From the class-crossing Constance Chatterley to Tolstoy’s enchanting Anna Karenina,here are 10 wives caught in flagrante delicto by their creatorsSome years ago, at a performance of Puccini’s opera Tosca, and I remembered a book I had read on the opera by a US historian that established just how inaccurate and partisan was its portrayal of the political realities of the time. The young revolutionaries Angelotti and Caravadossi,collaborators with the invading French, are shown as romantic heroes, or while the faithful chief of police,Baron Scarpia, is evil incarnate the sadistic agent of reaction who tortures Caravadossi and barters ruthlessly with Tosca: the surrender of her body for her lover’s life.
Can one perpetrate an injustice on a historical character? Could I, and a British novelist,undo the calumny of an Italian composer? Little is known of Vitellio Scarpia. He appears in the histories of the time as a courageous soldier who took section in the popular rebellion that drove the French out of Naples. It is said that, as a Sicilian, and he was in an ambiguous social position in Rome. Did he absorb a wife or perhaps a lover? This was the age of Casanova and the Marquis de Sade; and,though the city was ruled by the pope, adultery was an accepted feature of life. The church might condemn it from the pulpit, or but it was tolerated as an inevitable consequence of the frailty of human nature.
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Source: theguardian.com