Kings and Clowns: The (non) sense of the tragicomic

Rossella Ciocca is Professor of English and Anglophone Literatures and Coordinator of the PhD Programme in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. Her publications include volumes on Shakespeare (Il cerchio d’oro. I re sacri nel teatro shakespeariano, 1987; La musica dei sensi. Amore e pulsione nello Shakespeare comico-romantico, 1999). She has translated and edited The Taming of the Shrew and King John for the Bompiani Edition of Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Her more recent research and teaching interests include Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Colonial History, South Asian, Diasporic and Indian Literatures, Anglophone Literature of Globalization. Her published works include a volume on the literary representations of otherness from early modern to pre-modernist periods (I volti dell’altro. Saggio sulla diversità, 1990), essays on contemporary South Asian writers, Shakespearean appropriations in the Indian Subcontinent, the Partition of India, the city of Mumbai’s fiction, sustainability and ecocriticism in the Global South. She has edited with Sanjukta Das Gupta, Adivasi Histories, Stories, Visual Arts and Performances (Anglistica AION An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19.1, 2015); with Neelam Srivastava the volume Indian Literature and The World (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017) and has edited with Alex Tickell  Millennium’s Children. New Trends in South-Asian Postmillennial Anglophone Literature (Textus, XXXIII, 3, 2020). 

Bianca Del Villano is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Her research interests span pragmatics, stylistics, cognitive and literary linguistics. She is currently working on (im)politeness in early modern drama and in eighteenth-century scientific texts. Her publications include Using the Devil with Courtesy. Shakespeare and the Language of (Im)politeness (Peter Lang, 2018). She is the Director of the Argo Centre (Studies in Argumentation, Pragmatics and Stylistics).