Introduction: Country Dispositions
In the heart of the temptation scene, planting what may be his most poisonous seed in Othello’s mind, Iago warns his general: “look to your wife”, “observe her well”, “wear your eye not jealous nor secure”. The reason for such hypervigilance is that
I know our country disposition well; In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience Is not to leave’t undone, but keep’t unknown.
3.3.204-7
As E.A.J. Honigmann glosses, Iago means “I know, but you cannot know…”. 1 Othello is confident that his religious conversion, his service to the state, his command of oratory, and the intimacy of marriage have sanctioned his admission and assimilation into Venetian society; Iago intervenes to conjure up a “country disposition”, an ethnic/national factor which by its (feminine) nature eludes knowledge, rendering the Moor an irreducibly flawed stranger. According to this new, unofficial script of Venetian identity, Othello discovers himself the simultaneous victim of a double cognitive deficiency, as a foreigner and as a husband. Iago has convinced his general that while Desdemona may still be a faithful wife, he is not yet a
1 William Shakespeare, Othello (Arden 3), edited by E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 221.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 S. Bassi, Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_1
1
Venetian. Othello will be ready to commit the most extreme acts, murder and suicide, out of the desperate desire to master this disposition and, in the same breath, his wife. But of course his efforts will be vain, because the inner sanctuary of Venetian identity, as envisioned by Iago, is empty. Even though a sexual pun akin to that of Hamlet’s “country matters” (3.2.108) might be intended—nationalist and racist ideologies typically exploit women while claiming to defend them from some enemy—it is indicative that the word “country” derives from the Anglo-Norman contré, countré, or cuntré, stemming in turn from classical Latin contrā, that is, “against”, “opposite”, lit. “that which lies opposite or fronting the view, the landscape spread out before one”.2 Ethnic and national identities have a number of positive values (language, beliefs, traditions), but they often require someone who is opposite, an “other”, to affirm themselves.3 In Iago’s advice, we may see the mechanism operating at its most literal: his country is an imagined community, created through his masterful use of hypotyposis,4 defined mostly by the simultaneous deprecation of women (“they”) and the exclusion of the Moor: Venice is a closed cultural text because its women are unreadable, and it is “our” country because it is emphatically not Othello’s. In Iago’s picture, a “country disposition” is made to function as a “cognitive or moral island”,5 the state to which incline those versions of radical relativism advocating the intrinsic validity (and hence impermeability) of each and every cultural formation; as the ensign would put it, “what you know, you know” (5.2.300, my emphasis). It is, in contemporary terms, a fundamentalist view of identity, which presupposes an unbridgeable gap between “us” and “them” and informs racist and xenophobic discourses. But, as Hayden White cautions us, “communities or societies … may regard themselves as related by opposition or negation to some other community or society and indeed may act in such a way as to become merely an ‘other,’ but in reality they are only different from one another”.6
2 A “country disposition” first and foremost operates in and through language; to underline this aspect, I include in every chapter of this book a brief etymological or linguistic analysis of an Italian word that exists in some sort of tension with its English cognate.
3 Chapter 2 will analyze this point in detail.
4 Hypotyposis, the “vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bringing it, as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader” (OED), is one of Iago’s rhetorical weapons of choice. Alessandro Serpieri, Otello: l’eros negato (Napoli: Liguori, 2003), 21.
5 Sen, Reason Before Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31.
6 Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 3.
This book investigates the cultural difference of Italy in and through Shakespeare. It looks at the encounter, collision, and intermingling of the “country dispositions” represented respectively by Shakespeare and Italy, both understood as vast constellations rather than fixed stars. The obvious premise is that several plays by Shakespeare are adaptated from Italian sources; the additional context is the constant presence of Shakespeare in Italian culture from the mid-nineteenth century on. The classical topic “Shakespeare and Italy” is here revisited from a new perspective, focusing on the playwright’s Italian afterlife through the lens of the three categories that structure this book: place, “race”, and politics. My twofold and chiastic objective is to ask how Italy explains Shakespeare and how Shakespeare explains Italy, seeking possible answers in various texts, events, and sites: a Victorian racialist interpretation of Shakespeare that casts Iago as the archetypal Italian specimen, a Romantic adaptation of Othello written in Venice under Austrian rule, the Fascist appropriations of Shakespeare, the disparate uses of Machiavelli in recent Shakespearean criticism, the absence of Giordano Bruno in Shakespeare studies after Frances Yates, an essay on Hamlet by a prominent Italian philosopher and politician, monuments and sites associated with Shakespeare in Verona and Venice, and the Taviani brothers’ filmic version of Julius Caesar. These repositionings of Shakespeare share some inspiring analogies with the postcolonial appropriations analyzed by Thomas Cartelli. Agreeing with Jonathan Bate that “Shakespeare” is best understood as “a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent age in the image of itself”,7 Cartelli adds a key geopolitical factor: “[T]his tendency becomes even more pronounced when ‘Shakespeare’ is ‘refashioned’ outside the national boundaries of British culture and society “in the image” of cultures and societies seeking either to establish their independence from imperial influence or to identify, define, and assert their own national values or priorities.”8 In applying this notion outside of the Anglosphere (a concept analyzed below), I try to capitalize on his specific examination of the American case. Although my main interest in the book is in the differences between the two “country dispositions” as regards Shakespeare, I find a productive parallelism between Italy and the USA as former
7 The reference is to Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3. See also Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare. A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Vintage, 1991).
8 Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 2.
colonial spaces turned into nation-states with imperial ambitions.9 Some chapters will then examine the role of Shakespeare in the Italian process of national self-fashioning, some will focus on Fascist and racist appropriations of his plays, and others will deal with more recent Italian transactions with Shakespeare in the age of globalization.
Italy has been for centuries less a stable national and political entity than a work in progress, with all its internal contradictions and dissonances, an ideal aspiration troubling, obsessing, and frustrating its advocates and supporters as well as its opponents. Situated at the borders of East and West, Europe and Africa, struggling for centuries to define itself, always oscillating between freedom and oppression, experiencing democracy and tyranny, enforcing and suffering colonialism, negotiating modernity and tradition, Italy is marked by a history of political fragmentation, haunted by the memory of its ancient Roman past, strongly identified with the Catholic Church and yet striving to distinguish itself from it. Occupied for centuries by several foreign regimes, when it acquired independence, it turned in succession into a parliamentary monarchy, a fascist dictatorship that established a short-lived empire, and eventually into a democratic republic. Today it is the southernmost frontier of Europe in a geopolitical crisis characterized by unprecedented mass migrations from Africa and Asia. The various stories told in this book analyze the reverberations of these various political circumstances in the coeval appropriations of Shakespeare. These peripheral events may both illuminate singular potentialities of the plays activated by these specific Italian circumstances and simultaneously turn Shakespeare into a special guide to a nation’s changing ethos and political unconscious. This particular case is more compelling insofar as most of the plays under scrutiny are derived from Italian sources, making of each new Italian staging, edition, and interpretation of Shakespeare an adaptation of an adaptation, an act of translation that brings a text and a set of meanings back to their “original” context, creating in turn new texts and new meanings.
The territory is vast and there is no attempt at a comprehensive survey. This book deals with criticism, adaptations, performance, and film, but hardly mentions opera and, in most cases, it looks at the margins rather than at the center. In my analysis, I am guided by Slavoj Žižek’s insight:
We effectively understand a foreign culture when we are able to identify with its points of failure: when we are able to discern not its hidden positive
9 Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare, 6.
meaning, but rather its blind spot, the deadlock the proliferation of meaning endeavors to cover up. In other words, when we endeavor to understand the Other (another culture), we should not focus on its specificity (on the peculiarity of “their customs,” etc.), we should rather endeavor to encircle that which eludes their grasp, the point at which the Other is in itself dislocated not bound by its “specific context”.10
The specificity of Italian culture has been a constant theme and preoccupation for Italians and foreigners alike. Italians have interrogated themselves and their collective identity as part of their long struggle for national unity, and, more recently, in their longing for an accomplished democracy. For foreign observers, especially citizens of the Anglosphere, Italy has long been a real and imaginary place, a mirror and a refuge, and a screen where a wide array of negative and positive stereotypes is projected. Italophobia and Italophilia have ancient roots and sometimes coexist in the same viewer, as is probably the case with Shakespeare.11 Many precious studies have been devoted to the “hidden positive meaning”, the “specific context”, and the “peculiarity of customs” of Italy as constructed by Shakespearean and other early modern texts.12 This book, on the other hand, is more interested in Žižek’s “blind spots” and “points of failure”, which I read as a way to interpret Shakespeare’s “country dispositions”. For Iago, a “country disposition” is a virtual reality aimed at excluding Othello. In its less extreme version, a “country disposition” is the milieu and habitus in which we grow up and live, often unaware of its cultural and anthropological assumptions. As Giordano Bruno, one of the protagonists of this book, reminds us: “[H]ow great is the impact of the habit of believing and of being nourished from childhood with certain persuasions, on blocking
10 Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 50.
11 Attilio Brilli, Il viaggio in Italia: storia di una grande tradizione culturale. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006); Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Manfred Beller, “Italians”. In Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters: a critical survey. Edited by Manfred Beller and Joseph Theodoor Leerssen, 194–200 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007).
12 Michele Marrapodi, A. J. Hoenselaars, Marcello Cappuzzo, and Lino Falzon Santucci, eds., Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Michele Marrapodi, ed., Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Michael Redmond, Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
the understanding of most evident things.”13 A “country disposition” is the norms we take for granted, and that we take for granted other people take for granted; a bias, a horizon within which we operate undoubtingly until we cross a different disposition, which may generate tension, friction, anxiety, hostility, sometimes admiration, and which, at best, may lead to questioning our own prejudices. Against Iago’s fundamentalist approach, this is the hermeneutic potential of Othello’s “unhoused free condition” and Desdemona’s “divided duty”, their willingness to open their own experiences to a radically different country disposition.
The hypothesis of this book is that if we productively put in mutual tension Shakespeare and Italy, certain “points of failure” of Italian culture may come into relief. To quote Žižek, I will be looking for what the proliferation of Shakespearean meaning in the Italian context covers up, seeking what may elude our grasp; as a corollary, this view on/from the margins may also evidence some “blind spots” of mainstream Shakespeare criticism.
SASPER IN ITALY
“Sasper [sic] is the English Corneille”14—the eccentric, defamiliarizing view attested by the first critical appraisal of Shakespeare in Italian (1726) is the vantage point from which I address some lesser known episodes in the critical and theatrical history of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Antony and Cleopatra, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The relationship between Shakespeare and Italy has produced a wealth of critical work. The main scholarly approach is summarized by Michael Redmond: “[D]espite all the claims about the death of traditional source criticism, the focus of most research about early modern English drama’s engagement with Italian culture is still the identification of more or less specific parallels with Cinquecento verse, prose narration, and theatre.”15 More recently, Julia Lupton and Paul Kottman have suggested a more original agenda, suggesting that the nexus can be also studied “in relation to
13 Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, edited by Stanley L. Jaki (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 69–70.
14 Antonio Conti, Il Cesare. Tragedia del Sig. Ab. Antonio Conti nobile veneto con alcune cose concernenti l’opera medesima (Faenza: Gioseffantonio Archi, 1726), 54.
15 Redmond, Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy, 1.
the political and dramatic writings of Machiavelli and the critical theory of modern Italian writers on sovereignty, republicanism, and the multitude, including Agamben, Gramsci, and Virno. This experimental set of readings aims to ask what special relations might obtain between the Italy of Shakespeare and the Italy of a certain line of modern thought, as mediated above all by the work of Machiavelli.”16 Capitalizing on these critical orientations, Italy’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Italy examines aspects that have remained largely unexplored, arguing that the productive dialogue between the early modern and the postmodern advocated by Lupton and Kottman can be usefully supplemented by a consideration of key moments of the long pre- and post-independence history of Italy, a country that at the time of Shakespeare was a mosaic of disparate political entities and that only in the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare was first imported into Italian culture, became a unified state.
The history of Shakespeare’s reception in Italy is one of multiple displacements and dislocations. “Don’t you know that the very word Shakespeare is hard for us to pronounce?…Those blessed rules of Aristotle are firmly fixed in every head. Try to get outside them… capers and somersaults ….”17 lamented the actor Gustavo Modena to his younger colleague Ernesto Rossi, reminiscing about his own failed attempt to stage Othello in Milan in 1842. Shakespeare in Italy was for a long time primarily a crux of literary debates on “those blessed rules of Aristotle” (the unities of time, place, and action), a weapon to use in the battle between ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, a critical means rather than a theatrical end. A minor detail speaks eloquently: the very name Shakespeare remains difficult to pronounce for Italians. From its first occurrence in the notes of Lorenzo Magalotti (1668) as “Shakespier”, to the earliest record in print in Antonio Conti as “Sasper” (1726), down to a string of “Sachespar”, “Jhakespeare”, “Sakespir”, and the unsurpassable “Seckpaire” of Abate Gaetano Golt, emended in the errata to “Seckspaire”—Italians can compete only with him and his contemporaries in misspelling Shakespeare.18 These quirky minutiae reflect a more consequential phenomenon: in spite of limited pockets of admiration and periods
16 Panel proposal for the World Shakespeare Conference (Prague, 2011).
17 Ernesto Rossi, Studii Drammatici e Lettere Autobiografiche (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1885), 83–5. Partial translation in Lacy Collison-Morley, Shakespeare in Italy (Stratford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1916), 153.
18 For this and rich historical overviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cf. Collison-Morley, Shakespeare in Italy and Attilio Nulli, Shakespeare in Italia (Milano: Hoepli, 1918).
of anglophilia, Italy has never seen English language and literature as central to its culture, and Shakespeare was initially received through translations and critical interpretations made in France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. In a case like Modena’s, reworking Shakespeare for Italian culture meant retranslating an Italian plot, heavily editing a French text considered unsuitable, and performing in an Italian city that belonged to the Austrian Empire.
The most elusive and yet decisive factor in the reception of Shakespeare may be a general cultural disposition toward the tragic. Italy’s collective identity is based on a shared Catholic religion and a literary canon that has a (Divine) “comedy” as its centerpiece. As Giorgio Agamben writes, Dante Alighieri’s decision to “abandon his own “tragic” poetic project for a “comic” poem” was epochal and is still exerting its influence today: “The turn registered by these words is so little a question internal to Dante scholarship that it can even be said that here, for the first time, we find one of the traits that most tenaciously characterizes Italian culture: its essential pertinence to the comic sphere and consequent refutation of tragedy.”19 Tragedy is the genre that most has registered the tension between ancient Greek and Roman values and a Christian worldview (that in post-Reformation Italy became a strictly policed cultural code), and it may be argued that Dante’s monumental masterpiece in fact hybridizes tragedy with comedy. Agamben clarifies that for Dante “tragedy” was a matter of style and content rather than of dramatic form, and it entailed a specific theological and anthropological paradigm still underlying Italian culture, even in its contemporary secularized configuration: “It is [a] ‘comic’ conception of the human creature, divided into innocent nature and guilty person, that Dante bequeathed to Italian culture.”20 This is not to suggest that Italian literature has produced just an endless series of redemptive plots and happy endings, but that tragedy as a theatrical genre and as a vision of cosmic suffering of extraordinary individuals has been relegated to the margins; the Italian literary tradition “has remained … obstinately faithful to the antitragic intention of the Divine Comedy”.21 While Shakespeare and his contemporaries were filling up theaters in London, in Italy, tragedy remained mostly a matter of intellectual debate on Aristotle’s theories and a source of entertainment for an
19 Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem. Studies in Poetics, translated by Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1.
20 Agamben, The End of the Poem, 21.
21 The End of the Poem, 132.
aristocratic elite. There was indeed a revival of the genre after centuries of neglect, but theory held sway. The most famous author was Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, destined to become one of Shakespeare’s sources. The predominance of theory imprisoned the plays in rigid patterns, which, among other things, banned everyday speech in favor of “magniloquent oratory”. Tragedy was too much of a challenge for the small and embattled courts of a politically fragmented country, courts that were the only patrons of theater and favored the inside jokes of comedy (much as it could also convey harsh political satire)22 over the foreboding plots of tragedy and its representation of beleaguered rulers.23 Moreover, to quote Marzia Pieri: “On the plane of ideology, the concept of sin, with which the age of counterreformation tends to identify tragic fault, does not agree with the pagan presuppositions of the genre, and the times do not allow to speculate on stage about the evils of Power.”24
In this light, we may better appreciate why the vicissitudes of Shakespeare’s tragedies in Italy (as opposed to his comedies, which significantly, are very little represented) are part of, and maybe play a key role in, a larger struggle between the comic and the tragic in Italian culture. The paradox is that Shakespeare built many of his tragedies on Italian material that the Italians had articulated either in the prose tales of Giraldi Cinzio or in the philosophical speculations of Niccolò Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno. The playwright made Italian tales and ideas into successful plays for the stage; Italians took the plays, and before they were convinced they could applaud them in their own terms, they had already acclaimed Rossini’s opera Otello (1816), praised Salvatore Vigano’s ballet Otello (1820), and celebrated Francesco Hayez’s painting Romeo and Juliet’s Last Kiss (1823). The gradual rise of Shakespeare’s fortune in the second half of the nineteenth century is interwoven with the rising influence of French and German Romanticism and with the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence, and it is no coincidence that some of the most prominent political and cultural protagonists of this watershed age (Francesco De Sanctis, Giuseppe Mazzini, Alessandro Manzoni, Tommaso Salvini, Giuseppe Verdi) were passionate Shakespeareans.
22 I thank Kent Cartwright for this observation.
23 Marzia Pieri, La nascita del teatro moderno in Italia tra XV e XVI secolo (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989), 155.
24 Pieri, La nascita del teatro, 147.
Today, Shakespeare’s success in Italy appears to be unconditional. The postwar era has witnessed a steady rise of Shakespeare performances, scholarship, and translations.25 There is a Globe Theatre in Rome; a musical version of Romeo and Juliet attracts thousands of people, matching the thriving Shakespearean tourism in Verona under Juliet’s balcony; almost every permanent theater company features a Shakespearean play in their season; theatrical experiments continue on the fringes, and Shakespeare is taught in nearly every literature department, at least those which resist the attack on the humanities. “L’Italia di Shakespeare” (Shakespeare’s Italy) is the recent headline of a major magazine, the subtitle suggesting that “[i]n his tragedies is the key to understand what is happening to us”.26 The image on the cover showed a fine caricature of Shakespeare with a gorget decorated with a line of clasp knives, a bloodstained doublet, and a tiny chair with a smiling skull on its back. The tantalizing but ephemeral analogies between contemporary Italian politicians and Shakespearean characters offered by a major philosopher in the magazine are less relevant here than the red clown nose that the artist Manuela Bertoli placed on Shakespeare’s face. Shakespeare may have performed a compensatory function in Italy, providing iconic tragic plots to a culture traditionally recalcitrant to the genre; on the other hand, the prevailing “comic” country disposition has often been able to subdue the unsettling energies of tragedy, as the many parodies, adaptations, and deconstructions of the plays seem to indicate.
THE ANGLOSPHERE
A “country disposition” is often an intractable issue, generally relegated to the realm of ethnic humor and haunted by the risk of sweeping generalizations and national clichés, and yet it operates unwittingly in many cultural gestures and usually comes back with a vengeance at critical points. At the time of completing this book, Europe was shaken by its worst economic and political crisis, a continental emergency that was nevertheless mostly framed, often to the point of caricature, in a face-off between Greece and Germany. The pressure of global neoliberalism and mass migration, the confrontation
25 Michele Marrapodi, “Introduction: Shakespeare Studies in Italy Since 1964”, Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 7–18.
26 “L’Italia di Shakespeare”, Sette del Corriere della Sera, 9, 28 February 2014.
between rival economic models, and the need for cultural and political unification as opposed to the fetish of a single currency—no discourse was as compelling as that of national stereotypes, the lazy Greek and the intransigent German, or the civilized Greek and the Nazi German, often worthy of Iago’s drinking jokes. Not only did these populist tropes overshadow any analysis of larger political and economical issues, but they also foreclosed any alternative serious examination of a country’s ethos and anthropological matrix. In that respect, William Shakespeare, who may become in 2016, on the 400th anniversary of his death, the first poet laureate of Europe and who can claim the record of the most attempts by other countries to appropriate him as one of their own, becomes an extraordinary guide. The ways in which a certain nation reads, misreads, translates, selects, and claims Shakespeare and his works are key to that nation’s political unconscious, not excluding the country that begot him and those who speak his language. While the main focus of the different essays in this book is the multiple ways in which Italy has appropriated Shakespeare, an important corollary is the productive tension between the country disposition of Italy and those of what I will call the “Anglosphere”. I use this term, coined in the realm of fiction and later adopted into the discourse of political science and international relations, to signify a loose consensus and interconnectedness of English-speaking culture that is inevitably reflected in Shakespeare criticism.27 With all its national and individual variations, the Anglosphere probably carries some tacit assumptions that resist even the
27 “Australia, Canada, and New Zealand established their special relationships with the United States more gradually, as they gain more and more sovereignty from Britain. Together, these special relationships are said to constitute “core” of a distinct international, transnational, civilizational, and Imperial entity within the global society, currently known as the “Anglosphere”. … The processes of secession, dedominonization and decolonization destroyed the British Empire but left behind distinct yet loosely bounded community of peoples, who are fiercely committed to, among other items, freedom, democracy, the rule of (common) law, and English language. This community’s lack of formal institutional actorness merely disguises its exceptional longevity and power…. Centered first on London and then on Washington DC, the Anglosphere has dominated international politics for the world for the past 200 years, perhaps longer. Its agents—companies, empires, states, as nations— colonized and industrialized large swathes of the planet and moved millions of its inhabitants, often by force. …The origins of the Anglosphere are racial. The turn-of-the-20thcentury rapprochement between the expanding United States and declining Britain was closed by a discourse of identity that implied natural unity and moral superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”…The Anglosphere is a product of its racial past, a past that the may not have receded.”, Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 2–4.
tireless metacritical and self-reflexive work of the most metacritical and self-reflexive epoch of literary critics.
In one of his sporadic mentions of Shakespeare, Antonio Gramsci comments on the exchange between Alessandro Manzoni and his English translator Charles Swan, who took issue with a passage from The Betrothed, Italy’s foundational novel, where the narrator repeats Voltaire’s notorious definition of Shakespeare as “a barbarian not deprived of genius”.28 The Romantic Manzoni championed the cause of Shakespeare against neoclassical poetic in a national debate initiated by Giuseppe Baretti’s Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire (1778), appropriately considered “the first serious and extensive critical study of Shakespeare in Italy”.29 His quotation of Voltaire was ironic, but Swan warned him that “the phrase is calculated to draw upon you the anathema of every admirer of our bard”.30 The issue was relevant enough to invite a caveat by Manzoni in the appendix of Swan’s translation, and the expedient omission of the quotation from other English versions of Italy’s most famous novel. Curiously enough, Gramsci was using this example to decry the tendency of Italian intellectuals to nod at provincial family quarrels, speaking only to the initiated. But who was being provincial? Manzoni was alluding to a pan-European debate, while Swan was reacting defensively to the lèse majesté against “our” bard. This episode shows how a dialectical tension between different “country dispositions” (academic traditions, political frameworks, cultural priorities, theoretical preoccupations, or even single words) set off against each other can provide important insights into the way we read Shakespeare in a global perspective.
This book, written in English, is structured around three words (“race”, politics, place) and their specific use in the Anglosphere. Yet, when these concepts are applied in the Italian context, their meaning is subtly modified. Nowhere is this dynamic more perceptible than in the deployment of the category of “race”. While actively engaged in a painstaking historicization and deconstruction of this charged term, anglophone Shakespeare critics, I suggest, have paradoxically “naturalized” race with
28 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal Carcere. Volume 3, edited by Valentino Gerratana (Torino, Einaudi, 2014), 1792. Prison Notebooks: Three volumes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Franco Marenco, “The Rise and Fall of Irony”. World Literature Today 71, No. 2, “Italian Literature Today” (Spring 1997): 303–8.
29 Agostino Lombardo, “Shakespeare in Italy.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 141, n. 4, (December 1997): 455.
30 Gramsci, Quaderni, 1792.
a distinct North American inflection. Without a doubt, the benefits of such an introduction of “race”—actually, a reintroduction, as I argue in Chap. 2—for the study of Shakespeare have been invaluable, especially as a corrective to an older color-blind but tacitly racist criticism. Reading “race” in Italian Shakespeare tells us a lot about the largely repressed colonial and racist past of the nation. On the other hand, a wholesale import of Anglo-American raciologies may create disturbing collateral effects that need to be evaluated if we pursue a real transnational and cross-cultural understanding of Shakespeare, or, even more ambitiously, if we want to enroll Shakespeare as an ally in the building of a real transnational and cross-cultural consciousness.
“RACE”, POLITICS, PLACE: THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The following chapters form three conceptual triptychs, the first dealing with issues of “race” and ethnicity, the second with political philosophy, and the third with the notion of place. This subdivision is more a matter of emphasis, since the different dimensions interact and overlap throughout the book.
“Iago’s Race, Shakespeare’s Ethnicities” is the most theoretical contribution in the book and the first of three “race” chapters. Beginning from Giuseppe Verdi’s musings on his opera Otello, I discuss the genealogy of Shakespeare “race” studies to argue that racial thinking is quintessentially a nineteenth-century product and a powerful ethnic fiction which aims at appropriating symbolic capital, phenomena which are dangerously underestimated in contemporary criticism. I compare a little known Victorian work, A New Exegesis of Shakespeare: Interpretation of His Principal Characters and Plays on the Principle of Races (1859), that purports to demonstrate that the whole of Shakespeare is just a demonstration of how “race” is no less than the main key to human knowledge, to some recent studies of Shakespeare under the agenda of race. The analysis of these discursive strategies endorses Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that the category of “race” should be dropped altogether or, at the very least, supplemented, in my opinion, by the largely underutilized notion of ethnicity.
This criterion is promptly applied in the chapter “Slav-ing Othello”, where I analyze a minor Italian adaptation of the tragedy written in the early nineteenth century. Carlo Federici’s Otello ossia lo slavo (Othello, or the Slav) moves the action to Genoa and radically alters the ethnic identity of all the main characters, departing from the traditional dialectics of
whiteness and blackness. This alteration demonstrates how Othello’s ethnicity has always been a more complicated matter than his skin color and that it depends on specific geopolitical dynamics. It is precisely because it simplifies the “domestic” and psychological elements that have dominated Othello’s theatrical and critical history that this text illuminates the interplay of politics and ethnicity that continues to be one of the most topical aspects of the Shakespearean tragedy. By inventing a Slavic hero who assimilates into an Italian city, Federici’s text epitomizes a model which has remained dominant in Italian culture to this day, where consent may be more important than descent but equality requires ethnic homogeneity and minorities are more imagined than accepted in their real outlook.
“Shakespeare, Nation, and Race in Fascist Italy” investigates the impact of the cultural politics of Fascism on Shakespeare, particularly on the criticism and performance of his “Italian” (Venetian and Roman) plays. The names of Carlo Formichi or Piero Rebora are hardly remembered in Italian literary studies, let alone in Shakespearean criticism, but they were prominent intellectuals in an academic milieu where university professors were requested to sign an oath of allegiance to the Fascist Party and only 12 out of 1250 refused. Their interpretations were pervaded by a self-conscious, militant “presentism”, aimed at a celebration of Shakespeare’s Italian characters and plots functional to the consolidation of ethnic and nationalist pride. However, as the case of Julius Caesar (rewritten by Mussolini himself) demonstrates, some characters and plots proved recalcitrant to Fascist appropriations, requiring elaborate and ultimately unconvincing reading strategies.
The three chapters that follow focus on the relationship between Shakespeare and Italian political theory, ranging from early modernity (Machiavelli and Bruno) to postmodernity (contemporary Italian philosophy).
“Neocon and Theoprog: The New Machiavellian Moment” offers a comparative analysis of recent critical studies that read Shakespeare in the light of Machiavelli, producing radically divergent interpretations. By mapping their different preoccupations and styles onto the Hobbesian classic division of political theory into libertas, the space of “natural” relationships between individuals, imperium, the domain of the monarchy and the state, and religio, the realm of God and the Church, I suggest that the seven authors under scrutiny have produced multifaceted, prismatic Shakespeares with disparate and incompatible political profiles reminiscent of twenty-first-century trends: a moderate Shakespeare, a neoconservative
Shakespeare, a theoconservative Shakespeare, a neomarxist Shakespeare, a Nietzschean Shakespeare, a neoprogressive Shakespeare, and a theoprogressive Shakespeare. While new historicists and cultural materialist critics of the Anglosphere have privileged libertas (or, in Foucauldian idiom, the microphysics of power), and more traditional readers have focused on either religion or political theory, some critics have eclectically combined different elements, ushering in a distinctly new Machiavellian moment in Shakespeare studies.
In “Infinite Minds: Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno Revisited”, I interrogate the puzzling absence of Giordano Bruno from contemporary Shakespearean criticism. Part of the explanation lies in the monopoly created by the idiosyncratic studies by Frances Yates, whose highly influential portrait of the Italian philosopher as an esoteric figure has been long questioned in Brunian scholarship but has remained by and large unchallenged in Shakespeare studies, making the former irrelevant for the latter. The ensuing paradox is that in the heated debates on Shakespeare’s religious orientation, there is hardly any trace of the most audacious thinker on religious issues in Elizabethan England; and where Shakespeare is hailed as the inventor of the modern conception of the human, the first proponent of an infinite universe, with an unshackled man heroically struggling in it, is ignored. It is only at the margins that we find new attempts to correlate the works of Bruno and Shakespeare, in particular in the works by Gilberto Sacerdoti, who reads, according to a well-known Renaissance strategy of dissimulation of dissident ideas, Bruno’s radical thought between the lines of Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest.
In “Hamlet in Venice”, the Danish prince becomes a special guide to contemporary Italian theory, a philosophical constellation that has generated a good deal of international interest in political and cultural studies through the works of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and others. This case study examines the political praxis of a major Italian theorist, Massimo Cacciari, in the mirror of his analysis of Shakespeare. After surveying Cacciari’s political career and philosophical trajectory, I analyze his recent essay on Hamlet and read it in the light of Luisa Accati’s seminal book Beauty and the Monster. Accati argues that Catholicism in Italy is to be understood less as religious institution or belief than as an anthropological situation that has produced a patriarchal society with weak natural fathers and strong spiritual fathers, hinged on the cult of the Virgin Mary. Her cogent theory helps us to contextualize the uncanny analogies between Cacciari’s interpretation of Ophelia and the feminine ideal still
promoted by the Catholic Church. The essay ends with a look at Cacciari’s more recent reading of King Lear against the backdrop of the latest developments on the Italian political scene.
The third and final group concentrates on the nexus between Shakespeare and place, analyzing Italian sites linked to his works and asking what set of meanings is generated by this connection.
“The Grave and the Ghetto: Shakespearean Places as Adaptations” considers the motivations underlying the continuing fascination with the notion that Shakespeare really may have visited Italy, as many amateur scholars and thousands of visitors like to believe. The unending AngloAmerican fascination with Italy through the Shakespearean lens has reconfigured the meaning of places that carry the memory of Shakespearean plays and characters, from Romeo and Juliet’s Verona to Shylock and Othello’s Venice. By taking the reader to different locales, directly or indirectly connected with Shakespeare, I wonder whether we can consider a physical place as an adaptation of his plays, or to consider how a place appropriates and “remembers” Shakespeare. In the case of Verona, Shakespeare has inspired a whole Romeo and Juliet industry, which greatly contributes to the tourist economy. In the case of Venice, a city already overloaded with symbols and plaques, the most controversial characters of Othello and Shylock remain ghostly presences.
“Fixed Figures: The Other Moors of Venice” shows how the several Venetian toponyms and artifacts that refer to “Mori” give unexpected indications on the meaning of this famously ambiguous ethnic designation. “Mori” in Venice are associated with squares, streets, inns, statues, sculptures, jewels, door knockers, and even with patisserie. Showing how each name changes its significance from place to place, and the same “moors” elicit different stories in different times, this “moor tour” does not insinuate any direct link between these sites and the play, but suggests on the other hand that the historical shiftings of these monumental texts and their projective powers may find a correspondence in Shakespeare’s Othello. Highlighting how various Venetian Moors have inspired stories of petrification, I read this anecdotal evidence through modern interpretations of the myth of Medusa (from Fanon to Agamben), arguing in conclusion that they offer precious insight into the ways in which Western culture constructs stereotypes and dehumanizes its “others”.
The final chapter “The Prison-House of Italy: Caesar Must Die” returns to Julius Caesar to discuss, by way of an epilogue to the whole book, the 2012 prizewinning film by Italian cinema doyens Paolo and Vittorio
Taviani. Documenting a production of the play realized by director Fabio Cavalli in the prison of Rebibbia in Rome, Caesar Must Die is also used as a litmus test for the current “country disposition” of Italy, a nation that has often represented its own cultural, political, and social situation by reinventing classical Rome and has produced important reflections from within a prison cell (from Silvio Pellico to Antonio Gramsci). By looking at the treatment of gender, place, and ethnicity in the film, I suggest that the Taviani’s cinematically transfigured prison becomes a heterotopia, a mirror image of neoliberal Italy and a paradoxical refuge from its political and cultural impasse.
“EVEN IN SPITE OF OURSELVES”
Having given the opening word in this Introduction to the malign genius of Venice, Iago, and his toxic interpretation of a “country disposition”, I want to grant the last word to a symbolic descendant of Desdemona, a woman whose life and work reminds us that a country disposition is not an unavoidable destiny, that a nation can change its course and open up its horizons. Giustina Renier Michiel was a Venetian noblewoman who lived and worked in the dramatic years of the downfall of the millenary Republic swept by Napoleon, was fascinated by the values of the French Revolution, and hosted in her literary salon the likes of Byron, Foscolo, and Madame de Staël. She translated in prose Ottello, Macbet, and Coriolano, published between 1798 and 1800, at the dawn of Venice’s new era. Giustina Renier Michiel’s translations were primarily read by high-ranking aristocrats of her circle and never staged, at least in Venice, thwarting her ambitions to produce further versions. Her prose translation was guided by a clarifying impulse that led her to paraphrase and oversimplify some of the most pregnant passages. Iago’s “I am not what I am” was rendered as “assicuratevi che non sono qual sembro essere” [be assured I am not what I appear to be].31 Yet her pioneering effort is made more innovative by her pugnacious preface, where her critical approach is consciously associated with her gender. Asserting a privileged relationship between Shakespeare and women (on the grounds of “tenderness” and “admiration”), Giustina Renier Michiel explains that she intended to describe the “sensations” provoked by drama and “the dominant feeling in each tragedy”, seen as
31 Giustina Renier Michiel, Opere drammatiche di Shakespeare volgarizzate da una dama veneta, Volume I (Venezia : eredi Costantini, 1798), 89.
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F . 35. 19 specimens of Purpura lapillus L., Great Britain, illustrating variation.
(1) Felixstowe, sheltered coast; (2), (3) Newquay, on veined and coloured rock; (4) Herm, rather exposed; (5) Solent, very sheltered; (6) Land’s End, exposed rocks, small food supply; (7) Scilly, exposed rocks, fair food supply; (8) St. Leonards, flat mussel beds at extreme low water; (9) Robin Hood’s Bay,
sheltered under boulders, good food supply; (10) Rhoscolyn, on oyster bed, 4–7 fath. (Macandrew); (11) Guernsey, rather exposed rocks; (12) Estuary of Conway, very sheltered, abundant food supply; (13), (14) Robin Hood’s Bay, very exposed rocks, poor food supply; (14) slightly monstrous; (15), (16), (17) Morthoe, rather exposed rocks, but abundant food supply; (18) St Bride’s Bay; (19) L Swilly, sheltered, but small food supply All from the author’s collection, except (10).
The common dog-whelk (Purpura lapillus) of our own coasts is an exceedingly variable species, and in many cases the variations may be shown to bear a direct relation to the manner of life (Fig. 35). Forms occurring in very exposed situations, e.g. Land’s End, outer rocks of the Scilly Is., coasts of N. Devon and Yorkshire, are stunted, with a short spire and relatively large mouth, the latter being developed in order to increase the power of adherence to the rock and consequently of resistance to wave force. On the other hand, shells occurring in sheltered situations, estuaries, narrow straits, or even on open coasts where there is plenty of shelter from the waves, are comparatively of great size, with a well-developed, sometimes produced spire, and a mouth small in proportion to the area of shell surface. In the accompanying figure, the specimens from the Conway estuary and the Solent (12, 5) well illustrate this latter form of shell, while that from exposed rocks is illustrated by the specimens from Robin Hood’s Bay (13, 14). Had these specimens occurred alone, or had they been brought from some distant and unexplored region, they must inevitably have been described as two distinct species.
F . 36. Valves of Cardium edule from the four upper terraces of Shumish Kul, a dry salt lake adjacent to the Aral Sea. (After Bateson.)
Mr. W. Bateson has made[195] some observations on the shells of Cardium edule taken from a series of terraces on the border of certain salt lakes which once formed a portion of the Sea of Aral. As these lakes gradually became dry, the water they contained became salter, and thus the successive layers of dead shells deposited on their borders form an interesting record of the progressive variation of this species under conditions which, in one respect at least, can be clearly appreciated. At the same time the diminishing volume of water, and the increasing average temperature, would not be without their effect. It was found that the principal changes were as follows: the thickness, and consequently the weight, of the shells became diminished, the size of the beaks was reduced, the shell became highly coloured, and diminished considerably in size, and the breadth of the shells increased in proportion to their length (Fig. 36). Shells of the same species of Cardium, occurring in Lake Mareotis, were found to exhibit very similar variations as regards colour, size, shape, and thickness.
Unio pictorum var. compressa occurs near Norwich at two similar localities six or seven miles distant from one another, under circumstances which tend to show that similar conditions have produced similar results. The form occurs where the river, by bending sharply in horse-shoe shape, causes the current to rush across to the opposite side and form an eddy near the bank on the outside of the bend. Just at the edge of the sharp current next the eddy the shells are found, the peculiar form being probably due to the current continually washing away the soft particles of mud and
compelling the shell to elongate itself in order to keep partly buried at the bottom.[196]
The rivers Ouse and Foss, which unite just below York, are rivers of strikingly different character, the Ouse being deep, rapid, with a bare, stony bottom, and little vegetable growth, and receiving a good deal of drainage, while the Foss is shallow, slow, muddy, full of weeds and with very little drainage. In the Foss, fine specimens of Anodonta anatina occur, lustrous, with beautifully rayed shells. A few yards off, in the Ouse, the same species of Anodonta is dull brown in colour, its interior clouded, the beaks and epidermis often deeply eroded. Precisely the same contrast is shown in specimens of Unio tumidus, taken from the same rivers, Ouse specimens being also slightly curved in form. Just above Yearsley Lock in the Foss, Unio tumidus occurs, but always dwarfed and malformed, a result probably due to the effect of rapidly running water upon a species accustomed to live in still water.[197] Simroth records the occurrence of remarkably distorted varieties in two species of Aetheria which lived in swift falls of the River Congo.[198]
A variety of Limnaea peregra with a short spire and rather strong, stoutly built shell occurs in Lakes Windermere, Derwentwater, and Llyn-y-van-fach. It lives adhering to stones in places where there are very few weeds, its shape enabling it to withstand the surf of these large lakes, to which the ordinary form would probably succumb.[199]
Scalariform specimens of Planorbis are said to occur most commonly in waters which are choked by vegetation, and it has been shown that this form of shell is able to make its way through masses of dense weed much more readily than specimens of normal shape.
Continental authorities have long considered Limnaea peregra and L. ovata as two distinct species. Hazay, however, has succeeded in rearing specimens of so-called peregra from the ova of ovata, and so-called ovata from the ova of peregra, simply by placing one species in running water, and the other in still water.
According to Mr. J. S. Gibbons[200] certain species of Littorina, in tropical and sub-tropical regions, are confined to water more or less
brackish, being incapable of living in pure salt water “I have met,” says Mr. Gibbons, “with three of these species, and in each case they have been distinguished from the truly marine species by the extreme (comparative) thinness of their shells, and by their colouring being richer and more varied; they are also usually more elaborately marked. They are to be met with under three different conditions— (1) in harbours and bays where the water is salt with but a slight admixture of fresh water; (2) in mangrove swamps where salt and fresh water mix in pretty equal volume; (3) on dry land, but near a marsh or the dry bed of one.
“L. intermedia Reeve, a widely diffused E. African shell, attaches itself by a thin pellicle of dried mucus to grass growing by the margin of slightly brackish marshes near the coast, resembling in its mode of suspension the Old World Cyclostoma. I have found it in vast numbers in situations where, during the greater part of the year, it is exposed to the full glare of an almost vertical sun, its only source of moisture being a slight dew at night-time. The W. Indian L. angulifera Lam., and a beautifully coloured E. African species (? L. carinifera), are found in mangrove swamps; they are, however, less independent of salt water than the last.”
Mr. Gibbons goes on to note that brackish water species (although not so solid as truly marine species) tend to become more solid as the water they inhabit becomes less salt. This is a curious fact, and the reverse of what one would expect. Specimens of L. intermedia on stakes at the mouth of the Lorenço Marques River, Delagoa Bay, are much smaller, darker, and more fragile, than those living on grass a few hundred yards away. L. angulifera is unusually solid and heavy at Puerto Plata (S. Domingo) among mangroves, where the water is in a great measure fresh; at Havana and at Colon, where it lives on stakes in water but slightly brackish, it is thinner and smaller and also darker coloured.
(c) Changes in the Volume of Water.—It has long been known that the largest specimens, e.g. of Limnaea stagnalis and Anodonta anatina, only occurred in pieces of water of considerable size. Recent observation, however, has shown conclusively that the volume of water in which certain species live has a very close
relation to the actual size of their shells, besides producing other effects. Lymnaea megasoma, when kept in an aquarium of limited size, deposited eggs which hatched out; this process was continued in the same aquarium for four generations in all, the form of the shell of the last generation having become such that an experienced conchologist gave it as his opinion that the first and last terms of the series could have no possible specific relation to one another. The size of the shell became greatly diminished, and in particular the spire became very slender [201]
The same species being again kept in an aquarium under similar conditions, it was found that the third generation had a shell only four-sevenths the length of their great grandparents. It was noticed also that the sexual capacities of the animals changed as well. The liver was greatly reduced, and the male organs were entirely lost. [202]
K. Semper conducted some well-known experiments bearing on this point. He separated[203] specimens of Limnaea stagnalis from the same mass of eggs as soon as they were hatched, and placed them simultaneously in bodies of water varying in volume from 100 to 2000 cubic centimetres. All the other conditions of life, and especially the food supply, were kept at the known optimum. He found, in the result, that the size of the shell varied directly in proportion to the volume of the water in which it lived, and that this was the case, whether an individual specimen was kept alone in a given quantity of water, or shared it with several others. At the close of 65 days the specimens raised in 100 cubic cm. of water were only 6 mm. long, those in 250 cubic cm. were 9 mm. long, those in 600 cubic cm. were 12 mm. long, while those kept in 2000 cubic cm. attained a length of 18 mm. (Fig. 37).
An interesting effect of a sudden fall of temperature was noticed by Semper in connection with the above experiments. Vessels of unequal size, containing specimens of the Limnaea, happened to stand before a window at a time when the temperature suddenly fell to about 55° F. The sun, which shone through the window, warmed the water in the smaller vessels, but had no effect upon the
temperature of the larger The result was, that the Limnaea in 2000 cubic cm., which ought to have been 10 mm. long when 25 days old, were scarcely longer, at the end of that period, than those which had lived in the smaller vessels, but whose water had been sufficiently warm.
F . 37. Four equally old shells of Limnaea stagnalis, hatched from the same mass of ova, but reared in different volumes of water: A in 100, B in 250, C in 600, and D in 2000 cubic centimetres (After K Semper )
CHAPTER IV
USES OF SHELLS FOR MONEY, ORNAMENT, AND FOOD CULTIVATION OF THE OYSTER, MUSSEL, AND SNAIL SNAILS AS MEDICINE PRICES GIVEN FOR SHELLS
The employment of shells as a medium of exchange was exceedingly common amongst uncivilised tribes in all parts of the world, and has by no means yet become obsolete. One of the commonest species thus employed is the ‘money cowry’ (Cypraea moneta, L.), which stands almost alone in being used entire, while nearly all the other forms of shell money are made out of portions of shells, thus requiring a certain amount of labour in the process of formation.
One of the earliest mentions of the cowry as money occurs in an ancient Hindoo treatise on mathematics, written in the seventh century . . A question is propounded thus: ‘the ¼ of 1/16 of ⅕ of ¾ of ⅔ of ½ a dramma was given to a beggar by one from whom he asked an alms; tell me how many cowry shells the miser gave.’ In British India about 4000 are said to have passed for a shilling, but the value appears to differ according to their condition, poor specimens being comparatively worthless. According to Reeve[204] a gentleman residing at Cuttack is said to have paid for the erection of his bungalow entirely in cowries. The building cost him 4000 Rs. sicca (about £400), and as 64 cowries = 1 pice, and 64 pice = 1 rupee sicca, he paid over 16,000,000 cowries in all.
Cowries are imported to England from India and other places for the purposes of exportation to West Africa, to be exchanged for native products. The trade, however, appears to be greatly on the decrease. At the port of Lagos, in 1870, 50,000 cwts. of cowries were imported.[205]
A banded form of Nerita polita was used as money in certain parts of the South Pacific. The sandal-wood imported into the China market is largely obtained from the New Hebrides, being purchased of the natives in exchange for Ovulum angulosum, which they
especially esteem as an ornament. Sometimes, as in the Duke of York group, the use of shell money is specially restricted to certain kinds of purchase, being employed there only in the buying of swine.
Among the tribes of the North-West coasts of America the common Dentalium indianorum used to form the standard of value, until it was superseded, under the auspices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, by blankets. A slave was valued at a fathom of from 25 to 40 of these shells, strung lengthwise. Inferior or broken specimens were strung together in a similar way, but were less highly esteemed; they corresponded more to our silver and copper coins, while the strings of the best shells represented gold.
The wampum of the eastern coast of North America differed from all these forms of shell money, in that it required a laborious process for its manufacture. Wampum consisted of strings of cylindrical beads, each about a quarter of an inch in length and half that breadth. The beads were of two colours, white and purple, the latter being the more valuable. Both were formed from the common clam, Venus mercenaria, the valves of which are often stained with purple at the lower margins, while the rest of the shell is white. Cut small, ground down, and pierced, these shells were converted into money, which appears to have been current along the whole sea-board of North America from Maine to Florida, and on the Gulf Coast as far as Central America, as well as among the inland tribes east of the Mississippi. Another kind of wampum was made from the shells of Busycon carica and B. perversum. By staining the wampum with various colours, and disposing these colours in belts in various forms of arrangement, the Indians were able to preserve records, send messages, and keep account of any kind of event, treaty, or transaction.
Another common form of money in California was Olivella biplicata, strung together by rubbing down the apex. Button-shaped disks cut from Saxidomus arata and Pachydesma crassatelloides, as well as oblong pieces of Haliotis, were employed for the same purpose, when strung together in lengths of several yards.
“There is a curious old custom,” writes Mr W Anderson Smith, [206] “that used formerly to be in use in this locality [the western coast of Scotland], and no doubt was generally employed along the seaboard, as the most simple and ready means of arrangement of bargains by a non-writing population. That was, when a bargain was made, each party to the transaction got one half of a bivalve shell— such as mussel, cockle, or oyster—and when the bargain was implemented, the half that fitted exactly was delivered up as a receipt! Thus a man who had a box full of unfitted shells might be either a creditor or a debtor; but the box filled with fitted shells represented receipted accounts. Those who know the difficulty of fitting the valves of some classes of bivalves will readily acknowledge the value of this arrangement.”
Shells are employed for use and for ornament by savage—and even by civilised—tribes in all parts of the world. The natives of Fiji thread the large Turbo argyrostoma and crenulatus as weights at the edge of their nets, and also employ them as sinkers. A Cypraea tigris cut into two halves and placed round a stone, with two or three showy Oliva at the sides, is used as a bait for cuttles. Avicula margaritifera is cut into scrapers and knives by this and several other tribes. Breast ornaments of Chama, grouped with Solarium perspectivum and Terebra duplicata are common among the Fijians, who also mount the Avicula on a backing of whales’ teeth sawn in two, for the same purpose. The great Orange Cowry (Cypraea aurantiaca) is used as a badge of high rank among the chieftains. One of the most remarkable Fijian industries is the working of whales’ teeth to represent this cowry, as well as the commoner C. talpa, which is more easily imitated.
Among the Solomon islanders, cowries are used to ornament their shields on great field days, and split cowries are worn as a necklace, to represent human teeth. Small bunches of Terebellum subulatum are worn as earrings, and a large valve of Avicula is employed as a head ornament in the centre of a fillet. The same islanders ornament the raised prows of their canoes, as well as the inside of the sternpost, with a long row of single Natica.
The native Papuans employ shells for an immense variety of purposes. Circlets for the head are formed of rows of Nassa gibbosula, rubbed down till little but the mouth remains. Necklaces are worn which consist of strings of Oliva, young Avicula, Natica melanostoma, opercula of Turbo, and valves of a rich brown species of Cardium, pendent at the end of strings of the seeds known as Job’s tears. Struthiolaria is rubbed down until nothing but the mouth is left, and worn in strings round the neck. This is remarkable, since Struthiolaria is not a native Papuan shell, and indeed occurs no nearer than New Zealand. Sections of Melo are also worn as a breast ornament, dependent from a necklace of cornelian stones. Cypraea erosa is used to ornament drinking bowls, and Ovulum ovum is attached to the native drums, at the base of a bunch of cassowary feathers, as well as being fastened to the handle of a sago-beater.
In the same island, the great Turbo and Conus millepunctatus are ground down to form bracelets, which are worn on the biceps. The crimson lip of Strombus luhuanus is cut into beads and perforated for necklaces. Village elders are distinguished by a single Ovulum verrucosum, worn in the centre of the forehead. The thick lip of Cassis cornuta is ground down to form nose pieces, 4½ inches long. Fragments of a shell called Kaïma (probably valves of a large Spondylus) are worn suspended from the ears, with little wisps of hair twisted up and thrust through a hole in the centre. For trumpets, Cassis cornuta, Triton tritonis, and Ranella lampas are used, with a hole drilled as a mouthpiece in one of the upper whorls. Valves of Batissa, Unio, and Mytilus are used as knives for peeling yams. Spoons for scooping the white from the cocoa-nut are made from Avicula margaritifera. Melo diadema is used as a baler in the canoes.[207]
In the Sandwich Islands Melampus luteus is worn as a necklace, as well as in the Navigator Islands. A very striking necklace, in the latter group, is formed of the apices of a Nautilus, rubbed down to show the nacre. The New Zealanders use the green opercula of a Turbo, a small species of Venus, and Cypraea asellus to form the eyes of their idols. Fish-hooks are made throughout the Pacific of the
shells of Avicula and Haliotis, and are sometimes strengthened by a backing made of the columella of Cypraea arabica. Small axe-heads are made from Terebra crenulata ground down (Woodlark I.), and larger forms are fashioned from the giant Tridacna (Fiji).
Shells are used to ornament the elaborate cloaks worn by the women of rank in the Indian tribes of South America. Specimens of Ampullaria, Orthalicus, Labyrinthus, and Bulimulus depend from the bottom and back of these garments, while great Bulimi, 6 inches long, are worn as a breast ornament, and at the end of a string of beads and teeth.[208]
The chank-shell (Turbinella rapa) is of especial interest from its connexion with the religion of the Hindoos. The god Vishnu is represented as holding this shell in his hand, and the sinistral form of it, which is excessively rare, is regarded with extraordinary veneration. The chank appears as a symbol on the coins of some of the ancient Indian Empires, and is still retained on the coinage of the Rajah of Travancore.
The chief fishery of the chank-shell is at Tuticorin, on the Gulf of Manaar, and is conducted during the N. E. monsoon, October-May. In 1885–86 as many as 332,000 specimens were obtained, the net amount realised being nearly Rs.24,000. In former days the trade was much more lucrative, 4 or 5 millions of specimens being frequently shipped. The government of Ceylon used to receive £4000 a year for licenses to fish, but now the trade is free. The shells are brought up by divers from 2 or 3 fathoms of water. In 1887 a sinistral specimen was found at Jaffna, which sold for Rs.700.[209]
Nearly all the shells are sent to Dacca, where they are sliced into bangles and anklets to be worn by the Hindoo women.
Perhaps the most important industry which deals only with the shells of Mollusca is that connected with the ‘pearl-oyster.’ The history of the trade forms a small literature in itself. It must be sufficient here to note that the species in question is not an ‘oyster,’ properly so called, but an Avicula (margaritifera Lam.). The ‘motherof-pearl,’ which is extensively employed for the manufacture of buttons, studs, knife-handles, fans, card-cases, brooches, boxes,
and every kind of inlaid work, is the internal nacreous laminae of the shell of this species. The most important fisheries are those of the Am Islands, the Soo-loo Archipelago, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, Queensland, and the Pearl Islands in the Bay of Panama. The shell also occurs in several of the groups of the South Pacific—the Paumotu, Gambier and Navigator Islands, Tahiti being the centre of the trade—and also on the coasts of Lower California.[210]
Pearls are the result of a disease in the animal of this species of Avicula and probably in all other species within which they occur. When the Avicula is large, well formed, and with ample space for individual development, pearls scarcely occur at all, but when the shells are crowded together, and become humped and distorted, as well as affording cover for all kinds of marine worms and parasitic creatures, then pearls are sure to be found. Pearls of inferior value and size are also produced by Placuna placenta, many species of Pinna, the great Tridacna, the common Ostrea edulis, and several other marine bivalves. They are not uncommon in Unio and Anodonta, and the common Margaritana margaritifera of our rapid streams is still said to be collected, in some parts of Wales, for the purpose of extracting its small ‘seed-pearls.’ Pink pearls are obtained from the giant conch-shell of the West Indies (Strombus gigas), as well as from certain Turbinella.
In Canton, many houses are illuminated almost entirely by skylights and windows made of shells, probably the semitransparent valves of Placuna placenta. In China lime is commonly made of ground cockle-shells, and, when mixed with oil, forms an excellent putty, used for cementing coffins, and in forming a surface for the frescoes with which the gables of temples and private houses are adorned. Those who suffer from cutaneous diseases, and convalescents from small-pox, are washed in Canton with the water in which cockles have been boiled.[211]
A recent issue of the Peking Gazette contains a report from the outgoing Viceroy of Fukhien, stating that he had handed over the insignia of office to his successor, including inter alia the conch-shell bestowed by the Throne. A conch-shell with a whorl turning to the
right, i.e. a sinistral specimen, is supposed when blown to have the effect of stilling the waves, and hence is bestowed by the Emperor upon high officers whose duties oblige them to take voyages by sea. The Viceroy of Fukhien probably possesses one of these shells in virtue of his jurisdiction over Formosa, to which island periodical visits are supposed to be made.[212]
Shells appear to be used occasionally by other species besides man. Oyster-catchers at breeding time prepare a number of imitation nests in the gravel on the spit of land where they build, putting bits of white shell in them to represent eggs.[213] This looks like a trick in order to conceal the position of the true nest. According to Nordenskjöld, when the eider duck of Spitzbergen has only one or two eggs in its nest, it places a shell of Buccinum glaciale beside them. The appropriation of old shells by hermit-crabs is a familiar sight all over the world. Perhaps it is most striking in the tropics, where it is really startling, at first experience, to meet—as I have done—a large Cassis or Turbo, walking about in a wood or on a hill side at considerable distances from the sea. A Gephyrean (Phascolion strombi) habitually establishes itself in the discarded shells of marine Mollusca. Certain Hymenoptera make use of dead shells of Helix hortensis in which they build their cells.[214] Magnus believes that in times when heavy rains prevail, and the usual insects do not venture out, certain flowers are fertilised by snails and slugs crawling over them, e.g. Leucanthemum vulgare by Limax laevis. [215]
Mollusca as Food for Man.—Probably there are few countries in the world in which less use is made of the Mollusca as a form of food than in our own. There are scarcely ten native species which can be said to be at all commonly employed for this purpose. Neighbouring countries show us an example in this respect. The French, Italians, and Spanish eat Natica, Turbo, Triton, and Murex, and, among bivalves, Donax, Venus, Lithodomus, Pholas, Tapes, and Cardita, as well as the smaller Cephalopoda. Under the general designation of clam the Americans eat Venus mercenaria, Mya arenaria, and Mactra solidissima. In the Suez markets are exposed for sale
Strombus and Melongena, Avicula and Cytherea At Panama Donax and Solen are delicacies, while the natives also eat the great Murex and Pyrula, and even the huge Arca grandis, which lives embedded in the liquid river mud.
The common littoral bivalves seem to be eaten in nearly all countries except our own, and it is therefore needless to enumerate them. The Gasteropoda, whose habits are scarcely so cleanly, seem to require a bolder spirit and less delicate palate to venture on their consumption.
The Malays of the East Indian islands eat Telescopium fuscum and Pyrazus palustris, which abound in the mangrove swamps. They throw them on their wood fires, and when they are sufficiently cooked, break off the top of the spire and suck the animal out through the opening. Haliotis they take out of the shell, string together, and dry in the sun. The lower classes in the Philippines eat Arca inaequivalvis, boiling them as we do mussels.[216] In the Corean islands a species of Monodonta and another of Mytilus are quite peppery, and bite the tongue; our own Helix revelata, as I can vouch from personal experience, has a similar flavour. Fusus colosseus, Rapana bezoar, and Purpura luteostoma are eaten on the southern coasts of China; Strombus luhuanus, Turbo chrysostomus, Trochus niloticus, and Patella testudinaria, by the natives of New Caledonia; Strombus gigas and Livona pica in the West Indies; Turbo niger and Concholepas peruvianus on the Chilian coasts; four species of Strombus and Nerita, one each of Purpura and Turbo, besides two Tridacna and one Hippopus, by the natives of British New Guinea. West Indian negroes eat the large Chitons which are abundant on their rocky coasts, cutting off and swallowing raw the fleshy foot, which they call ‘beef,’ and rejecting the viscera. Dried cephalopods are a favourite Chinese dish, and are regularly exported to San Francisco, where the Chinamen make them into soup. The ‘Challenger’ obtained two species of Sepia and two of Loligo from the market at Yokohama.
The insipidity of fresh-water Mollusca renders them much less desirable as a form of food. Some species of Unionidae, however, are said to be eaten in France. Anodonta edulis is specially
cultivated for food in certain districts of China, and the African Aetheriae are eaten by negroes. Navicella and Neritina are eaten in Mauritius, Ampullaria and Neritina in Guadeloupe, and Paludina in Cambodia.
The vast heaps of empty shells known as ‘kitchen-middens,’ occur in almost every part of the world. They are found in Scotland, Denmark, the east and west coasts of North America, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, Australia and New Zealand, and are sometimes several hundred yards in length. They are invariably composed of the edible shells of the adjacent coast, mixed with bones of Mammals, birds, and fish. From their great size, it is believed that many of them must have taken centuries to form.
Pre-eminent among existing shell-fish industries stands the cultivation of the oyster and the mussel, a more detailed account of which may prove interesting.
The cultivation of the oyster[217] as a luxury of food dates at least from the gastronomic age of Rome. Every one has heard of the epicure whose taste was so educated that “he could tell At the first mouthful, if his oysters fed On the Rutupian or the Lucrine bed Or at Circeii.”[218]
The first artificial oyster-cultivator on a large scale appears to have been a certain Roman named Sergius Orata, who lived about a century . . His object, according to Pliny the elder,[219] was not to please his own appetite so much as to make money by ministering to the appetites of others. His vivaria were situated on the Lucrine Lake, near Baiae, and the Lucrine oysters obtained under his cultivation a notoriety which they never entirely lost, although British oysters eventually came to be more highly esteemed. He must have been a great enthusiast in his trade, for on one occasion when he became involved in a law-suit with one of the riparian proprietors, his counsel declared that Orata’s opponent made a great mistake if he
expected to damp his ardour by expelling him from the lake, for, sooner than not grow oysters at all, he would grow them upon the roof of his house.[220] Orata’s successors in the business seem to have understood the secret of planting young oysters in new beds, for we are told that specimens brought from Brundisium and even from Britain were placed for a while in the Lucrine Lake, to fatten after their long journey, and also to acquire the esteemed “Lucrine flavour.”
Oysters are ‘in season’ whenever there is an ‘r’ in the month, in other words, from September to April. ‘Mensibus erratis,’ as the poet has it, ‘vos ostrea manducatis!’ It has been computed that the quantity annually produced in Great Britain amounts to no less than sixteen hundred million, while in America the number is estimated at five thousand five hundred million, the value being over thirteen million dollars, and the number of persons employed fifty thousand. Arcachon, one of the principal French oyster-parks, has nearly 10,000 acres of oyster beds, the annual value being from eight to ten million francs; in 1884–85, 178,359,000 oysters were exported from this place alone. In the season 1889–90, 50,000 tons of oysters were consumed in London.
Few will now be found to echo the poet Gay’s opinion:
“That man had sure a palate covered o’er With brass or steel, that on the rocky shore First broke the oozy oyster’s pearly coat, And risq’d the living morsel down his throat ”
There were halcyon days in England once, when oysters were to be procured at 8d. the bushel. Now it costs exactly that amount before a bushel, brought up the Thames, can even be exposed for sale at Billingsgate (4d. porterage, 4d. market toll), and prime Whitstable natives average from 3½d. to 4d. each. The principal causes of this rise in prices, apart from the increased demand, are (1) over-dredging; (2) ignorant cultivation, and to these may be added (3) the effect of bad seasons in destroying young oysters, or preventing the spat from maturing. Our own principal beds are those
at Whitstable, Rochester, Colchester, Milton (famous for its ‘melting’ natives), Faversham, Queenborough, Burnham, Poole, and Carlingford in Co. Down, and Newhaven, near Edinburgh.
The oyster-farms at Whitstable, public and private, extend over an area of more than 27 square miles. The principal of these is a kind of joint-stock company, with no other privilege of entrance except birth as a free dredgeman of the town. When a holder dies, his interest dies with him. Twelve directors, known as “the Jury,” manage the affairs of the company, which finds employment for several thousand people, and sometimes turns over as much as £200,000 a year. The term ‘Natives,’ as applied to these Whitstable or to other English oysters, requires a word of explanation. A ‘Native’ oyster is simply an oyster which has been bred on or near the Thames estuary, but very probably it may be developed from a brood which came from Scotland or some other place at a distance. For some unexplained reason, oysters bred on the London clay acquire a greater delicacy of flavour than elsewhere. The company pay large sums for brood to stock their own grounds, since there can be no certainty that the spat from their own oysters will fall favourably, or even within their own domains at all. Besides purchases from other beds, the parks are largely stocked with small oysters picked up along the coast or dredged from grounds public to all, sometimes as much as 50s. a bushel being paid for the best brood. It is probably this system of transplanting, combined with systematic working of the beds, which has made the Whitstable oyster so excellent both as to quality and quantity of flesh. The whole surface of the ‘layings’ is explored every year by the dredge, successive portions of the ground being gone over in regular rotation, and every provision being made for the wellbeing of the crop, and the destruction of their enemies. For three days of every week the men dredge for ‘planting,’ i.e. for the transference of suitable specimens from one place to another, the separation of adhering shells, the removal of odd valves and of every kind of refuse, and the killing off of dangerous foes. On the other three days they dredge for the market, taking care only to lift such a number as will match the demand.
The Colne beds are natural beds, as opposed to the majority of the great working beds, which are artificial. They are the property of the town of Colchester, which appoints a water-bailiff to manage the concern. Under his direction is a jury of twelve, who regulate the times of dredging, the price at which sales are to be made, and are generally responsible for the practical working of the trade. Here, and at Faversham, Queenborough, Rochester, and other places, ‘natives’ are grown which rival those of Whitstable.
There can be no question, however, that the cultivation of oysters by the French is far more complete and efficient than our own, and has reached a higher degree of scientific perfection combined with economy and solid profits. And yet, between 40 and 50 years ago, the French beds were utterly exhausted and unproductive, and showed every sign of failure and decay. It was in 1858 that the celebrated beds on the Ile de Ré, near Rochelle, were first started. Their originator was a certain shrewd stone-mason, by name Boeuf. He determined to try, entirely on his own account, whether oysters could not be made to grow on the long muddy fore-shore which is left by the ebb of the tide. Accordingly, he constructed with his own hands a small basin enclosed by a low wall, and placed at the bottom a number of stones picked out of the surrounding mud, stocking his ‘parc’ with a few bushels of healthy young brood. The experiment was entirely successful, in spite of the jeers of his neighbours, and Boeuf’s profits, which soon began to mount up at an astonishing rate, induced others to start similar or more extensive farms for themselves. The movement spread rapidly, and in a few years a stretch of miles of unproductive mud banks was converted into the seat of a most prosperous industry. The general interests of the trade appear to be regulated in a similar manner to that at Whitstable; delegates are appointed by the various communities to watch over the business as a whole, while questions affecting the well-being of oyster-culture are discussed in a sort of representative assembly.
At the same time as Boeuf was planting his first oysters on the shores of the Ile de Ré, M. Coste had been reporting to the French government in favour of such a system of ostreiculture as was then
practised by the Italians in the old classic Lakes Avernus and Lucrinus. The principle there adopted was to prevent, as far as possible, the escape of the spat from the ground at the time when it is first emitted by the breeding oyster. Stakes and fascines of wood were placed in such a position as to catch the spat and give it a chance of obtaining a hold before it perished or was carried away into the open sea. The old oyster beds in the Bay of St. Brieuc were renewed on this principle, banks being constructed and overlaid with bundles of wood to prevent the escape of the new spat. The attempt was entirely successful, and led to the establishment or reestablishment of those numerous parcs, with which the French coast is studded from Brest to the Gironde. The principal centres of the industry are Arcachon, Auray, Cancale, and la Teste.
It is at Marennes, in Normandy, that the production of the celebrated ‘green oyster’ is carried out, that especial luxury of the French epicure. Green oysters are a peculiarly French taste, and, though they sometimes occur on the Essex marshes, there is no market for them in England. The preference for them, on the continent, may be traced back as early as 1713, when we find a record of their having been served up at a supper given by an ambassador at the Hague. Green oysters are not always green, it is only after they are placed in the ‘claires,’ or fattening ponds, that they acquire the hue; they never occur in the open sea. The green colour does not extend over the whole animal, but is found only in the branchiae and labial tentacles, which are of a deep blue-green. Various theories have been started to explain the ‘greening’ of the mollusc; the presence of copper in the tanks, the chlorophyll of marine algae, an overgrowth of some parasite, a disease akin to liver complaint, have all found their advocates. Prof. Lankester seems to have established[221] the fact,—which indeed had been observed 70 years before by a M. Gaillon,—that the greening is due to the growth of a certain diatom (Navicula ostrearia) in the water of the tanks. This diatom, which is of a deep blue-green colour, appears from April to June, and in September The oyster swallows quantities of the Navicula; the pigment enters the blood in a condition of chemical modification, which makes it colourless in all the other parts of the
