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Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare pp 99–119Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Infinite Minds: Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno Revisited

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Part of the book series: Reproducing Shakespeare ((RESH))

Abstract

In this chapter, I interrogate the puzzling absence of Giordano Bruno from contemporary Shakespearean criticism. Why is the most radical and innovative early modern philosopher overlooked by critics of the most radical and innovative early modern playwright? Part of the answer lies in the monopoly created by Frances Yates, whose highly influential portrait of the Italian philosopher as an esoteric figure has remained by and large unchallenged in Shakespeare studies. It is only at the margins that we find new attempts to correlate the works of Bruno and Shakespeare, in particular in the books by Gilberto Sacerdoti, who reads Bruno’s radical thought between the lines of Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Frances A. Yates. Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Routledge, 2013), 3.

  2. 2.

    Frances A. Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 206.

  3. 3.

    William Empson. Essays on Renaissance Literature. Volume Two: The Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168.

  4. 4.

    Recent telling examples include: John Joughin, ed. Philosophical Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), A.D. Nuttall. Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Jennifer Bates and Richard Wilson, eds. Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

  5. 5.

    For Bruno’s English years see Fabio Raimondi. La repubblica dell’assoluta giustizia. La politica di Giordano Bruno in Inghilterra (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2003).

  6. 6.

    Gilberto Sacerdoti, ‘Giordano Bruno in England’. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by M. Marrapodi, forthcoming.

  7. 7.

    Massimo Bucciantini. Campo dei Fiori. Storia di un monumento maledetto (Torino: Einaudi, 2015).

  8. 8.

    Hilary Gatti. The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge. Giordano Bruno in England (London: Routledge, 2013), 179.

  9. 9.

    Frances Yates. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1964).

  10. 10.

    The following paragraphs derive from conversations and exchanges with Nicoletta Tirinnanzi before her premature death.

  11. 11.

    Giordano Bruno. Opere magiche, edited by Simonetta Bassi, Elisabetta Scapparone, and Nicoletta Tirinnanzi (Milano: Adelphi, 2000).

  12. 12.

    Michele Ciliberto. Giordano Bruno. Il teatro della vita (Milano: Mondadori, 2007); Saverio Ricci. Giordano Bruno nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2000); Ingrid D. Rowland. Giordano Bruno: philosopher/heretic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Paul Richard Blum. Giordano Bruno: an introduction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). For an overview of recent interpretations: Bruno nel XXI secolo. Interpretazioni e ricerche, edited by Simonetta Bassi (Firenze: Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 2012).

  13. 13.

    Wouter J. Hanegraaff. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 325.

  14. 14.

    Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 326.

  15. 15.

    Esotericism, 326.

  16. 16.

    Esotericism, 378.

  17. 17.

    Routledge has recently published her Selected Works in a ten-volume series.

  18. 18.

    Aside from the studies that are discussed here, see Gatti. The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge; Rosanna Camerlingo. Christopher Marlowe, Teatro e teologia. Marlowe, Bruno e i Puritani (Napoli: Liguori, 1999); Gabriela Dragnea. Shakespeare: ermetismo, mistica, magia (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003).

  19. 19.

    Nuovo cielo, nuova terra. La rivelazione copernicana di «Antonio Cleopatra» di Shakespeare (Bologna, il Mulino, 1990; new edition Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008); ‘“What means this?” An “odd trick” in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.’ In Counting and Recounting. Measuring Inner and Outer Space in the Renaissance, edited by Paola Bottalla and Michela Calderaro (La Mongolfiera: Trieste, 1995), 209–231; “Three Kings, Herod of Jewry, and a Child: Apocalypse and Infinity of the World in Antony and Cleopatra.” In Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi and Giorgio Melchiori (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 165–184; William Shakespeare, Poemetti, edited by Gilberto Sacerdoti (Milano: Garzanti, 2000); Sacrificio e sovranità. Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Torino: Einaudi, 2002); “La tempesta della Tempesta.” In Con le ali dell’intelletto. Studi di filosofia e di storia della cultura, edited by Fabrizio Meroi (Firenze: Olschki, 2005), 185–208; “Antony and Cleopatra and the overflowing of the Roman measure.” In Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome, edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 107–118; “Calibano: post-colonial, precolonial o post-post-colonial?” In Postcolonial Shakespeare, edited by Masolino D’Amico and Simona Corso (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2009), 267–277; “Spontaneous Generation and New Astronomy in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” In Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome, edited by Maria Del Sapio Gerbero, Nancy Isenberg, Maddalena Pennachia (Goettingen, V&R unipress, 2010), 327–339; ‘“Self-sovereignty” and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost: From London to Venice via Navarre.’ In Visions of Venice in Shakespeare, edited by Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 83–104; “La presenza di Bruno nei drammi di Shakespeare e nella cultura inglese del’600.” In L’uomo, da vicino. Sei lezioni intorno a Giordano Bruno e Claude Lévi-Strauss, edited by Giuliano Martufi (Il Prato: Saonara, 2012), 51–67.

  20. 20.

    Sacerdoti, “Three Kings, Herod of Jewry, and a Child”, 183. The thesis is fully developed in Sacerdoti, Nuovo cielo, nuova terra.

  21. 21.

    John Bossy. Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

  22. 22.

    Jon R. Snyder. Dissimulation and the culture of secrecy in early modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  23. 23.

    It is the theme of the Fifth Dialogue of Giordano Bruno. The Ash Wednesday Supper, edited by Stanley L. Jaki (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).

  24. 24.

    Erasmus, Desiderius, “Sileni alcibiadis” (London 1543). http://people.virginia.edu/~jdk3t/SileniAlcibiadis.html, accessed 3 September 2015.

  25. 25.

    Giordano Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante. Or the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, translated by William Morehead (London, 1713), 271.

  26. 26.

    Francis R. Johnson, Sanford V. Larkey, and Thomas Digges “Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the Idea of the Infinity of the Universe in 1576.” The Huntington library bulletin (1934): 69–117.

  27. 27.

    Sacerdoti, “Antony and Cleopatra and the overflowing of the Roman measure”, 111.

  28. 28.

    Ricci, Giordano Bruno, 498.

  29. 29.

    Sacerdoti, ‘“Self-Sovereignty” and Religion’, 95.

  30. 30.

    Sacerdoti, “Antony and Cleopatra and the overflowing of the Roman measure”, 113.

  31. 31.

    “Antony and Cleopatra and the overflowing of the Roman measure”, 112.

  32. 32.

    Shakespeare, Poemetti, xxxvii–lvii; Sacerdoti, Sacrificio e sovranità.

  33. 33.

    Sacerdoti, “‘Self-Sovereignty’ and Religion”, 90.

  34. 34.

    Jean Bodin, The six Bookes of a Commonweal. A facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

  35. 35.

    Sacerdoti, “‘Self-Sovereignty’ and Religion”, 91.

  36. 36.

    “‘Self-Sovereignty’ and Religion”, 93.

  37. 37.

    Sacerdoti, “Shakespeare e l’Infinito libro di segreti della natura”, unpublished.

  38. 38.

    Sacerdoti, Sacrificio e sovranità, 229–273.

  39. 39.

    Franco Marenco. “Shakespeare in Italia.” L’Indice 10 (December 1991): 10.

  40. 40.

    In Michele Marrapodi, “Introduction: Shakespeare Studies in Italy Since 1964.” In Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 7–18.

  41. 41.

    Alan Liu. “The Power of Formalism: the New Historicism.” English Literary History, 56.4 (1989): 721–771.

  42. 42.

    The reference is to E.M.W. Tillyard. The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; London: Penguin Books, 1988).

  43. 43.

    It is the case of Hamlet, as Hilary Gatti argues in The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge.

  44. 44.

    Tzachi Zamir. “Shakespeare and Philosophical Criticism.” In Thinking with Shakespeare, edited by Rosy Colombo and Nadia Fusini. Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 1 (2014): 33–56.

  45. 45.

    Zamir. “Shakespeare and Philosophical Criticism”, 35.

  46. 46.

    Chantal Zabus. Tempests After Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Julia Reinhard Lupton. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  47. 47.

    Graham Hammill, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds. Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.

  48. 48.

    Hammill and Lupton, Political Theology, 5.

  49. 49.

    “We may indeed consider Bruno to be a ‘philosopher of the Renaissance’ in that he occupies the middle position in a line which if towards the past it reaches back to classical and pre-classical positions concerning natural philosophy and cosmological intuitions, as to the future it would be impossible to deny that he anticipates positions which are scientifically supported in our own days.” Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Giordano Bruno as philosopher of the Renaissance.” In Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance, edited by Hilary Gatti (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 13.

  50. 50.

    “[T]he nucleus of ideas which Weber brought together under the heading of The Protestant Ethic can be found again and again in key passages of Bruno’s philosophical texts … And it was through an energetic dedication to the new science, combining for Bruno as for Weber, both a Platonic moment of imaginative inspiration and an empirical or practical outcome in terms of a communal endeavour to attain the sommo bene on earth, that, for better or for worse, the doorway of the Pythagorean Academy would eventually open, leading into the modern world”; Hilary Gatti “Giordano Bruno and the Protestant Ethic” in Giordano Bruno: philosopher of the Renaissance, edited by Hilary Gatti (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 166.

  51. 51.

    Andrew Hadfield. Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  52. 52.

    Bucciantini, Campo dei Fiori.

  53. 53.

    Sacerdoti, “Shakespeare e l’Infinito libro.”

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  1. Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

    Shaul Bassi

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Bassi, S. (2016). Infinite Minds: Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno Revisited. In: Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_6

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