Shakespeares Shrews investigates the echoes of two early modern discoursesparadoxical writing and the womans question or querelle des femmesin the representation of the Shakespearean shrew in The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello.
Shakespeares Shrews: Italian Traditions of Paradoxes and the Womans Debate investigates the echoes of two early modern discoursesparadoxical writing and the womans question or querelle des femmesin the representation of the Shakespearean shrew in The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello.
This comparative cross-cultural study explores the English reception of these traditions through the circulation, translation, and adaptation of Italian works such as Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso, Baldassare Castigliones Il libro del cortegiano, and Ercole and Torquato Tassos Dellammogliarsi. The enticing interplay of these two traditions is further complicated by their presence in the writing of early modern male and female authors. The focus on Shakespeares appropriation of these traditions highlights two key findings: the thematic fragmentation of the womans question and the evolving role of paradoxes, from figures of speech to figures of thought, according to the gender of the speaker.
Contents
Foreword by Rocco Coronato
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Theres a double tongue; theres two tongues
Chapter 1 A wonderfull thing to hear: paradoxes and the womans question
as early modern literary traditions
1.1 Paradoxical argumentation and its fortune in early modern England and
Italy
The classical tradition of paradoxical rhetoric
Universities, Inns of Court, and Italian humanists
The early modern paradox: the mock encomium as an epistemological tool
Between Italy, France and England: the case of Ortensio Landos Paradossi
A paradoxical development: the mock encomium and the argumentum contra
opinionem omnium
1.2 The womans question and its paradoxical portrayal of the female sex
Literary antecedents and foundational texts of the womans question
The womans question in early modern Italy: Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia
Marinella
The womans question in early modern England: the Swetnam controversy
1.3 The paradox of the talkative woman in early modern Italy and England
Italian talkativeness: from the Roman slave to the masks of the commedia
dellarte
English talkativeness: folktale shrews and Shakespeares Kate
The Italian cortigiana and the English shrew: a comparison
Chapter 2 The role of Italian mediators in the English debate on women and
paradoxical literary tradition
2.1 Of women and agency in Ariostos Orlando Furioso and Haringtons
translation
Female infidelity and homosocial relations in Canto IV and Canto XXVIII
Translating misogyny: omissions, additions, and alterations
2.2 Witty women at the court of Baldassare Castigliones Il libro del
cortegiano
An Italian turned English: Thomas Hobys The Book of the Courtier
A necessary presence: the ordering role of women in Castigliones Il
Cortegiano and Thomas Hobys The Courtier
2.3 Ercole and Torquato Tassos Dellammogliarsi, Robert Toftes
translation, and the Bishops Ban
Fained battles, fought in iest: paradoxical misogyny in Toftes
translation
Misogynistic anecdotes and the Queens praise in Torquatos defense
Chapter 3 So sweet was neer so fatal: the womans question and paradoxes
in Shakespeares shrews
3.1 The Taming of the Shrew: a shrew-taming narrative in paradoxical terms
The pamphlet literature and the competing representations of the shrew
Petruchios pars destruens: coercion and resistance through paradoxes
Petruchios pars construens: the case of Kates new identity
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart
3.2 Something new, something old: the use of paradoxes and the womans
question in Much Ado About Nothing
Idealised partners in Shakespeares Messina
Thou thinkest I am in sport: love talks and logical paradoxes
The church scene and the shift in the use of paradoxes
Guarded with fragments
3.3 My lord is not my lord: paradoxes as figures of the soul in Othello
The stage misogynist and the effects of slander
It is their husbands faults: Emilias defence of women
Iagos poison: paradoxes as cyphers of tragedy and power imbalances
A word or two before you go
Conclusion Figures of thought and thematical dispersion
Opposite developments: the relationship between the womans question and
paradoxes
The variable of gender in the form and function of paradoxes
The shrews éndoxa, women writers, and the resolution of the paradox
Index
Beatrice Righetti is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Verona and member of the Shakespeares Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and their European Dissemination and Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes projects. She has published on Renaissance women writers and Shakespearean plays, examining the use of paradoxes, genderbased violence, and AngloItalian relations in Routledge edited volumes, NJES, and Linguae&.
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