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  • Published: 18 September 2014
  • ISBN: 9781910281437
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 2 hr 51 min
  • Narrators: Blake Ritson, John Hurt, David Warner, Hattie Morahan

The Divine Comedy

Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso




Blake Ritson, David Warner, Hattie Morahan and John Hurt star in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Dante's epic poem.

Blake Ritson, David Warner, Hattie Morahan and John Hurt star in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Dante's epic poem.

Inferno: Thirty-five year old Dante finds himself in the middle of a dark wood, in extreme personal and spiritual crisis. Hope of rescue appears in the form of the venerable poet Virgil, now a shade himself, who offers to lead Dante on an odyssey through the afterlife, beginning in the terrifying depths of Hell.

Purgatorio: Dante is led up Mount Purgatory by his guide. They encounter numerous souls who have embarked on the same difficult journey - one that will eventually lead to their spiritual salvation.

Paradiso: Dante's journey comes to a glorious conclusion as he is led by Beatrice, through the spheres of Paradise and into the presence of God himself. As they ascend, they encounter a number of souls who have also achieved blessedness.

Many years later, the older Dante reflects on the episodes from his life that have inspired his great poem.


©2014 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2014 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

  • Published: 18 September 2014
  • ISBN: 9781910281437
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 2 hr 51 min
  • Narrators: Blake Ritson, John Hurt, David Warner, Hattie Morahan

About the authors

Stephen Wyatt

Stephen Wyatt was born in Beckenham, Kent and brought up in Ealing in West London. He was educated at Latymer Upper School and then went on to Clare College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he directed the 1973 Footlights Revue, Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning, as well as productions of The Mikado, Handel’s Semele and Verdi’s I Due Foscari. His first full-length comedy, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, was produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. After a brief spell as Lecturer in Drama at Glasgow University, he began his career as a playwright in 1975 as writer/researcher with the Belgrade Coventry Theatre in Education team. In 1982 and 1983 he was Resident Writer with the London Bubble Theatre. Stephen has worked widely as a freelance playwright in theatre, radio and television ever since. He also has considerable experience as a teacher, workshop leader and script reader and in the creation of audio guides. The first piece he wrote for television was a play called Claws which led to his being commissioned to write Paradise Towers and then The Greatest Show in the Galaxy for Doctor Who. In 2008, his play, Memorials to the Missing, won the Tinniswood Award for best original radio script of 2007 as well as Silver in the Best Drama category of the 2008 Sony Radio Awards. He spent two years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Sussex and in the autumn of 2011 he took up a post as RLF Writing Fellow on Greenwich University’s Maritime campus. Author biography by David J. Howe, author of The Target Book, the complete illustrated guide to the Target Doctor Who novelisations.

Praise for The Divine Comedy

In a glorious adaptation of The Divine Comedy, Stephen Wyatt takes a potshot at bankers, forced to sit forever on hot sands under fiery rain.

Moira Petty, The Stage

He’s done a remarkable job. Out go the cantos and rigid rhyming structures. In comes a flowing narrative that loses none of the evocative imagery of the original. And it does Wyatt’s case no harm that the three central characters — Dante the younger, Dante the elder and Virgil, his ghostly omnipresent guide through hell, purgatory and paradise — are played by Blake Ritson, John Hurt and David Warner.

Jane Anderson, Radio Times
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