“Re-locating Shakespeare: Cultural negotiations in Italian Dubbed Versions of Romeo and Juliet”,

In Romeo and Juliet, as in so many others of his plays, Shakespeare stages an original Italian novella complete with its Italian characters and locations in the English theatre. What cultural negotiations are at work here has been already studied sufficiently -- but what happens when the English theatre text is screened in Hollywood and the film is then dubbed for an Italian audience? My contribution studies the linguistic homecoming of the archetypal Italian love story in the dubbed versions of George Cukor's and Franco Zeffirelli's screen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, made in 1936 and 1968 respectively. It shows that what is at stake here is an intercultural negotiation of attitudes and values and a struggle for national and cultural ownership of Shakespeare's tragedy. The dubbed version of Cukor's film invokes Shakespeare's cultural prestige by using a canonical 19th-century Italian verse translation; yet at the same time it topicalises the play by modifying and adjusting the translation in a way that makes it resonate with the contemporary political context of Mussolini's imperialist venture in Ethiopia. In the dubbed version of his film Zeffirelli, too, reinforces the 'Italianisation' of Shakespeare's tragedy by making a more vernacular and regional Italian harmonise with the demonstratively "authentic Italian locations", as well as by refiguring the generational conflict at the heart of Romeo and Juliet in mainly sexual, even proto-feminist terms, which would find a particular resonance in the climate of prudery and repression in 1960s Italy.