ABSTRACT
Keir Elam’s Afterword points out that the function of Italian settings takes a number of different forms. Most evident is the role they assume in reflecting and refracting English perceptions of national identity, as well as English political and commercial ambitions. Another aspect of location is the locus, as fictional place but also topos (locus comunis). One of the most fruitful lines of research in Anglo-Italian studies has been the far-reaching enquiry into the appropriation, transformation, and dissemination of literary and theatrical loci from Greek and Roman New Comedy, via medieval and Renaissance Italian narrative to the Early Modern English stage. Genre-specific locii, such as the locus amoenus of pastoral, are less places than conventional markers of literary mode. More in general, the distinction between place and literary or dramaturgic tradition is often slight. For the audiences of the Globe, Curtain, or Blackfriars, the Italian settings are narrative spaces, becoming literary constructs prior to their nominal appearance on stage. The Venice of Iago and Volpone, the Verona of Juliet, and the Amalfi of De Bosola – Elam contends – are intertextual rather than geographic places, created or recreated through the descriptive and performative power of the world. ‘Venice’ and ‘Rome’ are verbal and scenographic constructs, ontologically posited through allusion and description. This manifold exploitation of loci is brought together by Shakespeare in Cymbeline. Each location also becomes a form of narration where the spasmodic shifts in time and place bring with them abrupt changes in genre, while “the veritable feast of intertextual and macrotextual allusions” makes Cymbeline a unique case of Shakespearian self-appropriation and generic intertextuality.
