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Media type:
E-Article
Title:
The Young Verdi and Shakespeare
Contributor:
Kimbell, David R. B.
imprint:
Cambridge University Press (CUP), 1974
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1093/jrma/101.1.59
ISSN:
0080-4452;
2632-7724
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
<jats:p>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 <jats:italic>Frusta</jats:italic> 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 <jats:italic>Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.</jats:italic></jats:p>