The volume The Italian Method of la drammatica: its Legacy and Reception includes the long and complex investigation to identify the Italian acting-code system of the drammatica used by nineteenth-century Italian actors such as Adelaide Ristori, Giovanni Grasso, Tommaso Salvini, Eleonora Duse. In particular, their acting inspired Stanislavsky who reformedtwentieth-century stage. The declamatory code of the drammatica was composed by symbols for notation of voice and gesture which Italian actors marked in their prompt-books.The discovery of the drammatica’s code sheds new light on nineteenth-century acting. Having deciphered the phonetic symbols of the code, Anna Sica has given birth an investigation with a group of outstanding scholars in an attempt to explore the drammatica’s legacy, and its reception in Europe as well as in Asia. At this stage new evidence has emerged proving that, for instance, the symbol used by the drammatica actors to sign the colorito vocale was known to English actors in the second half of the nineteenth century.By noting how Adelaide Ristori passed on her art to Irving’s actress Genevieve Ward, and how Stanislavsky, almost aflame, moulded his system from Duse’s acting, an unexplored variety in the reception of the drammatica’s legacy is revealed.

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

The 1916 silent film Cenere (Ashes) features the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) in her only cinematic role. In her meditative approach to her craft, she reprised for the screen all the "mother roles" she had created for the theater. Marking the film's 100th anniversary, this collection of essays brings together for the first time in English a range of scholarship. The difficulties involved in the making of the film are explored--Duse's perfectionism was too advanced for the Italian movie industry of the 1910s. Her work is discussed within the creative, political and historical context of the silent movie industry as it developed in wartime Italy.

With its physical beauty and kaleidoscopic cultural background, Sicily has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers. Twelve new essays by international scholars--and additional writings from directors Roberta Torre, Giovanna Taviani, and Costanza Quatriglio--seek to offset the near-absence of scholarship focusing on the relationship between the Mediterranean island and cinema. Touching on class relations, immigration, gender and poverty, the essays examine how Sicily is depicted in fiction, satire and documentaries. Situated between North and South, East and West, innovation and tradition, authenticity and displacement, Sicily acts as a microcosm of the world, a place to explore numerous narratives and develop intercultural dialogue. It is also the center of cinematographic discussions and events such as the Taormina Film Festival and the SalinaDocFest. The volume presents Sicily almost as a character and creator in its own right.

The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold brings together a wealth of scholarship on one of the foremost innovators in European theatre. It presents a detailed picture of the Russian director’s work from when it first emerged on the modern stage to its multifarious present-day manifestations. By combining an historical focus with the latest contemporary research from an international range of perspectives and authors, this collection marks an important moment in Meyerhold studies as well as offering a new assessment of his relation to today's theatre-making. Its dynamic blend of research is presented in five sections: Histories enlarges on more conventional subjects like the grotesque and Biomechanics, to overlooked topics such as Meyerhold's ‘failed’ projects and his work in film; Collaborations and Connections extends understandings of Meyerhold’s well-known collaborative capacities to consider new cultural influences and lesser known working relationships; Sources engages with hitherto untapped material in Meyerhold’s oeuvre by reproducing and contextualising previously untranslated primary sources on his work; Practitioner Voices offer lively, on the ground, testimony of the contemporary impact of Meyerhold's practice; Meyerhold in New Contexts maps the routes of his practice across continents and examines ways in which his work is being applied in a number of contemporary scenarios, such as motion capture, computer-based 3D visualisations, and the ‘new normal’ of digital pedagogy. This is a key resource for students and scholars of European Theatre, acting theory, and actor training, as well as for those more broadly interested in the socio-political impact of theatre.

These proceedings contain the final versions of the papers presented at the 7th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP), held in Ispra, Italy, on September 11–12, 2008. The aim of the FSMNLP workshops is to bring together members of the research and industrial community working on finite-state based models in language technology, computational linguistics, web mining, linguistics and cognitive science on one hand, and on related theory and methods in fields such as computer science and mathematics on the other. Thus, the workshop series is a forum for researchers and practitioners working on applications as well as theoretical and implementation aspects. The special theme of FSMNLP 2008 was high performance finite-state devices in large-scale natural language text processing systems and applications. The papers in this publication cover a range of interesting NLP applications, including machine learning and translation, logic, computational phonology, morphology and semantics, data mining, information extraction and disambiguation, as well as programming, optimization and compression of finite-state networks. The applied methods include weighted algorithms, kernels and tree automata. In addition, relevant aspects of software engineering, standardization and European funding programmes are discussed.