Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning

Michele Marrapodi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351925846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

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.

PART I
Rewriting Italian Prose and Drama

Chapter 1
Pastoral Jazz from the Writ to the Liberty

Louise George Clubb

Even in this day and time there is, alas, some evidence that Shakespeare’s debts and references to Italian drama are not generally grasped, though it has slowly begun to sink in that his comic dramaturgy was based on the principle of ransacking narratives for plots and accumulating a repertory of units to be recombined in close-knit structures along lines originating in the domestic comedies of Plautus and Terence, a practice that had been in force in Italy for the better part of a century before he left Stratford, whenever that was, exactly.

This fact is one that I have written about at length¹ and restate now to reinforce a point about pastoral drama, its production and function, perhaps even about its material and final causes. Understanding Polonius’s vocabulary is essential to this, as to other arguments I have sometimes made. If the editors of the new Norton Shakespeare, currently my edition of choice, gave more attention to Italian drama, they would not be satisfied with defining ‘the law of writ and the liberty’ as a reference to ‘plays where classical rules are either observed or abandoned’.² The contrast is, in fact, between scripted five-act plays observing the rules (the ‘writ’) and improvised three-act performances from a canevaccio or scenario (the ‘liberty’), also obeying some of the rules, sometimes. Polonius makes it clear that Shakespeare knew the implications of both.

Thanks to a new breed of comparatists, the pastoral mode is no longer in the intellectual limbo where it lay bulky but obscure for several generations.³ With regard to drama, Robert Henke’s book on Italian tragicomedy in Shakespeare’s late plays⁴ should alone be enough to dispel lingering clouds of ignorance. And yet the pastoral play of the Renaissance remains the least understood genre of the period. Despite Angelo Ingegneri’s statement in 1598 that it had come to dominate the stage,⁵ even in Italy, where it was born, its character is still only half glimpsed, after long being stereotyped as sensual escapism, artificial prettiness, bloodless preciosity.⁶

More justice is done now to its capacity for commentary as satire, allegory, and metaphor. No one is unaware these days that pastoral topoi invited the honing of poetic skill, of continuing communion and rivalry with the ancients and of investigating subjectivity and airing modern views of universal bi-polarities: nature/art, city/ country, love/independence, solitude/society. All of this came into the dramatized pastoral and the very fact of dramatization offered the possibility of representing other intangible but supremely important ideas. Not the least of these was the interior phenomenon of psychological change. The commedia, whether regolare and written or improvised a soggetto, was always about marriage and impeded love, but not much about falling in love. The development of the comic genre over the century reveals an increasing pull toward emotion and analysis of the workings of the heart, but for depiction of growth, change, maturation, and self-knowledge, the pastoral play was required. As it grew in shape and popularity in the second half of the Cinquecento, reaching an ever-larger audience as the relation between private and commercial theatre organized the means of production and expanded the range of drama as propaganda (among other things making the touring troupes a cover for political spies) the pastoral play was molded by Counter-Reformation vision and, though not often overtly ideological, offered a theatrical paradigm of hope. Henke identifies tragicomedy as the natural goal of pastoral drama, and I would extend its domain. The third genre authorized a venue for liberty of imagination and included traditional elements, folk and literary, not elsewhere accommodated by the alta cultura, in a depiction of fulfilment, order and providence for all classes.

This phase of Italian theatre history seems to me pregnant in connection with Shakespeare, and with his title not only to the new form of English tragicomedy but also to the invention of romantic comedy. I propose to look beyond the handful of pastoral topoi and theatregrams found in Elizabethan plays, especially Lyly’s, but used with greatest ease and consistency by Shakespeare, including:

a country setting, forest, wooded island or a pleasance near shepherds’ cottages;
the presiding figure of Hymen, and/or Venus, Cupid or Jove decreeing mass weddings;
courtly shepherds and nymphs;
at least one satyr;
an enchanter, mago/a;
sprites, super/subhuman beings;
spells and magic potions;
dreams and sleep onstage;
Ovidian transformations;
wild beasts;
clown-bumpkins, defining class differences in Arcadia between pastore and
villano, pecoraio or capraio, who is lustful and coarse but not a rapist like the
satiro;
clown-visitors from the city, favored especially in the commedia dell’arte
scenarios, where various comic masks, Pantalone, Graziano and some of the
zanni, assumed this function.

Shakespeare’s use of these ingredients from the Italian repertory has been known ever since the discoveries of Neri and of Lea,⁷ yet even this essential knowledge has not found its way into all editions of Shakespeare. Many editors are still unaware, for example, that the contrast between real and ideal shepherds was an established theatrical topos probably antedating Ruzante. for that matter, even the authoritative Lea contented herself with stating that the ‘instrusion of buffoonery upon literary pastoral, which constitutes a new dramatic type, was one of the most fruitful of the comic ideas fertilized by the commedia dell’arte’ (1, 211). Although she knew of Ruzante as a precursor of the commedia dell’arte, she recognized neither the intrusion and parody in his early play La pastoral (1521) nor the still older lineage of both these elements.

Even less understood is that pastoral drama, destined eventually to deserve the name of empty masquerade, was in the time of its invention and flourishing an innovative achievement of structure which offered unique ways of signifying and means of expressing emotional and spiritual realities, communicating lessons in love and achieving the reification and visualization of metaphors of transformation, psychological change and self-knowledge. In the spectacle of lovers in a labyrinth like Ariosto’s ‘gran selva’ of love⁸ the favola boscareccia projected an icon, happier than Ariosto’s, of human ignorance of a destiny planned by the gods.

Consider its history. As a kind, it grew within the Italian critical movement that invented the new science of literary criticism. The key to that enterprise was the idea of genre, the naming and description of kinds. Its first aim was to establish principles and models that would set standards for the construction of true commedia and tragedia, that is, corresponding to dicta of Horace, Donatus and Aristotle and equalling or even surpassing Greek and Latin examples of drama. The kind labelled favola boscareccia, favola pastorale or, when warranted, tragicommedia pastorale, partook of the nature of other pastoral types, lyric, narrative or eclogue, but being drama, indeed having emerged in response to a major dramaturgical movement fuelled by critical, social, and psychological demands, it developed specifically theatrical features. As the need for the third genre was based in theory, its form would correspond to the theoretically established forms of the other two.

The second aim of theorizing playwrights resulted from the frustration accompanying progress toward the first aim, as what Guarini called ‘rules of nature’⁹ underlying Aristotle’s Poetics seemed to exclude many materials and features dear to humanistically educated vernacular-proud constructors of the New Italian classics. Plautus and Terence could be combined with Boccaccio and the novella tradition in the high-tech contaminatio that was an essential principle of comedy; but most of Ovid and Virgil, Apuleius, the Greek romances, Dante, Petrarch, Sannazaro, Ariosto and the chivalric epic could be accommodated only partly and inadequately in tragedy, and hardly at all in modern comedy as it was defined by the authoritative models produced by Ariosto himself and by his contemporaries Bibbiena and Machiavelli. Both svelte new genres were regulated by principles of verisimiltude and social rank, of unity of time and of place, the latter limited to the streets of a real city for comedy, and to the mythical or historical palaces of gods and human rulers for tragedy. The third genre was needed to free and to legitimate fancy.

Although Quattrocento theatre had included every kind of subject and venue, from myth to faith, from fabulous landscapes to heaven or hell in popular feste and sacre rappresentazioni, and though there were influential heralds of the pastoral play in the Ovidian mascherate, in Venetian momarie, in Ferrarese favole mitologiche such as Niccolò da Correggio’s and, most of all in Poliziano’s Orfeo, the Cinquecento pantheon of avant-garde drama had no assigned space for Arcadia or the countryside, and no clear theatrical models from antiquity, only eclogues, fragments, and notions about Greek satyr plays. The idea of this lost third classical genre was another spur and justification for Cinquecento theatrical scientists.

The favola pastorale or boscareccia they gradually and experimentally constructed, with Ferrara in the van, from Giraldi in 1550 and on, established a green place in regular drama and licensed unverisimilar subjects. It bore the imprint of late Cinquecento Catholic culture and offered an official genre for representing invisible realities, both the intimate workings of human emotions and the cosmic design of Divine Providence. The universal tragicomedy of Christianity – life, death, resurrection – also claimed representation in this welcoming and inclusive form as it developed and by natural progress culminated in Guarini’s Pastor fido, tragicommedia pastorale, where the figures of Oedipus, Abraham and Christ are fused among shepherds and satyrs in a restored Eden called Arcadia. Indeed, the pastoral structure of hope both invited tragicomedy and offered a means of transportation from one genre to another.

Like commedia and tragedia, the favola pastorale began with literary texts on the private stage and was eventually played by both private performers, academic and courtly, and professionals. I have written elsewhere that the difference between scripted and improvised plays, whether composed or acted by litterati or by actors-for-hire, is not unlike the difference between classical music and jazz, distinct in several ways but most obviously in that one is performed from a full score and the other is improvised on the chord progressions of a tune.¹⁰ Here I would reapply the simile to the activity of the early experimenters in written drama who were inventing a third genre departing from the other two, one that would maintain the principles and advances achieved in forging a modern comedy and modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Appropriating Italy: Towards a New Approach to Renaissance Drama
• PART I: REWRITING ITALIAN PROSE AND DRAMA
• PART II: REMAKING ITALIAN MYTHS AND CULTURE
• PART III: REFASHIONING IDEOLOGY
• PART IV: CODA
• Select Bibliography
• Index