Spartaco

Between 1821 and 1822 Manzoni’s creative output was very intense, spanning several literary genres successfully. During the same month or even on a single day, he was a writer of lyric poetry, a dramatist and a novelist. The relationship linking poetry, theatre and fiction in Manzoni’s intellectual life shows one genre surpassing another. Manzoni started out as a writer of lyric poetry, then became a tragedian, and finally a novelist. In 1821, however, these genres co-existed, and it was not clear even to the author himself which genre was to become his mainstay. A phase of uncertainty affected the writing of his novel: after starting the first draft, Manzoni stopped writing, not only to devote himself to the revision of his second tragedy, the Adelchi, but also to work on the project of a third tragedy, also on an historical topic, this time the story of Spartacus, the rebel gladiator of the first century B.C. who assembled a large army of slaves against Rome and was defeated only after a war that seriously took the Roman troops to task. Manzoni’s handwritten notes on this new drama (once again with a hero in unequal struggle against Power and the State) contain information on the historical sources used and indicate his planned division of the play into five main periods (these were probably to be the five acts of the tragedy). This new project almost forced Manzoni to set aside his work on the novel. In a letter of 3 November 1821, when Fermo e Lucia was still stuck at the first two chapters, he wrote to Fauriel saying that once he had finished correcting the Adelchi, he would devote himself either to the novel or to the Spartaco, depending on how he felt about each of the works. It was only after April 1822 that Manzoni abandoned the proposed tragedy completely, working constantly on his novel.