Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange

Early Modern to Present

Enza De Francisci, Chris Stamatakis, Enza De Francisci, Chris Stamatakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138668911
• eBook ISBN: 9781317210832
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare's drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare's work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare's works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare's works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

Part I
Early Modern Period

Dialogues and Networks

1 Shakespeare, Florio, and Love’s Labour’s Lost

Giulia Harding and Chris Stamatakis

Act 4 of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s comedy of frustrated courtship and “baroque poetics” (Elam 1984: 32) dating from the mid-1590s, contains an intriguing exchange between the constable Dull, the dim curate Sir Nathaniel, and the schoolmaster Holofernes. The dialogue is of interest not least because it soon fractures into a babel of confusion, willful mishearing, and misunderstanding—not unfitting for a play whose plot, such as it is, thrives on mistaken identity, misdirected letters, broken oaths, and punning ambiguity:

DULL	You two are bookmen: can you tell me by your wit What was a month old at Cain’s birth, that’s not five weeks old as yet?
HOLOFERNES	Dictynna, goodman Dull. Dictynna, goodman Dull.
DULL	What is Dictynna?
NATHANIEL	A title to Phoebe, to Luna, to the moon.
HOLOFERNES	The moon was a month old, when Adam was no more, And raught not to five weeks when he came to five-score.
HOLOFERNES	Th’allusion holds in the exchange.
DULL	’Tis true indeed: the collusion holds in the exchange.
HOLOFERNES	God comfort thy capacity! I say th’allusion holds in the exchange.
DULL	And I say the pollution holds in the exchange, for the moon is never but a month old; and I say beside that ’twas a pricket that the Princess killed.
DULL	(Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.33–48)

This kind of conversation is not untypical of a play noted for its occasional “macaronic gabble” and “implausible hash of English, French, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and creative error” (Carroll 1976: 14)—a play that “delights in the use and abuse of language”, is suffused with linguistic experiment and neologistic puns, and marked by a “verbal texture of repetition and allusion” in which words are “repeated, echoed, returned to and played with” (Woudhuysen 1998: 47–8). In the first instance, “allusion”—a term only ever used by Shakespeare in this scene—here adverts to a local delight in word-play: the aptronymic Dull’s riddle is answered by Holofernes’ ponderous lexical gloss of “Dictynna” as another title for the moon. Equally, the term “exchange” here refers primarily to the transformation of “Cain” into “Adam”, the moon’s cyclical phases, and the verbal repartee between the interlocutors themselves. Yet the claim that “th’allusion holds in the exchange” enjoys a wider resonance: the line gets to the heart of the linguistic exchanges that underpin Shakespeare’s text—a lexical, polyglottal interplay that characterizes the “great feast of languages” (5.1.35–6) on which the play’s entourage dine with abandon.

In its intricate linguistic texture, the play embodies an ideal of lexical exchange—of Latinate, Italian, and French borrowings made English. The idea is perfectly encapsulated in Holofernes’ adjective “peregrinate” (5.1.13), a “Shakespearean coinage” (Woudhuysen 1998: 225) denoting something that “affect[s] foreign styles or expressions”, and a term whose etymology announces its connotations of interlingual travel and transnational journeying, something that has “travelled or sojourned abroad” (OED, “peregrinate, adj.”). The dialogue between Holofernes and Dull shows the ready slippage of “allusion” into “collusion” (another unique usage in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, here denoting a verbal or syllogistic ambiguity), and thence into “pollution” (a corruption or contamination). This threefold regression gestures to some of the dynamics of exchange that undergird Shakespeare’s contact with foreign languages and literary cultures—the principles of substitution, transformation, conversation, and dialogic interaction. Extrapolating from this nexus of terms, a reader might note the ease with which a verbal allusion, whether a pun (OED, “allusion, n.”, 3) or a passing literary reference (OED, 1), shades into a corruption, something approaching a contaminatio, or a blending of sources, plots, and genres. These principles of allusion, half-allusion, and admixture dominate the fabric of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and dictate the nature of its engagements with Italian language and literary culture.

It has become a commonplace of critical accounts of Love’s Labour’s Lost since the eighteenth century that Holofernes represents a cipher for John Florio. Florio was an Italian-language tutor (producing such parallel-text manuals as Florio his Firste Fruites, 1578, and Second Frutes, 1591), grammarian and lexicographer (whose monumental A Worlde of Wordes, 1598, comfortably surpassed the only previous Italian-English dictionary, William Thomas’ Principal rules of the Italian grammer from 1550, before becoming yet more monumental in its revised, expanded form when Florio rebranded it as Queen Anna’s New World of Words in 1611), and translator of Montaigne (The Essayes, 1603, from which Shakespeare may have borrowed phrases from the essay “Of the Cannibals” for The Tempest, 2.1). As Montini notes, “in his 1747 annotated edition of Shakespeare’s works, William Warburton declared that ‘by Holofernes is designed a particular character, a pedant and schoolmaster of our author’s time, one John Florio, a teacher of the Italian tongue in London’” (Montini 2015: 109, citing Warburton and Pope, 2.227–8). Yet it is too simplistic to assume that Shakespeare modelled his “selfe-wise seeming Schoolemaister”, to borrow a phrase from Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (Sidney 1595: sig. I2^v), on the hapless John Florio. For one thing, other inspirations for Shakespeare’s Holofernes include Sidney’s Rombus from The Lady of May (Woudhuysen 1998: 2–3), and it seems unlikely that Shakespeare would have set out to ridicule Florio as a pedantic buffoon (Holofernes being routinely referred to in the speech-prefixes from the 1598 first Quarto as “Ped.” or “Peda.”, for “Pedant”, in a nod to stock types associated with the commedia dell’arte witnessed elsewhere in the prefixes and stage direction for Don Armado as “Braggart”). The distance between Holofernes and Florio is further suggested by the fact that Holofernes quotes unthinkingly from Florio’s Firste Fruites a popular proverb about the beauty of Venice, as if, like the character in Florio’s dialogue, he had visited the city himself, although clearly he has not and is merely being pretentious.

Notwithstanding the unlikelihood of an allusion to Florio in Holofernes, Shakespeare’s play nevertheless shows a clear indebtedness to Florio and the world of Italian language-learning and literature to which he and his writings gave access. It is often remarked that the title of the play may derive from Florio’s Firste Fruites: “We neede not speak so much of loue, al books are ful of loue, with so many authours, that it were labour lost to speake of Loue” (Florio 1578: sig. S3^r). In addition, there are some suggestions that Love’s Labour’s Lost responds to a skirmish between intellectual factions in the last years of the sixteenth century, whereby the play becomes a satirical attack on the so-called “School of Night”, a secret English academy notionally involving both Florio and his Italian friend Giordano Bruno who was resident in England in the early 1580s (Feingold 2004). Whatever the grounds for these tantalizing connections between Shakespeare’s play and Florio, several critics since Warburton’s initial proposition, as Montini remarks, “have been haunted by a sort of ‘magnificent obsession’ to prove the existence of a liaison”, whether biographical or linguistic or both, between Shakespeare and Florio, although she cautions that “no solid facts have been put forward” to cement a “possible, at best probable, acquaintanceship” between the two (Montini 2015: 109–110).

Whether Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italian derived from direct, personal contact with Florio remains the subject of heated critical speculation. The debate has its roots at least as far back as Frances Yates (Yates 1934: 35–8, 334–6), and is periodically revived by such pronouncements as Jonathan Bate’s that Florio was “the obvious person” to introduce Shakespeare to his Italian sources and would have subsequently exerted a formative role on Shakespeare’s literary career (Bate 1997: 55). It is hard to resist the notion that Florio and Shakespeare must have been close friends: the historical record and contemporary writings gesture to this relationship, which was commented on by their peers. To be sure, as Jason Lawrence cautions, by the early 1590s, it was quite possible for Shakespeare to have studied Italian independently of direct contact with Florio, relying simply on the aid of Florio’s published works, chiefly the Firste Fruites and Second Frutes, the latter of this pair a collection of dialogues with a particular focus on Italian proverbs and their use in colloquial speech, bound with Florio’s Gardine of Recreation yeelding six thousand Italian prouerbs, the most extensive list of proverbs to be published in the sixteenth century (Lawrence 2005: 11). Even more cautiously, Naseeb Shaheen asserts that “[n]othing certain is known” about Shakespeare’s mode of access to his Italian sources, whether these texts were encountered directly or mediated through English or possibly French translations (Shaheen 1994: 161). Yet the testimony of Florio’s contemporaries points to something potentially more tangible.

Intrigue remains around the possibility of some kind of personal acquaintance between Shakespeare and Florio not least since the latter was possessed of an invitingly capacious library of Italian books, subsequently bequeathed in his will to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. The suggestion of Shakespeare’s access to Florio’s book collection dates back at least to Joseph Hunter’s supposition from the mid-nineteenth century (Hunter 1845). To judge from the booklists (the “names of the Bookes and Auctors, that haue bin read of purpose, for the accomplishing of this Dictionarie”) that precede both the 1598 Worlde of Wordes (detailing some seventy-two texts) and its expanded 1611 counterpart (drawing on over two hundred and fifty Italian texts), Florio’s personal library could have supplied Shakespeare with his likely Italian sources from the late 1590s onwards, if not earlier too. Florio lists an interesting collection of both popular and rare Italian comedies in the bibliography to his 1598 dictionary, and Shakespeare seems to have drunk deeply from just such a well of literature for plots and characters in the composition of his own works: Sir Andrew Aguecheek, for instance, from the gender-bending farce of Twelfth Night, might take his origins from the Italian character “Malevolti” (literally, “sick cheeks” or “pox cheeks”) to be found in the entertainment Il Sacrificio performed by the Accademia degli Intronati in the early 1530s along with Gl’Ingannati, recognised as a likely source for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night by modern editors and early witnesses alike. John Manningham, a law student at the Middle Temple, recounted in his diary a performance of Twelfth Night that took place at the Middle Temple in February 1602, remarking that the “play called ‘Twelue Night, or What you Will’” was “much like the Commedy of Errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni” (Bruce 1868: 18). There is evidence for Shakespeare’s continuing recourse to Italian works that Florio himself drew on in compiling his dictionaries. As Lawrence remarks, certain key Italian texts resorted to by Shakespeare are “referred to only in Florio’s second dictionary, and […] were presumably acquired after completion of the first (by March 1596)”. These include, importantly, Matteo Bandello’s two-volume Novelle (1554), a subtext for Much Ado about Nothing (c. 1598) and for Twelfth Night (c. 1601); and Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), a source for the plots of both Measure for Measure and Othello (both c. 1603–4), although of course French translations of both these collections were available to Shakespeare as well (Lawrence 2005: 127).

“Bilingued Florio”, as he is styled in one of the commendations to him by “R. H. Gent.” prefacing the Firste Fruites (Florio 1578: sig. **4^r), is of particular interest to any study of intercultural or transnational exchange between late sixteenth-century England and Italy. Not least among these reasons is his “liminal position—being neither an Italian nor an Englishman” (Costola and Saenger 2014: 153), as the son of an Italian Reformed minister in exile and an unidentified Englishwoman (O’Connor 2008). Given this bicultural, transnational heritage, Florio was, accordingly, obliged to “craft a persona that could … appropriate and reflect both positive and negative stereotypes” of the Italian peninsular and its culture (Costola and Saenger 2014: 153). Exploiting this bilingual and intercultural untetheredness, Florio was celebrated by his contemporaries for his ability to obviate physical travel. In the prefatory verse “in prayse of Florio his Labour”, another of the poems prefacing Florio’s Firste Fruites, this time by the legendary and pioneering Elizabethan actor Richard Tarlton, this sense of linguistic journeying and labour is adverted to explicitly:

IF we at home, by Florios paynes may win,

to know the things, that trauailes great would aske:

By openyng that, which heretofore hath bin

a daungerous iourney, and a feareful taske.

Why then ech Reader that his Booke doo see,

Geue Florio thankes, that tooke such paines for thee.

(Florio 1578: sig. ***1^v)

These “trauailes great”, Florio’s textual labours, mediate a foreign language and its culture to an English audience, substituting physical travel with a type of lexical travail or peregrination.

This deft polylinguality is likened, by less sympathetic contemporaries than Tarlton, to a kind of “intermeddling”. When Thomas Nashe’s friend Robert Greene brought out his play Menaphon (1589), Nashe contributed to it an epistle “To the Gentlemen Students of both Uniuersities”, which amounted to an outburst against his rivals. One target in particular occupies his attention. This “idiote art-master” is described as intruding, as being among those “manie thred bare witts” who “emptie their inuention of their Apish deuices, and talke most superficiallie of Pollicie, as those that neuer ware gowne in the Vniuersitie [as enrolled fellows]” (Greene 1589: sigs. **1^r, **2^r). Nashe’s indictment continues, encompassing in general “some deepe read Grammarians, who hau[e] no more learning in their scull, than will serue to take vp a commoditie; nor Art in their brain” and specifically one who privately tutors an entourage of followers wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Early Modern Period: Dialogues and Networks
• Part II Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Translation and Collaboration
• Part III Twentieth Century to the Present: Originality and Ownership
• Afterword: Shakespeare, an Infinite Stage
• List of Contributors
• Index