ABSTRACT
Verdi and Shakespeare share much common ground as professional men of the stage. Unlike Shakespeare, Verdi was never embedded in a company as such, but he was intensely fastidious about what he expected of his performers. Such professional affinities between Verdi and Shakespeare, as dramatists of one kind or another, belong of course primarily to the perspective of later generations. Verdi's love of Shakespeare verged on idolatry and although he based more operas on Schiller in the end, it was Shakespeare who commanded his lifelong artistic loyalty. Verdi, unable to read a single line by Shakespeare in English, nevertheless thought that, of all the plays, King Lear was most powerful. Among Verdi's operas, Rigoletto probably has deepest affinities with the unrealised King Lear. Verdi's craving for authenticity is reflected both in the opera's occasionally literal adherences to the Shakespearean text, as in the dagger soliloquy, and in its lavish recreations of scenes from the play, notably the banquet scene.
