Chapter Genio nazionale versus gusto universale. Baretti interprete e apologeta di Shakespeare nella polemica contro Voltaire

Abstract

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Voltaire sparked off a fierce debate on the merits and demerits of Shakespeare’s plays, to which Baretti responded with his Discours sur Shakespeare et sur M. de Voltaire. Defending the English playwright against the charges brought against him by the French philosopher, Baretti framed what would be a fundamental tension in the transition from the Age of Enlightenment to the Romantic Age: the question of universalism, understood in terms of the opposition between “universal taste” and “national genius”. In an argument remarkable for its profundity and breadth of reference, Baretti raises issues that are still topical today, such as the process of globalization and the desire to overcome cultural boundaries and achieve a homogenization of aesthetic taste, bringing a new urgency to the dialectic between the universal and the particular.