The Shakespeare Guide to Italy

The Shakespeare Guide to Italy PDF

Author: Richard Paul Roe

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780062074263

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Richard Paul Roe spent more than twenty years traveling the length and breadth of Italy on a literary quest of unparalleled significance. Using the text from Shakespeare’s ten “Italian Plays” as his only compass, Roe determined the exact locations of nearly every scene in Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, The Tempest, and the remaining dramas set in Italy. His chronicle of travel, analysis, and discovery paints with unprecedented clarity a picture of what the Bard must have experienced before penning his plays. Equal parts literary detective story and vivid travelogue—containing copious annotations and more than 150 maps, photographs, and paintings—The Shakespeare Guide to Italy is a unique, compelling, and deeply provocative journey that will forever change our understanding of how to read the Bard . . . and irrevocably alter our vision of who William Shakespeare really was.

Shakespeare and the Visual Arts

Shakespeare and the Visual Arts PDF

Author: Michele Marrapodi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-02-17

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1351815121

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Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries PDF

Author: Michele Marrapodi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1351925849

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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.

Shakespeare and Italy

Shakespeare and Italy PDF

Author: Jack D'Amico

Publisher: Orange Grove Text Plus

Published: 2009-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781616101121

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"A must-read for any student of Renaissance culture as well as for Shakespeare scholars. It shows how and why Italian city life reverberated even across the Channel to enliven the English stage."--Silvia Ruffo Fiore, University of South Florida "D'Amico's book gives new life to an old idea--that Shakespeare's plays are essentially affirmative--and this is a message that not only seems to me deeply true but also will be welcomed by very many readers."-- Dain A. Trafton, professor emeritus, Rockford College In this rich study of the Italian settings in eleven of Shakespeare's plays, Jack D'Amico examines the essential characteristics of 16th-century Italian society and the Italian city-state as they come to life on Shakespeare's stage. Through the medium of his theater, we see how he creates an urban world open to exchange and decidedly theatrical in spirit. We witness Shakespeare's Italy become, simultaneously, the distant city and the mirror of his own Renaissance London. The book begins by reviewing what Shakespeare may have known about Italy, both the attractions and the dangers of Italian society as they may have appeared in the contemporary popular imagination. D'Amico observes that the dangers seem more pronounced in the tragedies, while the allure of a foreign city, where change and order can coexist, seems to predominate in the comedies. Structuring the book around specific features of the imagined urban setting, he discusses the piazza, the garden, the street, interior spaces, the court, and the temple, demonstrating that the city's limits and contradictions lend a special kind of consistency to the world of Shakespeare's plays. Written in a highly accessible style and carefully documented with primary and secondary sources, this book will be of great interest to teachers and scholars, to undergraduate and graduate students, and to the general reader.

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance PDF

Author: Michele Marrapodi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1317056442

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Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary traditions, with reference to the impact and influence of classical, coeval, and contemporary culture. In contrast to previous studies, the critical perspectives pursued in this volume’s tripartite organization take into account a wider European intertextual dimension and, above all, an ideological interpretation of the 'aesthetics' or 'politics' of intertextuality. Contributors perceive the presence of the Italian world in early modern England not as a traditional treasure trove of influence and imitation, but as a potential cultural force, consonant with complex processes of appropriation, transformation, and ideological opposition through a continuous dialectical interchange of compliance and subversion.

Shakespeare's Poetics

Shakespeare's Poetics PDF

Author: Sarah Dewar-Watson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1317056043

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The startling central idea behind this study is that the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the sixteenth century ultimately had a profound impact on almost every aspect of Shakespeare's late plays”their sources, subject matter and thematic concerns. Shakespeare's Poetics reveals the generic complexity of Shakespeare's late plays to be informed by contemporary debates about the tonal and structural composition of tragicomedy. Author Sarah Dewar-Watson re-examines such plays as The Winter's Tale, Pericles and The Tempest in light of the important work of reception which was undertaken in Italy by pioneering theorists such as Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio (1504-73) and Giambattista Guarini (1538-1612). The author demonstrates ways in which these theoretical developments filtered from their intellectual base in Italy to the playhouses of early modern England via the work of dramatists such as Jonson and Fletcher. Dewar-Watson argues that the effect of this widespread revaluation of genre not only extends as far as Shakespeare, but that he takes a leading role in developing its possibilities on the English stage. In the course of pursuing this topic, Dewar-Watson also engages with several areas of current scholarly debate: the nature of Shakespeare's authorship; recent interest in and work on Shakespeare's later plays; and new critical work on Italian language-learning in Renaissance England. Finally, Shakespeare's Poetics develops current critical thinking about the place of Greek literature in Renaissance England, particularly in relation to Shakespeare.

Mapping Shakespeare's World

Mapping Shakespeare's World PDF

Author: Peter Whitfield

Publisher: Bodleian Library

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851242573

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The locations of Shakespeare s plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London which he and his audience inhabited, but always in places remote in space or time. How much did he and his contemporaries know about the foreign cities where the plays took place? What expectations did an audience have if the curtain rose on a drama which claimed to take place in Verona, Elsinore, Alexandria or ancient Troy? This fully illustrated book explores these questions, surveying Shakespeare s world through contemporary maps, geographical texts, paintings and drawings. The results are intriguing and sometimes surprising. Why should Love s Labour s Lost be set in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre? Was the Forest of Arden really in Warwickshire? Why do two utterly different plays like The Comedy of Errors and Pericles focus strongly on ancient Ephesus? Where was Illyria? Did the Merry Wives have to live in Windsor? Why did Shakespeare sometimes shift the settings of the plays from those he found in his literary sources? It has always been easy to say that wherever the plays are set, Shakespeare was really writing about human psychology and human nature, and that the settings are irrelevant. This book takes a different view, showing that many of his locations may have had resonances which an Elizabethan audience would pick up and understand, and it shows how significant the geographical background of the plays could be. "