Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
- 3 ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
- 4 The Elizabethans in Italy
- 5 Tragic form and the voyagers
- 6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
- 7 Marlowe's Argonauts
- 8 Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama
- 9 The wrong end of the telescope
- 10 ‘Travelling hopefully’: the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama
- 11 ‘Seeing things’: Amazons and cannibals
- 12 Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban
- 13 The New World in The Tempest
- 14 ‘What's past is prologue’: metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest
- 15 Lope de Vega and Shakespeare
- Index
4 - The Elizabethans in Italy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
- 3 ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
- 4 The Elizabethans in Italy
- 5 Tragic form and the voyagers
- 6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
- 7 Marlowe's Argonauts
- 8 Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama
- 9 The wrong end of the telescope
- 10 ‘Travelling hopefully’: the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama
- 11 ‘Seeing things’: Amazons and cannibals
- 12 Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban
- 13 The New World in The Tempest
- 14 ‘What's past is prologue’: metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest
- 15 Lope de Vega and Shakespeare
- Index
Summary
Italy, the Paradice of the earth and the Epicures heaven, how doth it forme our yong master? It makes him to kis his hand like an ape, cringe his necke like a starveling, and play at hey passe repasse come aloft, when he salutes a man. From thence he brings the art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of Sodomitrie. The onely probable good thing they have to keepe us from utterly condemning it is that it maketh a man an excellent Courtier, a curious carpet knight: which is, by interpretation, a fine close leacher, a glorious hipocrite. It is nowe a privie note amongst the better sort of men, when they would set a singular marke or brand on a notorious villaine, to say, he hath beene in Italy.
This expatiation on Italy as perceived by an Elizabethan Englishman is characterized by, shall we say, a certain extremity. It begins with an image of the place as an earthly paradise, but quickly modifies it into a decadent one – for epicures only. It then descends into making Italy a kind of hell, associated with false religion or no religion, with villainy and sexual transgression. Is it a place where you educate yourself in the qualities of a courtier or the characteristics of a flatterer, insinuator and hypocrite? Or is it where you learn that to be a courtier and an insinuator are one and the same thing?
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- Information
- Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time , pp. 55 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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