Book Review: Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives by Silvia Bigliazzi

Abstract

How does one define ‘crisis’, that convenient holdall, bandied by – you name them – parents griping about their teenagers, but also politicians, journalists, economists, sociologists, art critics, psychologists, and Shakespeareans? Whether in the singular or the plural, with or without qualifiers, ‘crisis’ is a convenient tag for a wide range of individual and collective experiences. In her afterword to Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives, Silvia Bigliazzi, editor and principal contributor of this intellectually compelling volume, warns that ‘[i]deas of “permanent crisis” as a succession or concomitance of different undifferentiated destabilising factors have long prompted overuse of the word, making the pathology almost undiagnosable’ (p. 279). Also, how long does a crisis last? Does a situation that becomes endemic still qualify as a crisis, or does it become another form of normality – in a given historical, geographical and cultural context? This would suggest a degree of relativity: what may seem exceptional in one place and time may be, or become, the norm elsewhere. Certainly, the current pandemic and its consequences illustrate how a global threat is reconfigured by national, regional, social and individual factors that produce multiple intersecting responses to what one can confidently consider is a global crisis. Within Europe, Italy seems an appropriate hunting-ground to try and track down the notion of crisis within a turbulent national context that combines creative resilience with what Bigliazzi describes as a ‘diffuse longterm sense of crisis’ (p. 279). Engagement with Shakespeare provides a compelling narrative thread. Framed by an introduction and afterword, this collection of seven essays spans a century book-ended by two centennial celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth, 1916 and 2016. In her introduction, Bigliazzi sets out a transdisciplinary toolbox. She recalls the three basic models of crisis defined by Reinhart Koselleck, that may be identified individually and collectively, in a variety of combinations: permanent, or systemic crisis; iterative crisis, which can produce progress; and crisis as final decision, identifying ‘an absolute turning point’ (p. 7). All three models have become familiar over the past century in a country like Italy, inspiring intellectual and artistic responses. Bigliazzi draws attention to the disjunctive, destabilising nature of crisis: