Italian Novella and Shakespeare's Comic Heroines

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

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Using a comparative, feminist approach informed by English and Italian literary and theatre studies, this book investigates connections between Shakespearean comedy and the Italian novella tradition. Shakespeare’s comedies adapted the styles of wit, character types, motifs, plots, and other narrative elements of the novella tradition for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and they investigated social norms and roles through a conversation carried out in narrative and drama.Arguing that Shakespeare’s comedies register the playwright’s reading of the novella tradition within the collaborative playmaking context of the early modern theatre, this book demonstrates how the comic vision of these plays increasingly valued women’s authority and consent in the comic conclusion. The representation of female characters in novella collections is complex and paradoxical, as the stories portray women not only in the roles of witty plotters and storytellers but also through a multifaceted poetics of enclosed spaces – including trunks, chests, caskets, graves, cups, and beds. The relatively open-ended rhetorical situation of early modern English theatre and the dialogic form and narrative material available in the novella tradition combine to help create the complex female characters in Shakespeare’s plays and a new form of English comedy.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2019-08-21
Mått150 x 231 x 28 mm
Vikt560 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor296
FörlagUniversity of Toronto Press
ISBN9781487503642

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Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Enclosure, Conversation, and Spaces of Authorship 1. Filomena’s Voice and Female Character in Shakespeare’s Early Italianate Comedies 2. Thinking Inside and Outside the Box: The Casket Test and Audience Response in The Merchant of Venice 3. The Trunk in Twelfth Night as Mobility Machine4. Novellesque Domesticity and Impossible Places in The Merry Wives of Windsor 5. Reforming Civility in Measure for Measure6. Rewriting the "ladies text": All’s Well that Ends Well7. Seeing as Reading and Retelling in Cymbeline Conclusion Appendix Bibliography

"Walter’s book is an impressive achievement."- Rhodri Lewis, Princeton University (Times Literary Supplement) "This thoroughly researched book is both a critical assessment of the connection between the Italian novella and Shakespeare’s comedy and an analysis of Shakespeare’s creation of the female comic character."- Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University (Renaissance and Reformation) "Melissa Walter’s The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines is useful reading for scholars and students interested in the relationship between Shakespeare’s comedies and the Italian novella tradition. The book is well structured and informed."- Flavia Palma, University of Verona (Journal of British Studies) "Theoretically engaged and full of insightful readings, this book makes a vital contribution to scholarship […] in the study of Shakespeare and early modern drama in general."- Pamela Allen Brown, University of Connecticut (Early Modern Women) "Walter deftly analyzes the divestment of women’s power that curtails women’s speech and agency, and foregrounds key moments of resistance wherein women’s voices are heard."- Alani Hicks-Bartlett, Brown University (Annali d’italianistica)