Guglielmo and Benito: Shakespeare, Nation, and Ethnicity in Fascist Italy

While a modern cultural history of Shakespeare’s reception in Italy remains to be written, the last few years have witnessed a new effort to uncover the racist components of post-unification Italian culture. This essay looks at the small intersection of these two apparently unrelated phenomena to investigate the impact of the cultural politics of Fascism on Shakespeare, particularly on the criticism and performance of his “Italian” (Venetian and Roman) plays. I suggest that the thematization of ‘race’ in Shakespeare studies did not suddenly materialize in the late twentieth century with an anti-racist agenda, but originated in the nineteenth century as a powerful ethnic fiction which aimed at appropriating the cultural and symbolic capital of Shakespeare for nationalistic purposes. In other words, if Shakespeare and race is now primarily understood as an analysis of tropes of blackness/whiteness and non-European cultures in the plays, critics have left largely unexplored a massive critical body where the operative dichotomies were Celtic/Saxon, Germanic/Mediterranean, Slavic/Roman. This essay looks at how Fascist (and to a lesser extent anti-Fascist) critics interpreted Shakespeare, and especially his Italian narratives, through their ideological lens.