The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0470 Tuesday, 1 September 2009
From: Michele Marrapodi <
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Date: Tuesday, 1 Sep 2009 16:09:31 +0100
Subject: Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies - Books Announcement
Dear SHAKSPEReans,
I am pleased to announce the publication of the following new books in
the Ashgate series "Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies":
_Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy: Intertextuality on the Jacobean
Stage_ By Michael J. Redmond, University of Palermo, Italy
"The use of Italian culture in the Jacobean theatre was never an
isolated gesture. In considering the ideological repercussions of
references to Italy in prominent works by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, Michael J. Redmond argues that early modern
intertextuality was a dynamic process of allusion, quotation, and
revision. Beyond any individual narrative source, Redmond foregrounds
the fundamental role of Italian textual precedents in the staging of
domestic anxieties about state crisis, nationalism, and court intrigue.
By focusing on the self-conscious, overt rehearsal of existing texts and
genres, the book offers a new approach to the intertextual strategies of
early modern English political drama. The pervasive circulation of
Cinquecento political theorists like Machiavelli, Castiglione, and
Guicciardini combined with recurrent English representations of Italy to
ensure that the negotiation with previous writing formed an integral
part of the dramatic agendas of period plays."
_Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama: Comic Elders on the
Italian and Shakespearean Stage_ By Anthony Ellis, Western Michigan
University, USA
"This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old
man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English
dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native
concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides
an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of
sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in
early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a
consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's
subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In
outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes
the physical and behavioral characteristics of the comic old man and
situates these traits within early modern society by considering
prevailing medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational
conflict over political and economic circumstances. The plays examined
include Italian dramas by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Niccolo
Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti, Lorenzino de' Medici, Andrea Calmo, and
Flaminio Scala, and English works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
and Thomas Dekker, along with Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood's The Old
Law. Besides providing insight into stage representations of aging, this
book illuminates how early modern people conceived of and responded to
the experience of growing old and its social, economic, and physical
challenges."
_Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare's Rome_ Edited by Maria
Del Sapio Garbero, Universita Roma Tre, Italy
"Contributors to this collection delve into the relationship between
Rome and Shakespeare. They view the presence of Rome in Shakespeare's
plays not simply as an unquestioned model of imperial culture, or a
routine chapter in the history of literary influence, but rather as the
problematic link with a distant and foreign ancestry which is both
revered and ravaged in its translation into the terms of the Bard's own
cultural moment. During a time when England was engaged in constructing
a rhetoric of imperial nationhood, the contributors demonstrate that
Englishmen used Roman history and the classical heritage to mediate a
complex range of issues, from notions of cultural identity and gender to
the representation of systems of exchange with Otherness in the
expanding ethnic space of the nation. This volume addresses matters of
concern not only for Shakespeare scholars but also for students
interested in issues connected with gender, postcolonialism, and
globalization. Drawing implicitly or explicitly on recent criticism
(intertextual studies, postcolonial theory, Derrida's conceptualization
of hospitality, gender studies, global studies) the essayists explore
how the Roman Shakespeare of an emerging early modern empire asks
questions of our present as well as of our past."
New book proposals and edited collections of essays are welcome.
Best wishes,
Michele Marrapodi
General Editor
"Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies"
University of Palermo
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