Jacobean Tragedy

[Dave Monroe]

>From Linda Phyllis Austern, "'Forreine Conceites and
Wandring Devises': The Exotic, The Erotic, and the
Feminine," The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan
Bellman (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1998), pp. 26-42 ...

"... the alien land that most caught the early modern
English imagination ... was Italy.  When one thinks of
the the Golden Age of English Culture, one quickly
recalls ... theaters brought to life with Italian
characters and their fiery passions of vengeance,
family loyalty, and erotic fury ....  If one were to
believe the plays, prose fiction, and travelers'
accounts, Italy was a land of pagan superstition
masquerading as the damnable vice of Catholicism, of
brillaint color, beautiful boys, and wildly wanton
women.  English travelers, following routes opened by
increased diplomacy, returned with stunning tales of
forbidden sensual pleasure, of whoring, poisoning,
sodomy, atheism, epicureanism, and papal idolatry. 
According to the burgeoning science of geography,
climate exerted specific effects on native peoples,
and the Mediterranean man of Italy was quick and
crafty, prone to vivid, fantastical dress and all
manner of curious vice." (p. 37)

Austern makes reference here to ...

Hale, J.R.  England and the Italian Renaissance.
   London: Faber and Faber, 1954.  19-21

Sells, A. Lytton.  The Paradise of Travellers:
   The Italian Influence on Englishmen in the
   Seventeenth Century.  Bloomington: Indiana UP,
   1964.  42, 133

Oh, and from An Italians dead bodie, stucke with
English Flowers (1600) ...

An English man Italionate
Becomes a divell incarnate:
But an Italian Anglyfide,
Becomes a Saint Angelifide.

See Austern, p. 38.  Just one of those things I
stumbled across, is all.  But while Renaissance Italy
is on my mind, from The Autobiography of Benvenuto
Cellini, Ch. XXIX, wherein our hero, at this point in
Paris, finds himself being set up for a bum (no puns
where none ...) rap ...

"They made their minds up to have the law of me, and
consulted a Norman advocate, who advised them to
declare that I had used the girl after the Italian
fashion; what this meant I need hardly explain."

Maybe, maybe not, but the footnote sure does help ...

"Qual modo s'intendeva contro natura, cioè in
soddomia."

http://www.bartleby.com/31/2029.html

And I don't even know Italian ...

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