>A choreographer at New York City Ballet intends to stage Nathaniel
>Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," and has asked me if I know of any
>Italian or Clasical antecedents to this short story (aka "The Daughter of
>Signor Rappaccini"). Since I am in a small Italian town with limited
>bibliographic resources for the summer, I hope that someone might be able
>to point me in the right direction for an answer. I believe that Octavio
>Paz did a dramatization of the story, but I know of no other staging of
>the Hawthorne piece.
>
For what it may be worth, L. A. Cuddy, "The Purgatorial Garden of Hawthorne
and Dante: Irony and Redefinition in _Rappaccini's Daughter_", _Modern
Language Studies_, 17 (1987), no. 1: 39-53, argues that the Earthly
Paradise episode in Dante's _Purgatorio_ (cantos XXVIII-XXXIII) is "the
likely, if ironic, source" for the setting of the story.
Steven Botterill
Associate Professor of Italian Literature
Graduate Adviser, Department of Italian Studies
Acting Chair, Italian/Scandinavian/Slavic Administrative Cluster
6303 Dwinelle Hall #2620
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2620
(510) 642-6246 (voice)
(510) 642-9884 (FAX)
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