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# 68 • SEPTEMBER 21 , 2015
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GREAT ITALIANS OF THE PAST:
Eleonora Duse
By Giovanni Verde
Eleonora Duse has been one of the most
important actresses of the Italian theater scene of the nineteenth century. Her
style marked the era of modern theater
and her love affairs linked her forever to
one of the greatest contemporary poets: Gabriele D’Annunzio. Eleonora Duse
was born in Vigevano, in Lombardy, on
October 3, 1858.
She spends her childhood with her parents, Vincenzo and Angelica, and at age
4 she plays the part of Cosette in a stage
version of Les Miserables. In 1879 she
becomes part of Cesare Rossi’s Compagnia Semistabile di Torino, where she
grows her poetic made of gathering the
legacy of the past while breaking with
the tradition of the first mid-nineteenth
century.
In the 80s of the nineteenth century Eleonora Duse makes choices that will be
decisive for her career. Given the absen-
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ce of a defined dramaturgy in Italy, Eleonora Duse almost always chooses plays
that come from the so called French
pièce bien faite: modern, worldly, with a
strong appeal for the changed tastes of
the renewed public in the second part of
the XIX century.
Duse would undermine bourgeois values, representing them as they truely
are. In Duse’s hands, the drama of Sardou and Dumas become plays ready to
be dismantled and rebuilt, following her
idea of the world. These are the most
difficult issues, the ones that the great
actress loves to face, complex issues that
characterize and put in crisis the Western
society the late XIX century: money, sex,
family, the role of women. From Eleonora Duse’s re-readings comes out the
portrait of a society which is respectable
but actually hypocritical, gleaming in the
window but rotten in substance, hegemony by money, god controller of each