“These sixe parts of folly”: Robert Armin’s moralizing anatomy of fools’ jests

Robert Armin’s Foole upon Foole was published in 1600, i.e. when Armin had been a member of the Chamberlain’s Men for only about a year, under the pseudonym “Clonnico de Curtanio Snuff” (Snuff, the clown of the Curtain). A revision of the pamphlet was issued in 1608, with the author’s real name and a new title – A Nest of Ninnies –, but in this version Armin added a pseudo-philosophical frame consisting of a dialogue between Lady World and Sotto, while reproducing the tales connected to the previous six natural fools presented in Foole upon Foole. On the one hand the epigraph on the title page (“Stultorum plena sunt omnia”) seems to connect this new version of Armin’s work to the Erasmian tradition of The Praise of Folly, but on the other the frame and some speeches exchanged in the sections which precede and follow the tales, appear to look back to the allegorical world of the morality plays. The paper analyzes the idea of folly which underpins Armin’s two ‘Specula stultorum’, and evaluates how the writer describes the fools he presents, especially from a physical and physiognomic point of view

The Pragmatics of Dialogical Asides in Shakespeare

Neither the Folio nor the various quartos of Shakespeare plays contain the stage direction “aside”, which was added to the texts starting from the first editors in the eighteenth century. Modern editions continue to signal this particular theatrical convention to readers, and scholars have defined various categories for it. Among these categories (monological, ad spectatores, and dialogical) this article examines the dialogical aside and the pragmatic strategies it involves, when dialogue becomes hidden, so to say, and particularly guarded (and wary), so as not to be discovered by other onstage bystanders. In this case the noun aside takes on its full meaning: due to a theatrical convention (valid especially in Elizabethan and Restoration drama, but absolutely rejected by the so-called fourth-wall theatre), a character in a multiparty talk chooses only one or more characters as their addressee, thus creating a dialogically privileged group and isolating the remaining bystanders. The article discusses some cases from The Tempest, Henry VI Part 3, and Antony and Cleopatra

Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It: Plural Conflicts on- and off-screen

Kenneth Branagh’s latest Shakespearean film, As You Like It (2006), has not so far encountered much critical interest. Even the ‘Community’ site of HBO Films is poor of comments (there are actually only two: one extolling the director for putting «his whole soul into his movies», the other lamenting the unavoidable cuts to the play text, up to the basic question «where is the rest of Rosalind?». A third and more critical comment showing some of the inconsistencies of the movie can be read via a link. The critics’ silence may be attributable on the one side to the film’s process of physical and cultural dépaysement (with the action taking place in late nineteenth-century Japan), and on the other to Branagh’s tendency to choose a ‘worldwide Shakespeare’ stance (in the casting, for example, where Orlando and Oliver are two black actors). Besides that, since As You Like It as a ‘romantic comedy’ hides conflict underneath the cover of a love story with an ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ ending, what strikes spectators is the violence surfacing in the film (from the very beginning when Duke Senior is usurped after a Ninja warriors’ attack).[Segue nel testo ...]* Presentato dal Dipartimento di Letterature Moderne e Scienze Filologico-Linguistiche

Reading Aloud in Britain in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: Theories and Beyond

Thomas Sheridan, actor, theatre manager and elocutionist, had been dead for eleven years, when The Reader or Reciter was published, targeting those who had already followed Mr. Sheridan’s instructions about elocution and reading, but who still found themselves ‘deficient of that attractive power to engage the attention, and afford gratification to [themselves] and those who are [their] hearers’. The occasions for reading aloud evidently were still quite numerous if the anonymous author(s) of The Reader thought of publishing this Do-It-Yourself guide to shared reading. The article investigates the late eighteenth-century cultural milieu within which a booklet of this type was produced, mainly the elocution movement and its principal exponents, i.e. Sheridan himself and John Walker, and their theoretical production. Then a series of books are analysed, printed towards the end of the century in order to guide those people who wanted to practice reading aloud on the various occasions offered by genteel British society, in order to attain efficacious and pleasurable standards in their performances. The issue of the difference, if any, between communal reading and theatre is also taken into consideratio

Reading Aloud in Britain in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: Theories and Beyond

Thomas Sheridan, actor, theatre manager and elocutionist, had been dead for eleven years, when The Reader or Reciter was published, targeting those who had already followed Mr. Sheridan’s instructions about elocution and reading, but who still found themselves ‘deficient of that attractive power to engage the attention, and afford gratification to [themselves] and those who are [their] hearers’. The occasions for reading aloud evidently were still quite numerous if the anonymous author(s) of The Reader thought of publishing this Do-It-Yourself guide to shared reading. The article investigates the late eighteenth-century cultural milieu within which a booklet of this type was produced, mainly the elocution movement and its principal exponents, i.e. Sheridan himself and John Walker, and their theoretical production. Then a series of books are analysed, printed towards the end of the century in order to guide those people who wanted to practice reading aloud on the various occasions offered by genteel British society, in order to attain efficacious and pleasurable standards in their performances. The issue of the difference, if any, between communal reading and theatre is also taken into consideratio