From Dante to Shakespeare: Authorial Presence and the Manuscript Record

 From Dante to Shakespeare: Authorial Presence and the Manuscript Record

by Erminia Passannanti (January  2025)

1. Authors without autographed manuscripts: Dante and Shakespeare

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The surviving manuscript sources from the medieval, humanistic, and early modern periods constitute a form of evidence for the cultural and textual processes that determined their transmission and, to varying degrees, for the identities of their authors. Although not all medieval manuscripts preserve a direct authorial imprint, since transmission was frequently mediated by copyists, editors, and stratified textual traditions, the surviving material from these periods nonetheless retains traces of authorial identities as well as of broader processes of textual mediation. This condition becomes particularly significant when comparing authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch with a writer like Shakespeare, who, although among the most prolific and influential playwrights of his time, left no autograph manuscripts of his dramatic or poetic works. This distinctive absence of autograph documents most likely reflects the nature of Elizabethan theatrical and editorial practices, in which the written text was conceived primarily as a functional instrument for performance rather than as a document intended for preservation. From a comparative perspective, this situation may appear striking. 

Although no autograph manuscripts by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who wrote in both Latin and the Tuscan vernacular, survive, his reconstructed education, combining formal erudition in the ancient Greek and Latin classics, probably acquired under private tutors, with extensive self-directed study, rendered him renowned and highly regarded among his contemporaries. His intellectual formation reveals sustained engagement with classical Latin authors such as Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero, alongside the late antique philosophical synthesis of Boethius, as well as familiarity with early Christian writers’ sources and, more selectively, with the intellectual legacy of medieval scholasticism. Dante’s extensive knowledge of theology, philosophy, politics, and literature is manifest in the Divina Commedia (1308–1320), an allegorical, eschatological, and theological work narrated in the first person, and in De Monarchia (1310–1313), which reflects his active participation in Florentine cultural and political life up to his political exile.  In the case of Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca, poets and prose writers of the early Renaissance, several autograph texts have in fact survived, often glossed or corrected by the authors themselves.

Could a work such as the Divina Commedia be written by someone not deeply immersed in the specific historical and experiential contexts that the text itself so vividly encodes? Namely the trauma of a Florentine intellectual expelled amid the factional conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and more precisely within the division between White and Black Guelphs? Can a great work truly exist without the imprint of its author’s knowledge inscribed within it, yet remain ultimately unrecognized? Does not language itself, in the end, disclose the name and history of its creator? If Dante, owing to conditions imposed by exile or persecution had been compelled to conceal his name, his authorship of the Commedia would nevertheless have remained recognisable to anyone who had sought with rigour the author behind the nominal mask. 

Throughout the Commedia, Dante exercises a form of authority that assigns destinies to historically identifiable individuals, transforming them into subjects of a poetic justice. In Canto XIX of the Inferno, for example, Pope Boniface VIII, still alive at the time of writing, is placed among the simoniacs in an act that asserts a narrative prerogative akin to an unappealable verdict. (3)

Dante Alighieri deliberately consigns his political adversaries to the Inferno, thereby intensifying the conception of the author as an ethical agent embedded within his own historical milieu. The canto Inferno is thus transfigured into a space in which literary representation converges with juridical and moral adjudication. The Commedia as a whole may indeed be understood as a poetic tribunal, wherein Dante’s voice assumes functions conventionally reserved for theological, juridical, and institutional authority. The inclusion of a personal and political antagonist such as Filippo Argenti among the wrathful in the river Styx presents the author’s function as a jurist exercising moral agency through the aesthetic form. If one were to incur the enmity of a writer such as Dante Alighieri, one might well anticipate a form of radical and enduring retribution capable of consigning one’s name to infamy across the centuries. This strategy attains singular intensity in the episode of Bocca degli Abati: Dante’s act of physical violence against the traitor causes narrative mediation to collapse into an immediate and unrestrained expressive aggression, whereby the relation between author, character, and judgment is violently contracted into a single gesture of personal repudiation. Dante, alive yet in exile, imagined himself among the dead within the Divina Commedia, where both his voice and his embodied presence were conceived to be held in subordination only to the magisterial authority of Virgil (his “Maestro”, addressed as “il mio Dottore”, throughout Inferno and Purgatorio, and to the moral sovereignty of his beloved, now deceased, Beatrice Portinari, his luminous guide in the Cantica Paradise.The Divina Commedia offers a precise measure of  whose voice speaks through the text.

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Critics of the Shakespearean canon should more rigorously assess the extent to which an “author within the text”, conceived as a traceable mode of presence, may be identified across the corpus. In the historically grounded plays, the question of authorship must register the intensity with which lived experience is reworked into dramaturgy that persistently refracts the conditions of the Elizabethan court, where rivalries, intrigue, jealousy, betrayal, ambition, and the contest for power among the nobility recur as structuring motifs. 

A cautious hypothesis regarding the influence of Dante Alighieri on Edward de Vere may be advanced at this level: in the strategic rendering of events and agents while they are still in motion, coupled with their displacement from immediate temporality and reconfiguration on an allegorical plane. Such a procedure may be read as a means of negotiating censorship and attenuating the risks that might accrue to name, reputation, lineage, or even personal safety. 

This broader line of influence merits consideration, given Dante’s canonical status within Italian poetic and allegorical traditions; yet strict thematic correspondences are less sustainable in relation to the Shakespearean Sonnets. These diverge from the imitative and translational practices of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey upon Francesco Petrarca’s Canzoniere, elaborating instead a more expansive and internally differentiated discourse of desire rooted in the courtly love tradition associated with the Vita nova and with Guido Cavalcanti’s lyric practice. At the same time, they extend the field of erotic reference beyond a single, fixed object, so that desire is distributed across a plurality of possible figures rather than concentrated, as in Dante or Petrarch, upon a singular beloved. 

To understand the Shakespearean Sonnets, one should start from Roman poetry, and in particular from the formal elegance and technical ease of Ovid’s verse. Physical desire is also present in Publius Ovidius Naso's theatrical and experimental works as seen in the Amores and Ars Amatoria. Like Ovid, Shakespeare systematically exploited his elegiac wit and learned rhetorical skills to compose sonnets which were metapoetical reflections. For him, this also included the long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,  which deal with amorous passions.

In the Sonnets, one direction of the poet’s intense affection is directed toward a fair young man (or at least such is the impression conveyed by the arrangement, possibly imposed by an external editor), while another is oriented toward the so-called “Dark Lady”, unfolding through anecdotal digressions that speaks of an unstable heterosexual affair, not formalised within any official bond.

My impression is that Shakespeare had placed in a single folder a series of poems that preserved memories of different amorous experiences, some of which can be compared to the consuming passion of Propertius for his Cynthia [around 20 BC; The Book as Beloved; Elegies 3 and 4]. In these sonnets love constitutes the prevailing atmosphere together with an existential dimension in which the poet often indulges, in line with classical Roman poetry, where the woman assumes a significant role as an agent of her own amorous choices. 

Like a Roman matron, the Dark Lady does not deny herself the right to change her lovers, even though, from the poet’s perspective, this behavior is judged as cruelty and betrayal. Within this corpus there also appears a group of poems of direct Ovidian inspiration in which the poet criticizes the alteration of the face effected by women through cosmetics. The model for these sonnets--particularly Sonnet 127, which echoes Ovid’s ambivalent treatment of female adornment (“For since each hand hath put on nature’s power, / Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face, / Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower, / But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace”)--is Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae, where, through parody and irony, he addresses the falsifying practice of female facial cosmetics.

In the Sonnets, the beloved ends up being removed from the pedestal of idealization: “How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame.” (Sonnet #95); “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Sonnet #130). Love is described as both illness and battle: “Th’ expense of spirit is a waste of shame.” (Sonnet #129). Also the poet appears less absorbed in grievance or complaint than in a self-conscious display of rhetorical flourish and linguistic mastery: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” (Sonnet #18); “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, /But sad mortality o’ersways their power…” (Sonnet #65). Within this de-idealization, Shakespeare’s lucidity and a worldly sensibility becomes patent,  anticipating certain eighteenth-century erotic themes, as explored in works such as John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748), Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), and William Wycherley’s Restoration plays like The Country Wife (1675), which foreground sexual desire and romantic relationships with a frankness and psychological insight somewhat absent from plays ever written before, except for the Shakespearean ones.

If any intertextual passage from Dante to Shakespeare ever occurred, it may perhaps concern the example offered by Dante of the transformation of civic and historical anecdotes into allegorical constructions and even, as the title itself suggests, comic ones, as the very designation Divina “Commedia” implies. Indeed, in the choice to rework the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet, which our author derived directly from Matteo Bandello’s Italian novella, itself grounded in earlier Italian chronicles, it is difficult not to recall the example of Canto V of the Inferno, in the episode of Paolo and Francesca, which may, even if only indirectly, have furnished a narrative model for the tragic death of two intensely in love young noble persons.

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 Despite the lack of attesting manuscript, while Dante was active and alive, his public persona was widely popular among his literary contemporaries, and his artistic authority acknowledged as proved by Giovanni Boccaccio’s academic interest for the Divina Commedia. Unlike for “Shake-speare”, Dante’s celebrated authorship was carefully preserved by both fellow writers and subsequent generations, with a degree of biographical precision on his political misconduct and exilic disadvantages. Numerous manuscript copies closely follow his text, demonstrating strong authorial control and a clear awareness of his creatorship. 

A rich body of documentary evidence, including letters, civic records, and payment documents, directly links Dante to his works and his role as their author. His Divina Commedia was frequently cited, commented upon, and imitated by contemporaries, confirming both his intellectual prestige and firmly established authorship. Hence, even had Dante written under an allonym or pseudonym, the internal consistency of the ideological positioning and the specificity of historical reference would make authorial attribution evident to any critically attentive reader of his epoch and of the coming ones. The Commedia is thus at the same time a literary representation of the afterlife and an autobiographical inscription of authority, in which the poet’s voice functions simultaneously as witness, architect, and executor of judgment. The Commedia is a tribunal of poetic justice in which the poet’s voice assumes a prerogative traditionally reserved for theological or institutional authority. The poet exists in it as an active participant in the ethical and cosmological order the work seeks to establish. Conversely, the text is also a space of exaltation for those whom Dante venerates. In Paradiso XVII, his ancestor Cacciaguida legitimizes Dante’s exile and frames it as a necessary condition for the fulfillment of his poetic vocation. Beatrice Portinari, the Muse of Dante’s sonnets in Vita Nova, is both an historical figure and an allegorical representation of divine wisdom, who serves as the guide through Paradise and as the embodiment of salvific love. These characters are not incidental to the structure of the poem; they represent a poetic logic in which the autobiographical and the metaphysical are inextricably bound.

The detailed manuscript transmission of Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Boccaccio and Petrarca’s poetry further demonstrates a widespread Italian “autograph culture”, in which documents of creative works and specialist writings (political letters, apologies, short scientific or legal treatises) were vehicles for scholarly prestige and for securing an author’s legacy. This strong, well-documented practise stands in marked contrast to the anonymity and uncertainty that surround the transmission of Shakespeare’s texts, emphasizing the different cultural mechanisms through which authorship was secured and preserved in medieval Italian and early modern English literature. 

The recognition of Dante’s artistic value and impressive civic identity as a writer and poet with a unique mind in his time should solicit a parallel. Why was this not the case for “Shakespeare”? A similar awareness of his authorship would have existed among those in his close social and literary circles, even if it was later obscured by still unknown historical circumstances and power-related matters of fact. Where are the expected extended testimonies (not confined to a couple of ambiguous assertions like that of Ben Jonson in the 1623 Folio) by fellow writers and critics of Shakespeare’s age?

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The attribution of thirty-seven plays, a corpus of 154 sonnets (published 1609) and several long complex narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and A Lover’s Complaint (1609), produced within little more than two decades, to William Shakespeare constitutes an exceptional phenomenon in the English poetic-theatrical world of the early modern period. Such high productivity is connected to a sound engagement with historical material, the revisitation of monarchical biographies, psychological characterizations of royals and aristocrats, and a wide representation of the different social classes. If, in their time, these poems and plays represented the apex of all English literary achievements ever made, it becomes all the more perplexing that so little tangible effort seems to have been made by Shakespeare’s contemporaries to ensure their preservation with due archival care. Again, would such works of literary artistry not have inspired a corresponding concern for their classification and conservation in major collections at institutional libraries and archives? 

Their virtual invisibility in the records of Elizabethan and Jacobean custodians of knowledge suggests a more elusive situation beyond negligence. How could this remarkable body of work have circulated in such obscurity, without leaving the sort of bibliographic and custodial traces that even lesser figures of the period reliably generated?  The author of these texts, who spoke through them, was strangely untethered from the material and institutional realities that would normally anchor such a legacy.

That being said, the intertextual density of the many plays inspired by Italian works allows one to outline a profile of Shakespeare as an author who systematically engaged in the rewriting of Italy, entering into dialogue both with classical Greek and Latin authors and with relatively more recent medieval sources. It is well acknowledged the impact on Shakespeare of the Italian novella tradition, of courtly culture, and of Renaissance theatre is evident in the construction of many comedies, several of which are set in Italian cities and in which plots unfold through the classical devices of disguise, deception, and final recognition, as in the plays of the commedia dell’arte. 

Shakespeare’s literary sources have been mostly identified, the majority being Italian Renaissance, Latin and Greek classical masterpieces. One of the fascinating aspects of his writing is the way it absorbs, and transforms into new stories, ones derived from many Italian authors and genres. The tradition of Commedia dell’arte, along with Renaissance comedies by the authors Sir Giovanni Fiorentino and Ludovico Ariosto, shaped comic structures built around deception, disguise, and fixed social roles. Plots may revolve around romantic trickery, cheating, misunderstandings, and verbal sparring, conventions already well established in early Italian Renaissance theatre and literature. Shakespeare cannot be said to have “imported” the genre to England, yet many of his plays, Twelfth Night in particular, display such defining features: witty, fast-paced dialogue; intricate romantic entanglements; laughable and embarrassing truths revealed, verbal duels; and a blend of absurdity and hidden plots. In these comedies, courtship unfolds through trickery, accusations, misunderstandings, and a playful yet pointed satirical gaze on social conventions. This is what gives Much Ado about Nothing its flavour. In order to write a play connected to these realities, the author had to be in touch with such tradition directly. 

Equally striking is Shakespeare’s consistent use of well-traveled settings, both in terms of geography and language. His plays show clear familiarity with foreign places, their local customs, stories, idioms, social norms, national quirks, and even gender attitudes. All reflected in the way characters speak and behave according to their city, culture, or social class. 

It is not a question of stylistic or thematic features being directly taken from earlier Italian texts. Rather, one is dealing with elements of the author’s vision of life and linguistic competence: atmosphere, Italianate rhetorical structures, proverbs, mannerisms, and a certain expressive flamboyance, absorbed from Peninsular culture and reworked in his Italian-set plays. These include garden scenes (Romeo and Juliet: the Capulets’ orchard and balcony scene; Much Ado About Nothing: Leonato’s gardens and courtyards used for private dialogue and comic intrigue); orchards and country estates; arbours (Much Ado, Act II); interiors of noble houses (Much Ado: Leonato’s hall; Romeo and Juliet: the Capulets’ feast; Othello: Venetian domestic and civic interiors); legal and political spaces (Othello: the Venetian Senate; The Merchant of Venice: the ducal court); and maritime spaces (Othello: Cyprus and its shoreline; Twelfth Night: Illyrian coast and shipwreck; harbour arrivals). Italy, in short, is pervasive: in idiom, in behaviour, and in the configuration of plots and settings across many plays. These works repeatedly stage strongly opposed terms in a manner at once emotionally charged and intellectually playful, producing formulations such as “cold fire, sick health” in Romeo and Juliet. Through a deliberately Italianate idiom, the dramaturgy is inscribed within language itself. The influence is also visible in a heightened romantic diction, drawing on Dantean and Petrarchan conventions yet pushed beyond ordinary English usage, as in “O brawling love, O loving hate”.

Significant in Shakespeare’s connections to these Italian poetic referents is his gradual de-idealization of female characters and love affairs kept within the boundaries of lyrical contextualization (the sonnet form and the long narrative poems). He shifts from Petrarca to Boccaccio and then Chaucer. Or rather, his style encompasses all of them. In Othello, sensual and erotic love is simultaneously exalted, desired, and endured as shame. At times suffered as a torture, especially for a character deeply sentimental like the “Moor of Venice,” who had seen in Desdemona the quintessence of devotion and purity. The character Othello embodies a paradoxical figure: a valorous man torn between sanity and madness, between noble passion (war) and destructive obsession (doubting). The tragic outcomes of this play are intensified by the character’s insecurity and credulity. The “tragedy of jealousy” in Othello is particularly revealing of Shakespearean authorship, both with regard to the personal history of Edward de Vere (whether to believe or not the defamatory insinuations of others concerning the infidelity of one’s wife; whether to demand or not “ocular” proof of a slanderous act), and with regard to the literary sources from which the author draws the structural framework of the play, as well as the historical context that underlies it. 

De Vere was reportedly informed of allegations concerning his wife Anne’s (Countess of Oxford’s) infidelity during his absence from England, an episode that may have left a discernible imprint on his preoccupations. Motifs of gossip, defamation, suspicion, and betrayal, each fundamentally tied to notions of honor and reputation, recur with striking frequency, suggesting a sustained engagement with these anxieties rather than an isolated thematic choice.

The principal source of the drama is the novella Un Capitano Moro, in Giraldi Cinzio’s Hecatommithi (1565), from which our author adopts the essential narrative outline while profoundly transforming it on the psychological and tragic levels. Whereas in Cinzio the characters remain typological and moralizing figures, Shakespeare endows Othello, Desdemona, and Iago with an entirely new emotional complexity and inner depth, most likely felt on a personal level. This constitutes clear evidence of an original authorial intervention rather than a mere reworking of the source.

At the same time, in England the story is embedded in a context that would have been recognizable only to a learned Elizabethan audience: the historical context of the expansion and presence of the Moors in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Italian coasts were frequently subjected to Ottoman and North African incursions, while powers such as Venezia maintained ambiguous relationships of both conflict and cooperation with the Islamic world, especially in strategically important territories such as Cyprus. The figure of the “Moor” embodied a dual perception: on the one hand the external enemy, feared for his religious and cultural otherness. On the other, an indispensable military resource capable of ensuring security and maritime dominance. Yet it is the sentimental history that constitutes the true core of interest for our author. In this respect, our playwright often presents the morally ambivalent mythology of “mad love” (Cupid and Psyche, Tristan and Isolde, Phaedra and Hippolytus or Medea, Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, etc.). In Much Ado About Nothing, we have an allusion to Oberon’s magic that causes Titania to fall in love with Bottom, creating absurd, irrational behaviour. The same happens when it is suspected by Venetian people that Othello has used magic to seduce Desdemona. Mad passion surpasses admiration, overpowering reason. This represents a way of asserting that historicized love can be both the most delightful of experiences and a source of torment as it triggers jealousy and possessiveness. This kind of love, when betrayed, triggers vindictiveness born of wounded honor. That perspective stands in stark contrast to Dante’s and Petrarca’s sonnets about their idealized women, Beatrice and Laura, never allowing passion or sexuality to prevail over spiritual love.

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The title All’s Well That Ends Well does not proclaim emotional happiness, but affirms the necessity of some form of resolution, as occurs in the Novelle of Matteo Bandello (14801562), where the theme of arranged marriages, complex moral intrigues, and protagonists facing legal and social consequences for their imprudent actions is frequent. Also in All’s Well, the “formal” resolution without full emotional harmony is present: legal legitimacy is restored, while the real reconciliation between spouses remains deliberately unresolved. As a dramatic representation of remorse and belated, incomplete maturation, the play can therefore be interpreted as one of the most honest works in the Shakespearean canon. Especially in the lucid representation of aristocratic pride and in the severe meditation on responsibility acknowledged too late. In this aspect our author is indebted to the reflections of Italian writers. As for example in Il Cortegiano (1528) by Baldassarre Castiglione, the virtue of the aristocratic character is measured not by emotional stability, but by the restoration of social order, legitimacy, and public reputation. Similarly, in All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare realistically prioritizes the restoration of formal and social decency over sentimental harmony.

Elizabethans tended to associate Italian manners with both refinement and potential moral ambiguity. This is valid for Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is another good example of this; the plot twists and turns with a kind of playful intelligence that is very Italianate. Wit and clever social manoeuvring take precedence over morality. The sociology of the Italian world provides a crucial framework for understanding the aspects of culture that most engaged our author, particularly his interest in Italian literature, visual arts, and theatre. Renaissance city-states, each with distinct social hierarchies and political institutions, shaped both the production and reception of artistic works. Music, painting, and architecture functioned as integral elements of the social and ceremonial milieu a nobleman would have encountered if he visited Italy. And their principles are reflected in Shakespeare’s plays, where the structure and proportion of palaces and public spaces illustrate the relationship between a noble English visitor and the Italian environment.

Music, sacred and secular, serves as a marker there of courtly life and public spectacle. The theatre, however, offers the most revealing insight into an engagement with Italian culture. Commedia dell’arte operated according to codified conventions: masks and stock characters such as Pantalone, Arlecchino [Harlequin], and Il Dottore embodied social types and behavioral norms, enabling audiences to recognize and respond to character instantly. Observing these performances at courts and in public theatres offered practical training in the enactment of social position, gender roles, and behavioral codes, which Shakespeare later integrated into the English stage. Italian-Mediterranean travel thus represents a deliberate immersion in the sociological and aesthetic principles of Italian theatre. A living laboratory in which he could study dramaturgy, while having a good time away from London and his obligations. In the Shakespearean canon, even the villains are frequently understood as being modeled on stereotypical Italian examples of naive, uncultured, evil or just vile character types. Figures ready to commit malignant actions in the pursuit of their deeds. Iago (Othello), with his calculated cunning and manipulative strategies, has in some occasions been erroneously read as a Machiavellian model. The adjective itself certainly circulated in its correct meaning in the Renaissance English court, largely to indicate the political intelligence of an Italian ruler. Possibly perceived as dangerous, but not reductively understood as malevolent as Iago.

This mistaken association between Machiavellianism, a theory connected with the acquisition, maintenance, and stability of political power, and a general criminality of action in characters lacking strategic significance, constitutes a misreading of the governmental logic of Machiavelli’s famous treatise. And therefore also of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae. In fact, to describe Iago or Don John the Bastard (Much Ado About Nothing) as Machiavellian characters is misleading, since they have no power to acquire and no state to govern, but act within their plays solely according to a logic of sabotage, nastiness, envy, and misogyny, and their actions in the plays in which they appear are devoid of any rationality.

The Shakespearean evil characters’ criminal actions or spiteful and corrosive behaviour, present throughout literature and historic chronicles, are to be found particularly in ancient Athenian and Roman theatre, as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458 BCE), Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429 BCE) and Antigone (c. 441 BCE), Euripides’ Electra (c. 413 BCE) and Hecuba (c. 424 BCE), or Seneca’s Agamemnon (1st century CE), involving assassination, persecution, capital execution, and all sorts of violence; the two villains here cited simply reflect the human evil tendency, which some individuals have, to commit abuse. They remain embodiments of cunning, deception, and moral corruption at very degrading levels of human behaviours. And this is their allegorical presence in the plots. This to say that the Machiavellian Shakespearean characters (such as Richard III, King Claudius in Hamlet, and Macbeth) reveal an author who possessed a full and solid awareness, both theoretical and practical, of what Il Principe and Il Libro del Cortegiano truly meant and entailed.

2. Pre-Baroque Sensibility

Much Ado About Nothing, a play whose title wittily evokes the exaggeration of trivial matters, conveys the idea of much confusion in speech and action, but little valuable substance or meaningful result. The epigrammatic brilliance of this famous title would be the Latin maxim, De minimis non curat lex, meaning “the law does not concern itself with trifles,” which captures the notion of excessive fuss over matters too small to merit attention. The story is set on the island of Sicily, where the play unfolds within a social world populated almost exclusively by the leisures, preoccupations and affairs of nobles and their attendants. This enclosed milieu reveals the ironic, detached gaze of an internal aristocratic narrator who is closely observing and recording the interactions between native and foreign elites.

The plot weaves together affairs in which political maneuvering, sentimental intrigue, and verbal wit intersect. These elements generate a narrative that is most convincingly rendered by a writer deeply embedded within the aristocratic social sphere. Someone familiar with both its refinements and its shortcomings. Central to the play’s ostensibly light-hearted entanglements is Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, whose playful yet calculated interventions draw him into the very intrigues he seeks to direct. Paradoxically, his efforts to manipulate events render him partially responsible for the misunderstandings and conflicts that propel the action toward its climax. Don Pedro orchestrates the courtship of Count Claudio and Hero and similarly engineers the circumstances that bring Beatrice and Benedick together. Thereby positioning himself as both a facilitator of harmony and an inadvertent agent of discord.

The arrogant Prince imposes himself as the author and director of the amorous scripts. Closely aligned with traditions of Italian novelistic literature and the rules of the Venetian carnival, he uses his power and acts in disguise to mediate Claudio’s desire for Hero and performs these stratagems according to Renaissance theatrical comedic conventions: Don Pedro ends up reducing Claudio’s love for his chosen woman to a technical problem (“teach it but how”). One to be solved through calculated and malicious artifice enacted upon the virginal Hero within her own father’s household. This reveals something about the playwright. Why is there such keen attention to issues of jealousy, suspicion, and betrayal? Why such emphasis on a father seeking to settle his daughter in marriage with a nobleman? One can clearly sense his baroque delight in the Italian and Spanish combined aesthetic: a liking of rhetorical flourish, a taste for the fashion of redundant ornamentation, a wealth of literary borrowings, and the creative pride of operating within this exuberant framework. The play’s rascally verbosity replicates verbal skirmishes that the author may have witnessed, or even taken part in, whether at home or abroad, lively and precise in tone and meaning.

Later in the play Benedick’s mean answers at Beatrice’s attacks, for example, are delivered in full force, each insult sounding ornate, performative, and meticulously crafted. Taking a closer look at the “merry war” between Beatrice and Benedick, one sees how their relationship turns courtship into a kind of battle, where wit replaces romance and clever yet nasty words block emotional openness and physical closeness. We see a modern, somewhat disenchanted vision of love: one built on intellectual equality, irony, and mutual resistance rather than idealized passion. Beatrice and Benedick don’t fall in love in spite of their hostility, they fall in love through it. Beatrice refuses the conventional ideal of femininity and, with it, passive compliance. She asserts her dominance with language, not just in front of Benedick but before society at large. She constantly challenges his masculinity, mocking his “hard heart” as a flaw and reading his attempts to withdraw (“I have done”) as habitual evasion, a “jade’s trick.” She usually has the last word, signaling both narrative and rhetorical control. When Beatrice snaps, “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me” (Act I, scene I), she rejects the conventional language of love entirely.

Benedick, for his part, can’t help but admire her verbal agility—her “speed” and “continuance” inadvertently underscore her superiority. Beatrice stages her feelings through antagonism, trading contradictory claims with relentless energy. Yet this intensity of engagement, this endless quarrel, hints at hope and investment rather than genuine indifference. Importantly, neither character dominates for long. Every insult is answered, twisted, and returned. This balance creates a relationship defined not by aggression versus submission, but by reciprocal provocation, a push-and-pull that fuels both their wit and their attraction. This “merry war” is scattered everywhere in the play’s dialogues and it is clear in Beatrice’s verbal assault on Benedick who is in front of her in disguise.

Beatrice: “Why, he is the prince's jester: a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible slanders: none but libertines delight in him; and the commendation is not in his wit, but in his villainy; for he both pleases men and angers them, and then they laugh at him and beat him.” (Act II, Scene 1)

In the rapid and lucid succession of offensive clauses, the passage exemplifies with intense verbal excess, insults against Benedick which escalate through a mixture of metaphors (jesting, folly, slander, libertinism, and villainy). In a sense, it is the author subtly mocking himself, seen through the eyes of a woman who perceives far too clearly his mind’s attitudes. In fact, Beatrice is right to suspect Benedick of dishonesty, particularly since he is using disguise as a means to deceive and influence her perception of facts. The most famous example is the “gulling” scenes, where Benedick and Beatrice are each made to overhear staged conversations, suggesting that the other loves them. What can be seen is Beatrice’s almost boyish delight in slightly playful sarcastic verbal aggression, deployed where there is no real communicative necessity for such aggressiveness.

Excess also manifests in the play in the curious dynamics of reciprocal accusations. The most obvious interpersonal “trial” occurs in Act IV, Scene I, when Claudio denounces Hero at the altar, accusing her of unchaste behaviour and infidelity before the arranged marriage. This scene functions like a verbal trial in front of witnesses, where Hero is judged by Claudio, the friar, and the assembled wedding party. Claudio assumes the role of accuser, and Hero is the defendant. The process is rapid, dramatic, offering her no chance to defend herself. Friar Francis steps in as a moral and practical authority, akin to a judicial arbiter. He devises a plan to “fake Hero’s death” to allow the truth to surface and to test Claudio’s sincerity. The friar’s role resembles that of a mediator, like Friar Lorenzo in Romeo and Juliet, or a wise judge, rather than a conventional magistrate.

Hence, the “much ado about nothing” renders well the chaotic scene in the church at the altar. With all the melodramatic consequences of “malicious gossiping” and “jealously” which end, to put it in the spirit of another Italian proverb, in “tarallucci e vino” (“spicy biscuits and wine”). That is, in laughter and conviviality. Or better in a celebration of nuptial reconciliatory spirit with a banquet and collective joy. This comic ending to a pseudo-tragedy (in contrast to the darker murderous resolution in Othello), with Hero’s simulated death, reflects the author’s ironic and ridiculing perspective on the events leading up to the play’s climax and resolution. It closely echoes narrative motifs from Giovanni Boccaccio, particularly in the Decameron, Day 3, Tale 9, where a husband is misled regarding his wife’s fidelity, resulting in dramatic confrontation. The Decameron frequently employs false accusations and social embarrassment to probe themes of honour, love, and reconciliation, providing a clear parallel to Hero’s predicament. Taken together, these intertextual relations suggest that Much Ado About Nothing operates within a rich web of narrative transmission and transformation. The play’s handling of the Hero-Claudio sentimental plot draws on Italian inherited literary materials, while actively reshaping it. Placing particular emphasis on the themes of moral judgment, aristocratic self-regard, and the social consequences of credulity in the face of malicious gossip. 

It is difficult to presume that an uninformed playwright could “invent” out of whole cloth dialogues and monologues on subjects of which he had never even remotely heard. To maintain such a view is to rely on fables. It comes without saying that rather than being treated as a unique invention, this configuration invites analysis as a structure repeatedly adapted and recontextualized. In Much Ado About Nothing, the dramatist reshapes this familiar plot in a manner that suggests literary inheritance and a heightened sensitivity to its psychological and ethical implications. The differences between Claudio, immersed in the pain and humiliation of deception, and Benedick, initially positioned as a detached observer, introduces a dual perspective offering two different sides of the same tragicomic love-story.

The immediate literary source for this narrative design is traced to a Matteo Bandello novella, published in 1554, which provides both the setting and the essential dramatic crisis later reworked in the play. Bandello’s narrative unfolds within the same Italian milieu and culminates in a comparable exposure of the heroine’s supposed infidelity. Yet the process of accusation is markedly different. In Bandello, the repudiation is mediated through a letter dispatched to the heroine’s father in their private household, a fact that tempers the emotional violence of the revelation and mitigates the woman's alleged culpability. Much Ado intensifies the scene by staging the denunciation of infidelity publicly and without intercession, thereby foregrounding the cruelty inherent in Claudio’s response and sharpening the moral judgment implicit in the revised episode. This is because Claudio is a nobleman and his main concern is his reputation.

However, the contrast between Bandello’s compassionate treatment and the Shakespearean re-writing’s more severe moral drama underscores the extent to which the source material was deliberately transformed rather than imitated. Further complexity is introduced by the relationship between Bandello’s novella and earlier Italian literary treatments. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), particularly Book V, incorporates a closely related narrative, including the device of a substitute woman whose appearance enables the deception, an element that anticipates the role of Margaret in Much Ado. Ariosto’s Dalinda, who narrates her own involvement in the intrigue, foreshadows this dramatic function with notable clarity.

From its very first stage direction, Much Ado is situated within an exclusively aristocratic social world. As the discussion so far has shown, the comedy unfolds within a culture governed by a dominant conception of honour, accompanied by pathetic forms of dissimulation, obsessive displays of competitive masculine authority, and acute sensitivity to aristocratic rank. These dynamics are enacted above all through verbal wit and rhetorical performance, and are driven, at their core, by a persistent need for some form of revenge, a traditional value deeply embedded in Sicilian ethics, where moral standing is understood as a collective, familial asset whose violation demands public redress. This logic is articulated by Claudio when he submits himself to the offended father of his presumed dead bride, Hero, Leonato: “Choose your revenge yourself; impose me to what penance your invention can lay upon my sin: yet sinn’d I not but in mistaking” (Act V, Scene I). Claudio’s appeal unveils a culture in which the restoration of good standing depends less on inner remorse than on ritualized punishment and social rebalancing. The association between wronged honour and revenge is not unique to Much Ado About Nothing, though here it is refracted through comedy rather than tragedy. Shakespeare repeatedly returns to ethical systems in which one’s good reputation, once compromised, calls for retaliatory action. In Hamlet, revenge is framed within a chivalric and dynastic code inherited from both classical and Northern European traditions. In Othello, Venetian and Mediterranean notions of honour, closely aligned with those of Sicily, transform jealousy into a lethal demand for punitive justice. Outside Shakespeare, similar ethics govern Spanish Golden Age drama, particularly in Lope de Vega (1562-1635), where revenge is seen as a tragic necessity, not as an aberration. What distinguishes Much Ado is that the revenge ethic is absorbed into comic resolution even though the play never fully dismisses it: a man’s or a woman’s honour must still be publicly restored, repentance theatrically enacted, and social equilibrium ceremonially reaffirmed.

3. The infra-text (recurring themes, motifs)

In a writer as prolific as Shakespeare, who uses Italy more than any other foreign country, going so far as to title plays after Italian cities such as The Merchant of Venice and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and making Mantova the city of exile for Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, it is essential to look beyond individual works and consider the infratext: the web of recurring themes and motifs that runs through his entire body of work. By looking at patterns that emerge across different genres and stories, we can see how certain ideas become clear preferences, ongoing concerns, or even obsessions for the same author.

Nelle numerose trame attraversate da una evidente relazione con l’Italia, e dal materiale narrativo ricavato da Matteo Bandello, Luigi da Porto, Giovanni Fiorentino e Ludovico Ariosto, il caso di Romeo and Juliet, all’interno del più ampio processo di trasmissione e scambio culturale, dipendente da una catena di narrazioni italiane anteriori al suo approdo sulla scena inglese, si configura come paradigmatico. La tragedia non si presenta tanto come un prestito, quanto piuttosto come un processo di assimilazione, trasformazione, riconfigurazione, adattamento e rielaborazione creativa. La fonte italiana si espande, conferendo voce narrativa alle due figure tragiche della bella Verona. L’Italia non viene trattata come un semplice deposito di trame, ma come un campo dinamico di scambio intellettuale. L’interazione coinvolge forme letterarie insieme studiate e negoziate, convenzioni teatrali quali la commedia dell’arte e più ampi codici culturali. Il rapporto risulta così intertestuale e transnazionale, piuttosto che meramente derivativo. Questa forma di appropriazione dinamica si riconosce nella conoscenza diretta delle usanze italiane da parte dell’autore, poi trasposte all’interno del dispositivo drammaturgico elisabettiano.

The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing show some almost perfect parallels between the two sisters Katherina and Bianca with the two cousins Beatrice and Hero. In both cases, the author explores contrasting models of femininity: The tension between independence and obedience and the social expectations placed on women, but he does so in different settings. A farcical courtship in Shrew and a romantic comedy of misunderstandings in Much Ado. In both plays there is a type of woman with a sharp temper, a difficult personality, proving in dialogues to have an argumentative nature and an opposite type of woman, who is gentle and obedient, thus widely desired by suitors. Recognizing this allows us to appreciate the variety of Shakespeare’s works while also tracing the identity that runs through them: a playwright and linguistic experimenter. Beneath the surface, a consistent authorial vision is perceived, aimed at elevating English drama to the standards of Greek, Latin, and Renaissance theatre.

In The Taming of the Shrew, the male character courting Bianca is Lucentio, son of a Pisa gentleman, Vincenzo. Lucentio is on a trip through Italy (he mentions Milano, Pisa, where he was born, Firenze where he was brought up, and Padova). He has a lyrical, romantic name perfectly suited to a young scholar. It echoes classical names like Valerius or Florentio: derived from the Latin participle lucens, lucentis (“shining, bright”). To which Shakespeare added the suffix -io [Eee Oh], transforming an adjective into a personal name. Lucens → Lucentius → Lucentio, meaning “the shining one,” fitting for the ideal husband of a woman named Bianca (“White”), and in line with Renaissance conventions of giving names a poetic sense of virtue. (4) Bianca is indeed described as a sweet and studious adolescent who delights in playing musical instruments and writing poetry and who is instructed in these noble arts by tutors.

This play includes precise geographical references such as the Piazza del Mercato in Padova, the parish church of Saint Luke’s, the University of Padova, the Piovego Canal, and, outside Padova, Bergamo is mentioned as a place where the fabric for maritime sails are manufactured. Reference is also made to the authority of the Region, the “Doge” of Venezia, ruling over Padova. 

There is a display of the author's learning, with Latin proverbs (“Rédime te captum quam queas minimo”, “cum privilegio ad imprimendum solem”), extended phrases in Latin, a reference to a Greek place (Crete), and to mythological figures such as Agenor and Jupiter. It makes wide use of refined dramatic devices, including forms of gentle deception. Most notably the disguise of the lover as a tutor in order to approach Bianca, who is kept under strict control by her father. This strategy echoes the literary model of the love between a young tutor of letters (Paolo) and his pupil (Francesca) in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. The play also contains an allusion to Guido Cavalcanti’s sonnet “Voi che per gli occhi mi passaste il core…” (Act I, Scene I). As well as the comic device of exchanging master and servant, a convention typical of Italian Renaissance comedy. Importantly, the protagonists display a clear knowledge of book publication procedures. From this, Lucentio can be described as a character endowed with strong humanistic and scholarly competence, and the way he speaks reveals much about his intellectual profile.

From Lucentio’s remarks, we can infer a solid command of Latin, sufficient to recognize grammatical errors (solem vs. solum) and to understand fixed legal and ecclesiastical formulas. Through Lucentio, the author also indicates his own familiarity with law and early print regulations, as shown by his understanding of the above quoted phrase “Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum”, which refers to an exclusive printing privilege granted to a publisher under canon law. As his carefully chosen name suggests, Lucentio is an “enlightened” figure, characterized by intellectual clarity and humanistic erudition typical of a Renaissance-educated gentleman. His ease with learned formulas circulating in legal, ecclesiastical, and scholarly circles is not a superfluous detail but a deliberate marker of cultural prestige and self-awareness. In short, Lucentio corrects Biondello’s macaronic Latin with precision, but also places the editorial and legal formula in its proper historical and institutional context, reflecting critically on the gap between appearance and substance and exposing the irony of Biondello’s clumsy display of learning. In this sense, Lucentio appears as the ideal husband for the gentle Bianca: both share analytical intelligence, while Lucentio also demonstrates a capacity for meta-commentary on language and learning itself.

Beyond these intertextual references, the work includes autobiographical hints, similar to those found in Much Ado About Nothing.” Its characters come from different regions, including from “ancient Verona,” revealing Shakespeare’s familiarity with geography and with very specific cultural settings, likely known through travel, studies and close literary engagements. Philosophy is presented as a discipline to be taught to the beautiful Bianca. Lucentio also presents himself as knowledgeable in music, treating it not as mere entertainment but as a discipline connected to reason and reflection. Above all, he reveals his true identity to Bianca while he is teaching Latin to her , a moment that functions as a subtle act of self-disclosure, reinforcing the play’s deep engagement with language, learning, and authorship itself.

By studying how these inter- and infra-textual interactions operate, one can sketch a portrait of Shakespeare as a learned writer who distributed his literary knowledge of existing traditions carefully across his texts. Sometimes with self-irony, letting his inventions and passions spring up in recurring but subtly altered situations from their sources. Each work, in whatever genre, engages in an intertextual and infratextual dialogue with the others, linked through shared semantic and linguistic bridges.

4. The pervasiveness of noble status

It is clear that aristocratic authority in Much Ado About Nothing is materialised, ritualised, and enforced through elite ceremonies as in marriage, funeral, or duel that confer or destroy a man or a woman’s public persona. By the time the wedding approaches, the play has fully revealed itself to be a public spectacle of masculine dominance. Claudio’s shaming of Hero is vile yet theatrical, ritualized, and justified in the name of his sense of self-entitlement. One might infer that if the upper classes, educated to the highest possible degree, are capable of lowering their noble rank to such baseness and stratagems in the name of a constructed and false sense of self, the same does not apply to the lower classes when they commit the same crimes and expect to be forgiven. Social injustice can be perceived only tangentially, and under a contemporary critical gaze, since this comedy is not at all concerned with establishing general rules of legitimacy beyond those grounded in nobility. The author is just telling a reality that he in fact knows far too well.

It is consequential then pointing at the pervasive presence of other notable markers of an experiential aristocracy: titles and ranks saturate the play’s logic. Prince Don Pedro of Aragon, Count Claudio, “gentlemen,” “lords,” and “noble” figures inhabit a Sicilian world in which honour is further conferred through military merit and lineage. Marriage, too, is framed as dynastic negotiation, not as romantic culmination. Hero is repeatedly defined as Leonato’s daughter and heir, and her marriage is discussed in terms of alliance, inheritance, and ultimately status. Courtship is managed largely between men of rank, like the Prince, Leonato and Benedick, indicating the social habit of aristocratic marriage politics. Love, in this context, is subordinate to lineage and public stance. Pleasure is also aristocratically coded. Courtly leisure provides another powerful indicator of social exclusivity in Much Ado about Nothing. Music, masked dances, formal measures such as the “cinque-pace”, humorous banter, and elaborate entertainments distinguish the play’s recreational atmosphere as elite amusements requiring education, spatial privilege, and cultural fluency. Again, every action and surprise appears to be designed by the male characters. There are, strictly speaking, no non-noble figures of genuine dramatic weight. The messenger appears only briefly and speaks with ritual deference; the musicians exist solely to ornament aristocratic pleasure. Later figures such as Dogberry and Verges do not function as representatives of working-class realism but as parodic distortions of civic authority. Unlike A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, or The Merry Wives of Windsor, the play offers no parallel “lower world” governed by its own logic. Even Twelfth Night permits greater social permeability. Much Ado About Nothing is thus among the most socially exclusive of the thirty-seven plays attributed to the writer Shakespeare. Comparable in this respect to Love’s Labour’s Lost, a work conceived for courtly and elite audiences rather than for a vertically integrated public.

The Borachio-Don John intrigue exposes the cynical underside of privilege, gesturing toward class awareness without ever granting a figure such as Borachio genuine autonomy. Likewise, Dogberry, the constable of Messina’s watch, and his associate Verges stumble upon the truth yet lack the linguistic or social capacity to articulate it; they are consequently sidelined, functioning as proverbial fools rather than as civic agents. They both derive their comic force from inflated self-importance, maladroit attempts to appropriate aristocratic diction, and persistent malapropisms. The characters who might be classified as “non-noble” are thus parodied rather than realized as socially coherent figures. Margaret, Hero’s waiting-gentlewoman and the other minor figure, Balthasar, occupy subordinate social positions and appear primarily as servants enjoying some intimacy with the nobles, and function, for this reason, as supporters of the comic narrative. Margaret’s bawdy wit and Borachio’s complicity in Don John’s scheme add colour and contrast to the aristocratic milieu, yet neither is afforded the social depth or realism, characteristic of more grounded characters elsewhere in the canon. These features all reinforce the impression of an author writing from within, rather than toward, the world of the nobility.

5. Benedick and the Mediterranean Aristocracy: from Venezia to Messina

By the second half of the sixteenth century, the term “Aragonese” had ceased to function as a strictly precise dynastic designation and had instead acquired a broader cultural and political resonance. It was frequently used, particularly in northern European discourse, as a capacious label evoking Mediterranean authority, Spanish imperial power, and the prestige of courtly governance. Although the ruling dynasty of Sicily in this period was unequivocally Habsburg, the Aragonese legacy persisted in language, diplomatic usage, legal structures, and elite court culture throughout the English Renaissance. Sicily, governed as part of the Spanish Habsburg empire under monarchs such as Ferdinand II of Aragon, Charles V, and Philip II, was administered through a viceroyal system (viceré) centred primarily in Palermo. The viceroy’s authority embodied imperial power while simultaneously preserving entrenched local aristocratic hierarchies. This mode of governance produced a political environment marked by rigid social stratification, a pronounced military presence, and an acute sensitivity to questions of honour and public reputation.

The historical writing of the period reflects these conditions with notable consistency. Whether composed in Latin, Italian, or Spanish, sixteenth-century accounts of Sicily focus on interrelated concerns such as governance, noble lineages, taxation, civil unrest, and, above all, the island’s strategic role within Mediterranean international diplomacy, particularly in relation to Ottoman expansion. Works such as Tommaso Fazello’s De Rebus Siculis, first printed in Latin in 1558, offered comprehensive narratives of Sicilian history that combined humanist scholarship with contemporary political realities. While access to information remained limited, local annals and administrative records were largely confined to Sicilian, Neapolitan, or Madrid archives, printed histories circulated internationally and were available, albeit exclusively, within university libraries and private collections in England. It is within this framework of mediated and elite knowledge that Shakespeare’s representation of Messina in Much Ado About Nothing must be situated. In the late 16th century Venice was governed by an oligarchic system. A traveler would be struck by the sophisticated political machinery that sustained the Repubblica di Venezia: how the symbolic authority of the Doge and practical government were carefully distinguished, how power was shared yet at the same time minutely structured, and how a centuries-old oligarchic system could function with such stability and refinement. Messina, by contrast, is presented as an almost bizarre and comic nest of nobility off the shore of the south of the Mediterranean sea, an elegant but not rigidly regulated environment, in which deceptions and offences can remain contained within the polite space of the court, whose sense of respectability, the practice of noble marriage for reasons of caste interest, and military reputation govern every interaction more than the common good of a people who in this comedy are invisible. Dogberry and the local commoners, caricatures of the subaltern classes, only stand in contrast to the social manners of the court, further underscoring the divide between the courtly “world” and the different social environments of the professional and working classes.

Our author does not pretend to have been there: he was there. He constructs a Mediterranean and aristocratic backdrop, ideal for intrigue, festivities, and military references. Leonato’s house stands as the central residence, the hub of meetings, banquets, and amorous deceptions, with interior and exterior spaces that facilitate masquerades and comic intrigue. The courtyards and gardens become stages for private dialogues and playful encounters, secret meetings, and gossip, reflecting the author’s intimate knowledge of noble estates. The city streets play a minimal role, mostly for the comical movements of figures like Dogberry, while ballrooms and banquets host masquerades and social events showcasing aristocratic culture, complete with music, dances, elaborate costumes, and courtly rituals.ù

Within this setting, Benedick can be considered as consistent with some aspects of our author’s knowledge of nobility “from within”, the other being Claudio: his sharp intellect, sceptical approach to love, and mastery of verbal play reflect courtly culture, just as the comedy’s precise depiction of spaces, rituals, and objects indicates direct knowledge of the aristocratic class. Much Ado About Nothing is thus a brilliant tragicomedy and a vividly accurate portrayal of Renaissance courtly life, with Messina as the perfect backdrop for a narrative that speaks “from inside” the noble sphere.

Conclusions

Through the mediation of the Shakespearean works Italy’s Renaissance values of beauty, wit, individual dignity, tragic awareness, and its literature were translated into the English canon, and from there into the broader British tongue. This cultural interaction and transmission became one of the most potent and enduring bridges from classical antiquity, Italian legacy and English literature. The flowering of Western humanism and moral imagination owes as much to Italy’s Renaissance as to England’s Reformation. Shakespeare’s works served as the principal conduit through which Italy’s intellectual spirit became the moral language of modern English literature. Shakespeare’s stage dramatized the author's desire to be Italianate, along with what he learned of the Italian cultural and social values. And also its vices and weaknesses: its sense of honor (Othello), its wit and civility (Much Ado About Nothing), its political realism (Julius Caesar), and its metaphysical melancholy (Measure for Measure, steeped in Italianate). Behind the mask of the Bard stands the ghosts of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Castiglione, Petrarca, Dante, and the artists of Urbino, Florence, Mantua and Venice.

Bibliography

Fergusson, Francis. “Trope and Allegory: Some Themes Common to Dante and Shakespeare.” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, no. 86, 1968, pp. 113–26.

 

Traversi, Derek. The Literary Imagination: Studies in Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. University of Delaware Press ; Associated University Presses, 1982.

The author: The author: Dr. Erminia Passannanti (Ph.D. in Italian Literature, 2004, University College London; Ph.D. in Social Sciences, Law, and Media Communication, 2014, Brunel University, London). Professor of English Literature and Civilization for the Italian Ministry of Public Education.