Staging Bruno’s Scripted Emblems: Anti-Petrarchism and Mannerism in Love’s Labour’s Lost

Abstract

Among the several works in Italian vernacular that Giordano Bruno surreptitiously printed during his stay in London in1583-85, De gli eroici furori is the work that exerted the greatest impact on Elizabethan contemporary poets and dramatists. Ideas and emblems presented in the works of “the mad priest of the sun” (in Robert Greene’s phrase) crop up in the plays and poetry of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Andrew Marvell in particular. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare seizes on Bruno’s extreme anti-Petrarchism and mannerist techniques in his critique of the little academe of courtiers who reject love and break their vows. He playfully reworks Bruno’s use of the Neo-Platonist principle of infolding in the moral dialogue, which the philosopher-poet had already successfully adapted in a dramatic form in Il Candelaio, one of the best examples of Italian commedia erudita (1583). When Shakespeare creates his own version of this critique in a comic setting, he transforms the philosopher-poet’s procession of lovers under the influence of heroic frenzy (furore eroico) and provides one of the earliest examples of an active use of emblems on the Elizabethan stage. In Shakespeare’s unconventional and melancholy comedy, the main butt of this tongue-in-cheek treatment is Giordano Bruno’s namesake, Berowne.