Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy: Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage (review)

Michael Redmond's impressive new book forms part of the recent resurgence of critical interest in Shakespeare's rich relationship with Italian literature and intellectual culture. Redmond approaches the topic from the broad perspective of modern theories of intertextuality, as exemplified in Michele Marrapodi's two recent volumes of critical essays. These studies start from the premise that traditional source study has been exhausted in relation to Shakespeare's use of specific Italian models in his plays, whereas a more theoretical intertextual approach may still offer some fruitful avenues for exploration between Italian culture and Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Redmond suggests that "early modern intertextuality was a dynamic process of allusion, quotation and revision" (2), and one of the strongest elements of the book is his willingness to attribute an understanding of this process not only to early modern English dramatists but also to the theater's audiences as well. Although it is notoriously difficult to generalize about the "interpretative competence" of contemporary audience response, as Redmond acknowledges with reference to some dramatically ambitious but poorly received Jacobean plays, he argues that both playwrights and habitual playgoers were in a position to respond knowingly to the fast-developing corpus of Italian models and Italianate tropes employed on the early modern stage. Redmond is most interested in showing how English dramatists responded to the works (and the authors) of contemporary Italian political theory (the cover illustration shows Florio's important definition of the Italian term politica as "a booke written of policie" in his 1598 dictionary). He interprets these texts quite broadly and profitably by including the dramatists' responses to influential sixteenth-century Italian courtesy books too. Indeed, Redmond's title is somewhat misleading, apparently limiting the book's scope to Shakespeare's engagement with Italian political models on the Jacobean stage, when in fact it ranges impressively from the early 1570s to the 1630s, focusing on a number of additional playwrights and authors along the way.

This range—from Ascham in 1570 to Brome and Shirley in the 1630s—becomes apparent in chapter 2, where Redmond explores the discourse of the Italianate Englishman and the threat it posed to conceptions of domestic identity through the twin perils of foreign travel and the act of reading about the Italian peninsula. The chapter contains only a brief section on Shakespeare (on the Elizabethan play The Merchant of Venice); rather, its focus is on unfortunate early Jacobean travelers to Italy, both fictional and real, in Jonson's Volpone (1606) and Coryat's Crudities (1611), but Redmond effectively demonstrates how earlier Elizabethan attitudes informed contemporary responses to these travelers, and how these figures themselves then influenced later stage representations of the Italianate Englishman. The blurring of the boundary between fictional and real, with Jonson's Sir Politic Would-Be cited as a precedent for Thomas Coryate, who then becomes a figure for the foolish traveler on the Caroline stage, is shown to be, at least partly, a response to how many English readers encountered "Italy as a textual experience" (37). This is best exemplified in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), where Redmond explains how "Nashe established a rhetorical strategy that redefined the Italianate Englishman as an imitator of books from and about Italy" (45).

Chapter 3 contains even less on Shakespeare specifically in Redmond's analysis of the staging of Italian political theory in England between the 1590s and the 1610s. The direct engagement with Italian courtesy books and works of political theory on the early modern stage is often signaled by the representation of the authors themselves, either as characters in the action, or, more frequently, as a prologue or chorus to the play. For example, Machiavelli's celebrated but ambiguous appearance in the prologue to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1592) is shown to presage the play's deep engagement with Machiavellian policy, where the type of "strategic dishonesty" (91) displayed by Ferneze is deemed more representative of the type of subtle statecraft...