Introduction

Appropriating Italy: Towards a New Approach to Renaissance Drama

Michele Marrapodi

Various fashionable terms have been adopted and even newly coined to indicate the interplay of motifs, themes, traditions, exchanges, borrowings, and the like that marked the relationships between Italy and England in the early modern period. From the traditional idea of a given source or analogue, a written text directly affecting the author in one way or another, we have moved on to a larger process of cultural influence, mostly operating unconsciously, which has implied the existence of a deep, ultimate source, the archetypal or seminal legacy reached indirectly via the mediation of a countless number of subsequent models. This largely literary phenomenon, considered in its theoretical and applied premises by the most recent trends in comparative and intertextual studies as a novel form of critical investigation, intertwines with the notion of learning as an expression of wider cultural, ideological, and political forces circulating together within the literary text. From the creative circulation of learning, or social energy, in Stephen Greenblatts terminology, contextualizing the literary product of a given society in a certain epoch, to Cesare Segres concept of interdiscursivity applied to wider cultural issues, Alessandro Serpieris deployment of Bakhtins dialogism to read the theatrical polyphony of dramatic voices, and the definition of paralogue in Robert Miolas recent inquiry into what he classifies as the seven types of intertextuality, the reassessment of early modern drama has filtered through a variety of political negotiations with other cultural transactions, such as travel and courtesy books, the arts, fencing, dancing and fashions, which helped to create the notorious Elizabethan representation of exotic Mediterranean nations, and of Italy in particular, as a fundamentally double-faced vision of allurement and bias.

See, respectively, S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); C. Segre, Teatro e romanzo: due tipi di comunicazione letteraria (Turin: Einaudi, 1984); A. Serpieri, Polifonia shakespeariana, in Retorica e immaginario (Parma: Pratiche, 1986), and Polifonia shakespeariana (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2002); R. Miola, Seven Types of Intertextuality, in M. Marrapodi (ed.), Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 1425.


Introduction: Appropriating Italy

This particularly complex ancestry of early modern English drama, mingling together both classical and Renaissance roots, greatly profited from cross-cultural encounters, especially with Latin and Italian cultures, which nurtured the alluring fascination with the double-sided Other, seen both as an inexhaustible font of borrowing, imitation, and adaptation, in line with the classical principles of imitatio and aemulatio, and as an English projection, a repulsive territory of vices where domestic anxieties could be easily stored and exorcised. While the idea of the peninsula as the centre of humanistic civilization was exported through the arts, Italys notorious fame, nurtured by historical accounts as well as by imaginary and imaginative travellers reports, was also fostered by Protestant Englands natural aversion to Papistry in every religious aspect and political controversy. Boccaccios Decameron and, more generally, early modern novelistic literature both in Italy and on the continent provided the mediation from Roman New Comedy to Renaissance drama, propelling the plot structures of comedies and tragedies alike towards renewed developments by a contaminatio of narremes and theatregrams. The productive impact of Italian prose and theatre, assessed in recent decades by Leo Salingar, Louise George Clubb, Robert Henke, and others, has offered new ways to investigate the mechanisms of construction of Shakespearean drama, to delve into the intertextual legacy of dramatic discourse, and to consider the history of modern theatre as a diachronic process of transtextuality, moving across genres and epochs despite national divides. To single out the most influential of European cultures, composed of theatrical and narrative texts, poetic and dramatic theories, and cultural and political discourses, the enormous corpus of Italian material is subjected to a manifold process of transformation and adaptation to be gradually accommodated to English mores. Thus, the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions in general on the European Renaissance offers a renewed opportunity to study the intertextual dynamics that contributed to the composition of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic canon, via a complex series of cultural and historical processes that fostered the migration of European thought between the Middle Ages and the

 Cf. G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Traditions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1995; First Ed., 1993); M. Marrapodi et al. (eds), Shakespears Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), Intr., pp. 113.  Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), and his Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeares Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); Italian Stories on the Stage, in Alexander Leggatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 3246. Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeares Late Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997) and Performance and Literature in the Commedia dellArte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Renaissance. Since, in the specific area of theatrical discourse, the Italian-based drama of the early modern period is founded on this intense, systematic exploitation of Italys ambivalent iconology, encoded at the same time as the origin of poetry and art and as the site of intrigue, vice, and political corruption, the issue of a new approach to Renaissance drama, implying diverse forms of legacy from the Italian world at large, comes strongly to the fore and can be productively devised. In this attempt to investigate the dramatic effects of the literary forces and ideological motivations operating in Anglo-Italian transactions, the intertextual perspective of the present collection of essays challenges the traditional views of the past, based on simplistic double-sided constructs of imitation and xenophobia, thus delimiting the breadth of research almost exclusively to analyses of passive influences and source studies. While the philosophy of the old historical approach insisted on the idea of a borrowed source, artfully improved and rearranged by the dramatists, the newly-conceived Italian factor characterizing early modern theatre in its intertextual context invests the multifarious ways of exploiting Italianate discourses and is deeply concerned with questions of ideological appropriation, involving an array of issues and responses subjected to a process of political negotiation, confrontation, and opposition. The critical achievement of Mario Praz, for many decades the leading historical scholar of the English-Italian connection, remains an essential point of reference in the field of literary and cultural transactions between Italy and England in the Renaissance. Most of his positivistic assumptions, though, can be questioned by recent developments of American New Historicism and British Cultural Materialism, along with the new critical paths opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the genetic composition of the theatrical text. Although Prazs work has the merit of bringing the issue of Shakespeares Italian knowledge back to its historical terms, after the improbable hypotheses of the Bards personal voyages to the continent, the real focus of attention is not any more the local colour perspective but has
 Cf. Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (eds), Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (London: Thomson Learning, 2004).  For a recent traditional interpretation of Shakespeares sources, see for instance Doina Zaharia, Italian Motifs in Shakespeares Plays, American, British and Canadian Studies, 3 (May, 2000), pp. 5563. According to the critic: The comparative scrutiny discloses the points of semblance between Shakespeares plays and a variety of works assumed as their sources and analogue texts, their relationship in events and discourse, mood or characters. The difference of treatment between the originals and his finished product resides in the manner in which he processed the borrowed materials, susceptible to his poetic insight or to the mandate and gusto of his audience (p. 61).  M. Praz, Shakespeares Italy, Shakespeare Survey 7 (1954), pp. 95106; The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958; Rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966; New York: Norton, 1973).  For a critical discussion on the contrasts between old and new historicism, see Richard Levin, Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003).

Introduction: Appropriating Italy

now become the otherness of Italy as a powerful storehouse of cultural, political, and ideological models which are assimilated and transformed into representational strategies of characterization in the theatre, alongside a concomitant use of contrastive stage-worlds functioning as a cover for projected English vices and domestic anxieties. Alongside the critical attitude of poetic geography, a travelling of the mind from literary study and voyagers writings, as proposed by recent scholarship, this cultural process was also fostered by drawing upon the conversational strategies of the influential conduct books by Castiglione, Della Casa, Giraldi Cinthio, and Guazzo, which in varying degrees aimed at fashioning the character of the ideal courtier, gentleman, or prince for educational purposes. From this multiple cultural exchange the construction of English drama developed through several ways of self-fashioning by casting individual characterization as well as a coherent dramatic unity, domesticating the otherness of foreign customs to English usages. The idea advanced by Greenblatt several years ago that the major early modern dramatists created their own performances, represented themselves, and fashioned the identity of the characters that were in turn fashioned by cultural institutions throughout the artful process may well be pushed forward to include even more political negotiations, arising from the contrastive nature of imitation and cultural difference.10 As I have suggested elsewhere, in an introductory survey of the subject-matter,
Moving away from the positivistic analysis of source studies and Italian-based drama in general, as well as from the accurate reconstruction of a stage topography through the myth of the Italian lore, these procedures delve into the more political fields of cultural exchange, cultural difference, and cultural resistance, melting together a process of transition throughout Europe operating in a homogeneous interchange. () The ideological appropriation of Italy may thus become a disruptive force which serves as a cover for political dissent, or satire against social and political life in early modern England.11

The centre of interest is no longer, therefore, the passive influence of Italian source material on the Elizabethans and their creative capacity of adaptation but the ways in which the otherness of Italy and the politics of resistance that it implies
 Cf. J. Bate, The Elizabethans in Italy, in J.-P. Maquerlot and M. Willems (eds), Travel and Drama in Shakespeares Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 5574. J. Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); J. Gillies and V. Mason Vaughan (eds), Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998).  Balsassarre Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano (1528); Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo (1559); Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Discorso di m. Gio. Battista Giraldi Cinthio nobile ferrarese. Intorno a quello che si conuiene a giouane nobile & ben creato nel seruire vn gran principe (1569); Stefano Guazzo, La Civile Conversatione (1575). 10 S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Intr. pp. 19 and, specifically, p. 256. 11 See M. Marrapodi, Shakespeare and Italy: Past and Present, Shakespeare Yearbook, X (1999), pp. 118.

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worked on the ideological construction of Renaissance drama. What is at stake in other words is how and why Italys multi-layered presence as a foreign and alien culture was accommodated by the political negotiations at play in English society, governed by different and even opposing cultural, religious, and moral forces. Despite the long tradition of scholarship on dramatists use of Italian materials, the new approach implies a radical twist in what constitutes an intertext in the rich Anglo-Italian universe of discourse, since the influences and affinities disclosed by Shakespearean drama go far beyond one-to-one debts towards narrative or poetic sources, and embrace such broader intercultural factors as semantic topoi, genre models, ideological codes, and interdiscursive relationships. As Keir Elam has put it in a recent publication,
Perhaps the most fertile notion () is that of Renaissance Italy tout court as a great cultural intertext for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What is at stake here is the fact that not only Italy represented a treasure trove of literary and dramatic sources (thus becoming itself a sort of meta- or mega-source), but that it was perceived as a sort of generative machine producing powerful models cultural models, political models, ideological models, iconographic models, behavioural models and so on which could be freely taken up and transformed by the early modern English.12

For although strongly criticized by the times nationalistic literature, replete with defamatory tracts and anti-theatricalist pamphlets, the custom of importing cultural and behavioural models from abroad, and from Italy in particular, became a common feature of most early modern English drama. As is well known, a number of Renaissance poets and dramatists, including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton among many others, adopted both Italian modes and topoi as a structural constituent for their plays dramatic construction and provided ironical caricatures of Italianate characters for parodic intent. Departing from an attentive consideration of the new methodologies arising from the most recent trends of literary hermeneutics, focusing upon dramatic construction and political implications, the ensuing chapters will analyse early modern English drama from within the context of three broad categories of cultural and ideological appropriation: the rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of the iconic, thematic, historical and literary aspects of the Italian Renaissance influencing the production of English theatrical tradition. The above three-part classification offers the possibility of studying a number of diverse usages of the Italian world and how this culture was transformed, reused, and refashioned to suit the needs of the English stage. The overall perspective makes a significant shift from the traditional method of comparative research, since the influence and reception processes of Italian culture on early modern English drama are examined anew through the strategies of ideological appropriation by which Italys cultural, literary, religious, and political otherness was variously represented and exploited in the theatre. The aesthetics of intertextuality (transition by common ancestry), interdiscursivity (migration of discourses), and interlexicality
12 K. Elam, Afterword: Italy as Intertext, in M. Marrapodi (ed.), Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, pp. 2538.

Introduction: Appropriating Italy

(juxtaposition of semantic constructs) represented in this volume, as Keir Elam has named the competing cultural connotations within the space of a single lexical item, may help to define the convoluted network of cultural and literary modes investing the chosen categories of analysis or typologies of influence, although other possible forms and practices of critical investigation can be envisaged and usefully taken up by the rich scrutiny of contemporary critical enquiry. Rewriting Prose and Drama Although Shakespeares debts and references to Italian drama and culture have long been noted by a number of past and recent scholars, it is only in these last decades that the great world of transition between Italy and England has been studied afresh in painstaking detail. This new wave has invested not so much the various borrowings, analogies, and influences in themselves but the ways in which the early modern English dramatists adapted their Italian material intertextually, drawing from oblique, quite unprecedented, if not totally ignored, areas of differing cultural production or discourse, where the associations with the classical and Italian matrices stemmed from indirect lineage, in what I termed, some time ago, as the Darwinian theory of literary heredity by common ancestry.13 Hence, we are now more readily aware that early modern theatre developed, and indeed constructed, its dramatic structures, as Louise George Clubb has pointed out, by ransacking narrative-lines from the novella tradition and by combining them with theatregrams taken up from the wide repertory of Cinquecento drama, originating in turn from the domestic comedies of Plautus, Terence, and his followers. In this process of cultural transactions, the rewriting of Italian prose and drama, our first category, may well be manifest in Poloniuss notorious distinction in Hamlet between the writ and the liberty of the players (2.2.3978). In his catalogue of dramatic roles and genres, argues Louise George Clubbs opening chapter, Polonius alludes to the two theatrical forms of scripted and improvised acting, especially characterizing Italian pastoral drama. The pastoral mood is inventively adopted in the late tragicomedies as well as in the construction of the romantic comedies by incorporating theatregrams from favole boscareccie and commedia dellarte scenari, casting fabulous features and fanciful spectacles, impeded love, unexpected revelations and renewal, all seasoned with music and dancing. By drawing upon a broad selection of favole and pastorali of both scripted plays and improvised scenari, Shakespeare found the material most appropriate to his idea of mixed drama, a kind of theatre where the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, so often despised by his contemporaries, better suited the structural effectiveness and the very nature of his dramatic art. This same careful attention towards the rewriting of theatrical models imported from Italy explains, for Frances K. Barasch, some significant cruces in Falstaffs characterization and his extempore harlotry play-acting before Prince Hal. They
13 Prologue, in Michele Marrapodi (ed.), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), p. 16.

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demonstrate a clash between differing cultural modes mitigated by common ancestry and a natural legacy from Harlequin operating by malapropic associations. The legacy of Falstaff from his most natural Italian counterpart of Commedia dellArte may prove particularly useful in the examination of the dramatic context of the play and in the more general argument of the Italian matrix of early modern English drama. The character construction of Prince Hal in Henry V is instead seen by Adam Max Cohen as being imbued in Castigliones fashioning of the ideal courtier, the Renaissance prince who in the conjunction of manly fortitude with feminine grace mirrors Christian virtues by administering traits of either gender. In following Castiglione, King Henrys attitude to universalize private and public events as manifestations of divine Providence provides a kaleidoscopic emanation of kingly virtues which radiates into myriad perspectives. Harrys complete panoply of characterization with his overt Christian faith is never monotonous or repetitive. Despite his misgivings, his complex Italianate-based figure creates a different overall image of his character. Castigliones manual, as also other conduct or courtesy books concerning both male and female power systems of sex, gender, and education, notably Della Casas Galateo and Guazzos La Civil Conversatione, are again at the heart of Shakespeares interest in the Romantic comedies and may serve to reveal the structural and dramatic innovations operated in the plays. In my own chapter, a rich combination of narremes, theatregrams, and cultural transactions taken from the most influential dialogic works of Italian literature of manners contributes to form that kind of English Romantic comedy, based on sexual disguise, impeded love, peripeteia, and multiple marriages, which Shakespeare derived from Commedia in its threefold expression as erudita, grave, and allimprovviso. In such plays as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Merchant of Venice, the heterogeneous blend of Shakespeares comedic material, made up of novelistic, theatrical, and cultural transactions, demonstrates the intertextual rewriting of his dramaturgical method, explaining the notorious instability, in terms of a fidelity to a fixed category, of Shakespeares romantic comedies. The idea of a third, hybrid genre, which Shakespeare elaborates from all the forms of mixed genre imported to England from Italy (i.e. Giraldis theory of tragedia di fin lieto, pastoral tragicomedy, and improvised scenari), is also under scrutiny in Robert Henkes analysis of Hamlet as a test play, where forms of hybridism in both theatregrams and characterizations demonstrate the reliance upon the Italian world of scripted play-acting and Commedia dellArte virtuosic impersonation. Among the numberless characterizations stemming from Commedia, the performance of pazzia delivered by the actress Isabella Andreini, with its tragical-comical transgressiveness in both stylistic and generic decorums, recalls the fullest liberty of the buffone and anticipates the hybrid representation of madness in Hamlet and Ophelia. Another way of rewriting Italian literary modes in England, which became particularly effective in the case of Gascoignes adaptation of Ariostos Suppositi, is the tendency to add adversarial notes and marginalia as a means of reader orientation. In discussing this particular case of cultural appropriation, Jill Phillips Ingram explains how Gascoigne makes an operation of cultural politics in his own

Introduction: Appropriating Italy

introduction to the play. By suggesting the way to interpret the linguistic ambiguities and the elaborated wordplay associated with the category of supposing inscribed in the playtext, he encourages his readers to decipher some of the deceits themselves as a form of reader involvement and orientation in the appreciation of the plays explicit and implicit textuality. Remaking Italian Myths and Culture One of the vexed questions in the critical history of the Italian connection to Shakespeare is whether the dramatist actually knew Italian language and culture, if he was capable at all of reading Italian literature and thereby penetrating into its culture, customs, and philosophy at large. Critics have attempted in the past to discover in the dramatists literary biography of his early works a possible physical journey to Italy, hypothesizing an actual grand tour to the continent during the so-called lost years. Keir Elams opening chapter of Part II rejects this possibility because he detects in John Florios widespread and wide-ranging activity as reproducer of Italian linguistic and literary models the most influential mediator who linked Shakespeare to Italy and its culture. Florios case is indeed the most convincing demonstration of how Italian language and culture penetrated into English through lexical and semantic constructs derived from both literary and ordinary language. In his Second Fruites, a bilingual dialogical introduction to the Italian language, Italian customs, and indeed Italian geography, published in 1591, Shakespeare could find all the information he needed for his Italianate romantic comedies, from Much Ado About Nothing to Twelfth Night. What Elam terms as interlexicality in most of Shakespeares Italianate plays is the evidence of a more complex and intimate lexical acquaintance with Florios works than has been hitherto recognized.14 The extraordinary quality of Shakespearean drama to provide vivid portraits of the theatrical space and social ambience is largely assumed by past and recent scholarship. What is perhaps lacking is a reassessment of the dramatists art of documentation in representing historical as well as imaginary urban realities, social settings, and city-states. The myth of Venice, as is well known, originated from the historical complexity of the city itself, characterized by extraordinary levels of magniloquence and grandeur in customs, festivities, and architecture strongly juxtaposed by racist and patriarchal forces of marginality and social differentiation. Ronnie Mulrynes chapter provides a rewarding example of how important historical events, such as the French king Henri IIIs triumphal welcome to Venetian territory after his coronation in Cracow as king of Poland, are in the foreground of The

14 Two very recent books have treated this issue at some length, breaking new ground in favour of a competent reading knowledge of Italian, via the mediation of Florios work, on the part of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists: Jason Lawrences Who the devil taught thee so much Italian? Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) and Michael Wyatts more historicallyoriented study, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. A cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Merchant of Venice, a play which reveals a special intimacy with questions of historical accuracy and documentation. The influence of Machiavelli and Castiglione as source texts on early modern English drama is universally acclaimed but this influence appears particularly effective, together with that of Ariosto, in parodic and satiric works. Here, as Lisa Hopkins demonstrates in the case of Troilus and Cressida, this assimilation of Italian culture, mostly operating in translation, fuses with the question of the Poets War, echoing the critical debate between Tassisti and Ariostisti as well as the ironical mode adopted by Harington in his version of Orlando Furioso. Among the commonest elements of satire, death is seen as the most preferable ending. But although death is given to the eponymous heroes of both Hamlet and Henry V, Troilus and Cressida grants death to Hector alone, the noblest of Shakespeares characters, ensuring that the play does not even pronounce definitively on the issues of the Poets War it leaves it to history. Where the Italian influence of theatrical practices is most pervasive is in relation to Commedia dellArte types, especially those fixed characters of low comedy who often portray parallel rapid exhanges with their most natural antagonists. By enacting a servant-master relation with their corresponding partners, such as in the magnifico and zanni extempore dialogues, argues Nina DaVinci Nichols, the pair embodied the metaphoric postures of king and fool, magician and helper, prince and jester, substance and shadow as well as the reverse case of the powerful figure as shadow and the powerless one as substance. This play-acting, recalling the callidus servus vs senex amans relationship of Roman New Comedy, is particularly effective in such plays as A Midsummer Nights Dream and The Tempest, where the appropriation of Commedia theatregrams is unmistakably discernible in the three recurring topoi of the dream, the role of supernatural sprites, and the recognition game. Indeed, they appear to be pivotal episodes and, especially in The Tempest, demonstrate the extent of indebtedness to Italian theatre as well as the kind of extensive revision exploited by the dramatist. Guarinian tragicomedy and its theoretical premises were widespread throughout Renaissance Europe and reached English drama in the works of many Jacobean playwrights. It is mostly in its parodic derivation, though, that Italian tragicomedy found most fecund ground in England. John Fletchers pastoral The Faithful Shepherdess (16081609) is often cited as the first English play to acknowledge Guarinis theory and practice, becoming a kind of model for other plays and dramatists. Jason Lawrences chapter detects in Marstons earlier play, The Malcontent (1604), a number of linguistic borrowings and thematic derivations from the 1602 translation of Il Pastor fido, demonstrating a deeper, more intimate relation than modern criticism has hitherto allowed. For although the most striking differences appear in the use of a more politicized setting, favoured by the change from a pastoral to an urban stage-world, the Italian model informs in many respects the whole dramatic structure of Marstons play, giving a more complex response in the reestablishment of political order and not allowing the easy repentance of the wrongdoers, who are summarily banished from court. Guarinis pastoral world and Marstons corrupt Genoese court may seem initially remote, but all in all they reveal, prior to Fletchers

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Introduction: Appropriating Italy

The Faithful Shepherdess, a cultural and ideological affinity dramatically effective for the experimental tragicomedic genre staged for the private theatres. Refashioning Ideology Perhaps one of the most fruitful perspectives by which neo-historicist and cultural materialist studies on either side of the Atlantic have regarded the transition of Italian culture into Shakespearean and early Jacobean drama is that of ideology. For although ideological as well as political implications are inscribed into the very nature of drama itself, into its so-called deictical-performative structure as a spectacular art and literary genre,15 the ideological appropriation of Italy is digested by the majority of modern interpreters as an act of political negotiation between outer and inner forces, between the threat of otherness and the more edifying insularity of the English nation that manifested itself at the start of the seventeenth century, when the morbid fascination for the foreign Other and all matters Italian were resonant with manifestations of domestic anxiety. Shakespeares exploitation of the social and political contradictions inherent in the myth of Venice is a case in point. Although The Merchant of Venice as a romantic comedy and Othello as a tragedy have never been closely linked together as derivative plays, John Drakakiss chapter provides strong evidence that such a reading is not only possible but particularly rewarding in its detection of the common thread of ideological and political confrontations deriving from the dramatists demystifying representation of the Venetian republic. Renaissance Venice was indeed, because of the wide political and commercial interests throughout the Mediterranean, a territory of social conflicts which the historical regimes were content to leave dormant for the economic benefit of the city-state. Shakespeare perceived that these social conflicts could have arisen owing to the representation of his Venetian plays in terms of racial, patriarchal, and religious tensions and in the stage-worlds of both The Merchant and Othello made them become the very catalysts of the dramatic action. The ideological exploitation of Shakespeares source texts may prove particularly fertile when pondering the construction of his dramas and the way they shed light on individual characterization. The character of Coriolanus, Claudia Corti argues, refashions Plutarchs only too vague if subtle references to the heros affection towards his mother in order to develop a marker of a psychologically erotic dependence which deprives him of his manly vigour as husband. This motherly subjection is emphasized by Volumnias gradual substitution in the plays imagery for Martiuss wife and by the parallel treatment of Aufidiuss confrontation as a subversively homoerotic relation. As a result, the title heros Roman virtue is sardonically debased to a boyish role, subjugated by his mother and deprived of any sexual strength. Ceremonial power, which loomed large in the Middle Ages, releases its ideological efficacy and political strategy to be translated into ritual in the early
Cf. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980); and Alessandro Serpieri, Reading the Signs: Towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama and James H. Kavanagh, Shakespeare in Ideology, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), respectively pp. 11943 and 14465.
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11

modern portrayal of authority. Shakespeares Italian plays draw from Cinquecento authors and culture to deploy a dramatic transformation of ceremony into invented rituals which acts as a form of ironic inversion or displacement of hierarchy and state power. In dealing with this ideological representation of mock-ceremonies in late Shakespearean drama, Victoria Scala Wood individuates in The Tempest the most compelling example of hierarchical power, possession, and potency transformed by the spectacle of Prosperos rule into a perfect blend of theatrical astuteness and political opportunism, dramatizing the link between stagecraft and statecraft. By moving the locus of ceremony from the Milanese court to an island of exile, Prospero stages his mock-ceremony of supernatural powers to establish a new cultural space in which to test the values of established society. This same emphasis on Prosperos Machiavellian tactics of political opportunism is laid in Michael J. Redmonds chapter on The Tempest viewed in its Jacobean theatrical and ideological context as an Italianate disguised duke play. By deleting from Prosperos epilogue any form of sentimental abandonment of his governing powers as magician as well as accomplished statesman, Redmond reinforces Prosperos political strategy of regaining his Dukedom through the theatricality of his disguised identity and the cynical staging of mock-episodes by which he can spy, manoeuvre, and direct the islands subjugated population, including his own daughter and Ferdinand, so that, unawares, they all become actors and spectators of a play-script invented for his own political ends. This vision of Prosperos ruling ambitions and travesty is consonant with the early Jacobean theatrical repertory of a popular Italianate tragicomic sub-genre which, from Marstons The Malcontent to Middletons The Phoenix, from Sharphams The Fleire to Beaumonts The Woman Hater, often focused on political intrigue and disguised rulers who regain their authority and power with the hidden use of cunning surveillance and statecraft. Shakespeare adopted this particular model of tragicomedic plot structure in the Jacobean Measure for Measure and with his last play he concludes a cultural trajectory based on political cynicism and satirical scepticism. In studying the works of Thomas Middleton, past and recent criticism has often labelled the dramatists portrayal of his women characters as antifeminist. According to this trend of scholarship, Middletons misogyny is evident in the vicious characterization of women who express their sexuality freely, exposing themselves to every form of sexual crime. Their open response to politically subversive and illicit sexuality, however, is not different from that of men and this demonstrates on the part of the dramatist an equality between the sexes that can be considered protofeminist. For Celia Daileader, this critical bias is evidence of a latent gynaephobic prejudice that discloses male anxiety towards female sexuality. What she calls sexphobic criticism is indeed a cultural prejudice that has nothing to do with Middleton, in that he turns out to be the most feminist writer of his age and surely much more sensitive to the nature of women than his modern interpreters. By refashioning Aretinos Ragionamenti as well as other works more creatively than past criticism has generally allowed, Middleton demonstrates an extraordinary capacity of penetrating into the female nature, thereby becoming a real defendant of the womans part in his equal treatment of gender.

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Introduction: Appropriating Italy

Coda It is a recognized critical assumption that Romeo and Juliet is structured as a poetic drama with a number of parts distributed in sonnet form and assimilated within the main text as prologue and epilogue, and introductory and chorus-like verse. Giorgio Melchioris appended coda to this volume provides a compelling investigation into the presence of poetic forms in the tragedy by taking the example of the staging of operatic music in the late Renaissance. At a time when madrigals and Italian musical tracts were particularly popular, Shakespeare may have turned to a form of lyrical tragedy, structured musically with roles and bit-parts distributed to experienced singers according to their voice tonality, coinciding with the closure of the theatres because of the plague. Besides producing a close reading of the famous lamentable scene of Juliets presumed death, which is in itself both a brilliant account of textual reconstruction and a critical scrutiny of the ambiguities of the Q1 and Q2 texts, Melchiori reinterprets the whole scene in musical terms, demonstrating how Shakespeare distributed the lamentable parts of the condolence, thinking of it as an operatic polyphonic sequence with different tonal voices and a chorus-like part spoken or sung by the nurse. This kind of dramaturgical procedure, which is reproducible in print, Melchiori suggests, in operatic printing fashion, might have suited the needs of choric verse drama, written for child-actors engaged in private performances during the years of the plague. The distribution of the musical turns was then delivered as normal speaking parts by adult professional actors when Shakespeare returned to his public theatre.