Rome's space of plurality

The 2019 Conference of the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA) was held in Rome at Roma Tre University. Marked by the compelling, renewed topicality of its theme – ‘Shakespeare’s European Geographies: Centralities and Elsewheres’ – and the extraordinary number of more than 300 scholars in attendance, the Conference testified to the productivity of such a theme with an amazing richness of perspectives and intersecting articulations. In times of Brexit, resurgent forms of nationalism, new walls, as well as routes and borders daily redesigned by the movement of massive flows of migrant human beings, it may be proper for a convenor of a Conference held in Rome, to take advantage of this specific position to underscore the timely coincidence between theme and location. For ancient Rome, in Shakespeare’s imagination, controversially stands for ‘room’, namely for space as such, an englobing if centralising space problematised – as by Cassius in Julius Caesar, and other voices in Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline – by the agency of its constitutive, internal critique. Rome is also the place where the first ‘economic’ treaty for the foundation of the European Community (EEC) was signed on 25 March 1957, a sign of reunion on the part of six European countries, when the scenario of destruction and ruin left by the Second World War was still visible all over Europe, and, indeed, worldwide. But this is yet another story that, however, unites past and present in the name of a desired, if uneven, project of reunion. One which, seen against the backdrop of the revived early modern debate on ‘jointed’ and ‘disjointed worlds’, makes all the more symbolically timely the discussion of the geographical theme in this city. The ancient city – a conundrum of infiniteness and boundaries, thresholds and trespassing, inclusiveness and exclusion, continuity and discontinuity, eternity and ruins – cogently interrogates the reshuffled political and religious geographies of Shakespeare’s time as well as those of our new millennium, with a notion of history – and modernity – which is grounded in a permanent state of crisis and change. As best catalysed by the French poet Joachim Du Bellay (translated into English by Spenser), Rome appeared as ‘greatness’, as well as the lost referent per antonomasia, to the Renaissance traveller: ‘Thou stranger, which Rome in Rome here seekest, / and nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all’. And the greatness of its ruins stood for durability and evanescence – or else abiding mutability: ‘O World’s Inconstancy! / That which is Prologue