Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage

In this study of the Italian settings in 11 of Shakespeare’s plays, Jack D'Amico examines the essential characteristics of 16th-century Italian society and the Italian city-state as they come to life on Shakespeare’s stage. Through the medium of his theatre, we see how he creates an urban world open to exchange and decidedly theatrical in spirit. We witness Shakespeare’s Italy become, simultaneously, the distant city and the mirror of his own Renaissance London. Documented with primary and secondary sources, the book begins by reviewing what Shakespeare may have known about Italy, both the attractions and the dangers of Italian society as they may have appeared in the contemporary popular imagination. D'Amico observes that the dangers seem more pronounced in the tragedies, while the allure of a foreign city, where change and order can coexist, seems to predominate in the comedies. Structuring the book around specific features of the imagined urban setting, he discusses the piazza, the garden, the street, interior spaces, the court, and the temple, demonstrating that the city’s limits and contradictions lend a special kind of consistency to the world of Shakespeare’s plays.