Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy

Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage

Michael J. Redmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The use of Italian culture in the Jacobean theatre was never an isolated gesture. In considering the ideological repercussions of references to Italy in prominent works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Michael J. Redmond argues that early modern intertextuality was a dynamic process of allusion, quotation, and revision. Beyond any individual narrative source, Redmond foregrounds the fundamental role of Italian textual precedents in the staging of domestic anxieties about state crisis, nationalism, and court intrigue. By focusing on the self-conscious, overt rehearsal of existing texts and genres, the book offers a new approach to the intertextual strategies of early modern English political drama. The pervasive circulation of Cinquecento political theorists like Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Guicciardini combined with recurrent English representations of Italy to ensure that the negotiation with previous writing formed an integral part of the dramatic agendas of period plays.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Politics of Intertextuality
• 2 ‘You are better read than I’: Rereading the Italianate Englishman
• 3 ‘And let them know that I am Machiavel’: Staging Italian Political Theory for the London Audience
• 4 ‘I have my dukedom got’: Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Italianate Disguised Ruler Play
• 5 ‘No more a Britain’: James I, Jachimo, and the Politics of Xenophobia in Cymbeline
• Bibliography
• Index