Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (review)

Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Edited by Michele Marrapodi and Giorgio Melchiori. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1999. Pp. 299. $45.00 cloth.

As part of the series International Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries this collection of essays by Italian scholars of early modern drama aims to "gather a multifaceted group of significant essays which otherwise might not reach a worldwide readership" (7). The present volume offers thirteen such contributions in translation, most of which have appeared only in publications not widely available in North America or Britain. While its editors present this collection as a "picture of the present state and prospects of Elizabethan critical work in Italy" (7), most of the essays were originally published in the 1980s, while a handful date from the early 1990s.

The volume is divided into three parts and includes an introduction by Michele Marrapodi accompanied by a brief postscript by Giorgio Melchiori. Part One, "Theory and Practice," presents essays from various critical perspectives that share an interest in theoretical and methodological issues; Part Two, "Theme and Culture," offers a selection of thematic and sociological approaches to the plays; and Part Three, "Language and Ideology," gathers essays that investigate linguistic and rhetorical strategies at work in the drama. As these broad rubrics suggest, the main challenge for the editors has been organizational. In keeping with the general aim of the series, the focus here is on a shared critical heritage rather than on a common methodology or even a mutual subject. While the essays cannot complement one another as they might in a collection with a unified critical agenda, they do testify to the rich variety of Shakespeare studies in Italy.

The first essay is Marcello Pagnini's analysis of the dramatic construction of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Identifying the play as a product of a "culturally . . . profound . . . and typically baroque desire to produce a work of art manifesting the macroscopic paradox of variety in unity" (28), Pagnini presents a detailed semiotic analysis of the relation among Dream's subplots. This rather heavily schematic analysis is followed by Alessandro Serpieri's more accessible investigation of personal and public contracts in The Merchant of Venice. Serpieri's discussion of social, economic, and emotional bonds recasts Merchant as a metaphor for political and structural transformations in Elizabethan England by reading the marriage of Bassanio and Portia as symbolic of a cultural union between a new "mercantile bourgeoisie" and an older feudal structure (55). Marking both a generic and a theoretical turn in the volume, Fernando Ferrara's "The Interdiction of Eroticism in Shakespeare's Histories" offers a psychoanalytic discussion of the eradication of eroticism from the history plays and locates in the repression of sexuality elements of an epistemological crisis rooted in the ideology of absolutism. Perhaps the most engaging piece in this first section is Angela Locatelli's nuanced analysis of the notion that subjectivity and ethics are best understood as matters of cultural strategy. Locatelli argues convincingly that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama exposes the limitations of an Aristotelian theoria which subordinates character to action by presenting "'conscience' . . . [as] the basis for the new subject of ethics" (76). Presenting theater as a crucial locus of mimesis in a culture that understood identity as imitation, Locatelli suggests that Shakespearean drama "does not 'make sense' unequivocally," but rather that the "ideology of enunciation in the plays tends to foreground moral and logical contradictions" (80). As a result, plays like Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice demand that readers encounter crucial questions about ethics and characters that are at once potentially troubling and emancipatory.

Broadly speaking, the essays that make up Part Two of this volume consider the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the constantly shifting social and critical worlds that have produced and, as we had it in the 1980s, reproduced them. Vito Amoruso opens this section by identifying the "immediately and explicitly 'political...