Abstract
In “Telling Lives, Staging Silences: Dacia Maraini’s ‘Biographical’ Theater,” Alex Standen investigates Maraini’s adaptation of canonical plays by Friedrich Schiller (Mary Stuart) and Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade), and depiction of historical female figures. Standen argues that in rewriting the canon, Maraini subverts traditional discourse by evincing what has been absent from the reading of history, namely, women’s voices and points of view and their interpretations of both inner self and public events. For those historical figures known in the public sphere, Standen shows how Maraini’s plays bring to the stage the women’s inner and private lives, rather than their well-known public biographies. As a result, Standen concludes, Maraini’s plays exhibit those parts that have been silenced by history and public representation.
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Standen, A. (2017). Telling Lives, Staging Silences: Dacia Maraini’s “Biographical” Theater. In: Picchietti, V., Salsini, L. (eds) Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture . Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40835-4_8
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