Content area
Full text
A HISTORY OF ITALIAN THEATRE. Edited by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; pp. x + 432. $110.00 cloth.
In their chronological overview A History of Italian Theatre, editors Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa impose an impressive cohesiveness on a text authored by more than twenty contributors, many of whom have written multiple chapters. (The editors themselves wrote nearly one-quarter of the book, primarily the final section on twentieth-century theatre.) In the "Introduction," Farrell and Puppa differentiate their approach from previous histories in several ways. First, they acknowledge the difficulty of covering hundreds of years of history; theirs is a compendium of moments and people that recognizes the need for expansion. Second, they propose a two-pronged attack on the material "looking outwards at Italian theatre in Europe as well as inwards at the national cultural forces at work" (5). Finally, the editors and their fellow scholars place a strong emphasis on the history of performance. While performance-as-text is never fully engaged, its influence upon this work is clear. Ferdinando Taviani's chapter on "Romantic Theatre" is particularly persuasive in arguing that actors' performances are the true dramatic output of Italy.
While some notables like Gozzi and Alfieri naturally merit more attention, overall each period and its artists are given relatively equal space. The first seventeen of the book's thirty-four chapters are devoted to the medieval era, Renaissance, and Settecento; the second half covers the early 1800s through the relative present. According to Richard Andrews, whose four chapters cover much of the...