Revisiting Shakespeares 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 dellarte 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.
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
INTRODUCTION
Silvia Bigliazzi
PARTE ONE: MEMORIES
1. Memory, Intertextuality/Interdiscursivity and Reuse
Savina Stevanato
2. Whose Memory? From the Rossignuol to Female Communities in Groto and
Shakespeare
Silvia Bigliazzi
PART TWO: MEMORY AND REUSE
3. Welcome to Padua: Female Characters, Narrative Sources, and the Commedia
dellArte in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Melissa Walter
4. The Source as a Resonant Halo. Italian Neoplatonism in Twelfth Night
Rocco Coronato
5. Bandellos Novellas and The Merry Wives of Windsor
Roberta Zanoni
6. Ed ebbono bene e buona ventura. Multi-Layered Echoes of Il Pecorone in
The Merchant of Venice
Alessandra Squeo
7. Boccaccios Bernabò, Shakespeares Cymbeline, and Other Resources: A
Keyword and Co-textual Analysis
Fabio Ciambella
PART THREE: REUSE AND MEMORY
8 What country, friends, is this?: Displaced Identity and Homoerotic Desire
in Twelfth Night and its Italian Models
Jason Lawrence
9. The story that is printed in her blood: Patriarchal Authority in Much
Ado About Nothing and Its Sources
Emanuel Stelzer
10. Most strange, but yet most truly, will I speak: Female Agency from
Cinthio to Shakespeares Measure for Measure
Cristiano Ragni
11. Reviving Past Models: Dolces Marianna and the Intricacies of Othellos
Crux
Beatrice Righetti
12. As I please myself. Recollections and Reconfigurations of Female Agency
in Ariostos Suppositi, Gascoignes Supposes and Shakespeares The Taming of
the Shrew
Silvia Silvestri
13. The Ring is the Thing: Alls Well That Ends Well and its Mobile
Circuitry
Eric Nicholson
AFTERWORD
Robert Henke
Index
Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at Verona University, where she is the Director of the Skenè Research Centre for drama and theatre studies. Her Shakespearean publications include monographs on Hamlet (Oltre il genere. Amleto tra scena e racconto, 2001) and the experience of non-being (Nel prisma del nulla. Lesperienza del nonessere nella drammaturgia shakespeariana, 2005), as well as the co-edition of miscellanies on theatre translation (Theatre Translation in Performance, Routledge 2013), Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify (2014), Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life: The Boundaries of Civic Space, 2016), and Shakespeare and Crisis (2020). In 2019 she published Julius Caesar 1935: Shakespeare and Censorship in Fascist Italy. She is the co-general editor of Skenè. JTDS, as well as of the Global Shakespeare Inverted series. She has translated into Italian Romeo and Juliet (2012) and Shakespeares sonnets (2023), and has received several fellowships from New York University, Cambridge, and Oxford (All Souls). She is a co-founder of the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival.