JULIUS CAESAR 1935: Shakespeare and Censorship in Fascist Italy

On 1 August 1935, only a few months before Mussolini launched the colonial enterprise in Ethiopia, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was produced at the Maxentius Basilica in Rome. The performance was organised by The National Workers’ Recreational Club (O.N.D.) and the script was submitted for censorship. However, the procedure followed a different course from the usual one as the commissioner was also part of the Fascist political system. This parallel edition presents for the first time the integral script of the censored text of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in Raffaello Piccoli's 1925 Italian translation, and explores the implications of this peculiar type of censorship at the moment when, through Shakespeare, censoring became one and the same with political propaganda.