ABSTRACT

Scholars have tended to be cautious about accepting that there might be direct influences from Italian Renaissance drama into the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The individuality of the English theater tradition is no doubt responsible for this-in particular its refusal to accept the so-called Aristotelian “unities,” proposed by Italian theorists and then enthusiastically absorbed by French dramatists. It remains the case that modern European theater, as we still understand it, was born in Italy under the aegis of Humanism; and born, what is more, a good fifty years before it got underway in England. The first full-length play in the “classical” mode-which, however paradoxically, was also to become the mode of modern dramaturgy-was Ariosto’s La cassaria, performed in Ferrara in 1508. From a neutral standpoint, it seems simply implausible that prestigious models so long established could have been effectively quarantined from English theater, deriving as they did from a culture whose influence was sweeping through every other sector of the nation’s artistic life. Efforts are now being made to investigate what influences there might have been, however clandestine and disguised;1 but mainstream Shakespeare criticism remains slow to accommodate even relatively modest proposals.