ABSTRACT
The First Folio, the grand edition of Shakespeare's theatrical works edited by his two fellow actors. John Heminges and Henry Condell, contains 36 'playes' subdivided into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The common rhetoric, constructed on naturalness and simplicity of language, expands the 'woman as wonder' trope, which introduces the explicit Counter-Reformation moralism of commedia grave into Renaissance Anglo-Italian humanist culture. The wide-ranging structural effects in Shakespeare's late works of the transition from Giraldi's approach in the Lettera sovra il comporre le satire to Guarini's in Verrato primo and Verrato secondo written in opposition to the purist arguments of Giasone de Nores, who analysed their intertextual dynamics from outside the framework of traditional intertextual positivistic studies. The conflict between masculimsation and femimmsation also inspires Shakespeare's romances as Stevie Davies suggests, 'from the root-sources of Shakespeare's Last Plays, the Greek romances of the early Christian era with their emphasis on the love-quest.
