Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources

Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at Verona University, where she is the Director of the Skenè Research Centre for drama and theatre studies. Her Shakespearean publications include monographs on Hamlet (Oltre il genere. Amleto tra scena e racconto, 2001) and the experience of non-being (Nel prisma del nulla. L’esperienza del nonessere nella drammaturgia shakespeariana, 2005), as well as the co-edition of miscellanies on theatre translation (Theatre Translation in Performance, Routledge 2013), Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify (2014), Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life: The Boundaries of Civic Space, 2016), and Shakespeare and Crisis (2020). In 2019 she published Julius Caesar 1935: Shakespeare and Censorship in Fascist Italy. She is the co-general editor of Skenè. JTDS, as well as of the Global Shakespeare Inverted series. She has translated into Italian Romeo and Juliet (2012) and Shakespeare’s sonnets (2023), and has received several fellowships from New York University, Cambridge, and Oxford (All Souls). She is a co-founder of the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival.

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Silvia Bigliazzi

PARTE ONE: MEMORIES

1. “Memory, Intertextuality/Interdiscursivity and Reuse”

Savina Stevanato

2. “Whose Memory? From the “Rossignuol” to Female Communities in Groto and Shakespeare”

Silvia Bigliazzi

PART TWO: MEMORY AND REUSE

3. Welcome to Padua: Female Characters, Narrative Sources, and the Commedia dell’Arte in The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Melissa Walter

4. The Source as a Resonant Halo. Italian Neoplatonism in Twelfth Night

Rocco Coronato

5. Bandello’s Novellas and The Merry Wives of Windsor

Roberta Zanoni

6. “Ed ebbono bene e buona ventura.” Multi-Layered Echoes of Il Pecorone in The Merchant of Venice

Alessandra Squeo

7. Boccaccio’s Bernabò, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and Other Resources: A Keyword and Co-textual Analysis

Fabio Ciambella

PART THREE: REUSE AND MEMORY

8 “What country, friends, is this?”: Displaced Identity and Homoerotic Desire in Twelfth Night and its Italian Models

Jason Lawrence

9. “The story that is printed in her blood”: Patriarchal Authority in Much Ado About Nothing and Its Sources

Emanuel Stelzer

10. “Most strange, but yet most truly, will I speak”: Female Agency from Cinthio to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

Cristiano Ragni

11. Reviving Past “Models”: Dolce’s Marianna and the Intricacies of Othello’s Crux

Beatrice Righetti

12. “As I please myself.” Recollections and Reconfigurations of Female Agency in Ariosto’s Suppositi, Gascoigne’s Supposes and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew

Silvia Silvestri

13. The Ring is the Thing: All’s Well That Ends Well and its Mobile Circuitry

Eric Nicholson

AFTERWORD

Robert Henke

Index