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The Young Verdi and Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1974

David R. B. Kimbell
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Extract

One of Shakespeare's most eloquent eighteenth-century apologists was an Italian: Dr. Johnson's good friend Giuseppe Baretti, who had acquired the taste during his residence in London in the 1750s. When Johnson's Shakespeare edition appeared, Baretti, now back in Italy again, wrote to request a copy: he wished, he explained, ‘to expound the great tragedian to the ladies of Italy’. Baretti was as good as his word, writing in the literary magazine Frusta in January 1764 of this poet who ‘in both the tragic and the comic style stands quite alone, ahead of all the Corneilles, all the Racines, and all the Molières of Gaul’. And it was Baretti who took up arms against Voltaire, whose prestige as a Shakespeare critic had been hitherto unquestioned in France and Italy, publishing in 1777 his Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 101 , 1974 , pp. 59 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Arturo Graf, L'Anglomania e l'influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII, Turin, 1911, p. 317.Google Scholar

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