ABSTRACT

This chapter should be considered as a kind of extended footnote to the contents of the present volume, suggesting a different view of the relationship between Italian culture and Elizabethan drama, through the medium of music. In my view, Italian vocal music acted as an imaginative stimulus to the creation of English verse drama,

* The present article develops a suggestion contained in a lecture delivered in November 2001 at the conference on ‘La drammaturgia verdiana e le letterature europee’ at the Accademia dei Lincei. My contribution, under the title ‘Shakespeare e Verdi: due drammaturgie all’opera’

and in turn the ‘music of words’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays foreshadowed some form of compositional technique in later operatic music.