Poemetti

The performance is composed by two pieces: by William Shakespeare. The two poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The rape of Lucrece”, composed between 1593 and 1594, are the only works by Shakespeare for which the author edited personally, something that never happened either with his theatrical works or with the more famous Sonnets. They can therefore be considered as the only and certain originals of that author with uncertain contours who bears the name of William Shakespeare.
The high musical density of the award-winning shows convinced us to propose a version without a set, except for the musical one.

Venus and Adonis has been written by Shakespeare in London in 1593, when the plague was ravaging the city and the theaters were closed. Shakespeare finds inspiration and writes a small masterpiece in verse: the erotic-mythological poem Venus and Adonis. It will be, for the time, a huge success, with numerous reprints until the middle of the following century, unmissable in brothels, as well as under the pillow of great aristocratic ladies and amateurs. Venus and Adonis escapes any definition: “comic or tragic, light or profound, a hymn to the Flesh or a warning against Lust: the poem is a mixture in which all the terms of these antitheses are simultaneously true.” It is a dizzying starting point for research into the variations, declinations and contradictions of the theme “love”. But Venus and Adonis is also a sort of musical opera: “the sound editing draws on the most disparate acoustic sources, the sounds of everyday life superimposed on electronic frequencies and distortions, filtering everything with Elizabethan and contemporary music.”

The rape of Lucrece was published in 1594, the year following the printing of the twin poem Venus and Adonis. The two poems seem to form a sort of symmetrically counterpointed diptych, in which the second panel reverses the first: from the background of the first with rabbits, dogs, horses and wild boars as in a painting of Giorgione we move on to a tragic nocturne, immersed in a livid Caravaggio style darkness torn by the light of a torch. Shakespeare here deploys his very powerful language and his brilliant ability to mix horror with anti-tragic parody, with a kind of enchanting balance that engulfs us in the music of words without granting us any liberating suspension. A tense, turgid language that is crossed and supported by a restless and multifaceted sound score.