“Ink and paper": A Study on the English Editions and the Italian Translations of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra boasts a peculiar typographical and editorial history, as several variations differentiate the text published in 1623 from the copies that were printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. On the one hand, such redactions consisted of the correction of some graphical errors or the adjustment of the lines of the script in order to ‘fit the page’ before printing the book. On the other hand, the Shakespearian text was altered following the aesthetic taste of the editors. Nevertheless, such copies ineluctably affected the English contemporary editions as well as the Italian translations of the selected Roman play that were published from the nineteenth century onwards. Organised into 3 sections – the first and the second one aimed at reconstructing the history of both the English and the Italian editions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra; the last one presenting two case studies of literary translation –, the present essay seeks to understand how the evolution of both the editorial tendencies and the translations has impinged upon the structure as well the stylistic features of the tragedy, consequently affecting its reception.