SOURCE: Wood, Sharon. “Women and Theater in Italy: Natalia Ginzburg, Franca Rame, and Dacia Maraini.” RLA: Romance Languages Annual 5 (1994): 343-48.

In the following essay, Wood asserts that the diverse works of Ginzburg, Franca Rame, and Dacia Maraini share connections in feminist roots.

In 1954 the American writer and theater critic Eric Bentley commented that “Italy, ever as poor in drama as she is rich in theatricality, is finding that a profession of playwrights cannot be legislated into existence even with the help of subsidies.”¹ Bentley was echoing the despair expressed by Luigi Pirandello in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore some thirty years previously: in the absence of good new writing in Italy what was there for a company to put on if not a translation of a foreign play or something by the incomprehensible Pirandello himself? And forty years on from Bentley's own essay there are those who will...