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After Filumena : Illegitimacy and Paternity in 1950s’ Italian Women’s Theatre

2019; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00751634.2019.1623521

1748-6181

Daniela Cavallaro,

Theatre and Performance Studies

The issue of illegitimacy was relevant enough to Italian society to appear in a number of plays staged and/or published even after Eduardo de Filippo’s 1946 landmark work Filumena Marturano. This article addresses plays written by Italian women between 1950 and 1960, and treating conflicts arising from the birth of children out of wedlock or suspected to be the product of an extramarital affair. The discussion of the corpus develops with reference to debates regarding the place of illegitimate children in post-war Italian society. Analysis is provided of two plays that present the case of children conceived by unmarried women and a further two treating children who were born to (supposedly) adulterous wives. Through this review of the landscape of post-war drama and society, I isolate the aspects of illegitimacy that come to light in Italian women’s theatre of the 1950s and provide new insights specific to the female-authored corpus.