The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines / / Melissa Walter.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter ACUP Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Walter, Melissa,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.) :; 5 b&w illustrations

Using a comparative, feminist approach informed by English and Italian literary and theatre studies, this book investigates connections between Shakespearean comedy and the Italian novella tradition. Shakespeare’s comedies adapted the styles of wit, character types, motifs, plots, and other narrative elements of the novella tradition for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and they investigated social norms and roles through a conversation carried out in narrative and drama. Arguing that Shakespeare’s comedies register the playwright’s reading of the novella tradition within the collaborative playmaking context of the early modern theatre, this book demonstrates how the comic vision of these plays increasingly valued women’s authority and consent in the comic conclusion. The representation of female characters in novella collections is complex and paradoxical, as the stories portray women not only in the roles of witty plotters and storytellers but also through a multifaceted poetics of enclosed spaces – including trunks, chests, caskets, graves, cups, and beds. The relatively open-ended rhetorical situation of early modern English theatre and the dialogic form and narrative material available in the novella tradition combine to help create the complex female characters in Shakespeare’s plays and a new form of English comedy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Enclosure, Conversation, and Spaces of Authorship -- Chapter One. Filomena’s Voice: Female Character and Authority in Shakespeare’s Early Italianate Comedies -- Chapter Two. Thinking Inside and Outside the Box: The Casket Test and Audience Response in The Merchant of Venice -- Chapter Three. “Are You a Comedian?”: The Trunk in Twelfth Night as Mobility Machine -- Chapter Four. Novellesque Domesticity and Impossible Places in The Merry Wives of Windsor -- Chapter Five. Reforming Civility in Measure for Measure -- Chapter Six. Rewriting the “Ladies’ Text”: All’s Well That Ends Well -- Chapter Seven. Seeing as Reading and Retelling in Cymbeline -- Conclusion -- Appendix. Italian and French Novellas in England -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index