Verga and Duse: Shaping an Italian Identity on Stage

My contribution at the recent Interart/Intermedia conference looked at the interartistic collaboration between Verga and Duse and the effect their collaboration had on Italy’s artistic creativity: observations which have been inspired by my recent book, Women in Verga and Pirandello: From Page to Stage (Legenda: 2018). Despite the commonly held view that Italy was not producing its own major playwrights in the nineteenth century, I argue that Verga, whose plays have often been overshadowed by the success of his narrative prose and the acclaimed success of Mascagni’s operatic adaptation of Cavalleria rusticana (1890), made a notable contribution to the Italian theatrical tradition.

Like the French naturalists, Verga adapted his novelle for the stage. This intersemiotic translation from page to stage had a significant impact on the portrayal of his female characters. As soon as his stories are transposed from the narrative genre to the theatrical (a genre which predominantly relies on speech), more emphasis is inevitably placed on the characters’ ability to articulate their thoughts, and subsequently, their individual voices – and right to express an opinion – get ‘louder’. While men have been typically associated with words and women with silence, the additional use of dialogue introduced in theatrical adaptations enable women to break away from their traditional identification as the antithesis of logocentrism. As a result of this shift in emphasis, Verga’s theatre thus prioritizes the female perspective – a perspective embodied by the grande attrice Eleonora Duse who first interpreted his plays: Cavalleria rusticana (1884) and In portineria (1885). Through close comparison of Duse’s performances and that of her contemporaries, I show that, at a time when Italy still lacked a common spoken language, the grandi attori were able to exploit their use of gestures to break linguistic barriers and, together with Verga’s scripts, to shape Italy’s cultural identity in and outside the peninsula.

So in relation to one of the research questions posed for Interart/Intermedia (that is: how did artists – in this case Verga and Duse – push the boundaries between the arts in the 20th Century?), I would argue through theatre translation. The intriguing process that Verga’s novelle underwent when adapted into plays coincided with the emergent ‘new women’ debates epitomised by the heroines in Ibsen’s oeuvre, especially in A Doll’s House (1879). Indeed, early actresses who performed Verga’s ‘new’ female stage roles, above all the divina Duse, specifically chose to perform unconventional roles like Ibsen’s Nora at a time when women were gaining a political voice of their own – both on and off stage. My book thus investigates the wider cultural context which saw the rise of a ‘new’ type of female stage role in order to help assess how Ibsen might have influenced the development of Verga’s theatre, drawing attention to the ‘real’ women who are instrumental in the passage from page to stage. Without the presence of Duse, characters like Nora might not have been able to make their voices heard in auditoriums around the globe, and who knows how Verga’s (and later Pirandello’s) newly vocalised female figures would have developed had it not been for theatre translation and the emergence of Nora’s radical voice?

(Presented at the International Conference Interart/Intermedia Experimentation in Italy through the Ages, Royal Holloway, 12-13 April 2019)