ABSTRACT
Bernard Weinberg's monumental survey of Italian Renaissance criticism tells us that, in his De imitatione libri tres, Bartolomeo Ricci insisted 'that the moderns can equal the ancients, that Nature has been as generous to us as to men of the classical past'. Far from being a pot-boiler hastily put together to exploit the success of The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus is a deliberate and sophisticate exercise in aemulatio which targets both Shakespeare's fellow playwrights and the classics. Once the classics had been reverently studied and imitated, they could be emulated and outdone and Renaissance Italy was the place where this was going to happen. The Italians positioned themselves as the new models, without much fear that they, too, could in turn be outdone. They certainly did not expect it to happen any time soon and certainly not in Elizabethan England.
