Overview

""Pollastra and the Origins of Twelfth Night"" addresses two closely linked and increasingly studied issues: the nature of the relation of Shakespeare's plays to Italian culture, and the technology of modern theater invented in Renaissance Italy. The discovery of forgotten works by Giovanni Lappoli, known as Pollastra, led to publication in Italy in 1993 in a limited edition of the Italian texts with supplemental scholarship by Louise George Clubb and Robert Black, entitled Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy. One of those texts, the comedy Parthenio, has escaped the attention of theater bibliographers, because it was quickly sold out in its time and only a handful of copies are known to exist today. Yet it played an important part in the birth of Italian Renaissance drama and of modern comedy in general, in that it was the immediate predecessor and source of Gl'Ingannati, arguably the most famous comedy of the Italian Renaissance and certainly the most imitated, translated, adapted all over Europe. The best known of its progeny is Shakespeare's ""Twelfth Night"". Much has been written in Italy and England about Gl'Ingannati and Shakespeare's debt to it, but nothing at all about Parthenio. This volume provides the first English translation (with the original Italian on facing pages); and presents for an international audience the theatrical scholarship from the 1993 book ""Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy"", augmented with new findings.

Full Product Details

9780754668909

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Louise George Clubb is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a member of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Italian Studies. She is General Editor of Biblioteca Italiana, the bilingual series published by the University of California Press and launched by her edition and translation of Della Porta's Gli duoi fratelli rivali/ The Two Rival Brothers (1980). A former President of the Renaissance Society of America, she has been Director of the University of California's Centro Studi at Padua and the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence, a member of the Comitato dei Garanti at the University of Siena and currently of the Accademia Galileiana di Scienze, Letter ed Arti in Padua. Her other books include Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist (Princeton University Press, 1965), Italian Plays (1500-1700) in the Folger Library (Florence: Leo Olschki Casa Editrice, 1968), Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (Yale University Press. 1989), and (with Robert Black) Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993). She is the author of the chapter ""Italian Renaissance Drama"" in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995, reprinted 1997) and numerous studies of Renaissance comparative literature.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available