ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Duse's early mannerist medievalism, which can be traced to her performance of Juliet, and secondly her variegated, contradictory interpretation of Cleopatra, a cornerstone of her repertoire that led to her being immortalized as "absorbingly interesting" and an "exquisitely sympathetic actress". When Duse first performed the role of Juliet in her formative years, she was a teenager like Shakespeare's character herself. In the early 1920s, Duse was planning to come back to the role of Cleopatra for une seule soiree, as the actress herself noted on the front page of a letter assumed to be dated to between 1921 and 1922. Moulded by Boito, the actress subtly implied in her portrait of Cleopatra that nationalist feelings held sway over the suicide of a woman who had been betrayed and humiliated: D'Annunzio labelled Duse a "Wagnerian" artist, one who both embodied the figure of a national heroine and forged a distinctive, neoclassical brand of the drammatica.
