Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
In Episode 6 of Season 3 of the HBO television series Succession, Kendall Roy describes the planned theme of his upcoming 40th birthday: “ End Times: Weimar meets Carthage meets Dante meets AI and antibiotic-resistant superbugs.”
Succession has been featured multiple times on our website: see another reference from Season 1 here and a promotional poster citing here.
“Succession is an HBO series created by Jesse Armstrong which showcases a fictional battle between four adult siblings to succeed their father, Logan Roy, as CEO of Waystar/Royco, a multibillion-dollar media conglomerate.
“In Season 1, Episode 8, entitled ‘Prague,’ Roman Roy, one of Logan Roy’s four adult children, recites a line from Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter.’ This is a variation of line 9 of this canto as translated into English by John Ciardi in 1954, the full line being ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'” –Contributor Cesca Craig
See also the related post on HBO’s Succession here.
Photo and citing contributed by Cesca Craig (University of Arkansas, ’23)
The fourth season of Hulu’s dystopian drama The Handmaid’s Tale (based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name) features two characters roaming the ruins of a bombed-out Chicago (episode 5, “Chicago,” 2021). While attempting to trade resources with other rebels, the two handmaids find themselves hiding from Gilead soldiers in the wreckage of Chicago’s Dante’s Pizzeria. Below, a still from the show (which you can watch here, Hulu subscription required):
See our previous post for Dante’s Pizzeria, with two Chicago locations, here.
On the ITV drama Downton Abbey, in season three, episode eight, Matthew Crawley says “This is like the outer circle from Dante’s Inferno!” (Downton Abbey, ITV, February 10, 2013)
Contributed by Victoria Nicholls (The Bolles School, ’22)
In season four of the Netflix drama Lucifer, the second episode is titled “Somebody’s Been Reading Dante’s Inferno.” (Lucifer, Netflix, May 8, 2019)
Contributed by Audrey Cheng (The Bolles School, 22′)
