Abstract
One way that Shakespeare represented time and place was to create a double image, and in this chapter, I would like to focus on the doubling of England and Italy. In his nondramatic and dramatic poetry, Shakespeare represented an Italy of the ancients and what we have come to call the Renaissance, taking up this Victorian word. The term early modern, which is also a later invention that Shakespeare would not have recognized, has its own problems in terms of teleology, as if the modern could be graduated, the early looking forward to a modern that would then be left post haste. Here, I would like to look at one aspect of the temporal and spatial, a specific case that Shakespeare represented. Rome and Italy held, for England, an example of a place of politics, empire, poetry, culture, and history, topoi of ancient wisdom and of bold change.
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Notes
Since the first version during the 1990s, other work has appeared in the field. I would like to call attention to a few examples here. My thanks to Holger Klein and the Edwin Mellen Press for permission to reprint the earlier “Shakespeare’s Italy and England: The Translation of Culture and Empire,” Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 460–80, as part of this chapter. On the relation between representations of Rome and the theatrical space in London, see D. J. Hopkins, City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008).
Willy Maley, “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity and Identity Formation and Cymbe-line,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 145–57
Michele Marrapodi, ed., Shakespeare and Intertextuality: The Transition of Cultures between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000)
Brian Lockey, “Roman Conquest and English Legal Identity in Cymbeline,” EMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 3 (2003): 113–46
Barbara L. Parker, Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004)
John Alvis, “Liberty and Responsibility in Shakespeare’s Rome,” in The Inner Vision: Liberty and Literature, ed. Edward B. McLean (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 13–35
James Kuzner, “Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 174–99.
See Jonathan Hart, “Language, European,” and “Papal Donations and Colonization,” Encyclopedia of Western Colonization Since 1450 (Detroit: Macmillan/Thomson Gale, 2006), 695–703
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943)
A. P. Rossiter, “Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories,” in Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longmans, 1961), esp. 47
E. W. Talbert, The Problem of Order Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare’s Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962)
Leonard Dean, “From Richard II to Henry V: A Closer View,” in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. L. Dean (1967; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. 192–95.
Italy in English Renaissance drama is a vast topic, and so it is necessary to find a focus. Harry Levin begins his fine essay with a discussion of Violet Paget, who wrote about this topic under the name of Vernon Lee and dedicated her volume, Euphorion (2nd ed., 1884) to Walter Pater. In the volume in which Levin’s “Shakespeare’s Italians” appears (17-29), Michele Marrapodi, in his introduction, which is an excellent survey of the topic and the collection it introduces, discusses many approaches to this question (1-13). The various essays in the volume are enlightening, but none examines the translation of empire and the typology of Italy in the building of the mythology and history of the English nation. See Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. Michele Marrapodi et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). For an earlier study, see Ernesto Grillo, Shakespeare and Italy (1949; New York: Haskell House, 1973)
Mario Praz, “Shakespeare’s Italy,” Shakespeare Survey 7 (1954): 95–106.
Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976)
Robert S Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London: Routledge, 1990)
Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)
Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997).
On the translation of empire, see Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 178–79.
Jonathan Hart, “Translating and Resisting Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Studies,” in Borrowed Power; Essays in Cultural Appropriation, ed. Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 137–68.
Ralph Berry, “The Imperial Theme,” in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, ed. Richard Foulkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 153–60.
See Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), esp. 190.
Here I am thinking particularly of De Certeau’s and Todorov’s work on alterity or otherness. Whereas a theoretical view of otherness is not the focus of my chapter, which is more inductive, such work has been important in the field; see Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse of the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (1984; repr., New York: Harpers, 1992)
All citations and quotations to the poems and plays are from William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Riverside, 1997).
For a discussion of such Roman and Italian sources, see William A. Armstrong, “The Influence of Seneca and Machiavelli on the Elizabethan Tyrant,” Review of English Studies 24 (1948): 19–35.
Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
David B. Quinn, ed., New American World (New York: Arno, 1979), 96.
Stephen Orgel, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. S. Orgel (1987; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39.
Robert Wiltenburg, “The Aeneid in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987): 159–68.
Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia... (Frankfurt ad Moenum: Ioannis Wecheli, 1590)
As elsewhere I have discussed The Rape of Lucrece in detail, I examine it here only in terms of the establishment of an arc of history and mythology concerning ancient Rome. See Jonathan Hart, “Narratorial Strategies in The Rape of Lucrece,” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 59–77.
For the colonial model in Ireland and Virginia, see Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
Mark Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds., Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997).
For a discussion of these monarchs and their symbolic connections between ancient Rome and Renaissance England, see H. A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 17f.
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 33f.
Philip Brockbank, “Myth and History in Shakespeare’s Rome,” in Mythe et histoire, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (Paris: Touzot, 1984), 95–111.
See Jonathan Hart, “Strategies of Promotion of Promotion: Some Prefatory Matter of Oviedo, Thevet and Hakluyt,” in Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature, ed. J. Hart (New York: Garland, 1996), 73–94.
On editing and feminism, see Suzanne Gossett on Pericles, Lois Potter on Desdemona, and Barbara Hodgdon on Taming of the Shrew, in Arden: Editing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan (London: Thomson, 2003), 65–108.
On editing Shakespeare generally, see Thompson and McMullan. In this volume, see especially Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan, “Introduction,” xi-xxiv, and John J. M. Tobin, “Sources and Cruces,” 221–38. On recognition and misrecognition, see Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), esp. 190–91
Jonathan Hart, Interpreting Cultures: Literature, Religion, and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), esp. 7–8
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). Shakespeare’s Italy and England. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_7
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