Shakespeare and Padova: The Taming of the Shrew. New discoveries
The first of two Shakespeare evenings at the Museo Italiano. Save the date also for Friday 30 September!
The Museo Italiano (Co.As.It.) and the Faculty of Arts (The University of Melbourne) have the pleasure of inviting you to
SHAKESPEARE AND PADOVA: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. New discoveries about an extraordinary cultural exchange between Italy and England in the Renaissance
a talk by ALESSANDRA PETRINA, Assoc Professor of English Literature (University of Padova)
Museo Italiano, CoAsIt, 199 Faraday St, Carlton, Friday 23 Sept, 6.30pm
FREE EVENT. Light refreshments will be offered. Please RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/shakespeare-and-padova-the-taming-of-the-shrew-talk-by-prof-a-petrina-tickets-27479875046
Synopsis
After the Prologue dedicated to Christopher Sly, The Taming of the Shrew opens with Lucentio declaring ‘the great desire I had / to see fair Padua, nursery of arts’; Tranio, his servant, gently mocks him, expressing his delight at his master’s resolve to ‘suck the sweets of sweet philosophy’. Whether or not William Shakespeare was expressing his own desire to visit the centre of learning of Renaissance Italy, he was certainly interpreting the resolve of many of his contemporaries. Between the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century Padova was the goal of English students, scientists, philosophers, politicians and poets, from John Dee to Henry Wotton, from Gabriel Harvey to Francis Walsingham. Its proximity to Venice made it also an ideal point of reference for English merchants, for the exchange of wares, books, wealth and ideas: Lucentio’s counterpart in Shakespeare’s comedy, the much more down-to-earth Petruchio, declares the ‘I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily, then happily in Padua’.
Shakespeare thus shares with his audience the image of a unique Italian city: less splendid than Venice, less factious that Verona, Padova was at the same time a centre of learning and a uniquely free city, whose university was not governed by religious or political authorities but by the nationes, that is by the students, grouped according to their provenance and mother tongue. The natio anglica, though initially less numerous and influential that its southern counterparts, grew in the sixteenth century and created a unique bond between this city and the developing English culture.
In her talk, Professor Petrina explores this connection, using Shakespeare’s words as a case study for the variety of reactions that English writers present in their letters, travel narratives and literary works, and showing the results of very recent research that has brought to light a further, extraordinary instance of cultural exchange between early modern England and Italy, in which Shakespeare plays an active and hitherto unsuspected role.
Alessandra Petrina
is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy. She has published The Kingis Quair (1997), Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-century England. The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (2004), and Machiavelli in the British Isles. Two Early Modern Translations of the Prince (2009); she has also edited, among other books, The Medieval Translator. In principio fuit interpres (2013); Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England (2013), The Italian University in the Renaissance (special issue of Renaissance Studies, 2013), and Natio Scota (special issue of Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2012). She is co-editor of Scottish Literary Review; European editor of Renaissance Studies; member of the Advisory Board of the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations Series; and current president of IASEMS (Italian Association of Shakespearean and Early Modern Studies).
