7-8 page long research paper on Visible and Invisible cities (political theory, Renaissance literature)

In a climate of overcrowding, dwindling state and EU funding, and insti- tutionalised boredom, the Italian prison system has routinely embraced theatre programmes, drawing on a basic modicum of resources needed to stage plays. Of the inmates involved in such thespian ventures, quite a few develop a genuine interest for the plays, and some even start profes- sional acting careers upon release. As the directors of the programmes are understandably eager to point out, the level of recidivism among ex-convicts who were involved in theatrical activities is far below aver- age. With the exception of the masterly portraits of Neapolitan life by Eduardo De Filippo (known commonly just as “Eduardo”), the works of major Italian playwrights are usually considered either too cerebral (like those by Luigi Pirandello) or too far removed from the culture and language of the inmates (like Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century ve- netian plays) to be performed in prison. Shakespeare’s greatest hits, on the contrary, are deemed more suitable for the programme than those of most other European playwrights. Translated into modern Italian or, more frequently, into a variety of dialects, the plays become linguisti- cally accessible to the composite prison population and offer roles that can be successfully adapted to suit the personalities of the inmate play- ers. Moreover, a Shakespearean corpus of plays from which to draw ensures that productions profit from the added cultural value enshrined, in Italy, in the name of their originating author: in the bid for a lim- ited amount of press attention available for prison theatre programmes, Shakespeare’s name trumps any other playwright’s.

The longest-running project had its origins in 1988 at La Fortezza, a prison located in volterra (Tuscany), under the auspices of Armando Punzo, whose most successful adaptation remains Mercuzio non vuole morire (2012) [Mercutio Doesn’t Want to Die], in which the character deeply resents Shakespeare’s decision to kill him off early in the play in order to concentrate on the sentimental love story between Romeo and Juliet. This reimagining of Shakespeare’s play attests two transformative possibilities that might, to borrow Douglas Lanier’s terms, be classified as both “revisionary narrative, in which the new narrative begins with the characters and situation of the source but changes the plot” and

18 Shakespeare behind Italian Bars The Rebibbia Project, The Tempest, and Caesar Must Die

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“reoriented narrative, in which the narrative is told from a different point of view” (Lanier 2002: 83). Performed by the director himself, this Mercuzio is recuperated from an ancillary position in the margins to occupy a space centre-stage. Punzo’s Mercuzio, “a poet and a theatre artist” and thus a surrogate for both Shakespeare and Punzo, represents the values of poetry and culture that can only survive if the entire com- munity supports them: he “embodies” and is “defined as” what could be called a “principle of great literature in Italo Calvino’s American Lessons (1988)”, such that sparing him from the death envisioned for him by Shakespeare means “saving both poetry and theatre” (Mancewicz 2012: 549). Combining the techniques of street theatre and circus, Punzo—a director noted for his “intertextual approach to the script” and fondness for a “disruptive though liberating energy” (Mancewicz 2012: 554)— involves the spectators in the play, first in the courtyard of the For- tezza, where they mingle with the inmates, and then through the town of volterra itself. Created at a moment when the future of the theatre programme was under threat, the production is both a Shakespearean adaptation and a politicised reminder to local administrators and the town’s populace alike of the cultural and professional utility that the theatre programme offers La Fortezza’s convicts. The Compagnia della Fortezza, the prison theatre’s ensemble, selects plays to adapt with care, privileging a collaborative esprit de corps that responds to the concerns of inmates and local inhabitants in equal measure. The Shakespearean material adapted for performance is “chosen to question reality” and is “dismantled-fragmented” [sic] in keeping with the group’s “collective contributions” (Puppa 2013: 75).

Building on the success of Punzo’s work at La Fortezza, Paolo and vittorio Taviani’s film Cesare deve morire (2012) [Caesar Must Die] met with unexpected acclaim and shifted the critical lens from La Fortezza and volterra to Rebibbia, making it a household name among progressive intellectual audiences. Located on the periphery of Rome, Rebibbia is a huge prison complex that includes an all-male high- security wing that has become the venue for a series of theatre-related activities, and the prisoners’ productions are typically showcased in a purpose-built theatre inside Rebibbia. In 2003, Fabio Cavalli, a theatre director from Genoa, agreed to supervise the work of the Compagnia dei Liberi Artisti Associati di Rebibbia Nuovo Complesso [Company of the Free Associated Artists of the Rebibbia New Wing], an ensemble that included drug dealers, murderers, and inmates with connections to organized crime. After his first successful staging of one of Eduardo De Filippo’s plays, Cavalli proposed Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in De Filippo’s translation, as the next project. Initially unfamiliar with the play and indifferent to the iconic status of its author, the actors required a great deal of convincing, but eventually agreed. Following the success of this version of La Tempesta, which premièred in 2005,

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De Filippo would exert further influence on the Rebibbia troupe in an adaptation of Julius Caesar.

When Giulio Einaudi, a leading Italian publisher, asked him to con- tribute his version of a Shakespeare play to the series Scrittori tradotti da scrittori [Writers Translated by Writers], De Filippo chose The Tempest and made the task of translation even harder by abandoning the collo- quial, contemporary dialect characteristic of his own works in favour of classical, seventeenth-century Neapolitan. From his rendering of the very first lines, he makes it clear that he will take liberties with the letter of the original and inject robust doses of local colour. Thus, the Boat- swain’s “Heigh, my hearts!” speech (Greenblatt 1997: 1.1.5–7) becomes “Guagliú, curríte. Faciteve curaggio: ’a Maronna ’a Catena nce aiuta. […] Guagliú, facímmece annòre: símmo Napulitane!” (De Filippo 1984: 5) [Come on, lads, hurry up. Take heart: the virgin of the Chain will help us […]. Let’s prove ourselves, lads: we’re Neapolitan!]. Through cuts and additions to the original, he portrays Prospero essentially as a loving father and a forgiving victim (rather than the somewhat sinister magus obsessed with revenge who has intrigued Shakespearean critics for cen- turies), and turns Ariel into a street urchin [“scugnizzo”] and prankster [“burlone”] (De Filippo 1984: 187).

More disturbingly, in 2.2, De Filippo expands on Stephano’s or- ders (“kiss the book” and “Come on, then; down and swear”) and on Caliban’s response (“I’ll kiss thy foot. I’ll swear myself thy subject”, 2.2.134–145) to introduce echoes of an initiation ceremony for an un- derground crime syndicate like the camorra: “Te voglio addenucchiato pe’ fa’ lu giuramento” [I want you on your knees to swear], “Avanti, faje lu dovere tujo: vàsa!” [Come on, perform your duty: kiss!], “Li pede te li scarfo e te li vàso” [I’ll warm your feet with my breath and kiss them] (De Filippo 1984: 100). He is familiar with the sinister connotations that a word like “respect” can acquire: Stephano’s “The poor monster’s my subject, and he shall not suffer indignity” (3.2.34–35) becomes “Stu povero mostro è suddito mio e se rispetta lu cane pe’ lu patrone!” (De Filippo 1984: 117) [This poor monster is my subject and you should re- spect the dog because of the master]. Replete with a wealth of footnotes for readers unfamiliar with the Neapolitan dialect, the book was pub- lished in 1984, shortly before De Filippo’s death, after he had managed to leave a recording of his translation, albeit without ever seeing it staged.

Even for those Rebibbia inmates who were native speakers of Neapolitan, learning lines from De Filippo’s version was a challenge, and in some cases a simplified version of the text needed to be adopted. Of the lines in the text (running to over an hour and a half in performance) that required cutting, the most sophisticated grafts of classical Neapol- itan onto the living language were the first to go. Cavalli cast Cosimo Rega as Prospero and, perhaps predictably, Benneth Uche Emenike, the only African convict who had signed up for the theatre programme, as

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Caliban. Emenike, a Nigerian who held a degree in chemistry and was fluent in both English and Italian, embraced De Filippo’s lines without difficulty, and gave his Caliban comic and exotic twists while leaving the audience in no doubt that he could just as easily have made an excellent Prospero. Salvatore Striano offered an interpretation of Ariel as the wily Neapolitan street urchin envisaged by De Filippo and, playing the role of Miranda, professional actress valentina Esposito was called upon by Cavalli to speak her lines in standard Italian, even conducting a brief exchange in English with Caliban.

By 2005, large numbers of asylum-seekers braving the Mediterra- nean on rickety, overcrowded boats had turned shipwrecks from liter- ary themes into evening-news material. Dominated by a bare-chested, heavily-tattooed Boatswain, a well-choreographed opening scene leaves the castaways stranded on an island where, like the inhabitants, they will become prisoners, the iconography of bunk beds with hanging ropes, soon to be occupied by Alonso and his entourage, reinforcing this suggestion. Tweaks to the text of Shakespeare’s original are readily in evidence in this 2005 production: Ariel compensates for the lack of spe- cial effects with lively Neapolitan songs and dance routines, but does not even attempt “Full fathom five” (1.2.400–408), potentially out of keep- ing with the character as rebranded by De Filippo; the love between Fer- dinand and Miranda is kept completely chaste; Stephano and Trinculo bring a Roman flavour to their scenes through their distinctive accents, but still play up every possible camorra reference in the translation; and De Filippo’s recorded voice speaks the epilogue, lending his authority to the production and reasserting the intermediary, filtering presence of the translator at this crucial, valedictory moment in Shakespeare’s oeuvre in which questions of the speaker’s legacy, the surrendering of claims to ownership and title-holding, the collaborative involvement of the audi- ence in the fiction-making, and the possibility of release from crimes co- alesce (“Dateme la libertade [...] liberare mene”, De Filippo 1984: 182).

Just as De Filippo had felt free to add Neapolitan references to the Shakespearean base text, the convicts liberally interpolated repeated re- minders of their own status in De Filippo’s script. Thus, Ariel’s request for his liberty at 1.2.246 (“La libertà!”, De Filippo 1984: 36) is qualified with an aside in Cavalli’s version [Liberty, so to speak] that elicits the expected sympathetic response from the audience. In his utopian world, Cavalli’s Gonzalo not only admits “no name of magistrate” (Greenblatt 1997: 2.1.149) but also, in another addition, no prisons nor prisoners (De Filippo 1984: 74–75). Instead of “I shall no more to sea, to sea” (2.2.39), Cavalli’s Stefano breaks into “La ballata del Miché”, a famous 1961 song by Fabrizio De André, which opens:

Quando hanno aperto la cella era già tardi perché

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con una corda sul collo freddo pendeva Michè

[When they opened the cell door it was too late because with a rope round his neck Miché was hanging dead]

Ordinarily quick to respond with laughter to every irreverent contam- inatio of the Shakespearean source text with borrowings from modern popular culture, most of the Rebibbia spectators received this song in grim silence, alert to the oblique reference to the suicide rate in Italian prisons, buried in De André’s characteristically dark, jaunty homage to the socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised. Such interpo- lations in Cavalli’s version gesture to a combination of “reverent recogni- tion and playful revisionism” with respect to the Shakespearean source text, and give rise to what (to borrow another set of terms from Lanier) could be considered “a Shakespeare recast in the forms and practices of popular culture” (Lanier 2002: 55).

The equipoise that characterizes this interplay with the Shakespearean source is broadly in keeping with De Filippo’s rationale as translator. In his note on translation that appears at the close of his edition (“Nota del traduttore”), De Filippo recognises the exigencies involved in translating a text that is removed—linguistically and chronologically—from his au- dience, and the additional imperative to remain close to the source text:

Ho cercato d’essere il piú possibile fedele al testo, come, a mio par- ere, si dovrebbe essere nel tradurre, ma non sempre ci sono riuscito […] altre volte ho sentito il bisogno di aggiungere alcuni versi per spiegare meglio a me stesso e al pubblico qualche concetto.

(De Filippo 1984: 186)

[I have tried to remain as faithful to the text as possible, as, I believe, you should when translating, but without always succeeding […] at other points I have felt the need to add some lines in order to explain an idea more clearly, both to me and to the audience.]

Attentive to this duality, De Filippo also acknowledges the bivalence of the Neapolitan dialect chosen for his translation. With one foot in the seventeenth century and another in the present, De Filippo’s chosen me- dium bridged the temporal and cultural gap between his contemporary readership and his early modern source:

Quanto al linguaggio, come ispirazione ho usato il napoletano sei- centesco, ma come può scriverlo un uomo che vive oggi; sarebbe

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stato innaturale cercare una aderenza complete ad una lingua non usata ormai da secoli. Però … quanto è bello questo napoletano antico […] con la sua muscialità, la sua dolcezza […] e con una pos- sibilità di far vivere fatti e creature magici, misteriosi, che nessuna lingua moderna possiede piú!

(De Filippo 1984: 187)

[As for the language, I took as my inspiration seventeenth-century Neapolitan, but used it as someone would who is living today; it would have been unnatural to look for complete fidelity to a lan- guage not spoken for centuries. And yet … how beautiful this old Neapolitan is […] with its own musicality, and sweetness […] able to bring to life magical and mysterious events and creatures in a way no modern language is anymore!]

By a clever bivalent device, De Filippo captures the source’s alien an- tiquity at the same time as rendering the text legible and accessible to a modern audience. Rather than seeking to convey merely the substance or content or plot of the source, De Filippo’s Neapolitan rendition trans- lates something of the musicality and wonderment of Shakespeare’s play, the connotations of awe and the marvellous built into Shakespeare’s au- ral landscape, recreating the original’s rhetoric of wonder and forgive- ness through the seemingly distracting, obfuscating filter of a local, early modern dialect.

Under Cavalli’s direction, the Rebibbia Company continued to pro- duce theatrical work rooted in the Shakespearean canon (including a version of Hamlet in 2007) that was appreciated by spectators but went largely unnoticed by critics. The Rebibbia’s critical fortunes were re- vived when the Taviani brothers, two internationally-established film directors in their eighties, started attending their performances and consequently commissioned a production of Giulio Cesare that would come to form the core of their new film. Cavalli had countenanced an adaptation centred entirely on the rehearsals, Giulio Cesare alla prova [Julius Caesar in Rehearsal], but the Taviani brothers took full con- trol of the operation and imposed their own vision. The final product, Cesare deve morire, which met with acclaim at the 2012 Berlin Inter- national Film Festival, was a short film (76 minutes), but not a “docufic- tion”, as the Taviani brothers repeatedly emphasized: “Everything was performance. Everything was scripted. It’s a movie. A peculiar movie, yes, but still a movie” (Gilbey 2013). In other words, this film should not be considered an Italian equivalent of Shakespeare Behind Bars, a doc- umentary film directed by Hank Rogerson in 2005 detailing the nine- month gestation of a production of The Tempest (featuring prisoners from Luther Luckett Correctional Center in LaGrange, kentucky, and overseen by Curt Tofteland) that has become a kind of touchstone for

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all media presentations of Shakespearean performances in prison. The non-Shakespearean lines in Cesare deve morire were based on material that the Taviani brothers had gathered from conversations with the in- mates and were incorporated into a script by the directors, to be mem- orized and performed for camera within 35 days, a demanding task for performers required to adapt to the working practices of an unfamiliar medium. By contrast, the Shakespearean scenes had been first translated into the performers’ dialects (mainly Neapolitan, but also Roman, Sicil- ian, and Apulian) and thoroughly analysed and mastered over a period of six months of rehearsals under Cavalli’s guidance such that, by a cu- rious paradox, the inmates were more convincing when inhabiting the roles of Shakespeare’s ancient Romans than when playing themselves.

The film opens in colour with the close-up of an actor (Salvatore Stri- ano) performing on stage an abridged version of Bruto’s suicide scene (from Julius Caesar 5.5) in Neapolitan. A massive, imposing Stratone (Shakespeare’s Strato) reluctantly holds the dagger and bemoans the death of his leader, before we cut to the tribute over Bruto’s body paid by Antonio and Octavio (who appropriates some of Antonio’s lines), followed by general applause on the part of an enthusiastic audience. Without any prior knowledge of its subject matter, a viewer would as- sume that this introductory sequence shows the end of a professional performance of Giulio Cesare. Only after witnessing the audience leav- ing under surveillance and the actors meekly allowing themselves to be marched off-stage by guards, who take them through a series of locked gates, do we realize that the first scene has taken place inside a prison and the actors are inmates. At this point, five minutes into the film, the location is revealed as the high-security wing of Rebibbia.

Given that many of its ancient monuments have been reduced to ru- ins and are often off-limits to film crews, Rome is far from ideal as a film location for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Filmmakers have either reconstructed its ancient splendour in studios (for example, Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 Julius Caesar), sought out striking corners that have nothing to do with the Empire (the Palazzo della Civiltà del La- voro in Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus Andronicus), or selected another city altogether (Belgrade in Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 Coriolanus). The Taviani brothers shot their film in a place that both is and is not Rome. About halfway through the film, two aerial views of Rebibbia (one at night and one by daylight) remind the spectators of how claustrophobically self-contained this ghastly, brutally functional 1960s group of build- ings is. The Shakespearean scenes are rehearsed in several corners of the huge complex. The barren spaces lend themselves to an evocation of Elizabethan staging practices, a connection deliberately underlined by a close-up of a board on which an inmate has printed “The Philippi plain” as if in imitation of early modern scene-changing props. As for the cos- tumes, they are no more Roman than those portrayed in the famous

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1590s Peacham drawing (preserved in the “Longleat Manuscript”) of a scene from Titus Andronicus. In rehearsal, only Cesare is wrapped in a sort of white sheet that recalls a Roman tunic; all the other performers are in everyday clothes, supplemented by an assortment of cloaks over the course of the performance, though at each turn the directors take every opportunity to remind viewers that the setting is inescapably that of Rebibbia. In the rehearsal of the assassination scene, when Bruto in- flicts “the unkindest cut of all”, the camera lingers on the bent blade of the tin dagger that he pretends to pull out of Cesare’s body, a gesture to the prison authorities’ strictures on the use of anything resembling a real weapon.

Following the brief, introductory excerpt from the end of a perfor- mance, the bulk of the film recounts, in a flashback that starts six months earlier, the auditions and rehearsals of Giulio Cesare, and is beautifully shot in black and white. Cavalli is shown auditioning inmates, announc- ing that they will all take part in the play, before naming his choices for the main roles: Giulio Cesare (Giovanni Arcuri), Cassio (Cosimo Rega), Bruto (Salvatore Striano, who, we later gather, had already been released in 2011 and begun a successful acting career), Marcantonio (Antonio Frasca), Decio (Juan Dario Bonetti), and Lucio (vincenzo Gallo). Each inmate is framed in close-up while his crimes and his sentence are su- perimposed on the screen. Surprisingly, it is the two most unassuming prisoners, Rega (Cassio) and the harmonica player Gallo (Lucio), who have committed murders so brutal as to earn on their files the dreaded stamp, “fine pena: mai” [end of prison sentence: never], although their participation in Cesare deve morire probably helped precipitate a more lenient sentence. As Cavalli notes, “the theatre from this point of view is very important because it allows you to stop being anonymous” (De Benedetto 2012–13: 413). Given the relatively early moment in the film at which their criminal records are revealed (far sooner and more matter- of-factly than in Shakespeare Behind Bars), audience sympathy becomes far more challenging. viewers start expecting connections between the performers’ lives in crime and the Shakespearean roles they are asked to play, and through a clever mix of original scenes and lines from Julius Caesar, the directors fuel these expectations.

Two interpolated episodes apparently bring us tantalizingly close to the pre-Rebibbia lives of the convicts, only to leave us disappointed. In the first, Striano, whom we have seen obsessively practising Bruto’s lines, suddenly breaks down at “O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit, and not dismember Caesar!” (2.1.169–70). After much prompting, he admits that, with words that were “different but the same”, a friend of his had expressed a similar reservation, resenting, and possibly dis- obeying, his boss’s order to kill a snitch, for which he was consequently derided both by Striano and the rest of the gang. Since, in the camorra, refusing to obey an order to kill necessitates being killed in turn, the

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question to Striano—“What happened next?”—was shorthand for ask- ing whether Striano himself had been assigned the task to eliminate his friend. With a cutting gesture of his arm, Striano signals his unwilling- ness to offer further details and abruptly brings the curtain down on the play-within-the-film he has barely outlined. By contrast with Cavalli’s Tempest, a late play in which violence is threatened but averted, assassi- nations plotted but foiled, and danger deflected into forgiveness, Giulio Cesare resists these consolations of romance and pastoral, and Cesare deve morire insists on the inescapable proximity of fictional representa- tion and lived experience in the actions of its inmate players. The second “autobiographical” scene equally reminds viewers of how precarious the atmosphere of good-natured camaraderie actually is in a prison setting. While Arcuri and Bonetti rehearse Decio’s attempt to convince Cesare to go to the Capitol (2.2.58–105), Arcuri suddenly steps out of character and accuses Bonetti of having betrayed him in the past. After a weak at- tempt at returning to the rehearsal, Bonetti in turn becomes aggressive. Gallo (Lucio) points out to Cavalli that an outburst of violence would mean the end of the theatre project and urges him to intervene, but the director is completely out of his depth, his theatrical authority suddenly rendered useless. Rega (Cassio), the ruthless lifer, takes over and follows the fighters out of the room, returning a few moments later to signal to a distraught Cavalli that all is under control. We are left in no doubt about the means used to quell the outburst of violence so quickly; the cathartic remedy of Shakespearean language was clearly ineffective on this occasion.

While watching these two scenes that apparently open a window into the prisoners’ past, we should, of course, recall the directors’ warning, “Everything was scripted”, and avoid confusing Striano and the other convicts with “Striano & Co.”, fictional characters (albeit based on real people) who, like Shakespeare’s ancient Romans, only live their lives of words in performance, their “lofty scene acted over | In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (to borrow Cassius’ words from 3.1). What prevents us from fully understanding the past events that are alluded to in these two episodes is a directorial decision, not the reticence of the inmates. By leaving so much unsaid and unseen, the Taviani brothers tell us that we will only see the public face of the convicts, the one they choose to show us, not their true present and past lives. They also en- sure that the theme of betrayal, raised by the Shakespearean scenes and further elaborated upon in the subtext of Striano’s tale and in Arcuri’s outburst, receives full attention. Prior to doubling as the Roman rabble, the convicts who do not belong to the company fill the Rebibbia night air with whispered complaints against the prison authorities. Before we move on to the daylight assassination scene, “for a few seconds, a close-up of a self-satisfied Caesar is superimposed upon the image of the prison building, which cogently furthers the identification of ‘Caesar’

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with a ‘monstruous’ prison system” (Calbi 2014: 246). They are only too glad to cheer Bruto and shout “Freedom” from their cells overlook- ing the inner courtyard where an uninterrupted run-through of 3.2 is filmed, although, of course, they are just as readily won over by Antonio. Since in other parts of the film they show a complete lack of interest in the theatre workshop, this sequence (where every inmate finds his place in Shakespeare’s text and all work together collaboratively) should probably be considered the result of the directors’ decision to indulge in a brief, audience-pleasing flight into a fantasy world that momentar- ily transcends the drab reality of interpersonal relationships in a prison setting.

As the rehearsals unfold, we realize that, although there are no di- rect references to The Tempest in this film, Cavalli’s 2005 production (which also featured Rega, Striano, Arcuri, and Carusone) forms an important subtext for Cesare deve morire. The aerial shots of Re- bibbia establish it as an island-prison within Rome, akin to Prospero’s prison-island. The parallel is underlined by the only colour shot within the black-and-white sequence when, returning to his cell, Gallo stares at a postcard that suddenly acquires colours—a Mediterranean island on a sunny day, the foil for the island-prison we are about to see in a night-time aerial view. Within the Rebibbia complex, the camera re- peatedly returns (in a possible filmic echo of Peter Greenaway’s 1991 Prospero’s Books) to the very small room that houses the prison library and pans over the meagre collection of books on its few shelves. The throbbing heart of the New Wing is here, where the inmates gather not only to study their Shakespeare but also to undertake other mental journeys inspired by their engagement with Julius Caesar. When Ar- curi picks up Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and wonders why on earth he had hated it so much in school, we are encouraged to attribute to these volumes, like Prospero’s, a transformative, magical property capable of remoulding the readers who come into contact with them. As in their Tempesta, the inmates here are attentive to possible parallels with Naples, a city more familiar to some inmates than Rome. As Bruto and Cassio rehearse their version of 2.1, Cassio supplements Bruto’s “Rome, shameless city” with the ad-libbed line, “You too, my Naples, have become a shameless city”, before appending an apologetic aside to the director: “Looks like this Shakespeare had actually lived in my hometown”. Since most of the text is translated into Neapolitan, this sense of topographic dislocation is not unexpected, but the script elab- orates on it further. Later in the film, Bruto tells his cellmates how the angry Roman crowd has set fire to the houses of the conspirators and banished them: “Just like my homeland, Nigeria”, is the reaction of an African inmate. The cultural authority embedded in the Shakespear- ean source text becomes endlessly appropriable, apt for relocation and recontextualistion.

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The emphasis on books and Naples is not the only connection between this script and De Filippo’s translation of The Tempest. Just as De Filippo had preferred seventeenth-century to contemporary Neapolitan, Cavalli insists that his actors should translate Shakespeare’s lines into their own dialects, but “not a vulgar dialect, a dialect spoken by aristocrats”. De Filippo had managed to insert subtle references to the language and the ceremonies of the camorra in the unlikely context of The Tempest, a task considerably less problematic in Julius Caesar. Antony’s sardonic taxon- omy of “honourable men” effortlessly becomes “uomini d’onore” [men of honour], but with an additional nod to the Sicilian mafia: “Baciamo le mani” [We kiss your hands]. The Neapolitan playwright obliquely intrudes into the Shakespearean text. As Bruto struggles to master the lines of his monologue (2.1.10–34), the phrase “It must be by his death” (2.1.10) becomes “Adda murì” [He must die] and is repeated as “Adda murì, mò, mò” [He must die right now] at the end of the speech. The syntactical construction perhaps recalls De Filippo’s most famous line: “Adda passà ’a nuttata” [The night will pass, eventually]. Pronounced at the end of De Filippo’s 1945 comedy Napoli milionaria, it has acquired currency in standard Italian as a proverb signifying that even the worst situation will ultimately end. The connection with De Filippo is fur- ther foregrounded shortly afterwards. The conflicting views of Decio, Casca, and Cinna about the point on the horizon where the sun will rise (2.1.100–110) are fully rehearsed and then commented upon by the baffled convicts: what sort of idiots would argue over the rising sun when they are about to kill their boss? In the scene, Bruto’s “And every man hence to his idle bed” (2.1.116) becomes “Ch’a sprecammo a fa’ ’sta nuttata? Andiamo a dormì” [Why are we wasting this night? Let’s go to bed]. The clear implication, from this thicket of De Filippo intertexts and half-echoes, is that the night that envelops Rome under Caesar will eventually pass, but for the sun to rise, the tyrant must die.

And yet, after Cassio has committed suicide, unaided and with the ef- fortless air of a “uomo d’onore”, Bruto speaks some of the very few lines lifted verbatim from the original—“O Julius Caesar, thou are mighty yet” (5.3.93–95)—thus bringing Cesare very pointedly back into the play. In much greater detail than in the abridged version of the scene shown at the start of the film, Bruto is shown doing the rounds of his friends, begging them to help him to die until Stratone complies. As the camera frames Bruto’s dead body, we expect the final speeches to start, but instead Cesare comes in from the wings and, with an intriguing smile on his face, takes Striano’s hand, lifting him up for the curtain call. He had done the same at the beginning, but, by now, we are far better equipped to register the complexity of the persona that the Tavianis had created for Arcuri in his portrayal of Cesare. At this moment, poised on the threshold between the world of the characters and that of the actors, Arcuri signals Cesare’s final victory.

276 Mariangela Tempera

Cesare deve morire does not quite end with the upbeat note of the thunderous applause that greets the conclusion of the performance from the audience gathered in the prison to watch the play. The camera then follows Rega (who had performed the role of Cassio) back to his empty cell, which he enters while musing, “Ever since I knew art, this cell has become a prison”. The final frames show him making himself a cup of Neapolitan coffee. The convicts who shouted “I do not want to die!” in Punzo’s Mercuzio non vuole morire expressed a healthy will to resist a system that takes punishment well beyond the limits established by the law. In Cesare deve morire, the directors foreground the plight of those who succumb to despair. In 2011, out of about 68,000 inmates in Italian prisons, at least 66 committed suicide. The Rebibbia Company is made to perform Bruto’s suicide twice—not necessarily the first scene that comes to mind when one thinks of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The words that in the original Brutus whispers to his friends are spelt out by Striano four times: “Help me to die!”. Given that, in an overcrowded cell, even killing oneself requires the complicity of other inmates, this in- terpolation gestures to the directors’ desire to address the issue of suicide in custody without openly antagonizing the prison authorities. Just as during the Risorgimento, when anti-Austrian sentiments were voiced by Giulio Carcano through his translations and by Giuseppe verdi through his adaptation of Macbeth, so these two twenty-first-century Italian art- ists have turned to Shakespeare to bypass censorship, and to draw on the cultural authority of his presentation of ancient Rome to speak to and comment on the present, in a revisionary, circuitous translatio that brings the narrative full circle.

Bibliography

Calbi, Maurizio. 2014. “‘In states unborn and accents yet unknown’: Spectral Shakespeare in Paolo and vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die)”. Shakespeare Bulletin, 32.2: 235–53.

De Benedetto, Susanna. 2012–13. “Giulio Cesare a Rebibbia: il teatro come esperienza di libertà. Conversazione con Fabio Cavalli”. Stratagemmi, 24/25: 407–14.

De Filippo, Eduardo. 1984. La Tempesta. Turin. Gilbey, Ryan. 2013. “Paolo and vittorio Taviani: ‘For us it was cinema or

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Bulletin, 30.4: 548–54. Puppa, Paolo. 2013. “Theatre as Prison, Prison as Theatre”. Differences on

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