Abstract
The editors have gently coerced me into writing a postscript, drawing together from the preceding articles what seem to me common lines of interest (‘conclusions’ might be too strong) but with freedom to add a few independent comments. By the nature of the case, such a postscript can only be miscellaneous. But to give some degree of coherence to what otherwise would be random afterthoughts I propose to group the notes that follow into three sections. First, notes on Italian influence on Elizabethan drama; or rather (from the point of view of a student of the Elizabethans) international tendencies in the sixteenth century, where Italian influence took the lead. Second, Elizabethan resistance to Italian influence and, more broadly, differences between English and Italian conditions, as they affected drama. And finally, the mixture of borrowing from Italy and independence, as illustrated in John Marston’s The Malcontent.
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Notes
M. C. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player (1962) pp. 243–64.
Leone de Somi, Dialogues on Stage Affairs [1565?], trans. Allardyce Nicoll, in The Development of the Theatre (4th edn., 1958) p. 244
see Anna Fontes-Baratto, ‘Les fêtes à Urbin en 1513 et la Calandria de Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’, in André Rochon, ed., Les Ecrivains et le pouvoir en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance (Deuxième Série) (Paris, 1974) pp. 45–79.
Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster [1570], in English Works, ed. W. A. Wright (Cambridge, 1904) pp. 229–31
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted [1582], in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV (Oxford, 1923) p. 216.
Hélène Leclerc, ‘La Scène d’illusion et l’hégémonie du théâtre à l’italienne’, in Guy Dumur (ed.), Histoire des spectacles (Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, Paris, 1965) pp. 581–2.
John Orrell, The human stage: English theatre design, 1567–1640 (Cambridge, 1988) pp. 45, 150–63
cf. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, II, p. 366, and G. W. Groos, ed. and trans., The Diary of Baron Waldstein: A Traveller in Elizabethan England (1981) p. 36.
See my Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974) pp. 256–9 (with references); Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca and London, 1985) pp. 82–185.
On Webster, see J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (1971) pp. 14–15, 78–95
M. C. Bradbrook, John Webster (1980) pp. 145–65
on the general background, G. K. Hunter, ‘Elizabethans and foreigners’ (1964) and ‘English folly and Italian vice’ [1960], in Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Liverpool, 1978).
See my article, in collaboration with Gerald Harrison and Bruce Cochrane, ‘Les comédiens et leur public en Angletere de 1520 à 1640’, in Jean Jacquot, ed., Dramaturgie et société, XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1968) pp. 525–76: (the statistics given there are largely out of date by now, but information about actors’ provincial visits more recently published in Records of Early English Drama confirms the main historical outlines).
Jacquot, ‘La répertoire des compagnies d’enfants à Londres (1600–1610): Essai d’interprétation socio-dramatique’, in Dramaturgie et société, pp. 729–82; Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy (2nd edn., 1980)
Reaveley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: the story of a theatre company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge, 1982)
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge, 1987) pp. 153–64.
Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem [1594], ed. and trans. Allan H. Gilbert, in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit, 1940) p. 498
see Giancarlo Mazzacurati, ‘“Decoro” e indecenza: linguaggi naturali e teoria delle forme nel Cinquecento’, in Le pouvoir et la plume: incitation, contrôle et répression dans l’Italie du XVIe siècle, ed. J. Guidi, Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Renaissance Italienne (Paris, 1982) p. 230.
Louise George Clubb, ‘Shakespeare’s Comedy and Late Cinquecento Mixed Genres’, in Maurice Charney, ed., Shakespearean Comedy (New York, 1980); see also her ‘Italian Comedy and the Comedy of Errors’ (Comparative Literature XIX, no. 3, 1967) and ‘Italian Renaissance Comedy’ (Genre, IX, no. 4, University of Oklahoma, 1977).
Clubb, ‘Woman as Wonder: A Generic Figure in Italian and Shakespearean Comedy’, in Dale B. J. Randall and George Weston Williams, edd., Studies in the Continental Background of Renaissance English Literature (Durham, N. C., 1977).
Madeleine Doran, Endeavours of Art (Madison, Wisconsin, 1964) p. 197
cf. Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago, 1961) pp. 1074–1105
N. J. Perella, The Critical Fortunes of Battista Guarini’s ‘Il Pastor Fido’ (Florence, 1973).
Guarini, The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry [1599], ed. and trans. Gilbert, op. cit (n. 12 above) p. 523; cf. Giuseppe Toffanin, Il Cinquencento (5th edn., Milan, 1954) pp. 484–93, 584–92.
Gonzaga, quoted in Francesco Flora, Storia della letteratura italiana, III (13th edn; 1962, Verona, 1967) p. 121; Malacreta [1600], in Perella (n. 15), p. 21.
Guarini, Il pastor fido (1590), ed. Ettore Bonora (Milan, 1977).
‘Dymock’ trans. of Il Pastor Fido [1602]: passage quoted and discussed in Bernard Harris’s edn. of Marston, The Malcontent [1604] (1967), Introduction, p. xxvi; (this is the edition of The Malcontent used here).
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Salingar, L. (1991). Elizabethan Dramatists and Italy: A Postscript. In: Mulryne, J.R., Shewring, M. (eds) Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21736-6_11
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