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Shakespeare by Franco Marucci refrains from applying from outside forced theoretic keys or a priori and partisan totalizing visions of the literary. Always acting with scrupulous adherence to the text it tries to bring to light, in the awareness that every new book on Shakespeare is inevitably a rearrangement of previous interpretations, the major conceptual, dialectical, symbolic and epistemic conflicts emerging from the works. The analysis moves from a general assessment of Shakespeare’s macrotext, summarizes the critical reception since its onset, traces a tentative biography of the playwright, discusses the youthful poems and the sonnets and deals extensively with the plays one by one. The traditional division of dramas into thematic and chronological conventional subsets (such as historical dramas, euphuistic comedies, Roman dramas, middle and later comedies, great tragedies, final romances) is basically accepted but promoting some of the plays from the category of the ‘experimental’ to that of the ‘mature dramas’.


Franco Marucci is a former professor of English at the University of Venice “Ca’ Foscari”. His publications include books on Dylan Thomas (Ravenna 1976), Hopkins (Pisa 1977, Florence-Messina 1981, Washington 1994), and Joyce  (Rome 2013). He is also the author of History of English Literature (Oxford 2018-2019),  of Authors in Dialogue: Comparative Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century English Literature (Oxford 2020) and of Letteratura inglese. Un profilo storico (Rome 2020).

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