The Murray Edwards Duse Collection

The Murray Edwards Duse Collection is the best record of Eleonora Duse's literary background. It puts before us three fundamental facts: first, her literary education began - or became active - around 1886; secondly, it assumed a nationalistic character in the early 1890s; thirdly, her intellectual evolution influenced her acting. So advanced was her artistic and literary emancipation that she was considered one of the foremost Italian aesthetes. The discovery and the reconstruction of The Collection changes in many ways the reception of her acting and of her intellectual profile, and sheds new light on her art. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection includes several books that Eleonora Duse read, and they still reveal her comments. They are a kind of knowledge-map of the accomplished erudition she promulgated in her acting. Furthermore, the Collection proves that her books are a fundamental resource in understanding the roots of her artistic profile. It could now be said there are two aspects to Duse's acting. She is first and foremost a great actress, one of the greatest in the history of theatre; but she is also an incomparable intellectual of her time. She herself was fond of pointing out, how the 'actress' and the 'intellectual' closely (and perhaps indistinguishably) interacted. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection may be considered metaphorically as Duse's gold. In many letters to her daughter Enrichetta, she referred to her books as her 'only wardrobe' and as her most valuable possessions. It brings to mind Leonardo's tomb in d'Annunzio's Dead City (La città morta, 1896). In the fifth scene of the first act, Leonardo, coming from the Gate of the Lions, screams: 'The gold, the gold [...] A terrible splendour [...]'. This 'gold' has been previously considered to be lost for ever.