ABSTRACT

Recent work has shown that novellas provided a vehicle for the movement across national boundaries of the cruel beffe that appear in English revenge tragedies and for the circulation of the bed trick.2 In addition, novellas also provided new ways of rethinking dramatic agency and personhood through their representation of spatial-bodily analogies. Similar to the theatergrams identified by Louise George Clubb, novellesque spaces can be identified as “novellagrams” that bring with them certain ways of thinking about space, embodiment, and agency. These novellagrams may be reinterpreted locally in each narrative and play where they appear, though they raise certain related questions in each case. Transporting narrative and symbolic material across national and generic boundaries (among Italy, France, Spain, and England, and from narrative to drama), novellesque spaces become one of the ways in which cultural material crosses bordersbetween genres and across nations-in early modern Europe.