That time Shakespeare met the neapolitan playwright Eduardo de Filippo
We all know Shakespeare and the greatness of his plays, which are still relevant today. As we all know Shakespeare’s last play was The Tempest, of which there are numerous versions and adaptations.
One of the certainly lesser-known adaptations outside Italy is the Neapolitan version by the Neapolitan playwright and actor Eduardo de Filippo.
Eduardo de Filippo and siblings Titina and Peppino were the natural children of Luisa de Filippo and Eduardo Scarpetta, who, however, was married to an aunt of Luisa’s by whom she had other children.
The three siblings grew up in the Neapolitan theatrical milieu while also working with their half-brother Vincenzo Scarpetta. Eduardo wrote his first play in 1920 and founded his own company in 1931. During his very long career, Eduardo wrote and brought more than forty comedies to the theater and cinema. In 1983, at the request of the publishing house Einaudi, his rewrite of Shakesspeare’s The Tempest came out. It is Eduardo himself who explains the reason for choosing this work
“The tolerance, the benevolence that pervades the whole story. Although he has been treated unworthily by his brother, the king of Naples and Sebastian, Prospero does not seek revenge but rather their repentance. What more timely teaching could an artist have given to the man of today, who in the name of a religion or an ideal kills and commits unheard-of cruelties, in an escalation that who knows where it will take him?”
Eduardo tried to rewrite the Shakespearean text while maintaining fidelity to the original text. The originality of Eduardo’s rewriting of The Tempest lies in the language, in the rendering of language that. in the Neapolitan style, maintains the same sense of expressions and personalities as forged by the English playwright.
The Neapolitan language used by Eduardo almost faithfully brings back not only expressions, and words, but also all the musicality of the original text. While remaining faithful in terms of plot and characters, however, Eduardo’s Tempest presents itself as a new creature, a child yes of its 600s counterpart, but above all it remains the theatrical testament of the Neapolitan playwright in which he leaves all his poetics.
At first, Eduardo uses the Italian translations of Salvatore Quasimodo and Cesare Vico Lodovici, but the differences existing between the two versions lead him to choose the English text as a starting point. The choice is dictated by a desire to approach Shakespeare and The Tempest in an unmediated way. Eduardo decides to render in Neapolitan a version entirely in verse, while the English original often alternates between blank verse and prose. The Neapolitan chosen by Eduardo is not that of his century but that of the seventeenth century, but he contaminates it with linguistic expressions from the seventeenth century reach to the end of the twentieth century, to the point of including Italian vocabulary. Language is the area in which Eduardo’s dramatic invention is tested. If in substance Eduardo’s The Tempest remains faithful to Shakespeare’s masterpiece in theme and setting, the form with which the work is clothed shows a new nature: the use of such a structured dialect as well as the introduction of phrases, allusions, and gestures, drawn from the culture that to that linguistic code they belong to, give the work an otherness that goes far beyond the idiomatic datum, an austere and essential Neapolitaness on the theatrical level. It is not surprising, then, that Ariele leaves Ferdinand in a space described almost as the blue grotto of Capri, that the malignant witch Sicorace is referred to as originating in Benevento, or that Gonzalo thanks San Gennaro for finding himself safe and sound on the island. There are also proverbial expressions, slang, gastronomic references, and allusions to Neapolitan songs in the text, so that the general sense of Shakespeare’s lines is saved in substance, but culturally transcended in verbal expression.
The idea that takes shape is far from Eduardo’s theater, and its cultural tradition, but it manages to enthuse the artist to the point that he decides to play all the characters in The Tempest by himself. The only exception is Miranda, the only female presence. The project is completed with the inclusion of a musical part.
The performance of The Tempest is thus the third stage of the process completed by Shakespeare after the translation of the text and its recording. On stage are more than 150 puppets about five feet in
height, many more than the characters envisaged in the Shakespearean text. The fusion of the different languages deployed takes into account their specific registers and creates a unique and unrepeatable result, in which the dominant aspect is still Eduardo’s voice and presence.
Source: Dalla scena elisabettiana al teatro di figura: La tempesta di Shakespeare nella traduzione di Eduardo De Filippo di Annamaria Sapienza.
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
