IS 271T Shakespeare and Italy
This course focuses on Shakespeare’s "Italian plays" and on the relation between Shakespeare and his beloved Italy. Did Shakespeare visit Italy or was his knowledge of Italy entirely from second-hand sources? At a deeper level of analysis, what was Italy for Shakespeare and what where did the Italian sources for his "Italian plays" originate? Did Shakespeare perhaps know Italian? How does his language reflect Italian culture? These are some of the questions that this course aims to answer in order to illuminate this iconic author from an Italian perspective.
Beginning with an introduction to Humanism and the Renaissance from a broad interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, students will then focus on a selection of Shakespeare’s Italian plays. The second part of the semester will be devoted to the sonnets and their relationship to works by Dante, Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio. Following Richard P. Roe’s classic The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, during Academic Travel students will visit the cities forming the bulk of Shakespeare’s Italy: Naples, Messina and Syracuse in Sicily, and Venice.