Florence is paying tribute to English playwright William Shakespeare with a new exhibition at the city's Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale library.
The show focuses on the Shakespeare play that has been most popular with Italian audiences over the centuries, Hamlet, as well as ground-breaking British set-designer and director Edward Gordon Craig.
Craig (1872-1966) lived and worked in Florence during the second half of his life.
The exhibition, which opened recently, features historic material from the archives of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the British Institute of Florence and the Gabinetto Vieusseux Library.
Among the highlights are editions of Hamlet in English, Italian, French and German published between the 18th and 20th centuries.
There is also material from the famous 1912 production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre, for which Craig collaborated with another great drama innovator, Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). Craig started out as an actor with the company of Sir Henry Irving but dropped that career in favour of set design when he was in his 20s.
He made a number of major contributions to modern theatre scene design.
In his early productions, he experimented with new, simple designs that set off the movements of the actors and of the light.
He was also the first to try to use the design elements of a production (scenery, costumes, lighting, etc.) to symbolize the themes and ideas of the work being performed, rather than simply recreating a realistic picture of a given scene.
Craig settled in Florence in the second decade of the 20th century and founded the Gordon Craig School for the Art of the Theatre there in 1913. He also edited an influential theatre magazine, The Mask, from the Tuscan city. The show will be open Monday to Friday, from 9am to 6:30pm and on Saturday mornings, from 9am to 1pm.
