ABSTRACT
The representation of Italian myths in Shakespeare’s comedies, highly nurtured by the enticement of the arts, Petrarchan poetry, and commedia (in its threefold expression as erudita, grave, and all’improvviso), collides with the opposing view of the Italianate villain, embodying the equally constructed semantics of Italian vices. The reason for this ambivalent iconology, rooted in the duplicity of the peninsula mostly originating from travellers’ reports and defamatory tracts, belongs to fictional convention rather than historical accuracy. The prose works of Roger Ascham and Thomas Nashe, among many others, together with the alluring call of the most famous Elizabethan travelogues, have been indicated as the major source of influence and bias.1 Italian literary texts, though, either in the original or adapted and translated, as well as wider cultural transactions such as custom and education, dancing and music, clothes and fashion, horsemanship and duelling, equally concurred to the rise of the dramatic traditions of both countries. Thus, we may say that what the London stage offered in terms of Italian-based drama was an adaptation of heterogeneous Italian materials, ranging from a variety of written literary and non-literary works to a dissemination of cultural discourses as well as xenophobic prejudices, which better suited Elizabethan nationalistic ideology and affected every playwright’s theatrical agenda.
