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Sacchetti, Livia

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Livia Sacchetti primarily works on twentieth-century drama and Shakespeare studies. She is interested in posthumanist approaches to literature; contemporary notions of ecology and dark ecology; spacetime on stage. She also works on the evolution of the tragedy and the tragic, and posthuman feminism. At John Cabot, she teaches a variety of courses, including several courses on Shakespeare.

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Mirror Acts: Dramatic Form in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
    (2024) Sacchetti, Livia
    Pirandello is among the first playwrights to reshape the very notion of theatre and pave the way for a postmodern understanding of the human. By fixing one of drama’s cardinal axes—space—and making it simultaneously literal and inherently static—Pirandello frees the other—time—thereby undoing the core of the dramatic arc. This simple shift repositions both plot and characters, placing them in a cosmology which tauntingly ignores them. Their experience—and by extension the human experience—becomes inherently aimless. In this latter light, Pirandello’s characters are an anticipation of Beckett’s. While this is indubitably an important point of contact between the two, it is the similarity in their structural redefinition of spacetime, that allows both to pave the way for a pivotal revolution of form that will bloom in the works of their heirs—Pinter and Stoppard, primarily—and anticipate postdramatic theatre. In this light, Six Characters in Search of an Author, first staged in Rome and Paris in 1921 a time when Beckett would have been exposed to a response to it, plants a lasting seed.
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    Entropy: the Centripetal Force Governing Stoppard's Arcadia
    (Lithos, 2024) Sacchetti, Livia
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    Can the Subaltern Reclaim the Father’s Tongue?: Shakespeare’s Caliban and Shelley's Creature
    (Salem Press, 2024) Sacchetti, Livia
    Both Mary Shelley and William Shakespeare frame the problematic relationship between an oppressed creature and its oppressor within the context of language and, specifically, the creature’s ability to speak their “lapsed” father’s tongue and reclaim their identity in the process. In this comparative reading, Livia Sacchetti discusses how the correlation between a father figure and an oppressor illuminates the power dynamic intrinsic to domination: one that imposes control through the systemic and epistemic establishment of superiority.
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    Illusioni e Illusionisti in Romeo and Juliet
    (2002) Sacchetti, Livia
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    Arthur Miller and American Tragedy
    (2020) Sacchetti, Livia
    Although Miller’s approach to tragedy has roots in the Greeks and Ibsen, his vision is fundamentally American, based on hopes and delusions embodied in the American Dream. Rejecting the ahistoricism of theater of the absurd, Miller based his tragedies on characters’ confrontations with the way their present has inevitably emerged from betrayals in their past. In Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, the characters’ struggles with a past that irremediably controls them blend with America’s political need to rewrite the darker undertones of its roots in terms of the myth of the self-made man, the potential for justice to become persecution, and the challenges of integration, charging Miller’s tragedy with a poignant political edge, one that is ever more relevant today. Further, his specific and innovative approach to temporality makes his plays a reflection of the postmodern mindset and stretches the very fabric of tragedy, imbuing it with the unsettling quandaries of modernity.
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    “A Gap in Nature”: Rewriting Cleopatra Through Antony and Cleopatra’s Cosmology
    (2018) Sacchetti, Livia
    This chapter investigates Shakespeare’s rewriting of Plutarch’s Cleopatra as crucial in his deconstruction and re-creation of her character. He uncovers the infinitely varied power that constituted her queenship, devising a new archetype of femininity, while liberating her from the need to be measured in relation to a male counterpart or the Roman gaze. The creation of two parallel images of the queen—the one that takes the stage and the imaginative one—generates the “gap in nature” that propels the action forward, engendering the tension between two dimensions—the frail one of mortals and the timeless one of legends. This tension stretches toward infinity (as defined by Levinas) and allows Cleopatra to script her own ending, consigning her vibrant agency to history’s subconscious.