ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Italian Renaissance authors wrote very advanced essays about wonder and that Shakespeare shared many literary traits regarding the dramatic use of wonder with contemporary Italian theorists and playwrights. The relationship between Richard II and Italian aesthetics is hardly cited at all by the play's editors on the conjunction between the Italian and the English Renaissance. Shakespeare also shares with his predecessor a tendency to explore the nature of economic hardship and the problem of old age in comedies that contain putatively happy endings. The nexus between the Venetian sex trade and high culture, Keir Elam argues, made such female characters the ideal figures for exploring the social position of the London theatre. Louise George Clubb's afterword rounds off the question of the relationship between early modern Italian and English drama and particularly how Italian dramatic theories and practices were used and exploited by Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists.
