SHAKESPEARE’S ITALIAN DEBT
By Matthew V. Grieco
“Beware the Ides of March”; the phrase is known to countless people as a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, spoken by an unnamed soothsayer as a prophetic warning. Shakespeare, however, learned of the interaction from The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius (69-140 A.D.), who even tells us that the augur’s name was Spurinna. Shakespeare’s debt to Italians runs much deeper, though. In fact, Italian sources account for most of his Tragedies and Comedies (17 out of 23; we must exclude the 10 English Histories and 4 Romances). His genius undoubtedly lay in the telling of the tale, if not the originality of the theme.
Most obviously, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are derived from Roman materials. So too is Coriolanus, a general from the early Roman Republic, whose haughtiness nearly brought destruction to his country, and whose biography is presented in the Lives of Plutarch (46-120 A.D.). Also set in ancient Rome is the fictional Titus Andronicus, a story of violent revenge, which draws greatly from the Metamorphoses poetry of Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.) and the play Thyestes by Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.). Romeo and Juliet, written 1594-1596, comes from Romeo e Giulietta, a 1530 novella by Luigi da Porto, who derived his work from a 1476 story, Mariotto e Ganozza, by Masuccio Salernitano. Othello and Measure for Measure (a comedy) written in 1603 or 1604, are both based on the 1565 Hecatommithi, a collection of 110 stories by Giovanni Baptista Giraldi Cinthio.
The Comedy of Errors synthesizes two farces by Plautus (c. 254-184 B.C.), Menaechmi and Amphitruo. The Taming of the Shrew, published in 1594, borrows heavily from I Suppositi, written in 1509 by the epic poet Ludovico Ariosto, who based his own work on Captivi by Plautus and Eunuchus by Terence (c. 190-159 B.C.). A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes liberally from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and uses plot conventions developed by Plautus and Terence. The main themes of The Merchant of Venice come from Il Pecarone, written two hundred years earlier (1378) by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. To a lesser extent, The Merry Wives of Windsor also uses Il Pecarone. Both Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1600) and Twelfth Night (1599-1601) rely on a series of novelle written by Matteo Bandello in 1554. The pastoral motif As You Like It (1598-1600) traces its origins to the 1590 drama Pastor Fido by Giovanni Battista Guarini, who himself looked to the Eclogues of Virgil (70-19 B.C.). All’s Well That Ends Well is taken from the third “day” of storytelling in Boccaccio’s (1313-1375) masterpiece the Decameron. For Troilus and Cressida, set in the Trojan War, Shakespeare consulted Virgil’s Aeneid, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and the Historia Destructionis Troiae by the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne (c. 1215-1290). Although set in Italy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is based on a Portuguese work.
To bring our discussion full circle, it should be noted that several Italian operas adapt Shakespeare versions. Giuseppe Verdi composed an Otello, MacBeth, and Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor plus characters from the two Henry IV plays). Gioachino Rossini (the William Tell/Lone Ranger composer) also produced an Otello. Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835; most famous for his opera Norma, wrote I Capuleti ed I Montecchi (i.e., Romeo and Juliet). Recordings for all those works are readily available.