1st Edition
Massinger’s Italy Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger
Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the post-Shakespearean period.
This volume explores the relationships between Massinger and Italian literary, dramatic and intellectual culture in the larger context of Anglo-Italian cultural exchanges. The book investigates the influence of Italian culture, considering Massinger’s engagement and appropriation of Italian texts, dramatic and political theories and ideas related to the country and his use of Italy as a setting. Massinger’s Italy offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the development of Anglo-Italian discourse on the early modern English stage, showing to what extent Massinger contributed to the myth of Italy and to the circulation of Italian culture and shedding light on the complex system of Anglo-Italian interconnections within the corpus of Massinger’s plays as well as with the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
List of figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction: “As you walke the streetes of Florence”; 1. “New piles upon an old foundation”: Italian genres in the Massingerian canon; 2. “Familiar with all garbes gracious in England, Italie, Spaine or France”: Massinger and the Italian novella. 3. “A silent mourning through all Millaine”: The Italianate revenge tragedy; 4. “Sir Giles, that’s both a Lyon, and a Fox in his proceedings”: Italian rulership on the early modern stage; 5. “A Gentleman of the best ranke in Venice”: Visions of Venice; Conclusions: “Shew your self an Italian”; Bibliography; Index
Biography
Cristina Paravano is Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Milan, Italy. She authored a monograph on Renaissance multilingualism, Performing Multilingualism on the Caroline Stage in the Plays of Richard Brome (2018), and published articles in English Text Construction, Notes & Queries, Shakespeare, Borrowers and Lenders, Ben Jonson Journal and Early Theatre, as well as several chapters in edited collections.
