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Verga, Giovanni

The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre

Verga, Giovanni (1840–1922), Italian playwright, born in Sicily, better known as a novelist and short-story writer. He was, however, the only completely successful writer of tragedy in the Italian theatre between Alfieri and Pirandello, employing verismo not by formula but by conviction, his portraits of Sicilian life being unflinching confrontations of grey desperation. Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry, 1884), the first and most famous example of this movement, a dramatization of one of his own short stories which later provided the libretto for Mascagni's opera, is a sparse and swiftly moving example of Verga's power to fuse two interlinked tragedies, that of a community and that of a religious man, into a coherent whole. Comparable achievements are La lupa (The She-Wolf, 1896), a most perceptive study of female sexuality and man's rank fear of it, and La caccia al lupo (The Wolf-Hunt, 1901), where he succeeds in transmuting the melodrama of jealousy into the poignancy of inescapable aloneness. Only recently have critics come to discern the unequivocal poetry informing Verga's dramas, notably the overlooked excellence of In portineria (In the Porter's Lodge, 1885), a play set, untypically, outside Sicily, and Dal tuo al mio (From Yours to Mine, 1903), a terse and evocative analysis of the clash between two classes of society.

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© The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre 1996, originally published by Oxford University Press 1996.

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