Supposes (I suppositi) (1509) by Lodovico Ariosto

Abstract

ESC 27, 2001 to talk as this prisoner is suffered,” sputters one attorney [70]), or that these proceedings are not university disputations ( “The judges sit not here to make disputations, but to declare the law,” says commissioner Stanford [75]), Throckmorton proceeds at some length attacking their “misshapen arguments” (75). Patterson’s edition provides an excellent concise introduc­ tion, with information the reader needs to place the text, as well as appendices with documents such as the poetical version of the trial and biographical excerpts. This text could very prof­ itably be used in courses on Tudor literature since it highlights issues of audience and rhetorical skill, Renaissance argument and logical reasoning, and identity construction along with the political manoeuvring of the day. JUDITH DEITCH / University of Toronto Lodovico Ariosto. Supposes (I suppositi) (1509). Trans. George Gascoigne (1566). Ed. Donald Beecher and John Butler. Ot­ tawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1999. 178. $8.00 paper. George Gascoigne’s translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi is best known to English readers as a source for Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. It also enjoys, however, the distinction o f being the first Italianate comedy and the first prose drama in English; and, as Russell Fraser observes, “it is also in its own right a well-turned play” (Fraser and Rabkin 1: 101). It deserves, therefore, to stand outside Shakespeare’s shadow. Al­ though Supposes is widely available in Fraser and Rabkin’s anthology, Drama of the English Renaissance (1975), the last scholarly edition of it was published in 1911. This volume in the Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation series, subsi­ dized by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council o f Canada, makes a critical edition of Gascoigne’s play available at a price even graduate students can afford. The text, fully modernized, is jointly edited by Donald Beecher, Professor of English at Carleton University, and John Butler, Professor of English Studies at Chiba University in Tokyo. Beecher, who has edited several volumes in the series, and previously served as a general editor, provides a substantial 214 REVIEWS and learned introduction (sixty-eight pages), in which he traces “a continuum through this play from Roman New Comedy to The Taming of the Shrew” (77) and gives as much attention to Ariosto’s life and context as to Gascoigne’s. Unfortunately, although Beecher provides a lengthy bibliography and cites it in parenthetical references, his introduction is unsupported by notes. One is, thus, frustrated by his allusions to certain critics as “some readers” (34) or “more recent critics” (35): endnotes with specific names would help here. Beecher opposes critics “who read for messages of revolt or subversion” (34), and de­ nies the validity of Bahktinian and Marxist approaches to the play: “Theirs is an act of contextualization that is strictly his­ torical, joined with an ideological premise that takes no account of the literary context that links the play to genres and tradi­ tions” (40-41). He cites, however, only one example of such an approach — an essay by the French critic, Dominique Clouet — and thereby leaves the reader to wonder whether he is tilting at windmills. John Butler’s annotation of the text is generally helpful. Archaic words or phrases are glossed at the bottom of each page; longer explanations, commentary, and textual variants appear in eighteen pages of endnotes. Butler takes advantage of the notes to provide much interesting and useful informa­ tion: he observes, for example, differences between the versions of Ariosto and Gascoigne, records comments by contemporary readers as well as those of modern scholars, and illuminates the play’s original Italian context. Many readers will no doubt welcome Butler’s explanations of bawdy innuendo. Butler also supplies, however, some information of dubious relevance: thus, when a character swears by St. Anne (149), an endnote informs the reader that “St. Anne was the mother of the virgin Mary ac­ cording to the Protevangelium of James, one o f the apocryphal books of the Bible” (175, note 192). On the other hand, in spite of the play’s many references to dinner as a temporal marker, Butler offers the reader no explanation of eating times in early modern Italy and England. Occasionally...