ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role that Elio Vittorini attributed to Shakespeare's theatre in transmitting a fiercely anti-Fascist message through Conversazione's subtexts. It then shows that the Shakespearean artist—an artist who is truly and profoundly engageant—constitutes the novel's hidden, "suggellato" message. The chapter explores the symbolic meanings that references to Shakespeare and his theatre convey in Vittorini's novel, paying particular attention to the allusions to Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest scattered throughout. The artist described by Vittorini is therefore reminiscent of that actor-author, magician and tamer of ghosts and spirits, victim of betrayal and rebel against tyranny and colonization despite being a "tyrant" himself—Prospero. The scene at the cemetery can therefore be read as a proleptic mise en abyme of the role that Silvestro will play towards the novel's end, impersonating that model of actor-author to which he has alluded repeatedly in references to Shakespeare and "my Shakespearean father".
