Shakespeare, Cervantes, la letteratura, il teatro e il sogno…

Nadia Fusini

Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Contributo presentato da Luigi Bolondi

Abstract

Which magical, irrational beliefs and which presuppositions, interstellar influences and astrological occult powers, induce us, post-modern men and women, mostly disenchanted, hyper-rational, if not even cynical people, to imagine that we can find a meaning in the fact that two writers like Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? And yet it is a fact: we cannot help but suspect a hidden meaning in the coincidence by which two authors, most representative of two countries so different and distant from each other, both died on April 23, 1616… Be that as it may, when two phenomena co-incide (“fall” together), the mere fact that this happens certainly produces an alienating, disturbing effect… What exactly are coincidences? If not events that bring to light a causality that is no longer, or not only rational, but “other”? “Different”? No character really resembles Don Quixote in Shakespeare. Among the various types of men that Shakespeare imagined, there is not one who has the makings of a brave hidalgo. Hamlet, in comparison, is the exact opposite: all egotism, all analysis, all skepticism. Hamlet believes in nothing, if anything he doubts everything. If he believes in something, it is in doubt: critical self-awareness is his strength. His “irony” is the exact opposite of Don Quixote’s “enthusiasm”. If Quixote is pathetic, Hamlet is cool ‒ as we would say today. And yet the two, so different, understand each other. Hamlet would have listened with interest to Don Quixote’s fables, had he met him. Returning to the proximity between these two giants, yes, it is true: Cervantes and Shakespeare are not only almost contemporaries with each other, not only do they live in the same era, and are close in imagination; but in fact, in their works, although so different, one can grasp the contradictions of existence, as they are perceived at the dawn of modernity. They are brought together by the same skepticism, the same restlessness, the same perception of an existence subject to metaphysical shudder. And at the same time a growing feeling of solitude and orphanhood, if one may say so, of the human creature in front of a universe that expands and darkens. And it is precisely in this that we feel them to be our contemporaries.

Keywords

Shakespeare, Cervantes, Theatre, Reality, Illusion, Fantasy.

© Nadia Fusini, 2025 / Doi: 10.30682/annalesm2503a

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license