From the Classics to the Italian World: Elizabethan Essays

This collection records more than half a century of scholarly attention to Early Modern English literature and drama, particularly Shakespeare. A theme throughout is that Shakespeare was not a literary pundit but, first of all, a popular dramatist. As a literary writer he was best known in his own time as the poet of the two long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which went through many more editions than any of the plays. The plays only became literature when they became books, most notably with the publication of the first folio in 1623, long after Shakespeare’s death. This in effect turned Shakespeare into an English classic, and the plays – and even more the playwright – had to be continually revised to maintain this status. In addition to the continual revision of Shakespeare, the essays collected here deal with Elizabethan classicism and the popularity of Seneca, Renaissance readings of Aristotle’s Poetics, Stuart masques and the theoretical basis of spectacular theatre, attempts to reform English poetry on classical models, the representation of Italy on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and finally Shakespeare on the Italian stage.