Aretino’s Comedies and the Italian ‘Erasmian’ Connection in Shakespeare and Jonson

Abstract

Most discussions of the source-background to comedies by Shakespeare and Jonson recognise two overlapping areas of Italianate influence: the commedia erudita beginning with Ariosto and Bibbiena in the early years of the sixteenth century and the commedia dell’arte from about 1545. Most acknowledge debts to the Italian tradition of adaptation from classical Plautine and Terentian models in scripted comedy in the vulgar tongue, and to the more diffuse commedia traditions exported to France and England by travelling players towards the end of the sixteenth century. In almost all the analysable strands (character, plot, comic theme, linguistic diversity and so on), and in what can be tied down of stage setting and acting styles, the influences of commedia erudita and dell’arte function separately or together (in whatever mix) to convey an other-worldly, ‘foreign’ and therefore exotic and fantastic world, sometimes linked to the celebratory freedoms of carnival license or to the supposed ‘vices’ — social or political — of Italian Renaissance society. Aretino in this context is usually taken as linking the license of carnival with foreign vices.