Exotic locations in Shakespeare’s comedies

       In this essay we are going to deal with the locations that Shakespeare chooses for his comedies, paying special attention to those we have studied in class during this course.

        Generally speaking, Shakespeare wrote his comedies locating them in far away places, preferably Italy and areas in which the Elizabethan audience could not get identified with, but at the same time these are places which were well known by the English for its cultural background.

      
        This places carried the audience to a place in which the Renaissance population based their ideas on. As we can see in this map, many plays (tragedies and comedies) which Shakespeare wrote were located in eastern Europe, mainly Italy. Renaissance ideas were brought from classical Italy and Greece, and the audience identified this area with a place where everything was idealised.

        "In almost all the dramas set in Italy, learning and education are major themes" (Levith). As we can read in this sentence from Levith, we can find two topics which appear in Shakespeare’s comedies: learning and education. We can find it for example in The Taming of the Shrew, where we can read how Baptista brings a lecturer for Katherina and Bianca. In the Elizabethan era, education on women played a very important role (as we can read in the collective paper), because a learned woman had more access to be married with a rich or high-class man.

        “Shakespeare was not the only Renaissance English playwright to get his Italian details wrong at times” (Levith). From my point of view, setting the scene in Italy is only symbolic, and we don’t have to pay much attention if the places described in the play and the names of the characters correspond to real places and real names. In my opinion, what Shakespeare wanted was to locate the action in a remote place, far away from the present London times. With this point of view is easier to understand why comedies as Midsummer Night’s Dream are set in Greece, to make the audience realize that everything can happen on stage, and in that way we are able to extrapolate the action and set it in a complete different place from our daily life.

However, Shakespeare shows knowledge about Italian daily activity, and this is probably due to a visit to Italy that he should do during his lifetime: “The conclusion about Shakespeare as a traveller is similarly unflinching: 'on at least one occasion he must have visited Italy'. Other scholars agree. One writes of the playwright's 'eye-witness' verisimilitude and 'intimate description of Italian life', and another of the 'pure Paduan atmosphere' in The Taming of the Shrew.... Einstein also thinks the mature Othello shows 'undeniable knowledge of Italy', and that Shakespeare's information about Italian cities is 'remarkable’” (Levith).

    On the other hand, we have another point of view of Shakespeare as a man who had learned about Italy from books or by third persons: “his settings and incidental knowledge of Italian scenes and customs are such as to have prompted speculation that he had himself visited Italy. But he is clearly no "Italianate" Englishman. He sprinkles his plays with a smattering of broken Italian, although rarely in complete copybook sentences, as in The Taming of the Shrew (I,ii). Such individual words, dubiously Italian, as appear here and there throughout the plays - punto, fico, basta, magnifico, duello, zany, mandragora, via, nuncio, bona roba, fantastico, signior, etc. - are the common counters of the time. They indicate no particular proficiency in the language.” (Lievsay)

We have more references from a possible visit to Mantua: "Speculation as to Shakespeare's actual visit to Mantua in 1593, with the Earl of Southampton, is still inconclusive.” (Locatelli) So we don’t know exactly if Shakespeare visited or not Italy.

"Italy was not important to the dramatists as a place and that English folly and Italian vice are in this period only complementary images to express a single vision of the human state. Following his allegations, the Italian plays increasingly came to be read as metaphors of England" (Hoenselaars). In my opinion, this approach is more correct than the others. From my point of view, Shakespeare wants to criticise the internal problems of the contemporary England by moving the action to an unknown time and an unknown place for the audience, not to criticise England society directly and trying to avoid censorship.

“Other Italian places were chosen by playwrights both to distantiate the events of their plays from local English problems (and avoid censorship by doing so), and to reproduce a stereotyped idea of Italy as the land of corrupt power and lost glory" (Mullini). As we have said above, avoiding censorship was able by setting the scene in a remote place. This was the way in which not only Shakespeare, but also many other playwrights of the Elizabethan times, could criticise and talk (indirectly) about the current problems that English society were going through.

        To sum up, I think that Shakespeare uses the setting in an intelligent way for many things: first of all to let his plays took place without being censored, and to deal with the Elizabethan audience and society through the usage of a distant place as an alternative to make everything possible at the stage.

CONSULTED  SOURCES:

-Forés, Vicente. Shakespeare in Performance. April and May 2007. Universitat de València.

-Hoenselaars, A.J. "Italy Staged in English Renaissance Drama" In Marrapodi.

-Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

-Lievsay, John L. The Elizabethan Image of Italy. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press for The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1964.

-Locatelli, Angela. "The Fictional World of Romeo and Juliet: Cultural Connotations of an Italian Setting." In Marrapodi.