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

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra boasts a peculiar typographical and editorial history. Despite the fact that the version contained in the so-called First Folio is “the only authoritative” (Ridley 1954: VII), several variations differentiate the text published in 1623 from the copies that were printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Nevertheless, such copies ineluctably affected the English contemporary editions as well the Italian translations of the selected Roman play that were published from the nineteenth century onwards. The present paper aims to reconstruct the history of both the English and the Italian editions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in order to understand how the evolution of both the translation theories and the editorial tendencies have shaped the structure as well the stylistic features of the tragedy, consequently affecting its reception.