The Adaptation of French Comedy Before Italian Unification: A Study and Observations on the Italian Transposition of Eugène Scribe

Abstract In terms of theatrical experience, the Italian nineteenth century is a special case on the European scene. The activity of dramatic writing and the scenic realization of the peninsula depend on French dramaturgy and Parisian repertoires. With this contribution, and thanks to a small corpus of fifteen unpublished texts from the 1830s, I propose to analyse the manuscripts of the Italian translations of Eugène Scribe’s work. We will examine the linguistic, cultural and structural interventions practised by the actress-adaptor Gaetana Rosa in her Italian translation for the Compagnia Reale Sarda . We will discover that the constraints imposed by the geopolitical context and the economic constraints of the theatre strongly influence the translation process and the evolution of prose in Italy.