Recent commentary on poetic imitation in the Renaissance has tended to emphasize competition, to value kinds of imitation that strive to surpass their models, and therefore to disregard or even deprecate modes of imitation that seem to consist of little more than respectful duplications. It has too readily assumed that imitative poets can only achieve originality by defying or somehow asserting their difference from their models. In the following essay I seek to challenge such assumptions by examining the practice of a major Renaissance poet who managed to assert his modern voice through imitatio while refusing to engage in competitive struggle. I do not mean to suggest that Renaissance poets were not given to competitive imitation. For purposes of subsequent contrast it is worth considering rapidly why emulation frequently did characterize the imitative practice of some of these poets.

Regimes and families: historians have recently enriched our understanding of the patrician regimes of late-medieval and Renaissance Italy by analyzing relations among their component social units. This essay will contribute to this literature by throwing some light on the social structure and practices of the ruling class of fifteenth-century Venice. For a long time, but with quickening rhythm in the last decade or so, historians of Venice have been charting various currents that ran through the Venetian patriciate. On the whole, though, they have preferred to concentrate on political and economic groupings, less on the family and kinship patterns that fascinate investigators of other cities, notably Florence.

The rich and important debate over tyrannicide, in which Julius Caesar figures centrally, engaged the best political minds of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and raged with particular intensity during Shakespeare's time. The tremendous upheaval of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation ignited fiery polemics on the rights of subjects and on the nature and foundations of civil order. At various times Protestants and Catholics arose to challenge the authority of the earthly crown and to claim the right of deposition and tyrannicide. Monarchomachs like Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, George Buchanan, François Hoffman, Théodore de Bèze, the author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, the Ligue, and the Jesuits Robert Persons, Francisco Suarez, and Juan de Mariana drew upon the classics (especially Aristotle), the Bible, and other works (especially those of Aquinas, Salutati, and Bartolus) to reexamine fundamental assumptions about political order.

The Genius of Venice 1500-1600, the grand exhibition held at the Royal Academy of Arts from November 25, 1983, to March 11, 1984, transformed the London season, as one brochure announced, into “A Venetian Winter.” Notwithstanding the strong competition of the British Museum's exhibition of Raphael drawings, all London seemed filled with enthusiasm for the Queen of the Adriatic, an enthusiasm that manifested itself on every level of culture consumption and tourism: from gondolier shirts, carnival masks, and tins of baicoli to concerts of Venetian music, programs of films set in the lagoon, and public lecture series on topics such as “Venice: Art and Culture” and “Venice and the Victorians“; and, not least important in setting the tone of the occasion, special travel packages guaranteed the presence of large numbers of live Venetians in the British capital (the show was sponsored by the Sea Containers Group and Venice Simplon-Orient-Express Limited).