‘O omnivorous powers, hail!’

Dialogue in historical films is often the weakest component of the presumed ‘authenticity’ of the vision of the past to which they aspire. Its artificiality is especially evident in productions about ancient worlds, because the historical characters typically speak in a language which has nothing to do with the reality presented on the screen, yet somehow needs to convey the idea of diachronic distance and diversity. This chapter will examine the stylistic strategies used by the screenwriters of Quo Vadis in order to create a dialogue functional to the film’s ideological message, but at the same time sufficiently credible and ‘authentic’. Special attention will be paid to the way the scripts deal with forms of address and with military or honorific titles, as these are usually the most important and evident signals of ‘historicity’ in film dialogues. From this point of view, the verbal strategies of Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951) are rather complex and multilayered, and they will be the focal point of the analysis. Produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, the film relied heavily on the strategy of presentism, clearly audible in large chunks of the dialogue. On the other hand, as part of a ‘trustworthy’ reconstruction of classical antiquity, its cinematographic speech had to be at least superficially compatible with the image of imperial Rome. Finally, Quo Vadis also drew generously on its literary source and adapted for the screen some of the novel’s elegant, literary dialogues. The chapter will also examine the relation between the cinematographic and literary dialogue in two later adaptations to screen: Franco Rossi’s 1985 TV miniseries and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Polish heritage production (2001).

Horror amid Sweetness

Postcards, once an important form of communication which has now been driven out of contemporary culture by emails and other instant messages, are the least known among the metatexts of Sienkiewicz’s novel. The time of the novel’s creation and the fact that it was quickly recognized as a bestseller contributed to the production of numerous postcards that presented scenes and characters from Quo vadis. They deserve attention not only for their artistic variety (style, technique, format, and so on), but also for their coexistence with kitsch. The presence of this aesthetic category in intersemiotic interpretations of Sienkiewicz’s work implies the need for determining which parts of the novel particularly encourage kitsch. Postcards referring directly to Quo vadis reveal the presence of different types of kitsch. Due to the novel’s subject matter, religious, erotic, and patriotic kitsch are observed most often, followed by the kitsch of death and suffering. In order to understand the connection between Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and kitsch, it is not enough to determine its types. Kitsch on postcards tends to be integrated into an intertextual and periphrastic strategy. Whether through the vehicle of a photograph, watercolour painting, oil painting, engraving, or sculpturography, the purpose of creators of illustrations was usually to put across the idea of the novel and its aesthetic value. Importance was also attached to the expectations of potential purchasers of postcards, both those who had and those who had not read Quo vadis. Thus, the postcards are valuable evidence not only of the artistic interpretation of the novel in different semiotic systems but also of the perception of ancient Rome in twentieth-century European culture.

Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources

Sienkiewicz had to dress the characters of Quo vadis in period garments. Their descriptions rarely appear, but they are highly suggestive of how the author understood ancient Rome and tried to recreate it in his work. Sienkiewicz gives detailed descriptions of costumes only when they concern the most important figures in his novel, or if clothing plays an important role in the plot. The rest of the protagonists are treated as collective characters whose clothing is identified only in terms of togas, stolae, or the robes of the poor. Beside the ubiquitous tunic, other Latin names of clothing primarily indicate the status of characters or are mentioned when Sienkiewicz uses clothes to disguise them. In those cases, the ubiquitous tunic receives an adjectival descriptor of colour or shade, which in the world of Quo vadis has a differentiating function. The names of the characters’ outfits have their origins in Roman literature. The terms introduced in the novel allow for an easy recreation of the author’s reading list, which consists of the basic works of a classical education—Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Pliny, Horace, Propertius, Juvenal, Martial. Sometimes Sienkiewicz mixes his classical terminology with those of ecclesiastical Latin, creating an unintendedly humorous effect. However, the writer’s use of costume colour seems to have been inspired by the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Henryk Siemiradzki. This chapter will explore the very close relationship between text and paintings, and utilizes Sienkiewicz’s colour coding to pinpoint some of the images on which he drew.

Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the United States, 1896–1905

The immense success of Quo vadis in the United States prompted widespread interest in both its most interesting character, Petronius, and in its account of the reign of Nero. Although Sienkiewicz mentions the Satyricon only briefly, in the period following the novel’s appearance new translations of the Cena Trimalchionis were published, along with editions intended for students of Latin, despite the Satyricon’s earlier reputation as decadent and its association with pornography. Sienkiewicz’s sympathetic portrayal of Petronius was probably responsible for making this reception of the Cena possible. The general educated public was also concerned about the historical basis of Quo vadis. Readers who found the novel too sensational, as many did, not surprisingly also questioned its historical accuracy. Debates about the novel also show the complex influence of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which accepts Tacitus’s account of Nero’s persecution, but more generally argues that Christian accounts of persecutions are exaggerated. American critics of Quo vadis applied Gibbon’s arguments about Diocletian’s persecution to Nero’s. Academics who provided expert guidance seem uncritical compared to ancient historians today: while they point out that Tacitus did not have personal knowledge of Nero’s reign, they do not consider his sources or methods.

Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy (1900–1925)

In Italy, from the beginning of the twentieth century, illustrated editions of Quo vadis multiply, starting from that of Treves with drawings by Minardi (1901), down to the popular edition by ‘Gloriosa’ (1921). Related paratexts from the novel and its two cinematic adaptations by Guazzoni (1913) and D’Annunzio–Jacoby (1924) flank these numerous illustrated editions, such as a series of photosculptures by Mastroianni and postcards displaying scenes from the films. Sienkiewicz’s novel itself works on several levels, each one involving a large audience: from a popular one to educated readers. The illustrated editions and postcard series will be dealt with as paratexts, analysed not in terms of their aesthetics or fidelity to the plot but as elements widening the interpretation of Quo vadis in the context of Italian society and culture of that time, and taking into consideration the expectations of an Italian audience. Placed in editions of the novel, the iconographic choices displayed in the illustrations play the role of glosses, or even act as the voices of readers/viewers. Thanks to these paratexts, the novel gains new meanings. Our inquiry has been limited to the period 1900 to 1930, to coincide with the end of the silent-film era and the fading of the echo caused by D’Annunzio and Jacoby’s film. The two films will be the constant iconographic reference point because of their accumulation of all the preceding illustration strategies for Quo vadis and their influence on the subsequent typology of illustrations in a continuous circulation of media.

Introduction

The introduction to this edited collection on the historical novel Quo vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero explores the initial cultural context of the novel’s publication in 1896 and its reception in Poland as an astounding work of high literature. It also summarizes how the novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz came to cross national boundaries, cultural categories, and media to gain a long and rich afterlife in the popular culture of Western Europe and the United States. The introduction considers the novel and its afterlife as an exceptional example of the reception of classical antiquity. The introduction explores how the historical novel provided a powerful discursive structure through which to explore Christian faith and resistance to tyranny. It also argues that analysis of Quo vadis and its multimedial transformations decentres the West and elite culture as sites of classical reception, reveals the particularities and the influence of the Polish classical tradition, and demonstrates how and why classics and popular culture converge.

‘A more permanent world’

This chapter traces the long production history of Quo Vadis at MGM, beginning in the mid-1930s and including an unsuccessful attempt to bring Sienkiewicz’s novel to the screen during the Second World War. It examines the predominantly economic factors which led to the film being made as a ‘runaway’ production, initially bound for locations in Italy and studios in London but ultimately realized as an all-Italian production based at the revived Cinecittà studio. MGM’s need to repatriate revenues which had been temporarily blocked by the Italian government was instrumental in this decision: their money could not be withdrawn from Italy directly, but it could be invested in local production and then exported back to America as materials for a film. This chapter also considers the legacy of Quo Vadis, both in Italy and America. The film’s success not only propelled a cycle of highly profitable epic movies set in the ancient world but also established a model for relocating big-budget film production overseas. Giulio Andreotti later claimed that the film ‘did more for Italy than the Marshall Plan’, but others have been less sanguine about the industrial restructuring which occurred in its wake. More than sixty years later, overseas production (buttressed by an array of tax-incentive schemes) remains a key element in the American film and TV industry’s global reach. In this context, the transnational production history of Quo Vadis is perhaps more relevant than ever.

Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel

Quo vadis?, directed by Enrico Guazzoni in 1913, is still one of the most faithful film adaptations of the novel by Sienkiewicz. When the silent feature came to cinemas around the world, the story was already familiar to the majority of the audience, due to the popular success of the book and a proliferation of many derivative works, especially theatrical. In various ways, these adaptations developed audiences’ previous knowledge of the plot and the characters. Some of them were set in an openly illustrative relationship; others focused on a single narrative thread of the novel. The most complex examples, especially the 1909 opera by Jean Nouguès, offered a skilled concentration of the plot in a few scenes that were complex both in terms of narrative and staging. The director Guazzoni was quite familiar with the ‘horizons of expectation’ that adaptations of such a popular novel created, but he decided to use them differently. In his film, faithfulness to the original text became the most important trait of a new, ambitious staging strategy: the protection of the plot’s complexity and its spatial fragmentation. Performing a comparative analysis of the narrative spaces in Guazzoni’s film and in a few theatrical adaptations, this chapter delves into two different examples of interaction between the original novel, the adaptation, and viewer expectations: the centripetal model, in which the most important quality is the ability to synthesize, and the centrifugal one, based precisely on fidelity to the original text and to historical accuracy.

Ursus as a Serial Figure

This article examines the transtextual legacy of Ursus in Italian cinema from the silent period to the popular ‘sword-and-sandal’ genre of the 1950s and 1960s. We discuss Ursus as a blueprint for Maciste, the iconic strongman created by Gabriele D’Annunzio for one of the biggest international hits of early Italian epic cinema, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914). We then discuss the persistence of the strongman icon in the following years, in relation to such topics as the emergence of physical culture during the first decades of the twentieth century, and the escalation of fascist culture and politics in the 1920s. The reappearance of Ursus in the late 1950s, in the second wave of the strongman genre, offers the opportunity to further discuss this figure in terms of both transnational reception and gender representation, exploring the multiple paths of its cultural circulation and appropriation.

Comparing the Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the United States, 1896–1913

Shortly after the Boston publisher Little, Brown and Company issued Jeremiah Curtin’s English translation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis: A Tale of the Time of Nero, it was soon compared in American newspapers to Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The plot of Wallace’s novel, published in 1880 and by 1896 the most commercially successful American novel of its generation, concluded before the reign of Nero, so Sienkiewicz’s novel was widely perceived as a chronological sequel or historical comparandum to Ben-Hur. Comparisons ranged from publication announcements to advertising to literary analyses in contemporary newspapers. Similarly, when large-budget dramatic adaptations of both Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur were in development and production during the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a perceived head-to-head competition. This chapter reviews the contrasting backgrounds of the authors—Wallace being an American evangelical, Sienkiewicz a Polish Catholic—and the parallel successes of Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur during this period (mostly before the American premier of Guazzoni’s film) in the arenas of literature, drama, film, and business commerce. Its source material consists mostly of reviews, advertising, and analyses published in contemporary American newspapers.