Guest seminar: Maddalena Pennacchia

This week's guest speaker is Maddalena Pennacchia, Professor in English Literature at Roma Tre University. 

About the seminar

Intermedial Shakespeare: the Roman Plays on Screen

What do we mean when we relate Shakespeare to intermediality?  Why is his dramatic writing so capable of adapting to different media and transform them from within or even invent media yet unborn? Could his texts be considered as an example of intermedial writing ante litteram? The aim of this talk is trying to answer to such questions focusing on the Roman plays. In Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Cymbeline  Shakespeare appropriates the history and myths of Ancient Rome circulating in the early modern culture in order to adapt them to the Elizabethan playhouse, which to spectatorships of the time could remind of a Roman amphitheatre. In so doing, Shakespeare disseminates for the first mass audiences a fascinating and multilayered image of Rome. And when cinema became the primary mass medium, three centuries later, it reproduced the same operation appropriating and adapting the Roman Shakespeare to the silver screen in order to fashion its own version of the Roman past. Examples include Titus by Julie Taymor, Coriolanus by Ralph Fiennes and others.  

Short biography:
Maddalena Pennacchia is Professor in English Literature at Roma Tre University, where she became tenured as Lecturer in 2002. She is a the coordinator of the graduate school of the Department of Languages and Literatures. Besides numerous essays in Italian on Shakespeare, literary intermediality, adaptation studies, the biopic, literary tourisms, children’s literature, Jane Austen on screen, Shakespeare on screen, Bollywood adaptations of English literary classics, and early earth sciences in the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays., she is the author of four monographs in Italian: Il mito di Corinne. Viaggio in Italia e genio femminile in Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller e George Eliot (Carocci, 2001), Tracce del moderno nel teatro di Shakespeare (ESI, 2008), Shakespeare intermediale. I drammi romani (Editoria & Spettacolo, 2012), and Adattamento, appropriazione, condivisione di un classico. Pride and Prejudice di Jane Austen (ESI, 2018). She is also the author of a creative bio-fiction for children, Shakespeare e il sogno di un’estate (Lapis 2009), that was also translated into Spanish (2013) and Romanian (2016). She has edited Literary Intermediality. The Transit of Literature Through the Media Circuit (Peter Lang 2007) and co-edited Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome (V&R, 2010) with Maria Del Sapio Garbero and Nancy Isenberg, and Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (Ashgate, 2014) with Marta Minier.

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen