Jack D'amico. Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage (Italian Bookshelf) (Book Review‪)‬

Jack D'Amico. Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001. In this volume, the author engages the reader in a scholarly discussion of the individual settings in Shakespearean dramas set in Italy, whether in real cities such as Verona, Venice, Milan, and Messina in the case of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Much Ado About Nothing, respectively, or the courtly, mythical world of Sicilia, the setting of The Winter's Tale. This he does in order to suggest the relationship between the individual plays and their contemporary audiences. The fundamental thesis of the volume is that Italian society, as it is represented in Shakespeare's plays, is a reconfiguration of the urban world of contemporary London. D'Amico further extends this principle of correspondences by drawing a parallel between the major city-states of northern Italy and the theaters in and around Elizabethan London, as both are enclosed within walls but open to the air, a meeting place for all social strata. Since the book focuses on the multiple locations within the Italian cities in question, be it a piazza, a city street, an interior space, a garden, etc, the discussion of the individual plays is fragmented according to the presence or absence in them of the topographic features that are, in turn, the focus of the discussion. However, my comment is not to be seen as detracting from the book's worth as the index provides references to individual characters, plays, and their Italian settings for readers wishing to extrapolate information on them.