Situating itself in a long tradition of studies of Anglo-Italian literary relations in the Renaissance, this book consists of an analysis of the representation of women in the extant Elizabethan translations of the three major Italian Renaissance epic poems (Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata), as well as of the influence of these works on Elizabethan Literature in general, in the form of creative imitation on the part of poets such as Edmund Spenser, Peter Beverley, William Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel, and of prose writers such as George Whetstone and George Gascoigne. The study emphasises the importance of European writers' influence on English Renaissance Literature and raises questions pertaining to the true essence of translation, adaptation and creative imitation, with a specific emphasis on gender issues. Its originality lies in its exhaustiveness, as well as in its focus on the epics' female figures, both as a source of major modifications and as an evident point of interest for the Italian works' 'translatorship'.
Courtesans-women who achieve wealth, status, or power through sexual transgression-have played both a central and contradictory role in literature: they have been admired, celebrated, feared, and vilified. This study of the courtesan in Renaissance English drama focuses not only on the moral ambivalence of these women, but with special attention to Anglo-Italian relations, illuminates little known aspects of their lives. It traces the courtesan from a wry comedic character in the plays of Terence and Plautus to its literary exhaustion in the seventeenth-century dramatic works of Dekker, Marston, Webster, Middleton, Shirley and Brome. The author focuses especially on the presentation of the courtesan in the sixteenth century - dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly view the courtesan as a symbol of social disease and decay, transforming classical conventions into English prejudices. Renaissance Anglo-Italian cultural and sexual relations are also investigated through comparisons of travel narratives, original source materials, and analysis of Aretino's representations of celebrated Italian courtesans. Amid these fascinating tales of aspiration, desire and despair lingers the intriguing question of who was the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.
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