Between Stereotype and Sedition: Romantic-Era Geo-Histories of the Italian South on the London Stage

This essay aims to explore the extent to which representations of the Italian Southern territories in British Romantic-era theatrical culture can be coherently read within the discursive flow underlying the formation of European identity, as delineated in recent scholarship. In Roberto Dainotto’s challenging construal, the “genealogy of the concept of Europe” and “Eurocentrism” took coherent shape during the Romantic era and had wide circulation throughout the period’s European cultures. In this respect, Britain did prove to belong to a (North) European identity that was taking shape against the stereotypical construction of an internal other, i.e., its own South. In this essay, this specifically (North) European cultural dynamics is tested against a number of case studies that include both trans-historical representations of revolutionary Southern subjects – such as the multifarious stage history of Neapolitan revolutionary villain-hero Masaniello – and, specifically, the figuration/conflagration of the ebullient geography of Southern Italy. Etna and Vesuvius, the two most active and dangerous volcanoes in Europe, provided a formidable and theatrically spectacular objective correlative for the revolutionary undercurrents in post-Vienna Europe.