Full Description
Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories against and alongside the background of English dramatic traditions, to assess this influence in the emergence of Elizabethan theatrical convention and the innovative dramatic practices under the early Stuarts. Contributors respond anew to the process of cultural exchange, cultural transaction, and generic intertextuality involved in the debate on dramatic theory and literary kinds in the Renaissance, exploring, with special emphasis on Shakespeare's works, the level of cultural appropriation, contamination, revision, and subversion characterizing early modern English drama. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories offers a wide range of approaches and critical viewpoints of leading international scholars concerning questions which are still open to debate and which may pave the way to further groundbreaking analyses on Shakespeare's art of dramatic construction and that of his contemporaries.
Contents
Introduction Shakespeare against Genres; I: Art, Rhetoric, Style; 1: Sheakespeare and the Art of Forgetting; 2: Shakespearean Comedy: Postmodern Theory and Humanist Poetics; 3: Shakespeare: What Rhetoric Accomplishes; 4: Shakespearean Outdoings: Titus Andronicus and Italian Renaissance Tragedy; 5: Transalpine Wonders: Shakespeare's Marvelous Aesthetics; II: Genres, Models, Forms; 6: Hamlet versus Commedia dell'Arte; 7: The End of Shakespeare's Machiavellian Moment: Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Historiography, and Dramatic Form; 8: The Problem of Old Age: Anticomedy in As You Like It and Ruzante's L'Anconitana; 9: Ruzante and Shakespeare: A Comparative Case-Study; 10: The 'Woman as Wonder' Trope: From Commedia Grave to Shakespeare's Pericles and the Last Plays; III: Spectacle, Aesthetics, Representation; 11: Shakespeare's Italian Carnival: Venice and Verona Revisited; 12: (Re)fracted Art and Ordered Nature: Italian Renaissance Aesthetics in Shakespeare's Richard II; 13: 'Tis Pity She's Italian: Performing the Courtesan on the Early Seventeenth-Century English Stage; 14: Silence, Seeing, and Performativity: Shakespeare and the Paragone; 15: Italian Spectacle and the Worlds of James VI/I; IV: Coda; 16: How Do We Know When Worlds Meet?
