Italians found another way to engage with Shakespeare besides opera. In 1923, Italian intellectual Piero Gobetti wrote that his age would be remembered as a curious chapter in the reception history of Shakespeare, when the Bard got entangled with ideas of criminal anthropology. In fact, the uses of Shakespeare by Lombroso’s school are now forgotten. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare began to be portrayed as a genius who anticipated the findings of the Italian Positivist School, or, alternatively, as an authority who could debunk them. Shakespeare’s own psyche and the characters of his plays were explored and pathologised. These studies occasionally percolated into the practices of courthouses, prisons, hospitals, and asylums, and had an impact on the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. This volume provides an edition of hitherto uncollected primary sources which document these uses of Shakespeare. Each text has a parallel English translation, and is introduced by a preface providing details about the context and its main discursive stances. The volume also features a critical introduction and explanatory notes.

Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources is about the complex dynamics of transmission and transformation of the Italian sources of twelve Shakespearean plays, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Cymbeline. It focuses on the works of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, Da Porto, Bandello, Ariosto, Dolce, Pasqualigo, and Groto, as well as on commedia dell’arte practices. This book discusses hitherto unexamined materials and revises received interpretations, disclosing the relevance of memorial processes within the broad field of intertextuality vis-à-vis conscious reuses and intentional practices.

Is Shakespeare’s The Tempest a Mediterranean play? This volume explores the relationship between The Tempest and the Mediterranean Sea and analyses it from different perspectives. Some essays focus on close readings of the text in order to explore the importance of the Mediterranean Sea for the genesis of the play and the narration of the past and present events in which the Shakespearean characters participate. Other chapters investigate the relationship between the Shakespearean play, its resources from the Mediterranean Graeco-Latin past and its afterlives in twentieth-century poems looking at the Mediterranean dimension of the play. Moreover, influences on and of The Tempest are investigated, looking at how Italian Renaissance music may have influenced some choices concerning Ariel’s song(s) and how The Tempest has shaped the production of twentieth-century Italian directors. Finally, other chapters try to reaffirm the centrality of the Mediterranean Sea in The Tempest, bringing to the fore new textual evidence in support of the Mediterraneity of the play, by adopting and/or criticising recent approaches.

Why does Bassanio compare himself to Jason? What is Hecuba to Hamlet? Is the mechanicals' staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe story funny or sad? This dictionary elucidates Shakespeare's use of mythological references in an early modern context, while bringing them to life for today's audiences and readers, at a time of renewed critical interest in the reception of the classics and fascination with classical mythology in popular culture. It is also a precious tool for practitioners who may not always know quite what to make of mythological references. Mythological figures, creatures, places and stories crowd Shakespeare's plays and poems, featuring as allusions, poetic analogies, inset shows, scene settings and characters or plots in their own right. Most of these references were familiar to Shakespeare's spectators and readers, who knew them from the writings of Ovid, Virgil and other classical authors, or indirectly through translations, commentaries, ballads and iconography. This dictionary illustrates how, far from being isolated, a mythological reference may resonate with the poetics of the text and its structure, cast light on characters and contexts, and may therefore be worth exploring onstage in a variety of ways. The 200 headings correspond to words and names actually used by Shakespeare: individual figures (Dido, Venus, Hercules), categories (Amazons, Centaurs, nymphs, satyrs), places (Colchos, Troy). Medium and longer entries also cover early modern usage and critical analysis in a cross-disciplinary approach that includes reception, textual, performance, gender and political studies.

The Mediterranean of Shakespeare’s dramas is a vast geopolitical space. Historically, it spans from the Trojan war to Greek mythology and the ancient Roman empire; geographically, from Venice and Sicily to Cyprus and Turkey, from Greece to Egypt, the Middle East and North Africa. But it is also the Mediterranean of Renaissance Italian cities and Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful example of how exotic frontiers for an English gaze may be replaced by closer yet different cultural Mediterranean frames. The volume offers studies on the circulation of the story of Romeo and Juliet and its ancient archetypes in early modern Europe, from Greece to Italy, France and Spain, as well as on contemporary receptions and performances of Shakespeare’s play in Sicily, the Balkans, Israel and Jordan.

In 1602 and 1604 two collections of paradoxes, both entitled Four Paradoxes, authored by Thomas Scott, and Thomas and Dudley Digges, respectively, were published. Scott, a Protestant preacher, wrote four poems about art, law, war, and service. On the other hand, the diplomat and intellectual Dudley Digges published his father’s two paradoxes about the art of war together with his own two texts concerning the worthiness of war and warriors. What do these two collections of paradoxes have in common, and why publishing their critical edition together? Apparently, besides sharing the same title, the two works do not seem to have anything else in common. Nevertheless, this modern spelling critical edition of both texts aims at demonstrating that they share political, cultural, and genre-related features connected with the circulation of paradoxical discourse about war in early modern England.

This volume originates as a continuation of the previous volume in the CEMP series (1.1) and aims at furthering scholarly interest in the nature and function of theatrical paradox in early modern plays, considering how classical paradoxical culture was received in Renaissance England. The book is articulated into three sections: the first, “Paradoxical Culture and Drama”, is devoted to an investigation of classical definitions of paradox and the dramatic uses of paradox in ancient Greek drama; the second, “Paradoxes in/of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” looks at the functions and uses of paradox in the play-texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; finally, the essays in “Paradoxes in Drama and the Digital” examine how the Digital Humanities can enrich our knowledge of paradoxes in classical and early modern drama.

This study aims to provide a comparative analysis of the dynamics of musical and poetical meta-performance as they emerge both from the surviving corpus of ancient Attic comedy (which adds up, for our purposes, to Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays) and from Ben Jonson’s comedies. As a matter of fact, both corpora show a huge presence of meta-performative elements, that is, of moments in which musical and/or poetical performance is explicitly thematized or enacted in the drama. Those moments are hardly ever fortuitous, or not significant. On the contrary, they play each time a vital role in the development of the plot, in the portrait of characters, or in the definition of the ideology of the play. By means of a comparative analysis between the two authors, the book aims at providing a taxonomy of meta-performance in Aristophanes and Ben Jonson, with particular attention to its role in the definition of the characters' poetic ability. Such comparison will show that, despite using similar comic and performative strategies, the two authors draw a completely different ideology around the crucial themes of culture and titularity.

A volume in honour of Angela Locatelli The book explores the significance of literary translation and interpretation, in the widest sense of terms, as multiple processes of meaning and cultural transfer, by investigating how and why literature can be considered as a repository and a disseminator of knowledge and values. Featuring essays by a number of scholars focusing on a wide range of literary and critical texts of different nations and cultures and encompassing the last three centuries, this book intends to offer a contribution to the study of translation and interpretation as literary processes of cultural and epistemic dissemination of knowledge from both a theoretical and a practical perspective.

This volume aims at providing a comprehensive view of the performative as well as heuristic potentialities of the theatrical paradox in early modern plays. We are interested in discussing the functions and uses of paradoxes in early modern English drama by investigating how classical paradoxes were received and mediated in the Renaissance and by considering authors’ and playing companies’ purposes in choosing to explore the questions broached by such paradoxes. The book is articulated into three sections: the first, “Paradoxes of the Real”, is devoted to a theoretical investigation of the dramatic uses of paradoxes; the second, “Staging Mock Encomia” looks at the multiple dramatic functions of mock encomia and at the specific situations in which paradoxical praises were inserted in early modern plays; finally, the essays in “Paradoxical Dialogues” examine the connections between a number of early modern mock encomia and ancient or contemporary models.