Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
Edited by
Laura Tosi
and Shaul Bassi
VISIONS OF VENICE IN SHAKESPEARE
ANGLO-ITALIAN RENAISSANCE STUDIES SERIES
Series Editors
General Editor: Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo, Italy
Advisory Editors: Keir Elam, University of Bologna, Italy
Robert Henke, Washington University, USA
This series aims to place early modern English drama within the context of the
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series considers early modern Italian novellas, theatre, and discourses as direct or
indirect sources, analogues and paralogues for the construction of Shakespeare’s
drama, particularly in the comedies, romances, and other Italianate plays. Critical
analysis focusing on other cultural transactions, such as travel and courtesy books,
the arts, fencing, dancing, and fashion, will also be encompassed within the scope
of the series. Special attention is paid to the manner in which early modern English
dramatists adapted Italian materials to suit their theatrical agendas, creating new
forms, and stretching the Renaissance practice of contaminatio to achieve, even
if unconsciously, a process of rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of ‘alien’
cultures. The series welcomes both single-author studies and collections of essays
and invites proposals that take into account the transition of cultures between the
two countries as a bilateral process, paying attention also to the penetration of
early modern English culture into the Italian world.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England, 1558–1603
Compiled by Soko Tomita
Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy:
Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage
Michael J. Redmond
Courtesans, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Drama
Duncan James Salkeld
Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare & His Contemporaries
Edited by Michele Marrapodi
Machiavelli in the British Isles
Alessandra Petrina
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
Edited by
Laura Tosi
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Shaul Bassi
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
© Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and
3DWHQWV$FWWREHLGHQWL¿HGDVWKHHGLWRUVRIWKLVZRUN
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited
Wey Court East
Union Road
Farnham
Surrey, GU9 7PT
England
Ashgate Publishing Company
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101 Cherry Street
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USA
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare. – (Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Venice. 2. Shakespeare, William,
1564–1616 – Settings. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Merchant of Venice.
4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Othello. 5. Venice (Italy) – In literature.
I. Series
822.3’3–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare / edited by Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi.
p. cm. — (Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Venice (Italy)—In literature. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—
Venice (Italy) 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Merchant of Venice. 4. Shakespeare,
William, 1564–1616. Othello. I. Tosi, Laura, 1966– II. Bassi, Shaul.
PR3069.I8V57 2011
822.3’3—dc22
2010025850
ISBN 9781409405474 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409405481 (ebk) II
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
vii
ix
xiii
Foreword
Stanley Wells
xv
Introduction: Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi
1
Part 1 Sources
1
Supersubtle Venetians: Richard Knolles and the Geopolitics of
Shakespeare’s Othello
Virginia Mason Vaughan
19
2
Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella
Daria Perocco
33
3
Genealogy of a Character: A Reading of Giraldi’s Moor
Karina Feliciano Attar
47
Part 2 Political Culture and Religious Policy in Venice and England
4
Shakespeare and Republican Venice
$QGUHZ+DG¿HOd
5
‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
From London to Venice via Navarre
Gilberto Sacerdoti
6
Job in Venice: Shakespeare and the Travails of Universalism
Julia Reinhard Lupton
67
83
105
Part 3 Crossing Boundaries and the Play of Identity
7
‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’
Graham Holderness
8
Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice:
Crossing Boundaries in the City
Laura Tosi
125
143
vi
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
9
The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice
Kent Cartwright
167
10
Othello and Venice: Discrimination and Projection
Alessandro Serpieri
185
Part 4 Venetian Plays and their Afterlife
11
12
13
Index
Merchant of Where? The Venetian Plays in English
Visual Culture
Stuart Sillars
Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock:
Nineteenth-Century French and Romanian Adaptations
of The Merchant of Venice
Madalina Nicolaescu
Barefoot to Palestine: The Failed Meetings of
Shylock and Othello
Shaul Bassi
197
215
231
251
List of Figures
6.1
Vittore Carpaccio, Meditation on the Passion. Job sits on the
right; St. Jerome on the left. Oil and tempera on wood, c. 1510.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy
Fund 11.118. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
106
11.1
Francois Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: Frontispiece to
The Merchant of Venice, from The Works of Mr William Shakespear;
in six volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an
Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq.
(London: Jacob Tonson, 1709). By permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library.
200
11.2
Charles Knight: Frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice
from The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere.
Edited by Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight and Co.,
56 monthly parts, 1838–1843). Author’s collection.
202
Henry Courtney Selous: title-page to Othello from Cassell’s
Illustrated Shakespeare: The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and
Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke (London:
Cassell, Peter, and Galpin, 1864). Author’s collection.
204
William Hodges, engraved by John Browne: The Merchant
of Venice, Act V, Scene 1, published 1 December 1795.
Author’s collection.
207
Unsigned engraving of a scene from Charles Kean’s
production of The Merchant of Venice (1858), published
in the Illustrated London News, 7 August 1858.
Author’s collection.
210
11.3
11.4
11.5
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Contributors
Karina Feliciano Attar (Ph.D., Italian, Columbia University, 2005) is Assistant
Professor of Italian at Queens College of the City University of New York. She
has published essays on Masuccio Salernitano and Pietro Fortini, and is currently
completing a book on Christian–Jewish and Christian–Muslim liaisons in the
fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian novella.
Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ca’ Foscari
University of Venice. His research, teaching and publications are divided between
Shakespeare, postcolonial studies and Jewish studies. His publications include
Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (2000) and Poeti
indiani del Novecento di lingua inglese (1998). He is the editor of a new Italian
edition of Othello (translated by Alessandro Serpieri, 2009) and co-author (with
Alberto Toso Fei) of Shakespeare in Venice. Exploring the City with Shylock and
Othello (2007).
Kent Cartwright is Professor of English and chair of the Department of English
at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Shakespearean Tragedy and
Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991) and Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century
(Cambridge University Press, 1991). He has recently edited A Companion to Tudor
Literature (Blackwell, 2010), and he is currently editing The Comedy of Errors for
the Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series.
$QGUHZ+DG¿HOG is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the
author and editor of over 20 books, including Literature, Politics, and National
Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994), Literature, Travel, and Colonial
Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (1998), Amazons, Savages and
Machiavels: An Anthology of Travel and Colonial Writing, 1550–1650 (2001), and
Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005). He is the editor of Renaissance Studies
and is currently writing a new biography of Spenser.
Graham Holderness is Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire,
and author or editor of numerous studies in early modern and modern literature,
drama and theology. Recent books include Shakespeare and Venice (Ashgate,
2010) and Shrews: Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives 1500–1700
ZLWK'DYLG:RRWWRQ+HLVDOVRDZULWHURI¿FWLRQDQGSRHWU\&XUUHQWSURMHFWV
include Shakespeare and the Middle East, and the representation of Christ in
OLWHUDWXUHDQG¿OP+HLVFXUUHQWO\ZRUNLQJRQDQHZELRJUDSK\RI6KDNHVSHDUH
x
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare
and Political Theology and Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and
Renaissance Literature and co-author with Kenneth Reinhard of After Oedipus:
Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Her latest book, Thinking with Shakespeare:
Essays on Politics and Life, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
She has started work on a new project on Shakespeare and designs for living.
Madalina Nicolaescu is Professor of English Literature at the University of
Bucharest. She is author of Eccentric Mappings of the Renaissance (1997) and
Meanings of Violence in Shakespeare’s Plays (2002). Further recent publications
include ‘Religion and War in Henry V’ in Shakespeare and War, edited by Paul
Fransen and Ros King (2008); ‘Mixing and Mingling: Bodin and Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus’ in Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory, edited by Marta
Gibinska (Kraków, 2007); and ‘Undoing Nationalist Leanings in Teaching
Shakespeare’ in Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture (2003).
Daria Perocco is Professor of Italian Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of
Venice. Her work focuses mainly on literary and cultural history of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, especially drama (Machiavelli), treatises (Bembo,
Castelvetro, Amadi), travel literature (Viaggiare e raccontare, 1997), women’s
writing and narrative (Bandello, Straparola). She recently published a book with
WKHFULWLFDOHGLWLRQRIWKH¿UVWVRXUFHVRIRomeo and Juliet (La prima Giulietta,
2008) and edited previously unknown texts dedicated to Venetian rowing races
(Poesie per le regate, 2006).
Gilberto Sacerdoti is Professor of English Literature at Università Roma Tre. He
is the author of two books on Shakespeare: Nuovo cielo, nuova terra. La rivelazione
Copernicana di Antonio e Cleopatra di Shakespeare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990,
reprint Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008), and 6DFUL¿FLRHVRYUDQLWj
Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Torino, Einaudi, 2002). He
has also written a number of essays on Ralegh, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli,
Bacon, and Toland.
Alessandro Serpieri, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University
of Florence, has carried out extensive research on dramatic language as well
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(particularly Shakespeare), the poetry of John Donne, romantic poetry, nineteenthand twentieth-century poetry, aspects of the novel, and twentieth-century theatre.
His rich bibliography includes: John Webster (1966), the Epistolario of Joseph
Conrad (1966), Hopkins – Eliot – Auden (1969), T.S. Eliot: le strutture profonde
(1973), I sonetti dell’immortalità (1975), Otello: l’Eros negato (1978, 3rd revised
edition, 2003), Retorica e immaginario (1986), On the Language of Drama (1989),
and Polifonia shakespeariana (2002).
List of Contributors
xi
Stuart Sillars is Professor of English at the University of Bergen, having
previously been a member of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
His most recent books are Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820
(Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), and his other books discuss literature and
YLVXDO DUW LQ WKH WZR ZRUOG ZDUV DQG YLVXDO UHODWLRQV LQ SRSXODU ¿FWLRQ +H LV
a member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters, a Visiting Fellow of
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and an Honorary Research Fellow of the
Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Laura Tosi is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University
of Venice. She has researched and written articles on Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama, women’s studies, eighteenth-century mock-heroic poetry, postmodernist
¿FWLRQ DQG FKLOGUHQ¶V OLWHUDWXUH 6KH KDV ZULWWHQ PRQRJUDSKV RQ %HQ -RQVRQ¶V
plays (Comunicazione e aggressione, Milan 1998) and John Webster (La
memoria del testo, Pisa, 2001) and has edited and translated a collection of
Victorian fairy tales (Draghi e Principesse, Venice, 2003). Her latest book is
on the literary fairy tale in England (/D ¿DED OHWWHUDULD LQJOHVH, Venice, 2007).
She is currently editing (with Alessandra Petrina) a collection of essays on
Elizabeth I: Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, for Palgrave
Macmillan (April 2011).
Virginia Mason Vaughan is Professor of English at Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts. With Alden T. Vaughan she co-authored Shakespeare’s Caliban:
A Cultural History and co-edited The Tempest for the Third Arden Series. She is
also the author of Othello: A Contextual History and Performing Blackness on
English Stages, 1500–1800.
Stanley Wells is a renowned authority on Shakespeare and other writers of his
time. He is Chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon and
Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is
also the General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare series, of the Oxford Complete
Works of Shakespeare, and of the Penguin edition. He was formerly Professor of
Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University
of Birmingham. He holds honorary doctorates from Furman University and from
the Universities of Munich, Hull, Durham, Warwick, and Craiova. He edited the
annual Shakespeare Survey for Cambridge University Press for 19 years and has
written many books and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In 2007
he was awarded a CBE for services to literature.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the general editor of the series in which this book is published,
Michele Marrapodi, and our commissioning editor, Erika Gaffney, who took a
generous and friendly interest in it, as well as many friends and colleagues with
whom we have discussed, on different occasions, the topic of this book: Gil
Anidjar, Palmira Brummett, Fernando Cioni, Paul Edmondson, Flavio Gregori,
Joshua Holo, Farah Karim-Cooper, Loretta Innocenti, Patricia Parker, Elizabeth
Pentland, Dorit Raines, Susanne Wofford, and Daniel Vitkus. Thanks to John
Moore and David Newbold for their precious linguistic advice.
We are grateful to our friend Patrick Spottiswoode, director of Globe Education,
Shakespeare’s Globe, London, and his staff for co-hosting the conference that
inspired the present book (Shakespeare in Venice, Venice, 12–13 October 2007)
and for allowing us to test and discuss ideas regarding the complex relationship
between Shakespeare’s ‘Venetian’ plays and their location on several occasions in
the Globe lecture season of 2007–2008. Without Patrick’s support and enthusiasm
we believe that none of this would have happened. We also express our gratitude
to the Dipartimento di Studi Europei e Postcoloniali – Università Ca’ Foscari
Venezia and Ateneo Veneto di Scienze Lettere e Arti for hosting the conference.
We would also like to thank the Banca Cariparo for a generous contribution
towards the Venice conference organization, as part of the research project ‘Queen
and Country’, directed by Alessandra Petrina, to whom we extend heartfelt
appreciation of her advice and friendship.
And last, but by no means least, to our spouses, Susanne and Renato, we give
much thanks for conversations and advice about the project, but most of all for
keeping up our spirits at occasional moments of uncertainty or crisis.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Janet Adelman, a very special friend
with a very special vision of Shakespeare.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Foreword
Stanley Wells
From an early age, Shakespeare was steeped in early Italian culture, above all
through study of its language and its literature. The Roman classics were drilled
into him at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. The extent to which this
kind of education permeated the culture of his time is not easy for us to imagine, but
it is illuminated by a passage in the diaries of the law student John Manningham,
who saw an early performance of Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple in 1602
(and who told the scurrilous anecdote about Shakespeare anticipating Burbage in
an assignation with a woman of easy virtue: ‘William the conqueror was before
Richard III’). Manningham records that his ‘cousin,’ as he calls him, one day
UHSHDWHGIURPPHPRU\DOPRVWWKHZKROHRIWKH¿UVWERRN±RYHUOLQHVORQJ±
of Virgil’s Aeneid, and that two days later the same man ‘rehearsed without book
very near the whole of the second book of the Aeneid, viz. 630 verses without
missing one word.’ This was, as Manningham dryly notes, ‘A singular memory in
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It’s clear that Shakespeare developed a deep fondness for especially Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, which he read both in the original and in Arthur Golding’s
translation, but also that he knew and made use of such writers as Virgil, Cicero,
Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. It was probably only after he left school that he
EHJDQWRH[SHULHQFHWRRWKHLQÀXHQFHRI,WDOLDQ5HQDLVVDQFHZULWHUV±3HWUDUFK
Boccaccio, Castiglione and Bandello among them. Italians living and working in
(QJODQGLQÀXHQFHGKLVZRUN0LFKDHO:\DWW¶V¿QHERRNThe Italian Encounter
with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (2005),1 offers a fascinating
study of Anglo-Italian relations of the period. John Florio plays a major role in
the story, and Shakespeare undoubtedly knew some of Florio’s work, including
his translation of Montaigne, and may well have been acquainted with him
personally, through his membership of the circle of Shakespeare’s patron the Earl
of Southampton. Jonathan Bate has even conjectured that Florio’s wife – curiously
ZHGRQ¶WNQRZZKDWKHU¿UVWQDPHZDV±PD\EHLGHQWL¿HGZLWKWKHVRFDOOHGGDUN
lady of the Sonnets.2
English attitudes toward Italy during the period were ambivalent. Maybe they
can be characterized by the contrast between Machiavelli and Castiglione. At times
the country was thought of as a sink of antiquity and an Italianate Englishman
1
Cambridge series of Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2
Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), pp. 57–8.
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
xvi
was spoken of as a ‘diablo incarnato.’ In Piers Penniless (1592) Thomas Nashe
apostrophizes the country in vivid terms: ‘O Italy, the academy of manslaughter,
the sporting place of murder, the apothecary–shop of poison for all nations.’3 And
in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) he writes of it as a land from which a traveller
may bring ‘the art of atheism, the art of epicurizing, the art of whoring, the art of
poisoning, the art of sodomitry.’4 His traveller visits Venice, where he has lurid
adventures – he and his master are taken to the house of ‘a pernicious courtesan’
alluringly named Tabitha the Temptress, and as a result of her wiles they land up in
prison. There is however no evidence that Nashe himself ever visited the country.
7KHQHJDWLYHYLHZRI,WDO\LVUHÀHFWHGODWHULQDERRNSXEOLVKHGLQE\
the historian Peter Heylyn, who writes of Italian men that ‘in their lust they are
unnatural, in their malice unappeasable, and in their actions deceitful. They will
blaspheme sooner than swear, and murder a man rather than slander him. They
are exceeding jealous over their wives.’ And he describes the women only a little
more favourably, quoting a proverb which Shakespeare had cited in Othello:
‘The women are generally witty in speech, modest in outward carriage, and
bountiful where they bear affection; and it is proverbially said that they are magpies
at the door, saints in the church, goats in the garden, devils in the house, angels in
the street, and sirens in the windows.’ This is the dark view of Italy, the one that is
UHÀHFWHGLQIRUH[DPSOHWKHWUDJHGLHVRI7KRPDV0LGGOHWRQDQG-RKQ:HEVWHU
Shakespeare knew and adopted this perspective on the country, but for him
Italy was above all a land of romance. It is not too much to say that if Italy had
not existed, he would have had to invent it – even that in some respects he did.
Plots of many of his most delightful comedies derive, directly or indirectly, from
Italian literature. In The Taming of the Shrew, he writes of ‘great Italy’ and praises
‘fruitful Lombardy’ as the country’s ‘pleasant garden.’5 And in Love’s Labour’s
Lost the pedant Holofernes quotes the proverb ‘Venetia, Venetia,/chi non ti vede,
non ti pretia.’6 Bandello’s novelle LQÀXHQFHGMuch Ado About Nothing and Twelfth
Night, Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone lies behind All’s Well That Ends Well, set partly
in Florence, The Merchant of Venice is anticipated in the Florentine writer Ser
Giovanni’s Il Pecorone, and the manners of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano
provided Shakespeare (and many of his contemporaries) with models of courtly
behaviour and speech. There is even reason to suppose that we have underestimated
the number of his plays originally set in Italy. It has always seemed odd that
though the action of the Folio text of Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, most
of the characters have Italian names – Isabella, Lucio, Claudio, Angelo, and so on.
3
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other works, ed. J.B. Steane
(London: Penguin, 1985), p. 83.
4
Nashe, p. 345.
5
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Brian Morris
(The Arden Shakespeare, London: Routledge, 1981), 1.1.3–4.
6
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H.R. Woudhuysen (The Arden
Shakespeare, Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), 4.2.95–6.
Foreword
xvii
In an important article, John Jowett has made a strong case for the belief that the
surviving text represents an adaptation by Thomas Middleton of a play originally
VHWLQ,WDO\VSHFL¿FDOO\OLNH0LGGOHWRQ¶VThe Phoenix – which has a similar theme –
in Ferrara.7
Though it is unlikely that Shakespeare would have learned Italian at school,
he certainly appears to have been able to read the language. In this he would have
been helped by his training in Latin and his familiarity with French, witnessed most
obviously by the Princess of France scenes in Henry V. Cinthio’s tale on which
Othello is based had not been translated into English when Shakespeare based his
great tragedy on it, and Naseeb Shaheen demonstrates that he was undoubtedly
LQÀXHQFHG E\ WKH RULJLQDO UDWKHU WKDQ E\ D )UHQFK WUDQVODWLRQ8 Interestingly, a
speech of Portia’s in The Merchant of Venice shows that a command of Italian was
regarded as a necessary accomplishment of an English gentleman. Speaking of her
would-be suitor ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England,’ she complains that
he ‘hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian.’9 I like to think that Shakespeare would
QRWKDYHZULWWHQWKLVLIKHKLPVHOIGLGQRWKDYHDWOHDVWDUHDVRQDEOHÀXHQF\LQDOO
three languages.
Whether Shakespeare ever travelled to Italy himself has been endlessly debated.
It has been an especially favoured subject of those who like to suppose that someone
other than Shakespeare wrote his works. How, they ask, could he have known as
much as he appears to have known if he had not visited the country? Well, one
can reply that, as the editors of this volume point out in their Introduction, he
could have learned about it from ‘innumerable written and oral sources’ including
conversations with those who had. And there is such a thing as the power of the
imagination. Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson, John
Webster, and many others wrote plays and other works of literature set in Italy
without being known to have visited it. Of Venice, E.H. Sugden, in his invaluable
Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists
(1925), remarks that ‘none of our dramatists show any personal knowledge of’ the
city-state, and that ‘the local references to it are of the most general character. Ben
Jonson, in Volpone, mentions more details than any other of them, but even they
are meagre and derived from hearsay.’10
At least one English theatre practitioner did, however, visit the country, and
that is Shakespeare’s close colleague Will Kemp, who was a shareholder in the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men and for whom Shakespeare wrote a sequence of roles
7
John Jowett, ‘The Audacity of Measure for Measure in 1621,’ Ben Jonson Journal
8 (2001): pp. 229–47.
8
Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian,’ Shakespeare Survey 47
(1994): pp. 161–9.
9
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 10th rpt., ed. John Russell Brown
(The Arden Shakespeare, London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 1.2.64–6.
10
E.H. Sugden, Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow
Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), p. 543.
xviii
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
including Dogberry and possibly Falstaff. After leaving the company in or around
1599, Kemp visited both Germany and Italy. In Rome he met up with the English
traveller Sir Anthony Shirley, and the encounter is dramatized in a comic episode
in a curious play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, written by William
Rowley, John Day and George Wilkins a few years later. In this play Kemp has a
mildly bawdy conversation with an Italian Harlequin and his wife. Thomas Nashe,
in An Almond for a Parrot (1590) also associates Kemp with Harlequin, suggesting
WKDWFRQWHPSRUDULHVOLNHVFKRODUVODWHUVDZDI¿QLWLHVEHWZHHQWKHWHFKQLTXHVRI
English clowns and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Whether or not Shakespeare travelled to Italy, writers have often enough
LPDJLQHG KLV SUHVHQFH LQ WKH FRXQWU\ DQG VSHFL¿FDOO\ LQ 9HQLFH 2QH RI WKH
more preposterous examples comes in a book called The Real Shakespeare,
A Counterblast to Commentators, published in 1947 by an 82-year-old gentleman
named William Bliss, who was known as ‘the father of English canoeing.’
(We must not hold this against him.) In this book Bliss proposes that when
Shakespeare was aged 13 he left home to join Sir Francis Drake on his voyage
round the world on the Golden Hind, and that in 1585 he went to sea again, was
shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, and found his way from there to Venice
where he met and fell in love with the Earl of Southampton. Romance between
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Serenissima, of 1987, later issued in America under the new title of Shylock’s
Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice ,WV FHQWUDO FKDUDFWHU LV DQ$PHULFDQ ¿OP
star named Jessica who takes a journey backward in time in the course of which
she meets up with Shakespeare, Southampton, and a courtesan posing as a boy.
Steamy scenes ensue; the three were, she writes, ‘a three-backed beast that pants
and screams and begs for mercy.’11 Venice has also of course provided wonderful
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of Venice starring Ermete Novelli and his matronly wife (she plays Portia) of 1910,
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in the city a century ago.
The story of Shakespeare and Italy, centering on the international city-state
of Venice, is inexhaustible. This volume, appropriately written by a distinguished
international and multi-disciplinary team of scholars, offers sophisticated and
learned expositions of the relationship between the dramatist and the city, centering
DVLV¿WWLQJRQ6KDNHVSHDUH¶VWZR9HQHWLDQSOD\VOthello and The Merchant of
Venice 7KH ¿UVW LQGHSWK VWXG\ IRU PDQ\ \HDUV LW RIIHUV QHZ DQG LOOXPLQDWLQJ
insights into a fascinatingly diverse topic.
11
Erica Jong, Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (New York: Norton,
2003), p. 120.
Introduction:
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi
Around the time Shakespeare was writing about the city, Venice was undergoing
a ‘shift from a center of information about the world (especially the East) to a
center of information about itself.’1 It was the beginning of an ongoing process that
turned, as has often been remarked, a real city into a myth. Having accumulated
over the centuries an immense amount of economic, social and cultural capital
while at the same time becoming less and less competitive in an expanding
world market, Venetians started investing in symbolic capital and made of their
name a currency that circulated throughout Europe and beyond, exerting its
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and global tourism. The myth of Venice, ‘that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of
stories the Venetians told themselves about themselves,’2 was quickly adopted by
non-Venetians, so that the longevity and persistence of this city of fantasy and
imagination has to be credited now to foreigners, visitors, strangers, with William
Shakespeare prominent among them.
We hardly need to be reminded that Shakespeare, like Venice, has long become
a far-reaching myth, which today we may call ‘global’ rather than ‘universal,’
because we have learned that its unequalled planetary reach was not only caused
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wide on the wings of powerful economic and political forces linked to British
colonization.
The existence of myths, while claiming eternity, depends on their being
perpetually reinvented, endlessly reproduced, casually recycled, remolded
into new artistic masterpieces (whether a classical Venetian painting or a new
Shakespearean staging) or debased into trite clichés. Myths are myths because
we periodically revisit them, or to be more precise, because they invite periodic
reconsideration, drawing attention to themselves as they speak to broader cultural
and political concerns.
Our brief opening quotation also implies that before it started disseminating
in profusion idealized and virtual Venices, the real city had based its fortunes on
1
Peter Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Centre of Communication and Information,’
in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–
1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2000), p. 391.
2
Martin and Romano, p. x.
2
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
diversity (of people, merchandise, political forms, information, etc.), a diversity
that has been alternatively (and sometimes, perhaps even in Shakespeare,
simultaneously) interpreted positively or negatively as opulence, confusion,
SDUDGR[ PL[WXUH ,Q WKLV OLJKW ZH PD\ GH¿QH WKH SUHVHQW FROOHFWLRQ RI HVVD\V
as a book that relies on an academic cultural mix in the same way as Venice was
represented as a mixed city. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional
topic, it deliberately tries to bring together different critical outlooks informed
by different cultural and academic traditions. Philology and theory, history
and politics, and the visual and performing arts all intersect here and prove to
be complementary tools to broach such a complex and engrossing subject.
Shakespeare’s appropriation and re-creation of the Venetian symbolic landscape is
here investigated and explored through a variety of perspectives by an academic
equivalent of that ‘famous concourse and meetings of so many distinct and sundry
nations’3 that was so typical of Venice and that the English traveller Thomas Coryat
described in 1608 in such fascinating terms.
A Symbolic Landscape
Venice is possibly the most enduring of all symbolic landscapes of the Renaissance.
In the last three decades research on the relationship between landscape and national
identity suggests that landscape is less real and physical and more ideologically
charged than we can imagine – a country of the mind, mediated through culture. As
Meinig has noted, ‘we regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural
values, social behaviours, and individual actions worked upon particular localities
over a span of time. Every landscape is an accumulation … and every landscape is
a code, and its study may be undertaken as a deciphering of meaning.’4
The cultural geography of the Republic can indeed be perceived as an
accumulation of traditions, myths, values and anti-values which is constructed
along primarily narrative lines (as in travellers’ reports for example) as well
as dramatic ones, with the extraordinary impact of early modern plays set in
Venice (as in Thomas Platter’s much-quoted observation, ‘the English pass their
time, learning at the play what is happening abroad … since for the most part
the English do not much use to travel, but prefer to learn of foreign matters and
take their pleasures at home’).5 If landscapes are indeed part of the iconography
3
Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and
Sons, 1905), p. 318.
4
David W. Meinig, ‘Introduction,’ in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes:
Geographical Essays, ed. D.W. Meinig (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979), p. 6.
5
Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, ed. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape,
1937), p. 170, cit. in Ania Loomba, ‘Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England,’ in The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 160.
Introduction
3
of nationhood,69HQLFHLVFRQVWUXHGDVWKHXOWLPDWH¿FWLRQDOODQGVFDSHRIRWKHUQHVV
a representation that resembles reality in its being inescapably bound up with the
sea. In the association with the city, the sea appears both as a geographical feature
of protection (from land invasions) and vulnerability (to the intrusiveness of tides,
then as today) and is strongly felt to be a key factor in the extent of the commercial
and political domination of the Republic in the Mediterranean. One often wonders
about the impact of the early modern experience of approaching the city from the
sea, which must have been central to the perception of the Venetian landscape.
The traveller would have been exposed to a most peculiar variety of paradoxical
cityscape that established a very close and inescapable connection with the
surrounding environment of the lagoon, a place of mediation between urban spaces
and the spaces of travel and commerce. As Denis Cosgrove has succinctly put it,
‘The sixteenth-century myth of Venice was at once geographical and historical, and
it found expression in the constitution of Venice as a symbolic landscape.’7
Brabantio’s words, ‘This is Venice: my house is not a grange’ (1.1.105–6)8 are
there to remind us that Venice is the city par excellence, the open space where
a multitude of nationalities, religions and ethnicities made their way through
the centuries right into the heart of the symbolic landscape of early modern
JOREDOL]DWLRQµDFRPPRQDQGJHQHUDOPDUNHWWRWKHZKROHZRUOG¶LQWKHGH¿QLWLRQ
given by Lewes Lewkenor.9 It is a landscape that Shakespeare found described in
innumerable written and oral sources, ranging from travellers’ reports to maps,
from translations of Venetian political treaties to possibile conversations with the
Anglo-Italian cultural mediators of the time such as John Florio and Philip Sidney,
and perhaps even with the Venetian merchants living in London.10
It is not easy to determine with certainty what the educated view of Venice
was in England and contrast it with its theatrical counterpart.11 Both fantasies
and projections combine sophistication with corruption, sameness and alterity,
often producing a powerful vision which blurs the boundaries between historical
6
D.W. Meinig, ‘Symbolic Landscapes. Some Idealizations of American
Communities,’ in Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, p. 164.
7
Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 [1984]), p. 109.
8
William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
9
Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewes
Lewkenor (London, 1599; reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York:
Da Capo Press, 1969), p. 132.
10
See, among others, David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of
Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990) and John R. Mulryne, ‘Between
Myth and Fact: The Merchant of Venice as Docu-Drama,’ in Italian Culture in the Drama of
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007),
pp. 111–26.
11
See the chapter ‘“I had read Contarine”: Sources for Shakespeare and Jonson,’ in
McPherson, pp. 17–26.
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare
4
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entirely dissimilar to that of the whole of Italy in some respects, that of the most
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as well as banking, political science,12HWFWKLVLVWKHIDQWDV\ZH¿QGLQPDQ\
of Shakespeare’s comedies) but also the cradle of political, religious and sexual
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worked most of this available information into his oeuvre, and, as John Drakakis
has eloquently put it, ‘Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays both represent, and
maintain a critical distance from, Venice, and … in different ways they interrogate
and challenge existing elements of the received “myth.”’13
It is certainly worth asking why, as mentioned before, Shakespeare and Venice
seem to call for our attention in the present moment. A century ago the Scottish
historian and Venice resident Horatio Brown wrote: ‘the scattered allusions to
be collected from [Shakespeare’s] plays prove an intimacy with Venice which is
surprising in a man who probably was never out of England.’14 There was a distinct
note of nostalgia in this suggestion, a longing to follow the footsteps of a mythical
journey by Shakespeare to Italy, an antiquarian pursuit of a long-gone past at a
time when, probably, clever gondoliers and romantic expatriates were inventing
Desdemona’s houses and Shylock’s banks to quench the thirst for authenticity
of enthusiastic bardolaters. Back then, and for a long time afterwards, whether
Shakespeare ever set foot to Venice (or the rest of Italy) was a vexed question.
Today it appears more fruitful to investigate the Venetian plays as intellectual sites
of interacting voices and discourses from the most diverse cultural collocations. We
NQRZWKDWVXI¿FLHQWLQIRUPDWLRQZRXOGKDYHEHHQDYDLODEOHWR/RQGRQUHVLGHQWVWR
‘picture’ a believable version of Venice on page or stage. Perhaps these exchanges
took place at the Oliphant, a Bankside inn that catered to Italian customers and
that is mentioned in Twelfth Night or, near the Tower and Bishopsgate where, as
Michael Wyatt has recently shown in his book on the cultural exchanges between
Italy and England, Venetian merchants used to meet, nostalgically referring to
these places in London as the Rialto and San Marco.15 Hence we can safely
compare Shakespeare to Lewes Lewkenor, the English translator of Gasparo
Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice (1599), a famous book
that Shakespeare probably read. In his note ‘To the Reader,’ Lewkenor writes:
I was not so fortunate as to be a beholder of the glory [of Venice], yet I have not
omitted from time to time to gather such observations as well by reading the best
and choicest authors entreating thereof, as also by conference with sundry well
12
Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1989), pp. 4–5.
13
John Drakakis, ‘Shakespeare and Venice,’ in Marrapodi, Italian Culture, p. 172.
14
Horatio Brown, Studies in the History of Venice, vol. 2 (London: John Murray,
1907), p. 160.
15
Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of
Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 187.
Introduction
5
experienced gentlemen, as might not only satisfy the curiosity of my own desire,
but also deliver unto others a clear and exact knowledge of every particularities
worthy of note.16
Some of ‘the best and choicest authors’ may well be among those analyzed in
the present book – see Mason Vaughan’s chapter on historical narratives of the
Ottoman empire or Attar’s chapter on the Italian novella.
Gradually abandoning the projective fantasy that the playwright visited the
Serenissima and walked its teeming piazzas and calles, drawing inspiration for
Shylock and Othello, critics started leaning toward the view that Venice was to
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summa of the urban and civic qualities that fascinated and troubled early modern
Europe. In this light Shakespeare’s Venice could be utilized without bothering
with Italian sources, at a time when in fact the historical background of literary
works was at best taken for granted. Such a metaphorical view could then be
taken to the anglocentric extreme of suggesting that if you scratched the surface
RI 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V 9HQLFH \RX FRXOG HDVLO\ ¿QG 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V /RQGRQ ,Q David McPherson’s seminal book Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice
criticized the widely held view that the Venice of Shakespeare’s plays was London
in thin disguise and turned to actual Venetian history, and crucially to the historical
construction of the Myth of Venice. In the following decade, such works as Michele
Marrapodi’s Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance
Drama (1993) reconsidered in a more critically and historically nuanced way
the whole relationship between Shakespeare and Italy. In the same period a
growing bibliography, and in particular two important books such as John Gross’s
Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (1992)17 and Virginia Mason
Vaughan’s Othello: A Contextual History (1994),18WHVWL¿HGWRWKHQHZUHOHYDQFH
attributed to the Venetian plays and to their rich critical and theatrical afterlives. If,
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what it is looking for and what it wants to see’19 and if for most of the twentieth
century, Hamlet and Lear contended for the title of ‘the best, the great, or the chief
masterpiece of Shakespeare,’20 at the turn of the third millenium it seems easier
to mirror ourselves in plays where tormented rulers and medieval monarchies
give way to citizens of multireligious societies and a teeming metropolis. As John
Drakakis cogently writes:
16
Lewkenor, in Contarini, p. 12.
John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1992).
18
Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
19
Ian Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1994 [1965]), p. 5.
20
R.A. Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 1.
17

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