SOURCE: Zanger, Jules. “Boker's Francesca da Rimini: The Brothers' Tragedy.” Educational Theatre Journal 25, no 4 (December 1973): 410-19.

In the following essay, Zanger discusses Boker's transformation of the traditional story, which focused on Francesca and Paolo as tragic lovers, to a narrative centered around the relationship between the two brothers Paolo and Lanciotto.

The playwright, if he is adapting a religious or nationalistic myth, is relatively bound by both the narrative or historic plot and the traditional characterizations as they appear in that myth. Confined as he is, the play's characterizations, confrontations, and resolutions are necessarily inevitable and familiar to his audience. For this reason a playwright who wants the allusive richness of a mythic theme but is concerned with exercising his own creative originality, will choose a legend or historic episode to which he feels no pious or patriotic commitment. With such a theme, he may remain more or...