Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare revisits a classical topic from a new perspective, focusing on Shakespeare’s afterlife in Italy through the lens of place, “race,” and politics. From discussions of a Victorian racialist interpretation of Shakespeare that casts Iago as the archetypal Italian specimen to Fascist appropriations of Shakespeare to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film Caesar Must Die, Shaul Bassi interrogates how Italy explains Shakespeare and how Shakespeare explains Italy. These peripheral events both illuminate singular potentialities of the plays and turn Shakespeare into a special guide to Italy’s ethos and political unconscious.
