"A must-read for any student of Renaissance culture as well as for
Shakespeare scholars. It shows how and why Italian city life
reverberated even across the Channel to enliven the English
stage."--Silvia Ruffo Fiore, University of South Florida "D'Amico's
book gives new life to an old idea--that Shakespeare's plays are
essentially affirmative--and this is a message that not only seems
to me deeply true but also will be welcomed by very many
readers."-- Dain A. Trafton, professor emeritus, Rockford College
In this rich study of the Italian settings in eleven of
Shakespeare's plays, Jack D'Amico examines the essential
characteristics of 16th-century Italian society and the Italian
city-state as they come to life on Shakespeare's stage. Through the
medium of his theater, we see how he creates an urban world open to
exchange and decidedly theatrical in spirit. We witness
Shakespeare's Italy become, simultaneously, the distant city and
the mirror of his own Renaissance London. The book begins by
reviewing what Shakespeare may have known about Italy, both the
attractions and the dangers of Italian society as they may have
appeared in the contemporary popular imagination. D'Amico observes
that the dangers seem more pronounced in the tragedies, while the
allure of a foreign city, where change and order can coexist, seems
to predominate in the comedies. Structuring the book around
specific features of the imagined urban setting, he discusses the
piazza, the garden, the street, interior spaces, the court, and the
temple, demonstrating that the city's limits and contradictions
lend a special kind of consistency to the world of Shakespeare's
plays. Written in a highly accessible style and carefully
documented with primary and secondary sources, this book will be of
great interest to teachers and scholars, to undergraduate and
graduate students, and to the general reader.
Jack D'Amico, professor of English at Canisius College, is
coeditor of "The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical
Views" and author of "The Moor in English Renaissance Drama" (UPF,
1991).
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