato positivo è un’ invenzione nuova.’ Massimo Montanari, Il cibo come cultura (Rome: Laterza, 2004), p. 115.

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tradition.27 It is interesting to observe how in many cases the recipes presented appear as if they were becoming codified for the first time, brought to print by wringing them—in the case of Fort—from Signora Cappello, from Signora Gaetano, from Gennaro e Titina, from Signor Caruso and many many others.28 I am not saying that Fort’s book is not a charming one, but it is worth looking at what it is performing: In travelling ‘up’ Italy, Fort has actually eaten and tasted every single one of the dishes which he lists as a recipe with exact descriptions, and he describes his adventures and conversations as he goes along. The project he has set up for himself would in fact result in a kind of personal travel diary which is pleasant to read, with many anecdotes and humoristic details, the result of a personal quest beyond the beaten track and of visiting carefully chosen addresses. Yet it follows a much wider scope by taking part in a powerful mythmaking about Italianità, not only by declaring its itinerary as the route of unification, but also by endlessly confessing that what he encounters is the authentic, the traditional, the typical, the real, the honest. This would not work if it were a singular enterprise, but it is reinforced by numerous texts on many levels. Jamie Oliver, for example, fits well into this pattern: he also hunts after ‘the real thing’, after what he calls ‘the unique sense of tradition and village spirit’; his folklore Italy is rural, the soups he discovers are ‘rough and crude and full of personality—very much like some of the old Italian faces’, and the images in his glossy and spectacularly presented cookbook speak a language of their own.29 Negative images of English food are employed to support the idealisation which in itself powerfully corresponds to Italian auto-stereotypes distributed in great quantity and best visual quality by local tourism boards. Such phantasmatic constructions do not take into account that a great number of the recipes with ‘gourmet’ qualities originated in times of extreme poverty, and that firmly inscribed in the present scene of culinary habits are dirigistic government interventions, restrictive trade regulations, regimes of hierarchies and privileges in the access to food and in the representation of class through food. Camporesi, the historian of Italian food, expresses his anger at […] one currently fashionable style of cuisine to restore defunct dietary ‘genres’ by creating pretentious hybrid adulterated dishes far from the authentic cookery of the past. This becomes almost intolerably annoying if there is a pretence of recovering dietary forms from the oral tradition, flaunting them as authentic rediscoveries and 27. On inventions made by managers and institutions of tourism see Claudio Visentin and Barbara Schaff in this volume. 28. Fort, pp. 19, 45, 95, 116. 29. Oliver, pp. ix and 63.

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ignoring the fact that folklore cannot be brought back to life once it is extinct. The dishes that are claimed to be ‘typical’, ‘characteristic’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘home-style’ are in fact nearly always examples of ‘dietary kitsch’. They are a shoddy patchwork of culinary odds and ends exploiting the nostalgia of consumers who have lost their past, unaware of the arbitrary mystifications disingenuously promoted to play on their sad, poignant desire for mythical ‘genuine’ foods prepared by the loving hands of ancestral mammas and grannies.30

In contrast, Tim Parks’ best-selling books, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education, which have been put into the category of ‘travel book’ by others and into ‘arrival book’ by himself, strive to avoid generalising comparisons.31 Instead he embarks on a ‘process of immersion in details […] sticky as spider’s silk’.32 ‘The truth is’, he states, ‘that I have always been suspicious of travel writing, of attempts to establish that elusive element which might or might not be national character, to say in sweeping and general terms, this place is like this, that place is like that’, although he also believes in the existence of ‘a substrate of national character’.33 His solution is ‘to write only about those people and places I knew intimately, my neighbours, my street, my village, never to stray into the territory of the journalist, never to assume the eye of the traveller just passing through’.34 This results in two books rich in details and set up like a succession of one-act plays each devoted to one subject which brings out cultural specificity by skilfully chosen actors. Food comes up ‘naturally’ in many places, we get a lecture on the regimes of cappuccino, the description of a rural pranzo, of spectacular Italian barbecues, of how ingestion and digestion are recorded in the asilo (kindergarten) and the kind of fast food the kids desire at the beach of Pescara.35 There is a huge difference between this and the nostalgic and subconscious desires in Fort’s or Jamie’s blessed ‘land of plenty’.36 Performing Genre Fiction which contains recipes has a characteristic and very special performative side, for the recipes can be taken as instructions and carried out literally. It still remains fiction, of course (the author cannot be sued for any damage) 30. Camporesi, p. 85. 31. See the captions on the blurbs of the paperback editions. Tim Parks, Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 328. 32. Parks, Italian Neighbours, p. 328. 33. Tim Parks, An Italian Education (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 18 and 19. 34. Parks, Italian Education, p. 19. 35. Parks, Italian Education, pp. 19, 96–97, 113–14, 163, 388–89. 36. Another caption on the blurbs of the paperback editions.

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but most readers automatically follow in their imaginations the blending of ingredients, the cooking process and the smell and taste of the results, thus setting up an imaginary kitchen like an interior stage. Italian fiction knows many such performative temptations, best researched in Biasin’s The Flavors of Modernity and in a recent collection entitled Soavi sapori della cultura italiana.37 Clara Sereni’s much-acclaimed novel Casalinghitudine can serve as one of the more extreme examples, for it narrates a life through recipes.38 Even recipes which are definitely not meant for imitation, produce this performative effect. Even if they are revolting, we first follow their instructions in our imagination. James Hamilton-Paterson’s novel Cooking with Fernet Branca gives precise instructions to prepare unsavoury dishes like ‘Otter with lobster sauce’ or ‘Alien pie’ which contains ingredients like paraffin, turtle, and ‘1 kg smoked cat’ and mocks the mythmakings of British and American ‘Tuscanites’, Myers included.39 Listen to his recommendations on how to consume his ‘Alien pie’: Beyond this point we enter the realm of the sacramental, and words all but fail me. All I can say is that Alien Pie, hot from the oven and with a jaunty buzzard feather stuck in the tip, should be eaten on a terrace overlooking a distant ocean above which the remnants of sunset brood like old wounds seeping through a field dressing. It is one of those experiences poised exquisitely between sorrow and oblivion.40

Similar to fiction containing recipes, travel literature also has a strong performative effect, even if it is fictional. Boundaries between description and instruction have always been transgressed by travellers as readers and readers as travellers who follow the steps of predecessors even if they do not contain any instructions or precise itineraries. Keates speaks of the merging of several maps, the ‘green Touring Club series’, ‘the Great Gastronomic Map of the peninsula’ and the ‘Cartography of individual desire, the chart whose points of orientation are determined by the notional fulfilment of a particular craving’.41 In the pursuit of the ‘natural’, of the ‘honest’, of a refreshing touch of immediacy, of ‘a clear sense of identity tied up with each dish’ as Fort puts it, one could find many traces of several centuries of travel litera-

37. Gian-Paolo Biasin, The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Soavi sapori della cultura Italiana. Atti del XIII congresso dell’A.I.P.I. 1998 ed. by Bart Van den Bossche and others (Florence: Cesati, 2000). 38. Clara Sereni, Casalinghitudine (Turin: Einaudi, 1987). 39. James Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), pp. 22, 166. 40. Hamilton-Paterson, p. 170. 41. Keates, p. 235.

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ture from Britain to Italy, but here with a shift from art to cuisine or at least an addition of cuisine to art.42 Encounter: Performing Dialogue In their epistolary novel, Conversioni a tavola of 1996, Franco Nasi and Paul Sears set up a dialogue between an Italian Catholic and a British Jew with Easter, respective Passover, dinners in the centre of their exchange of letters.43 Franco writes from Reggio Emilia, Paul responds from London. In great narrative detail Franco describes the cooking of the pranzo di Pasqua as learned from zia Marcellina, cappelletti in brodo, agnello arrosto, i bolliti, le salse, il dolceamore and le ciliegine sotto spirito. Paul writes about ritual Jewish food, mazzo, erbe amare, stinco e uovo arrosto and il charoset. For both each detail of the food and even the time schemes for its preparation are highly symbolic—the preparation, for example, of the cappelletti has to be performed ‘a fuoco lento, lentissimo, come una Via Crucis’ (‘on a small flame, so slowly as if doing the stations of the cross’ [my translation]), or the cloves used in one of the recipes remind of Christ’s crown of thorns—and both mix their accounts with numerous anecdotes.44 Franco’s frequently bizarre anecdotes are, as he writes, ‘quelle storielle che si raccontano a tavola […] sono comunque necessarie, tanto quanto sono il pane, il vino, il parmigianoreggiano. Non c’è niente di più triste di un pranzo dove nessuno parla’ (‘the little stories that are told at the table and are necessary like bread, wine and cheese. There is nothing more sad than a meal during which nobody is talking’ [my translation]).45 In contrast, Paul’s anecdotal stories narrate episodes in the lives of three Jewish male teenagers growing up in a London suburb estranged from the beliefs of their parents and the dreadful fates of their grandparents. The title of the book would in fact suggest the word conversazioni (‘conversations’) instead of conversioni (‘conversions’) and thus refer to the genre of table talk. In choosing conversioni, the text opens up to a multitude of allusions, in the first place, of course, to the religious aspects of the discourse including the notion of transubstantiation and including the political pressures on Jewish communities in history, then it alludes to the linguistic dimension because the letter writers talk a lot about translation, and most of all 42. Fort, p. 50. 43. Again, the epistolary novel has a strong performative side in that there is no mediator between the correspondents. Many sincere thanks to Antonio Giannetti, librarian in the tourist office and archives of the town of Ripatransone who helped me to acquire a copy of the book: Franco Nasi and Paul Sears, Conversioni a tavola (Ripatransone: Sestante, 1996). 44. Nasi and Sears, p. 18. 45. Nasi and Sears, p. 9.

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writers talk a lot about translation, and most of all conversioni refers to processes of transformation, for example, as Franco’s letter puts it, ‘acqua si trasforma in brodo’, water is transformed into broth, or, similarly, the metamorphosis of milk into cheese: ‘[c]’è una ritualità tutta particolare nella trasformazione del latte in formaggio.’46 Paul suggests to leave aside theological debates and acknowledge that the Last Supper has certainly been a Seder (‘l’ultima cena di Gesù fu probabilmente un Seder’) and, concentrating on questions of food arrives at his idea of transmutation of ‘giudaismo in cristianesimo’.47 The great achievement of Conversioni a tavola—besides its richness in allusion and invention—lies in its lucid consciousness that food is symbolically charged and a means of communication and signification. By setting against each other two distinctive cultures, their dishes and ritual modes of preparation and consumption are perceived as culturally produced and subject to historical change. Nasi and Sears perform Montanari’s principle which is directed against the current phantasmatic fixation upon origins: ‘noi siamo il punto fisso: L’identità non esiste all’origine, bensì al termine del percorso.’ (‘It is us who are the fixed point: identity does not exist in the origin but in the destination of our journey’ [my translation].)48 ‘Le identità non sono scritte in cielo’ ‘Le identità non sono scritte in cielo’ (‘Identities are not written in the stars’ [my translation]), writes Massimo Montanari, the theoretician of food.49 Contemporary images of self and other in the two groups we are looking at are produced by eating travellers and travelling cooks, ‘expert poseurs’ in Keates’ formulation, they are produced by temporary expatriates who narrate culinary rituals in which they discover cultural difference, by food experts of all kinds who are interested in incorporating the other, in enhancing their own lifestyles, in advancing tourism.50 It is worth looking beyond the symbolic value of food in intercultural constructions of identities and explore the potential that lies in its materiality and its sensual appeal and its aptness for display. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Nasi and Sears, pp. 27 and 48. Nasi and Sears, pp. 133 and 135. Montanari, p. 160. Montanari, p. 158. Keates, p. 1. That cookbooks can be taken seriously as scholarly objects and indeed provide most interesting material for cultural studies becomes most obvious in texts like the following: Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Comparative Studies of Society and History, 30 (1988), 3–24 and Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cook Books and the Transformation of British Food (London: Faber and Faber, 2005).

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The close interplay between ‘Aufführung’ and ‘Ausführung’, between staging and carrying out as Manfred Pfister puts it, this interplay in the texts opens up a multitude of performative options in dealing with the other.51 Reports, descriptions, invented stories frequently go beyond the boundaries of the genres they use in that they tease their readers into putting into action what was in the first place meant to be just a description or a fantasy. They also give access to prejudice which frequently would not pass in the form of an explicit political and social comment, they allow to negotiate ideas of national identities on sensual, playful, and material planes.52 Appendix Food metaphors gathered in our conversations during the conference and after: suggestions from Mario Curreli, Carla Dente, Sara Soncini, Marina Spunta, Manfred Pfister, and my Italian neighbours. Many sincere thanks to all of them. Al contadino non far sapere com’è buono il pane con le pere Andare in brodo di giuggiole ( = essere estremamente felice) Avere le mani in pasta Cadere dalla padella nella brace È come la ciliegia sulla torta È come un pezzo di pane È il sale/ pepe della vita È sempre la stessa minestra/zuppa È tutta un’altra minestra È una pappa molla Entrarci come i cavoli a merenda Essere come il cacio sui maccheroni Essere come il prezzemolo (= essere ovunque) Essere come piselli nel baccello Essere compagni di merenda Essere fritti Essere tutti pappa e ciccia

51. Manfred Pfister, ‘Performance/Performativität’, in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze—Personen—Grundbegriffe, ed. by Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), pp. 516–18. 52. See for example Appadurai on cookbooks; he points out that cookbooks predominantly contain positive stereotypes, which can differ extremely from orally transported images. Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’, p. 18. Jamie Oliver’s TV film about his journey to Italy can serve as an immediate example, because in the film version he retreats from his idealisation of Italian food and manners by confessing that he is looking forward to going home because his fellow countrymen are less obstinate in their opinions towards food.

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Essere tutto fumo e niente arrosto Essere una bietola Essere una buona forchetta Far venire il latte ai ginocchi (= essere noiosi) Fare le nozze con i fichi secchi Fare una bella frittata, un bel pasticcio, un bel arrosto Hai fatto una frittata (Hai sbagliato/fatto un guaio) In tutte le salse La vendetta è un piatto freddo L’amore non è polenta Latte e vino fanno un bel bambino Le nozze con i fichi secchi Lei è un bel bocconcino Lui è una pasta d’uomo Mangiare pane e coltello Mettere il sale sulla coda a un uccellino Non esserci trippa per gatti Non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco O mangi questa minestra, o salti la finestra Prendere due piccioni con una fava Rigirare la frittata Se non è zuppa è pan bagnato Sei bell’e fritto Stare a pane e cicoria Tanto va la gatta al lardo che ci lascia lo zampino. Trovare la pappa scodellata Una bella pollastrella Una mela al giorno leva il medico di torno Una patata bollente Una pentola di fagioli Una pera cotta

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Comparative Studies of Society and History, 30 (1988), 3–24. Artusi, Pellegrino, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene: Manuale pratico per le famiglie (Florence: Landi, 1891). Biasin, Gian-Paolo, The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Biasin, Gian-Paolo, ‘Other Foods, Other Voices’, MLN, 109 (1994), 831–846. Buzzi, Aldo (1979), The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). Camporesi, Piero, The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) (Original title: La terra e la luna [Milan: Mondadori, 1989]).

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Capatti, Alberto and Massimo Montanari, La cucina italiana: Storia di una cultura (Rome: Laterza, 1999). Ecker, Gisela, ‘Eating Identities—From Migration to Lifestyle: Mary Antin, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Ozeki’, in Wandering Selves: Essays on Migration and Multiculturalism, ed. by Michael Porsche and Christian Berkemeier (Essen: Blaue Eule, 2001), pp. 171–183. Ecker, Gisela, ‘“Fremdes Wasser”: Reisesteuerungen in Prosatexten der Gegenwartsliteratur’, in Wege des Kybernetes: Schreibpraktiken und Steuerungsmodelle von Politik, Reise, Migration, ed. by Anja K. Maier and Burkhardt Wolf (Münster: LIT, 2004), pp. 218–234. Feinstein, Wiley, ‘Converting, Conversing and Eating at the Table of Diversity in Franco Nasi’s and Paul Sears’ Conversioni a tavola’, Romance Languages Annual, 10 (1999), 241–246. Fort, Matthew, Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa (London: Harper Perennial, 2005). Ginzburg, Natalia, Le piccole virtù (Turin: Einaudi, 1962 and 1998). Hamilton-Paterson, James, Cooking with Fernet Branca (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). Helstosky, Carol, ‘Recipe for the Nation: Reading Italian History through La scienza in cucina and La cucina futurista’, Food and Foodways, 11 (2003), 113–140. Hertel, Ralf, Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). Hörisch, Jochen, Brot und Wein: Die Poesie des Abendmahls (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992). Humble, Nicola, Culinary Pleasures: Cook Books and the Transformation of British Food (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Keates, Jonathan, Italian Journeys (London: Picador 1992). Marinetti, Filippo, La cucina futurista (Milan: Sonzogno, 1932). Mintz, Sidney W., ‘Eating Communities: The Mixed Appeals of Sodality’, in Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. by Tobias Döring and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), pp. 19–34. Montanari, Massimo, Il cibo come cultura (Rome: Laterza, 2004). Nasi, Franco and Paul Sears, Conversioni a tavola (Ripatransone: Sestante, 1996). Oliver, Jamie, Jamie’s Italy (London: Penguin, 2005). Olsen, T.G., ‘Poisoned Figs and Italian Sallets: Nation, Diet, and the Early Modern English Traveler’, Annali d’Italianistica, 21 (2003), 233–254. Ortese, Anna Maria, ‘Il batello di Dover’, in La lente scura: Scritti di viaggio (Milan: Marcos and Marcos, 1991), pp. 11–19.

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Parks, Tim, Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona (London: Vintage, 2001). Parks, Tim, An Italian Education (London: Vintage, 2000). Parks, Tim, Destiny (London: Secker and Warburg, 1999). Pfister, Manfred, ‘Performance/Performativität’, in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze—Personen—Grundbegriffe, ed. by Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), pp. 516–18. Polezzi, Loredana, Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001). Prior, Lily, La Cucina (London: Black Swan, 2001). Richards, Charles, The New Italians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Ross, Janet, Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen or How to Cook Vegetables (London: Dent, 1911 [1899]). Savinio, Alberto, Nuova Enciclopedia, 4th edn (Milan: Adelphi, 1991). Sereni, Clara, Casalinghitudine (Turin: Einaudi, 1987). Svevo, Italo, ‘Soggiorno Londinese’, in Opera omnia: Racconti, saggi, pagine sparse (Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1968). Van den Bossche, Bart and others, eds., Soavi sapori della cultura Italiana: Atti del XIII congresso dell’A.I.P.I. 1998 (Florence: Cesati, 2000). Internet Sources http://www.cimolelli.com (accessed 23 January 2006). http://www.cookingwithpatty.com (accessed 5 March 2007). http://www.deliciousitaly.com (accessed 5 March 2007). http://www.stratsplace.com (accessed 5 March 2007). http://www.taccuinistorici.it (accessed 5 March 2007).

Notes on Contributors Carla Dente is Professor of English at the University of Pisa, where she also teaches Theatre and Drama. She has published on contemporary and Renaissance theatre, mainly on Shakespeare. Author of La recita del diritto: Saggio su ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (2nd edn 1995), her recent published work includes the editing of Teatro inglese contemporaneo: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Bond, Hampton (1995) and Scenes of Change (1996), and the coediting of Conflict Zones: Actions Languages Mediations (2004), Proteus: The Language of Metamorphosis (2005), as well as of a hypertext: ‘Hamlet’ Promptbooks of the Nineteenth Century (2002). She has recently worked on the antitheatrical debate both within and outside the theatre world during the Restoration and a book is just coming out with her editorship: Dibattito sul teatro in Europa: Voci opinioni interpretazioni. She is also a member of the Board of the International Shakespeare Association. Gisela Ecker, since 1993 Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Paderborn. She has also taught at the universities of Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt, at Sussex University/UK and held visiting professorships at the University of Cincinnati, at Berkeley, and at Emory University/ USA. Recent book publications on Heimat, on mourning and gender, and on objects in literature. Forthcoming a study of modes of gift giving in literature. David Forgacs is Professor of Italian at University College London and Research Professor in Modern Studies at the British School at Rome. He taught previously at Sussex, at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was Reader in Film Studies. His research interests are in modern Italian cultural history, the mass media, and cinema. He recently coordinated an AHRC-funded research project on ‘Memory and Place in the 20th-century Italian City’ and directed a 53-minute documentary on the district of San Lorenzo in Rome. His publications include Rome Open City (London: BFI Film Classics, 2000), L’industrializzazione della cultura italiana (1880-2000) (2nd edition, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000), and (with Stephen Gundle), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Stephen Gundle recently left the post of Professor of Italian Cultural History at Royal Holloway, University of London to become Professor of Film

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and Television Studies at Warwick University. His interests cover nineteenth and twentieth century Italian history and culture and the social history of the mass media. He is the author of Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000; Italian edition Florence: Giunti, 1995); The Glamour System, with Clino T. Castelli (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007; Italian edition Bari: Laterza, 2007); Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War, with David Forgacs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007; Italian edition Bologna: Mulino, 2007). Ralf Hertel teaches English literature at the Free University of Berlin where he is a member of the Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen, a centre of excellence devoted to the study of the performative turn in the humanities. His main interests are early modern theatre and culture, literature and the arts of the Fin de siècle, the contemporary novel, and, less specifically constricted to one particular epoch, the interaction of literature and other forms of art as well as the sensuousness of reading. His publications include Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) and Tanztexte und Texttänze: Der Tanz im Gedicht der europäischen Moderne (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2002), a comparative study of dance and poetry in the Fin de siècle. Currently, he is working on a study of the impact of Elizabethan Drama on the emergent national identity in early modern England. Anthony King is a professor of sociology at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on football and social theory, including The European Ritual: Football in the New Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) and The Structure of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2004). He is currently working on the transformation of the European military. Werner von Koppenfels has recently retired from his professorship of English and Comparative Literature at Munich University. He has published widely on English Renaissance to Enlightenment literature in its European context. His books include Bild und Metamorphose (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991) and a study of Menippean Satire Der Andere Blick (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007). He has translated, among others, Thomas Nashe, John Donne, Francisco de Quevedo, Sir Thomas Browne, and Emily Dickinson, and co-edited anthologies of French and English poetry. He is currently compiling an anthology on Baroque Gardens in Literature.

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Fabienne Moine, lecturer at the University of Paris 10-Nanterre where she teaches business English, translation, and poetry. She is the author of a doctoral thesis on ‘The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Heritage, palimpsests and transitions’ and since then has written various articles on Barrett Browning as well as other Victorian women poets (from England and Scotland). Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s studies and poetics. She is interested in exploring the identity of the nineteenth-century women poets in general and is currently focusing on the various aspects of poetical communities. Judith Munat is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pisa where she teaches English linguistics, stylistics, communications studies, and 20th century American literature. Her research interests include formulaic language, metaphor, translation, and the globalisation of English. Among her recent publications are ‘Iconic functions of phraseological units and metaphor’ (2005), ‘Routines, Rituals and Patterns: Stereotypical Language in Literary Dialogue’ (2005), ‘Metaphor as Mirror of the Mind’ (2004), ‘Doing Things with Formulaic Language: the Interface Between Language and Social Action’ (forthcoming). She is currently editing a volume of articles on lexical creativity. Pamela Neville-Sington received her PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London, in Tudor history and bibliography. She is the author, together with David Sington, of Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers Have Changed the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (New York: Viking, 1998), and Robert Browning: A Life After Death (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). She has edited Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans for Penguin Classics (London, 1997), written an introduction to Anthony Trollope’s Thackeray, and contributed to the History of the Book in Britain, the New Dictionary of National Biography, and a number of other periodicals and publications. John Peacock is Reader in English at the University of Southampton. His research crosses from the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the field of art history, and concentrates especially on the culture of the early Stuart court. Cambridge University Press are about to reprint his monograph on The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones (1995) in paperback; and Ashgate will shortly bring out The Look of Van Dyck: The ‘Self-portrait with a sunflower’ and the Vision of the Painter, a preview of which may be read in the collection Dealing with the Visual from the same publisher, edited by Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters. He is now at work on a complementary

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study of Van Dyck’s aristocratic portraits and ideas of nobility in the early modern period. Manfred Pfister is Professor of English at the Freie Universität Berlin. His main areas of research are, in historical terms, the Early Modern Period, the Fin de siècle and modern and contemporary literature and, in terms of genre, the theatre, poetry, and travel writing. He is co-editor of Poetica and author of Das Drama: Theorie und Analyse (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982; Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 1988). His most recent book publications are ‘The Fatal Gift of Beauty’: The Italies of British Travellers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), Laurence Sterne (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2001), A History of English Laughter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), and an edition of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). In his leisure time, of which he spends as much as possible in the Maremma, he translates poetry and has co-edited a four-volume bilingual anthology of English and American poetry (Munich: Beck, 2000). Barbara Schaff studied English and Russian Literature at the Universities of Munich and Edinburgh. She took her PhD on contemporary English bioplays at Passau University in 1990. From 1992 to 1996, she held a position at the Graduate College for Gender Studies at Munich University, where in 2002 she completed her post-doctoral dissertation: War, Gender and Memory: The First World War in British Cultural Memory. Since then, she has held several visiting professorships in Tübingen, Munich, Bochum, and Vienna, has co-edited books on authorship around 1800, English fantasies of Venice, and bi-textuality, and has published on travel literature, war literature, fakes and forgeries, and female authorship. Her current research project explores the changing respresentations of the Continent in John Murray’s 19th century handbooks, for which she has been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sara Soncini holds a PhD in English from the University of Genoa and currently teaches translation at the University of Pisa, where she is also Research Associate. Her areas of interest include contemporary British drama, Restoration theatre culture, and stage and screen translation (with a specific focus on Shakespeare). She is the author of a volume on present-day rewrites of Restoration theatre, Playing with(in) the Restoration (Napoli: Edizioni scientifice italiane, 1999) and co-editor of Shakespeare Graffiti: Il Cigno di Avon nella cultura di massa (Milano: CUEM, 2002, with Mariacristina Cavecchi), on Shakespeare appropriation in popular culture(s) and, more

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recently, Conflict Zones: Actions Languages Mediations (Pisa: ETS , 2004, with Carla Dente). She has also translated plays by a number of contemporary dramatists and co-edited Caledonia Dreaming: La nuova drammaturgia scozzese (Salerno: Oedipus, 2001), a collection of Scottish plays in Italian. At present she is preparing a monograph on the representation of war in 20th and 21st century British and Irish theatre. Mariangela Tempera is Professor of English Literature at the University of Ferrara and Director of the Ferrara ‘Shakespeare Centre’ which houses a vast collection of Shakespeare-related video materials. She is editor of the series Shakespeare dal testo alla scena and co-editor of the series The Renaissance Revisited. She has published widely on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare in performance and in popular culture. Her full-length studies include: The Lancashire Witches: Lo stereotipo della strega fra scrittura giuridica e scrittura letteraria (Imola: Galeati, 1981) and Feasting with Centaurs: Titus Andronicus from Stage to Text (Bologna: Clueb, 1999). She is currently working on a book on Shakespeare in Italian cinema. Peter Vassallo is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Head of the Department of English at the University of Malta. He is also Director of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies at this University. His publications include Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984) and Byron and the Mediterranean (Msida: Malta University Press, 1986); he has published extensively in the field of Anglo-Italian Literary Relations in which he has specialised. He is editor of the Journal of AngloItalian Studies and has also edited the Bibliography of Anglo-Italian Literary Criticism (1880-1990) (Msida: Malta University Press, 1997) compiled by Alfonso Sammut. He has recently completed a study of Romantic Narrative Verse for the Oxford Guide to Romanticism edited by Nicholas Roe. Claudio Visentin is ‘Cultural History of Tourism’ professor at the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano. At first he devoted himself to the study of International Relations, with special regard to intercultural dialogue, and he has published a book about the image of Germany in Italy (Nel paese delle selve e delle idee: I viaggiatori italiani in Germania 1866–1915 [Milan: Jaca, 1995]). He then turned to the history and culture of travel and tourism, and he has particularly investigated the history of italian tourism and package holidays. His last book is Il turismo contemporaneo: Cultura e mondo dell'impresa (Lugano: Casagrande, 2002). He is General Secretary of the International Commission for the History of Travel and Tourism, affiliated to the International Committee of Historical Sciences.

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Greg Walker is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture and a Director of the Medieval Research Centre at the University of Leicester. His main research interests are in the literary and cultural history of England and Scotland in the late medieval period and the sixteenth century. He wrote John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Persuasive Fictions (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), and The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and edited the Everyman John Skelton (London: Everyman, 1997) and Blackwell’s Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). He is a General Editor (with Martin Stannard) of the Studies in European Cultural Transition series and Renaissance Editor (with Tony Hasler) of the e-journal Literature Compass. His most recent book is Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). He has additional research interests in the films of Alexander Korda, (having written the British Film Guide to The Private Life of Henry VIII [London: Tauris, 2003]) and the popular music of the 1970s. Alison Yarrington is Richmond Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Department of History of Art at the Univesity of Glasgow. Her research interests are in the area of sculpture c. 1750–1914 and British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of The Commemoration of the Hero 1800–1864 (New York: Garland, 1988), author of An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey, RA (1994), co-editor of The Lustrous Trade: Material Culture and the History of Sculpture in England and Italy c. 1700–1866 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), and has written articles on the patronage and practice of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury sculpture. She has recently finished writing a history of women sculptors: ‘Women and Sculpture 1740–1918’ to be published by Yale University Press. She wrote the introduction to the PMSA (Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) volume The Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) and is a member of the editorial board for the PMSA series, published by Liverpool University Press, and Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, a peer-reviewed on-line interdisciplinary journal. She has recently been awarded an AHRC research grant for a project ‘Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951’.