Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage. .

Jack D'Amico. Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xii + 198 pp. index. illus. map. bibi. $55. ISBN: 0-8130-1878-1.

Fascination with Italian society and culture was omnipresent during the English Renaissance. Early modern travelers such as Fynes Moryson, Richard Torkingron, and Thomas Coryat wrote for an English audience, and works of Italian authors such as Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso proved popular with English readers. The so-called myths of Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, were accepted by artists and historians for several centuries, even though positive attitudes were not universal (see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice [1981]). Recently, critics and historians (old and new) have begun to reexamine the role of Italian culture in northern Renaissance life.

Professor D'Amico seeks to demonstrate how knowledge of the Italian city states played a significant role in the theatrical performance of Shakespeare's Italian plays. Our failure to discover precisely how Shakespeare learned about Italy -- through schooling, friends, travelers, books, or plays -- leads us to considerable conjecture. We have no inkling of any "grand tour" such as that taken by Milton, so we must assume that Shakespeare's knowledge was gained second-hand. His choice of settings, characters, stories, and sources in many of his plays, however, attests to the power of Italy's hold on his imagination.

D'Amico's aim is to examine how Shakespeare uses Italian settings which would be both imaginatively distant as well as recognizably close. He stresses Shakespeare's valuing of the fresh perspective provided by Italian society, which was "an urban world teasingly familiar and yet different in the degree of its openness to exchange and transformation" (6). However, Shakespeare did not wish to upset or subvert the traditional hierarchies of the Elizabethan world. Thus, using Italy to discover new freedoms of social discourse enabled Shakespeare to create "urban centers in which the privileges of rank and the rigidity of the social system are softened, if not entirely forgotten," so that he had "the potential for a reshaping, if not a transformation, of society" (9). Taking a cue from Robert Weimann's analysis of the interplay of locus and platea -- the specific place (in these plays, the Italian city itself), as related to the general, nonlocalized space of the stage -- D'Amico is concerned with how the sense o f place, both imaginative and also experientially theatrical, was created in Shakespeare's texts and theater.

D'Amico examines these theatrical and imaginative representations in terms of the important loci of the Italian city, including the piazza, streets, court, garden, temple, and city walls. In an especially interesting chapter, D'Amico looks at the use of the garden setting within the city -- the hortus conclusus -- as well as outside the city. He adduces the Italians Palladio and Alberti, and also the Englishmen William Thomas and Thomas Coryat, in his survey of attitudes towards gardens, and then applies this historical evidence to Shakespeare's use of urban and extra-urban gardens, particularly in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. For Shakespeare, "the Italian garden mediates between public and private worlds" (136) and can signify either the locus amoenus or the postlapsarian Eden, depending on the dramatic situation. In keeping with his critical practice in this book, D'Amico's discussion ranges from the specific locus of Venice or Belmont to the use of the theatrical space in an Elizabethan theat er. As a result, the theater audience is delighted by the specifics of a particular Italian setting, while at the same time benefiting from the representative nature of that setting as it relates to their own city of London.

Throughout, D'Amico looks at how the sense of place is created through language and then transferred to the stage. He assumes that Shakespeare had some knowledge of specific Italian cities, even though his descriptions are not always detailed. D'Amico neither subscribes to postmodern views which destabilize the text to the point of undercutting the Italian settings, nor does he view Shakespeare as subversive in his use of Italian cities and societies. Instead, Shakespeare maintains traditional social hierarchies while he molds the fluid spaces of the stage to the English audience's expectations of an imagined Italian city represented according to their own theatrical standards. However, the difficulty of ascertaining exactly how Shakespeare melded dramatic presentation with literary representation remains; and though D'Amico gives us a well-written, traditionally historical account, we are left with the feeling that we still do nor have definitive answers.