Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning

by Marrapodi,Michele

• ISBN13: 9780754655046
• ISBN10: 0754655040
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-12-08
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism-along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text-the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on early modern English drama. The volume focuses strongly on Shakespeare but also includes contributions on Marston, Middleton, Ford, Brome, Aretino, and other early modern dramatists.The pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on the European Renaissance, it is argued here, offers a valuable opportunity to study the intertextual dynamics that contributed to the construction of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical canon. In the specific area of theatrical discourse, the drama of the early modern period is characterized by the systematic appropriation of a complex Italian iconology, exploited both as the origin of poetry and art and as the site of intrigue, vice, and political corruption.Focusing on the construction and the political implications of the dramatic text, this collection analyses early modern English drama within the context of three categories of cultural and ideological appropriation: the rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of the English theatrical tradition in its iconic, thematic, historical, and literary aspects.

Table of Contents

Introduction: appropriating Italy: towards a new approach to Renaissance drama

Rewriting Italian Prose and Drama

Pastoral jazz from the writ to the liberty

Harlequin/harlotry in Henry IV, Part One

The mirror of all Christian courtiers: Castiglione's Cortegiano as a source for Henry V

Shakespeare's romantic Italy: novelistic, theatrical and cultural transactions in the Comedies

Virtuosity and mimesis in the Commedia dell'arte and Hamlet

Gascoigne's Supposes: Englishing Italian 'error' and adversarial reading practices

Remaking Italian Myths and Culture: 'At the cubiculo'

Shakespeare's problems with Italian language and culture

Between myth and fact: The Merchant of Venice as docu-drama

Harington, Troilus and Cressida, and the poets' war

Shakespeare's dreams, sprites, and the recognition game

Re-make/re-model: Marston's The Malcontent and Guarinian tragicomedy

Refashioning Ideology

Shakespeare and Venice

'As if a man were author of himself': the (re-)fashioning of the Oedipal hero from Plutarch's Martius to Shakespeare's Coriolanus

'The strongest oaths are straw': ritual inversion in Shakespeare's The Tempest

Learning to spy: The Tempest as Italianate disguised-duke play

The courtesan revisited: Thomas Middleton, Pietro Aretino, and sex-phobic criticism

Coda

The music of words

From madrigal to drama and beyond

Shakespeare foreshadowing an operatic technique

Select bibliography

Index

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