Shakespeare and Early Modern Italian Theatre: Scripts, Scenarios and Stories

Why was Shakespeare drawn to Italian sources when writing his plays? How did Italian novellas, plays and ideas from professional Italian theatre reach Shakespeare and find their way into his plays?

Illuminating the resonance of Italian scripted comedy, improvised comedy (the commedia dell'arte) and the novella in his works, Robert Henke reveals Shakespeare's openness to transnational cultural exchange at a time when 'fear of the foreign' was common. In all, 14 of Shakespeare's plays are studied in genre clusters - comedies, dark comedies, tragedies and tragicomedies - in order to provide a unified picture of the pervasive Italian theatrical resonance. For each play, not only are specific sources studied but also the resonance of modular units ('theatregrams'), conventions and genres that Shakespeare absorbed from Italian stories and plays.

We see a distinct presence of the commedia dell'arte in his early comedies, the increasing capacity to read novellas in the original Italian, an absorption of conventions and modular units from Italian Renaissance comedy, the latent presence of the commedia dell'arte in some tragedies, a creative response to the new Italian form of pastoral tragicomedy in his late plays, and the artful capacity to combine Italian narrative and dramatic ideas throughout his career.