ABSTRACT
In a number of the plays of his middle period, Shakespeare not only makes use of Italian source texts but, as he does so, offers a sustained reflection on what has happened to both these texts and the values they represent as they have been translated and/or assimilated into English culture. Shakespeare is well aware that such processes of transition are not always easy – in As You Like It, for instance, he draws our attention to the fate of ‘honest Ovid among the Goths’1 – and he seems to find in them a profound analogy for the transformations effected by his own dramatisations of actual and fictional narratives, as well as an implicit reflection on the effectiveness and cultural legitimacy of the translatio studii et imperii. Rather unusually among his contemporaries (I think here particularly of Marlowe, Chapman, and Kyd), Shakespeare himself never translated anything, but he clearly registers an interest in the theory and practice of translation both in themselves and as a model of the relationship of one text to others in the same cultural field. This is, I shall suggest, particularly so in Troilus and Cressida, but the ways in which Shakespeare is operating in that play seem to me to be comprehensible only if we approach them through two very different and probably slightly earlier plays, Henry V and Hamlet, which, I shall argue, combine interest in Italian source texts – specifically Machiavelli and Castiglione – with reflection on both their translation to England and the cultural politics of hortatory art in general.
