SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT:
Throughout his writing career, William Shakespeare revealed a considerable artistic debt to Italy and Italian culture. Though there is no evidence to suggest he left England, Italian settings feature in more than a third of his plays. From his first tragedy, the blood-soaked Titus Andronicus, to the racially-charged The Merchant of Venice, and on to the moral and political turmoil of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Italian plays contain intriguing dramatic obsessions regarding the role of power, family, war, treachery, revenge and love.
This course entails the study of four of Shakespeare’s plays in order to assess how he located and historicized his Italian-based drama. Given that we are in Rome, we will be able to compare directly the archaeology of Shakespeare’s creativity with the splendors of ancient and Renaissance Italy that are integral to the works we will read.
Throughout, we will track the intersections of Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative with the notion of Italian ‘cultural difference’ in Shakespeare’s time. In this way we will learn how he dramatizes the Italian ‘Other’. In doing so, we will read his primary sources and evaluate how Shakespeare’s creative brilliance responded to the writings of historians such as Plutarch and Macchiavelli and story tellers such as Ovid, Matteo Bandello and Giovanni Fiorentino. We will also attempt to gauge whether within his Italian plays there exists a veiled critique of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts in which Shakespeare’s work was widely circulated.
Moreover, we will see how filmmakers such as Joseph Mankiewicz (Julius Caesar; 1953), Michael Radford (The Merchant of Venice; 2004) and Julie Taymor (Titus; 1999) have documented Shakespeare’s obsession with Italy, and how their work both subverts and confirms Shakespeare’s imaginative settings and Italianate compulsions.
This will require primary and secondary source readings, a solid attendance record, active engagement in class, and total commitment to the scope of the course.