Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality (review)

This collection of essays explores Shakespeare's refashioning of Italian sources, motifs, and topoi, as well as literary, iconographic, philosophical, political, and cultural traditions associated with classical, medieval, and early modern Italy. It is therefore oddly appropriate that this volume should stem from an earlier incarnation, Shakespeare and Intertextuality: The Transition of Cultures between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period (2000), which was published in Italy following an international conference held at the University of Palermo in 1999.Not all essays included in the earlier volume were "totally revised and updated," as the editor claims (x), although three earlier contributions were indeed replaced by three new ones. Collectively, the three new essays add considerable focus and depth to the earlier volume. Also useful is Keir Elam's new "Afterword: Italy as Intertext," which combines a thoughtful response to individual contributions with a reflection on the impact of a "Kristevian or Bakhtinian conception of intertextuality as a dissemination or permutation of texts . . . [on] the traditional quest for single sources" (253).

The collection as a whole amply illustrates the beneficial effects of widening the notion of source from what Elam calls "the 'book on the shelf' category" to a "totalizing conception of textuality, which . . . can happily and 'promiscuously' comprehend any kind of cultural contamination, direct or indirect" (254). And yet this crucial shift is far from uncontroversial. For example, Robert A. Miola's opening essay defines "seven types of intertextuality" (13–25), ranging from "books or texts mediated directly through the author" (14) and "the indirect influence of traditions" (20) to "paralogues [that] move horizontally and analogically in discourses rather than in vertical lineation through the author's mind or intention" (23). Miola reveals a deeply rooted distrust toward the last category and toward those critics who have preferred the study of the circulation of cultural discourses to the circulation of texts and traditions. "Today," Miola complains, "critics can adduce any contemporary text in conjunction with another, without bothering at all about verbal echo, or even imprecise lines of filiation" (23). He adds, "In some ways, the discussion of paralogues departs from past critical practices, bringing new freedom; but, of course, new perils threaten: rampant and irresponsible association, facile cultural generalization, and anecdotal, impressionistic historicizing" (23). Such tensions emerged even more clearly in the earlier volume from a transcription of the roundtable discussion at the Palermo conference. An exchange among Alessandro Serpieri, Robert Miola, and J. R. Mulryne prompted the conference delegates to discuss the viability of recent critical approaches, which, according to the first two speakers, analyze randomly selected nonliterary texts alongside canonical literary texts. Mulryne countered their reservations by emphasizing the need to look beyond literary traditions and the plays' immediate cultural context. His essay on "Cleopatra's barge and Antony's body" (197–215) brilliantly exemplifies the advantages of his use of paralogues, in this case "Florentine marriage-entertainments of the late 1580s" (197). While earlier scholars have highlighted the relevance of Elizabethan royal pageants to the symbolism of Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra's barge, Mulryne shows how "interpretation of Enobarbus' speech is most fruitfully undertaken in a European, not only an English, context" and how "Florence and the Arno offer just as apt cultural references as Elvetham and its lake" (199). What makes Mulryne's reading particularly persuasive is precisely that the nonliterary paralogues he considers alongside Shakespeare's rendition of Enobarbus's speech are not randomly selected. Identifying Inigo Jones as "the leading vector for the introduction of Florentine culture . . . into England in Shakespeare's day" (206), Mulryne thus offers a fresh insight into one of Shakespeare's best-known speeches, by positing that his "mannerist portrait of Cleopatra . . . belongs recognizably to the same pictorial tradition as the masque figures drawn and designed by Jones" (207).

According to the transcription of the roundtable discussion included in the earlier volume, Mario Domenichelli also parried Serpieri's and Miola's objections...