Italian Dance Tradition and Translation in Romeo and Juliet: From Narrative Sources to Shakespeare

This article examines the intertextuality concerning the ball scene in Romeo and Juliet’s Italian and French narrative sources, comparing them with the Shakespearean text, with a double aim. On the one hand, I will try to understand how the carnivalesque Italian masked ball, or masquerade, present in the whole intertextual chain (from Da Porto to Shakespeare), acquires a new significance when taken onstage in late-sixteenth-century England. On the other hand, the omission of the so-called ballo del torchio or del cappello (Torch or Bonnet Dance), understood as a dance-within-the-masque moment in the sources, and its resemanticisation through the persistence of the symbolism of the torch/light in Shakespeare’s tragedy, will be analysed. In both cases, I will argue, the cultural and semantic shift of the dances performed or removed is a direct consequence of their de-Mediterraneanisation (Morris 2003) and change of chronotopic coordinates. My contrastive analysis has been facilitated by the SENS archive (Shakespeare’s Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and Their European Dissemination) developed at the University of Verona (https://sens.skene.univr.it/shakespeares-works/romeoand- juliet/) and carried out by treating the main narrative sources, or sources proximate, and their target text as a trilingual parallel corpus. Specific parts of text, verses and scenes have been compared and contrasted thanks to the text(ual) segmentation of each text available on the website.