Books by Michela Compagnoni
I mostri di Shakespeare. Figure del deforme e dell'informe, Roma: Carocci editore, 2022
Nella cultura rinascimentale inglese si assiste a un processo di graduale secolarizzazione che li... more Nella cultura rinascimentale inglese si assiste a un processo di graduale secolarizzazione che libera il mostruoso dal dominio della religione e della superstizione. Da moniti divini i “mostri” si trasformano in oggetto di curiosità e, grazie alle esplorazioni geografiche, dai confini del mondo approdano nel cuore delle città europee, fino a diventare materia viva di quell’approccio medicalizzante che si affermerà nel Settecento. È questo il ricco campionario di cui la parola shakespeariana si nutre e a cui dà voce attraverso rielaborazioni metaforiche. I mostri di Shakespeare non sono dunque creature fantastiche bensì individui che sconvolgono, eventi che turbano o paradigmi che si rovesciano. Il volume indaga quelli presenti in Richard III, The Tempest, Macbeth, Othello e King Lear, cinque drammi che catalizzano le derive tragiche dei cambiamenti epistemologici del loro tempo per farne teatro della mostruosità. La mappatura dei discorsi aperti da queste opere intorno al concetto di mostro, ad oggi unica nella sua ampiezza, si muove lungo tre binari tematici: corpo, sguardo e linguaggio. A guidare l’analisi, l’inedita categoria del mostruoso deforme/informe, che fa emergere con particolare efficacia la capillarità e la complessità del mostruoso shakespeariano, ponendo l’enfasi sul suo dinamismo generativo, inteso come continua proliferazione di forme nuove ma mai fisse che – mutando – incrinano, sovvertono, rinnovano.
Journal Articles by Michela Compagnoni
Shakespeare Bulletin, 2023
An increasing number of contemporary Shakespearean adaptations exploit the transformative possibi... more An increasing number of contemporary Shakespearean adaptations exploit the transformative possibilities of performance to address social injustice and inequality from different perspectives and towards new directions. A timely response to the challenge of finding alternatives to target current social concerns comes from Sex Education, a British TV series created by Laurie Nunn for Netflix in 2019. This series’ engagement with Shakespeare fosters a radical and wide-ranging critique of reactionism and a fight for change in terms of teenage sexual liberation, freedom of self-expression, inclusivity, and representation of queerness and gender fluidity. In the finale of season two, a long sequence is devoted to Romeo & Juliet: The Musical, an erotic and galactic musical version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, created by a young eccentric writer of science fiction attending the school. By also taking into consideration both the production context and Netflix’s status as a streaming platform, this article explores how this parodic postmodern version of Romeo and Juliet—informed by references to queer pop culture and to contemporary movements for civil rights—becomes the ultimate realization of Sex Education’s rallying cry against the regimes of the “normal,” through the words of a Shakespearean play that opens up possibilities of resistance for teenagers which go beyond distinctions between heteronormative and queer.
Cahiers Élisabéthains, special issue on Shakespeare and European Geographies. Borders and Power, a cura di Lisanna Calvi e Maddalena Pennacchia, pubblicazione online https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/C7ZIZMHPZSFFTCKFQVQP/full, 2022
Lingue e Linguaggi, special issue on Experiencing Shakespeare in a Digital Environment, a cura di Maddalena Pennacchia, Alessandra Squeo e Reto Winckler, 45, 2021, pp. 95-110., 2021
Textus. English Studies in Italy
Despite the financial potential of all things Shakespearean and the degree of freedom granted by ... more Despite the financial potential of all things Shakespearean and the degree of freedom granted by gaps in Shakespeare’s biography, only a few biopics have been produced. "All Is True" (2018), directed by Kenneth Branagh, is the latest re-telling of Shakespeare’s life, the huge cultural capital of which mostly lies in its starring Branagh himself as Shakespeare alongside an all-star cast of long-Shakespearean iconic actors. All Is True is a family drama addressing a semi-neglected period of the playwright’s life, and it is imbued with a gloomy and melancholic atmosphere that clashes with more usual representations of Shakespeare’s mythicised glory. However, what I argue in this paper is that the bleakness inhering All Is True is made in fact functional to a consecration of both Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time and of Kenneth Branagh as the greatest interpreter of his words. The film’s bittersweet celebration of Shakespeare’s genius through the reiterated emphasis on the uniqueness of his language is all the more compelling because it takes place far from London, and yet defeats the yoke of stagnating country family life. When Branagh takes Shakespeare back home to Stratford, he exploits the scientific endorsement of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust as a way to state his film’s historical accuracy. "All Is True", nonetheless, mingles fact and fiction, but Branagh prevents any charges of speculation by indirectly comparing himself to Shakespeare: just like the Bard, he is filling in the biographical gaps with sparks of his own genius to write his own Shakespearean play.
Key-words: Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare, cultural capital, fact vs fiction.
Cahiers Élisabéthains (101.1), pp. 65-84, 2020
The role of ‘Poor Tom’ – Edgar’s disguise in "King Lear" – is crucial in the play and draws upon ... more The role of ‘Poor Tom’ – Edgar’s disguise in "King Lear" – is crucial in the play and draws upon a popular figure in early modern England known as the Bedlam beggar. I argue that, albeit closely following this tradition, Tom transcends the boundaries of the cultural representations of the Bedlamites, inasmuch as his liminality and unrestricted otherness turn him into what may be perceived as a monstrous creature. In this essay, I propose to discuss the extent to which Poor Tom’s monstrosity emerges in the play from his language more than his outward looks or actions. Through a close reading of selected passages, I set out to explore the ways in which the creation of Tom in 2.2 is anticipated by Edmund’s and Gloucester’s words earlier in the play, and stands out as a metaphorical self-birth whereby Edgar delivers his own monstrous alter ego by means of his language. I also point to the fact that, from his first appearance in 3.4 and onward, this monstrosity feeds on words, and it mainly issues from the multifaceted linguistic performance of Edgar as Tom, whose composite tangle of overlapping voices strikes as monstrous in both structure and content.
Since her death in 1603, Queen Elizabeth I has been remembered in ways that increasingly depart f... more Since her death in 1603, Queen Elizabeth I has been remembered in ways that increasingly depart from history. Soon after James I was enthroned, mythical representations of Elizabeth – the warrior queen epitomizing chastity and national glory – were revived in popular recollections and literary eulogies, while the more controversial aspects of her reign were being partly repressed. Shakespeare’s treatment of Elizabeth’s legacy in his Jacobean plays was however different from most of his contemporaries’. Albeit drawing from the renowned androgynous representations and virginal imagery of the Queen – Shakespeare’s feminine roles do not celebrate the mythologized memory of Elizabeth as an imperishable model of sovereignty. On the contrary, they feed on the paradoxes of her femininity, thereby retrieving the whole complexity and contradictoriness of the Virgin Queen’s myth. My paper intends to address Shakespeare’s idiosyncratic recasting of Elizabeth’s myth through an insight into the articulation of gender roles in The Winter’s Tale. As it bears nuanced traces of the lost Queen, such a reshaping of femininity – I argue – polemically targets the widely contested rule of the present King in line with widespread discontent.
Book Chapters by Michela Compagnoni
Shakespeare / Nature, ed. Charlotte Scott, Arden Shakespearean Intersections Series, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2024, 2024
Starting from a post-structuralist theoretical definition of monsters as liminal creatures or ent... more Starting from a post-structuralist theoretical definition of monsters as liminal creatures or entities that undermine, contravene, and subvert a given system of norms, in this chapter I will explore Shakespeare’s rhetorical construction of the monstrously deformed bodies of Richard III (3H6; R3) and Caliban (Temp). In particular, I will focus on how the descriptions of these characters’ monstrosity often draw almost verbatim upon classical and early medieval accounts of the “mola” – an abnormal and lifeless mass growing in the mother’s uterus – and upon early modern revivals of this notion in anatomical and gynaecological treatises. I will start from the analysis of specific lexical items and linguistic formulae that are frequently connected to the “mola” in treatises and are recurrent in the monstrous representations of Richard III and Caliban. By taking into consideration shifting paradigms of corporeality (from a purely analogical conception of the body to the emergence of anatomical dissection as a heuristic principle), I will then discuss how the plays’ references to this pseudoscientific concept epitomize many aspects of the complex and multifaceted notion(s) of monstrosity in early modern English cultural imagery and how they open to the discourses of Renaissance “bestiality” with regard to ethnical identity, sexuality, and reproductivity.
"Prophecy and Conspiracy in Early Modern England. Selected Papers from the ‘Shakespeare and His Contemporaries’ Graduate Conference. Florence, 22 April 2016", G. Iannaccaro and M. Morini (eds), Florence: The British Institute of Florence, 2017, 2017
"Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries", ed. by D. Lovascio (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications), pp. 39-58 - https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/558372, 2020
Critical readings of Volumnia in Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" have often mainly focused upon the re... more Critical readings of Volumnia in Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" have often mainly focused upon the relationship between her and her son in ways that stress their interdependence and/or the construction of the eponymous hero's masculinity in relation to – or in reaction against – his mother. This essay aims, instead, at shedding light on Volumnia per se, especially on her motherhood meant as the confluence of most of the meanings attached to maternity both in ancient Rome and in early modern England. Volumnia embodies, in fact, the prototype of the Roman mother of a male son, endowed with a lifelong educational role and great authority, and, at the same time, also epitomizes the paradigm of the monstrous mother haunting the early modern cultural imagery, thus personifying the widespread anxieties about maternal contamination which the Renaissance stage aptly intercepts. What I would like to argue is that this kind of composite motherhood becomes paradigmatic as the point of contact between two antithetical notions of maternity which – in Volumnia as nowhere else in Shakespeare's canon – can conflate and blend: only in Rome can Volumnia's monstrous motherhood, in fact, be foregrounded and triumph without being demonized and thus annihilated.
Book Reviews by Michela Compagnoni
Early Modern Literary Studies, 2022
Notes and Queries, 67.3, 2020
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (13.2), 2020
Early Modern Literary Studies (21.1) - https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/495, 2019
Performance Reviews by Michela Compagnoni
Shakespeare Bulletin (37.3), 2019
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Books by Michela Compagnoni
Journal Articles by Michela Compagnoni
Key-words: Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare, cultural capital, fact vs fiction.
Book Chapters by Michela Compagnoni
Book Reviews by Michela Compagnoni
Performance Reviews by Michela Compagnoni
Key-words: Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare, cultural capital, fact vs fiction.