Italian Theatrical Traditions and Shakespeare’s Drama. Selected Essays

This retrospective selection of essays, composed over more than forty years, offers a series of reflections on Italian scripted and improvised comedy from the Early Modern period, and its pioneering impact on European theatre. Three themes are highlighted in the separate parts of the volume. Essays about Dramatic Content and Dramatic Structures treat aspects of how comic scenes and dialogues were composed in Italy – concentrating on performance effects, and on how techniques of improvisation became detectable in written scripts. Women On Stage and Behind the Scenes surveys the work of Italian actresses and women singers, and the ways in which female characters were presented on stage. Italian Theatre in Shakespeare and Elsewhere gathers proposals about how Shakespeare was affected – in general, and in some individual plays – by specifically theatrical Italian models; with some attention also paid to later European comedy including Molière. The volume is framed by studies which focus on sixteenth-century comedies from the city of Siena, reconstructing the lifelong contribution to Anglo-Italian studies by one of the most perceptive scholars of comparative research in early modern literature.