ABSTRACT
The very 'genius' of both Ruzante and William Shakespeare, even when correctly specified as the distinctly collaborative genius operative in the particularly social medium of theatre, and forged in the particularly fertile social-theatrical environments of the Veneto in the early Cinqucento and London at the turn of the seventeenth century may be seen to render them, quite literally, incomparable. Striking differences between the two playwrights may easily enough be identified, mostly stemming from the significantly greater presence of the actor Angelo Beolco in his scripted plays relative to Shakespeare. In their 'realistic purchase on agricultural life both Ruzante and Shakespeare could be strikingly sensitive to the hardships and sufferings befalling small landowners in the painful transition from feudalism to capitalism: famine, hunger, exorbitant rents, dispossession, and enforced migration. Both playwrights were reaching their dramatic maturity when disastrous famines struck: the great 1527-1529 Venetian famine, in the midst of which and immediately afterwards Beolco wrote Seconda oratione, Dialogo facetissimo.
