Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in Italy: The Complexity of Domestication

Over the centuries, playwrights have frequently manipulated Shakespeare’s plots to make them fit coeval audiences. The so-called “afterlife” of his canon provides the opportunity to infuse words with unprecedented meaning, often engaging with texts that are intricately connected to a particular time and cultural context. The Italian staging of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra can be considered as an interesting case study in this direction: never represented during the first half of the twentieth century, the tragedy was included in the repertoire of several companies from the 1950s onwards,
sometimes altered in its content as well in its structure. By scrutinising the adaptations performed in the last 50 years, this paper aims to demonstrate how Italian directors such as Cobelli (1972), Missiroli (1982), Bruschetta (2001), Camerini (2010), Pascoe (2012), De Fusco (2013) and others have altered the First Folio’s text in order to allow the theatre to reflect upon life and its problems.