The reception of Aeschylus in Italy: translation, adaptation and performance

The present thesis seeks to address the neglect of Aeschylus’ reception in Italy. By putting Aeschylus back into the history of Classics in Italy, it becomes clear just how central a role this playwright (and in particular his Prometheus Vinctus and Oresteia) has played in the history of Italian theatre, in the forging of a strong national identity, and in the history of Italian scholarship. In its seven chapters, this work fills a gap in the reception history of Aeschylus by ranging widely across the Italian histories of performance, translation and adaptation over five different centuries. Chapter One begins with the first translations of Aeschylus’ plays, from the first published in 1556 to two others that remained long unknown; Chapter Two focuses on the oft-neglected importance to theatre and the translation of the classics of Alfieri’s retelling of Aeschylus’ Oresteia; Chapter Three is about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations of Aeschylus’ plays and their importance in the forging of an artificial and aristocratic language for translation, a language that still burdens some translations of the classics today. Chapters Four and Five retrace the birth (1914–1921) and subsequent growth under Fascism (1924–1939) of the longest running modern festival of ancient drama at the ancient theatre of Syracuse, organised by the entity that is today known as INDA. Chapter Six focuses on the revolutionary and precursory work of Manara Valgimigli in re-conceptualising philology as essentially a ‘rethinking’ of humankind, always oscillating between past and present, because always in the making. Finally, Chapter Seven analyses the ground-breaking production of the 1960 Oresteia directed by Vittorio Gassman and Luciano Lucignani with a translation by Pier Paolo Pasolini. This journey through five different centuries not only reveals how Aeschylus’ reception has contributed widely to Italian classical scholarship, intellectual history and history of theatre; it also contextually allows for the writing of an ‘unclassical’ – i.e. ‘uncommon’ and ‘unknown’ – account of not just Aeschylus, but of the ‘classic’ generally in Italian theatre, scholarship and translation.