Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories: Anglo-Italian Transactions (Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies)

Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories against and alongside the background of English dramatic traditions, to assess this influence in the emergence of Elizabethan theatrical convention and the innovative dramatic practices under the early Stuarts. Contributors respond a new to the process of cultural exchange, cultural transaction, and generic intertextuality involved in the debate on dramatic theory and literary kinds in the Renaissance, exploring, with special emphasis on Shakespeare's works, the level of cultural appropriation, contamination, revision, and subversion characterizing early modern English drama. "Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories" offers a wide range of approaches and critical viewpoints of leading international scholars concerning questions which are still open to debate and which may pave the way to further groundbreaking analyses on Shakespeare's art of dramatic construction and that of his contemporaries. Cover 1 Contents 8 List of Figures 10 Notes on Contributors 12 Acknowledgements 16 Introduction: Shakespeare against Genres 18 Part I: Art, Rhetoric, Style 40 1 Shakespeare and the Art of Forgetting 42 2 Shakespearean Comedy: Postmodern Theory and Humanist Poetics 54 3 Shakespeare: What Rhetoric Accomplishes 74 4 Shakespearean Outdoings: Titus Andronicus and Italian Renaissance Tragedy 92 5 Transalpine Wonders: Shakespeare’s Marvelous Aesthetics 106 Part II: Genres, Models, Forms 120 6 Hamlet versus Commedia dell’Arte 122 7 The End of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Moment: Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Historiography, and Dramatic Form 136 8 The Problem of Old Age: Anticomedy in As You Like It and Ruzante’s L’Anconitana 154 9 Ruzante and Shakespeare: A Comparative Case-Study 170 10 The ‘Woman as Wonder’ Trope: From Commedia Grave to Shakespeare’s Pericles and the Last Plays 192 Part III: Spectacle, Aesthetics, Representation 218 11 Shakespeare’s Italian Carnival: Venice and Verona Revisited 220 12 (Re)fracted Art and Ordered Nature: Italian Renaissance Aesthetics in Shakespeare’s Richard II 238 13 ’Tis Pity She’s Italian: Performing the Courtesan on the Early Seventeenth-Century English Stage 252 14 Silence, Seeing, and Performativity: Shakespeare and the Paragone 264 15 Italian Spectacle and the Worlds of James VI/I 282 Part IV: Coda 296 16 How Do We Know When Worlds Meet? 298 Bibliography 304 Index 322