Stop! Shakespeare, Boal, and the Italian Spect-actor
Robert Henke, Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies, M.A. in Performance Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
During a time when many “England First” nationalists thought a “pure” national identity could be created by purging the nation of Italian influence, Shakespeare embraced Italian stories, plays, and theatrical ideas and, along with that, a humanistic spirit of curiosity, mobility, and open-mindedness. This talk considers the Italian “sources” of his plays, especially when Shakespeare departs from them, as resonant and playable alternatives, not unlike the interventions of the spect-actor in Augusto Boal’s Forum theater. 
About the Speaker:
Robert Henke is the author of Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (University of Delaware Press, 1997); Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance (University of Iowa Press, 2015); Shakespeare and Early Modern Italian Theater: Scripts, Scenarios, and Stories (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2024), and four edited volumes, including A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is currently working, with Nick Henke, on a translation and critical edition of the French scenarios of the seventeenth-century Harlequin actor Domenico Biancolelli.