Divine Comedy in Pop Culture

As we saw with our presentation last week, many artists, writers, and poets have been inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and have incorporated it indirectly or directly into their pieces. We covered a good bit of the visual arts, but there are still a lot of literature and film references out there. The following are some examples:

1) Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales: The Monk's Tale (describes the dire situation Count Ugolino was in)

2) Lemony Snicket dedicated his works (Series of Unfortunate Events) to a deceased lover, Beatrice. Later, we find out that Beatrice actually refers to the Baudelaires' (if you're familiar with the books) mother. Beatrice was inspired by Beatrice Portinari, who was Dante's inspiration and love interest.

3) Stephen King in his Wizard and Glass has a scene in which all the characters have to pass through a gate that says "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

4) In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Jack Sparrow references the ninth circle of Hell.

5) Ghostbusters II: The mayor says that the city of New York was being "sucked down into the tenth level of Hell.

6) In Law and Order: SVU, an actress in the play recounting Dante's Inferno is raped on stage during the Second Circle, where the sin is lust.

There are so many more, and I encourage you all to check out the list I linked below and see if you can recognize some of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri_and_the_Divine_Comedy_in_popular_culture