English and Italian Literature From Dante to Shakespeare : a Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence.

343 Pages·2014·27.26 MB·English

by  Robin Kirkpatrick

ENGLISH AND ITALIAN LITERATURE
FROM DANTE TO SHAKESPEARE
Lo n g ma n M ed iev a l a n d R en a issa n c e Libr a r y
General Editors:
Ch a r l o t t e Br ew er , Hertford College, Oxford
N.H. Keebl e, University of Stirling
Published Titles:
Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text
Janies Simpson
Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales: Recurrent Plot Motifs in Shakespearian Drama
Leah Scragg
English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith
Marion Glasscoe
The Fabliau in English
John Hines
The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry
Robin Sowerby
Regaining Paradise Lost
Thomas Corns
Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture
Michael Bath
Robin Kirkpatrick
ENGLISH AND ITALIAN
LITERATURE
FROM DANTE TO
SHAKESPEARE
A Study of Source,
Analogue and Divergence
O Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1995 by Longman Group Limited
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 1995, Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and ex-
perience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices,
or medical treatment may become necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described
herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety
and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or edi-
tors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter
of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods,
products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
ISBN 13: 978-0-582-06558-1 (pbk)
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Kirkpatrick, Robin, 1943-
English and Italian literature from Dante to Shakespeare : a study
of source, analogue, and divergence / Robin Kirkpatrick.
p. cm. — (Longman medieval and Renaissance library)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-582-06559-3. — ISBN 0-582-06558-5 (pbk.)
1. Literature, Comparative-Italian and English. 2. Literature,
Comparative—English and Italian. 3. Italian literature—To 1400
History and criticism. 4. Italian literature—15th century-
History and criticism. 5. Italian literature—16th century-
History and criticism. 6. English literature—Italian influences.
I. Title. II. Series.
PQ4050.E5K57 1995
820.9—dc20 94-21998
CIP
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
The early development of the Italian city-state
Culture and politics in fourteenth-century Florence
Crisis and transition in the fourteenth-century city
Conclusion
Chapter 1 Chaucer and the Italians 24
Introduction
Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio
Dante and Chaucer: The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer and Petrarch
Chaucer and Boccaccio
Troilus and Criseyde
Chapter 2 Education and politics, 1350-1550 80
Introduction
The Italian example: Coluccio Salutati and Guarino
Two English humanists: John Free and John Tiptoft
A second phase of humanism: philosophy and Greek in England and Italy
Machiavelli and Castiglione
Hoby, Elyot and the Italian tradition
Chapter 3 Humanism and poetry 116
Introduction
Wyatt, Petrarch, Alamanni and Aretino
Sidney and Petrarch
Sidney, Sannazaro and Arcadia
vi English and Italian Literature
Chapter 4 The Renaissance epic 155
Introduction
The theory of the epic romance in Ariosto and Tasso
Ariosto and Harington
Fairfax and the Gerusalemme Liberata
The response of Sidney and Spenser
Chapter 5 Comedy in the Renaissance 193
Introduction
The development of Italian comedy
Bibbiena’s La Calandria
Machiavelli’s Mandragola and Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio
George Gascoigne’s Supposes and Ariosto’s I Suppositi
Chapter 6 The novella in Italy and England 224
Introduction
Cinthio and Bandello
The English novella collections: Fenton, Whetstone and Painter
Webster and the idiom of the novella
Chapter 7 Pastoral experiment in the plays of Guarini, Marston
and Fletcher 254
Introduction
The theory and practice of mixed forms in Cinthio and Guarini
Pastoral tragi-comedy in Marston and Fletcher
Chapter 8 Shakespeare and Italy 277
Introduction
The Italy of Shakespeare’s comedy: The Taming of the Shrew and The
Merchant of Venice
Experiments in mixed genres: All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and
Cressida and Measure for Measure
Cymbeline and the pastoral
Othello and Dante’s Vita nuova
Select Bibliography 311
Index 324
Preface
In 1979, Seamus Heaney included among the poems collected in Field
Work a translation of Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXXIII. Six hundred years
earlier, in the Monk’s Tale, Chaucer had offered his own version of the
same canto.
From Chaucer to Heaney, there runs an uninterrupted history of sim-
ilar affiliations between English and Italian literature. The present
volume will concentrate upon the first two centuries of that history. Yet
the tradition continues; and this book would hardly have been written if
it did not. The names which figure in the following pages — Chaucer,
Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare - could well have been
matched by others - Milton, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Joyce and Eliot -
deserving at least equal attention. Indeed, there is reason to look as
much to the future as to the past. Almost all the following chapters
began as lectures or seminars in the English Faculty at Cambridge; and
my principal debt is to the many members of that audience who
revealed to me the areas in which close attention to the Italian text
might continue to illuminate the English analogue.
None of this means that the English reader has been or should be
uncritical in approaching Italian literature. It is true that for the greater
part of the period I shall be considering, Italian culture provides, on the
literary as on other fronts, the more progressive example; and it would
be impossible to account for the developments that occurred in English
literature during this period, without acknowledging the stimulus and
example of the Italian. Yet by the end of the sixteenth century, Italian
culture was in decline, or at least was perceived as being so by the
English, who in this same period were increasingly conscious of their
own intellectual and political success. Ascham famously declares that ‘an
Englishman italianate is the devil incarnate’, while Nashe in Have with
you to Saffron Walden (1596) derides Gabriel Harvey for his attempt to
viii English and Italian Literature
speak English with an Italian accent. More productively, Spenser at the
end of the period sets himself to outdo Ariosto while already at the
beginning of the period Chaucer has directed a keenly analytical eye
upon the writings of the three founders of the Italian literary tradition,
Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.. (I shall devote an especially long chapter
to Chaucer not least because his treatment of these three writers
amounts even now to an excellent reading of their work.)
Such considerations have consequences for the modern critic. In the
first place, it cannot be appropriate to speak only of the influence which
Italian writers exerted over their English counterparts. There are already
a number of valuable studies - often produced in the early years of the
century - which offer comprehensive accounts in terms of influence, for
instance Symond’s Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (London
1889) and Einstein’s The Italian Renaissance in England (New York
1902). Yet it is no less valuable to look at the differences which arise
between the two literary traditions than at the similarities. This
approach will imply no disparagement of Italian literature. On the con-
trary, in asking how English writers transformed the Italian original, one
is bound to observe how seriously they themselves took that original
and how closely they engaged in critical or technical debate with its
detail. Often, the important question is not what the source might have
been for this or that work, but rather why an identifiable Italian text
should have attracted the English writer in the first place; and, often, to
answer this question, one will need to investigate the Italian text not as a
passive source but as a primary work to be viewed on a level with its
English equivalent.
The attractions, stimuli and - occasionally - the repulsions which
emerge on such a view are various in kind. Some may be said to be
purely literary. The work of Italian writers did much to heighten both
the technical and theoretical awareness of English readers, as will be evi-
dent from the discussion of the genres - lyric, epic, comic and
prose-narrative - in Chapters 3 to 6. Likewise, in Chapter 7 I shall look
at how the literary theory which developed in sixteenth-century Italy
produced a notion of mixed genres which was particularly influential, as
the same chapter will show, in stimulating an appetite for experiment
among English dramatists from Marston to Webster, including
Shakespeare himself.
But literary (and also, frequently, linguistic) considerations of this sort
cannot be seen in isolation from their historical and cultural context.
Throughout the period there is an especially close connection to be
Preface ix
drawn between text and context. The influence of Italy extends far
beyond the realm of literature to include, on the one hand, whole areas
of visual style, etiquette or even cookery and, on the other, political
theory and theological attitudes.
For that reason, I shall attempt to outline in the introductory chapter
the historical developments in Italy over the early years of the modern
period in a way which invites (even if there is no space to pursue them)
comparisons with developments in England over the same period; like-
wise, in Chapter 2 I shall consider the social and intellectual
developments that characterised the relationship between the two coun-
tries in the early Renaissance. It will, however, be important at all
points to examine not only the facts of Italian history but also the myth
of Italy as it seized and coloured the English imagination of English
intellectuals. The myth is a potent one, exciting - even now, as it did in
earlier times — impressions of both brilliance and decadence. Italy as, his-
torically, it was, may have been transformed or deformed by the English
myth; its importance is no less great on that account.
The many-sided nature of the literary relationship which is now to be
examined has been brought home to me by friends and colleagues in
many different disciplines. My thanks first and last are due to David
Wallace, in recognition of a recurrent debt - sometimes reluctantly paid
- to his understanding of the historical connections between England
and Italy and for his extremely helpful reading of early versions of the
book. In the literary sphere, the writings of Piero Boitani are a model of
what cordial but critical relationship between England and Italy can pro-
duce, while the unfailing interest of all my colleagues in both the
English and Italian Departments at Cambridge has sustained the work
when its purpose dwindled. I am particularly grateful to Virginia Cox
for reading Chapter 2 and to Matthew Reynolds of Trinity College for
his comments on the final Chapter. I also wish to record my thanks to
Dr Gillian Rogers and the staff of the English Faculty Library in
Cambridge, where a generous stock of Italian texts and a welcoming
atmosphere should make the continuing study of this subject as enjoy-
able for others as it has been for me. The failings of this book remain
my own — and they are the more serious in that they are to be judged
against a standard of ancient as well as modern enthusiasm for its subject.
I remain confident that whatever the deficiencies of the present treat-
ment, the subject itself will survive and prosper.