ABSTRACT
In a much quoted article, Leo Salingar asserts that ‘the image of Venetian society’ in the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson is ‘a refracted projection of London’ and that both writers ‘are reacting to English life and thought’.1 Ernst Honigmann, the most recent editor of the Arden Othello, acknowledges a greater interest in location in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays, but falls back on the ‘fact’ that: ‘that Venice was the pleasure capital of Europe, especially in its sexual tolerance’.2 The late Allan Bloom, however, took more seriously the actual setting of Venice, although his argument, couched in a reactionary rhetoric, lionized Venice’s republican tradition, in the face of a commonly held Renaissance view that, ‘the proper practice of political life had deteriorated since the fall of the Roman republic’.3 The historian J. G. A. Pocock has, more recently, affirmed the ‘myth’ of Venice, whose power lay ‘in the vision it conveyed of a polity in which all particulars were harmonised and whose stability was consequently immortal’.4 But as Terence Hawkes has recently reminded us, ‘History is far too important to be left to scholars who believe themselves able to make contact with a past unshaped by their own concerns’.5 A renewed interest in Elizabethan conceptions of Venice is indicative of a desire to compensate for what Edward Soja has described as ‘an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination’.6 In this context, Richard Sennett’s Foucauldian Flesh and Stone: The Body and The City in Western Civilization (1994) explores the widespread ramifications of these spatial pressures upon urban cultures, and
1 Leo Salingar, ‘Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’, in Michele Marrapodi et al. (eds), Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 173 and 182.
