Abstract
This article locates Shakespeare's Padua, a prestigious site of humanistic learning and eloquence, amidst allusions by his contemporaries. Emphasis is placed on the pleasure and profit derived from travel for pedagogic purposes, yet Shakespeare appears to give equal weight to commonplace fears about the potentially deforming distractions that alluring Italian cities offer unwary English travellers, and about the rival, licentious pleasures that might ensnare and corrupt unsuspecting youth. The final section offers an alternative portrait from the period, hinted at by Shakespeare: travel is recuperated as a readerly activity, and Italy is reconceived of as a text to read, quote, and imitate.
‘Woe's me, in England thou dost bide, & I / (Scarse shadow of my selfe) in Italy’. 1 So declares the speaker of Robert Tofte's Laura. The toyes of a traueller (1597) to his fictionalised mistress. Tofte's collection of pastoral poems and proxy-sonnets was for the ‘moste parte conceived in Italie’ from March 1591 onwards, at approximately the time Shakespeare composed his Paduan play, The Taming of the Shrew. Claiming to have penned this opening ‘sonnet’ in ‘Padoa’ (one of ten Italian cities invoked in his collection), Tofte offers a useful index for late-Elizabethan representations of English travel to Italy. Tofte's inaugural poem not only expresses Padua's appeal to sixteenth-century English travellers and the city's hold over the English literary imagination of the 1590s, but also, more troublingly, registers some disquiet about the impress left on those travellers to the Italian peninsular. It intimates an identity crisis, a kind of Anxiety of Influence exerted on the figure of the early modern English traveller. By the opening of the third and final part of Tofte's collection, in a poem allegedly penned in ‘Napoli’, the eponymous speaker R. T. doubtfully contemplates how his selfhood has been fashioned in and by Italy: ‘then tel me, what am I?’. 2 Tofte conveniently thematises some of the concerns that recur in this article: The perils of English travel to Italy, the risk of self-alienation, and the loss of native identity in the Elizabethan fin de siècle. In the portraits by Shakespeare and his contemporaries of travel to Padua, these anxieties often revolve around the enriching or impoverishing ways by which the figure of the traveller is reshaped or refigured. This process of reconfiguration is frequently inflected through two classical subtexts – Odyssean proteanism and Ovidian metamorphosis – in an unresolved tussle between profit and loss.
Travel and profit
In his Italian plays, often centring on youthful indirection, Shakespeare derives considerable dramatic capital from the idea that travels profitably forms character, a commonplace justification for continental travel in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Thomas Wilson (1523/4–81), one of Elizabeth I's principal secretaries and author of The arte of rhetorique (1553), travelled on the continent as a religious exile in the 1550s, and is among the first commentators to ‘formulate a clear pedagogic statement on the benefits of continental travel’ for ‘the “body”, “the increase of wit” and “the getting of experience”’. 3 The sentiment remained current in the early seventeenth century: Francis Bacon (1561–1626) affirmed that ‘Trauaile, in the younger Sort, is a Part of Education’, perhaps recalling the similarly forthright equation between foreign travel and education ventured by the eccentric Thomas Coryate (c. 1577–1617) in what is perhaps the first self-professed example of English travel-writing, Coryats crudities (1611). 4 Travel becomes for Coryate ‘that most renowned Schoole, wherein we are instructed in good artes, sciences, and disciplines, to true wisedome’, and Padua is recommended from among the ‘Mart townes of learning’ – ‘Athens, Marseilles, Bononia, Padua, Paris’. 5 The collocation of Athens and Padua evidently gained purchase in the period: where the 1594 quarto play The Taming of a Shrew (to which Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew [1590–94] is uncertainly related) is set in Athens, seat of ancient learning associated with ‘Platoes schooles and Aristotles walkes’, early modern accounts hailed Padua, the setting for The Taming of the Shrew, as a new Athens associated especially with the study of Aristotelian philosophy. 6 For the travel-writer Samuel Lewkenor, Padua's ‘farre renowned Academie … surmounting all other Italian Vniuersities’ is ‘as it were another Athenian Areopage’. 7 Travel to Italy and especially, given this humanist lineage, to Padua is justified as its own kind of pedagogy.
The character-forming utility of travel is detailed in the very first lines of what is perhaps Shakespeare's very first play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1589–91). Travellers are liable to encounter ‘Some rare note-worthy obiect in [their] trauaile’ (1.1.13) that merits recording in a literal or figurative commonplace-book, and the play's opening lines tease out this ideal of educative travel.
8
Valentine, a Veronese youth set on travelling to Milan to pursue learning, counsels his friend, the lovesick Proteus, against the provincial idleness to which domestically confined young men are susceptible:
The scene echoes a sentiment expressed in an anonymous dialogue a decade earlier. In Cyuile and vncyuile life (1579), a text perhaps recalling the debate on civility in Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione (1574) later Englished by George Pettie in 1581, the plain-speaking Vincent discourses with a young travelling gentleman, called (like Shakespeare's character) Vallentine, who argues that exposing young men to urban environments is preferable to ‘beeing brought vp in the Countrey till they bee sixteene or eyghteene yeares olde, before which time they are so deepely rooted in rusticitie’. 9 For Shakespeare, travel ostensibly remedies this provincial dullness: it confers form on what is still ‘shapelesse’ and prevents youth from being not so much spent or even idly misspent as inertly depleted (weare out) through untutored passivity. Incongruously, Shakespeare's coinage ‘sluggardize’ – taking the same morphology favoured by his contemporary Thomas Nashe who defended his own ‘often coyning of Italionate verbes which end all in Ize’ – furnishes an exotically Italianate-looking neologism quite at odds with the dull domesticity it describes. 10
Metaphors of arrested, sluggish, ‘sluggardiz’d’ development recur in Sir John Stradling's A direction for trauailers (1592), adapted from Justus Lipsius's Epistola de peregrinatione Italica. Invoking the ‘great Sapience, and prudence of Vlisses’ cultivated on his epic ‘trauailing’, Stradling exhorts his dedicatee, the young Edward, third Earl of Bedford, to pursue his ambitions for Italian travel: ‘Base and badder minds indeed content their poore thoughts with their owne countries knowledge, ande being glued to their home they carrie (with the sluggishe and slowfooted snaile) their howses on theyr backs’. 11 Unlike sluggish rusticity, educational travel abroad moulds character, countervailing fears of youthful regression – the ‘shapelesse idlenesse’ envisioned by Shakespeare's Valentine – through lack of exposure to the world of action. 12 The aptronymic Proteus, an embodiment of either virtuous plasticity or unchecked formlessness, needs shaping through educative travel, an idea reaffirmed two scenes later by his father, Antonio, who concludes that Proteus ‘cannot be a perfect man, / Not being tried, and tutord in the world’ (1.3.20–1), reasserting the law that youth remains unshaped or incomplete until profitably augmented into perfection by educative travel. Another nominally protean traveller, Amorphus, in Jonson's surreally comic turn-of-the-century satire Cynthias reuels, argues in similar terms that, paradoxically, the cloistered youth ‘should digresse from [him]selfe’ by remaining homebound, losing shape through stasis. Instead, ‘Trauaile is your onely thing that rectifies, or (as the Italian says) virendi pronto all’Attioni, makes you fit for Action’ (1.4.107–9). 13 The idea reaches its bluntest expression in the final chapter, ‘Of Trauaile’, in Henry Peacham's ambitiously-titled courtesy book, The compleat gentleman (1622): ‘nothing rectifieth and confirmeth more the iudgment of a Gentleman in forreine affaires, teacheth him knowledge of himselfe, and setleth his affection more sure to his owne Country, then Trauaile doth’. 14
The most prestigious venue for overseas education was Padua, a university town synonymous with humanist pedagogy and in the sixteenth century a prominent centre of both Aristotelian learning and civic humanism. For early Tudor commentators, Padua was a locus of ‘humanism and the vita civile, providing … a secular education in litterae humaniores then available nowhere else’. 15 As Jonathan Woolfson's indispensable Padua and the Tudors has established, English scholars studying in Padua at the turn of the sixteenth century – especially under the tutelage of the Anglophile humanist and Aristotelian luminary Niccolò Leonico Tomeo – included William Latimer (who corresponded with no less a figure than Aldus Manutius), Cuthbert Tunstall, Richard Pace (who studied bonae literae), Thomas Lupset, and Thomas Starkey. 16 A glut of mid-century travellers and Protestant exiles studied there, drawn especially by the university's reputation for religious toleration. 17 Thomas Wilson and brothers Philip and Thomas Hoby are recorded in Padua, in the company of Sir John Cheke, tutor to Edward VI; Francis Walsingham, on the continent during Mary I's reign, had by 1555 enrolled in Padua as a student in civil law; Sir Philip Sidney (flitting between Venice and Padua between November 1573 and August 1574) visited Padua's studium; and William Fowler, the Scottish Italophile and translator of Petrarch, was probably a student in Padua in the early 1590s. 18 It is Padua's reputation in the ars eloquentiae – a tradition implicit in the rhetorical pyrotechnics of Shakespeare's Benedick, introduced in Much Ado about Nothing (1598–99) as a gentleman of Padua – and in the art of poetry that ranks among its principal attractions for English visitors. Sidney's mentor, the Burgundian political observer Hubert Languet, celebrated the city's wealth of ‘cheerful companions with whom to make merry and talk about your studies’: not only Padua's ‘intelligence and industry’ but even its ‘very air’ contributed to training in eloquence. 19 Sidney probably attended lectures at the university by Jacopo Zabarella, Professor of Logic, on Aristotle's Poetics, and his Defence of Poesie shows a familiarity with commentaries on the Poetics produced by Scaliger and Minturno, themselves products of the University of Padua. 20
The catalyst for at least some English travel to Padua was an implicit cultural lag – a sense of English vernacular culture, for all its nascent surety, as still peripheral and belated. Questions of ‘cultural imitation tended to be closely identified with Italy’.
21
Hence Giovanni Battista Guarini's anecdotal (though possibly misinterpreted) comment on the deficiencies of English literary culture, reported when Samuel Daniel, a self-professed ‘raw traveler’ accompanied by his patron Edward Dymoke, visited Guarini in Padua, probably in 1590–91.
22
In a sonnet prefacing the 1602 English translation (probably by Tailboys Dymoke) of Guarini's pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido and addressed to Sir Edward Dymoke (Tailboys's grandfather), Daniel qualifies Guarini's apparent dismissal of English letters:
Daniel celebrates both the Italian work and its English rendition, coyly elevating the translation above the original and reversing Guarini's ‘imbasing’ (lowering, degrading, discrediting) of English letters. English travel to the Italian peninsular both sustained and sought to revise this myth of Italian superiority in learning and literature. Reprising the terminology of abasement and disfiguration in The English ape (1588), William Rankins's crushingly parochial invective against the ‘Apelike’ Englishman decking himself ‘with the deformed quality of forreayne refuse’, English writers simultaneously reinforced and interrogated the presupposition, voiced by the Duke of York in Richard II (1595), that England was still the ‘tardie apish Nation’ limping after Italy ‘in base imitation’ (2.1.21–3). 24
Countering these fears of belatedness, many travellers to Padua from the vanguard of Elizabethan literary culture boldly reconfigured Paduan humanism and Italian eloquence as tradable commodities to which English travellers could lay as ready a claim. Inscribed on the title-page of Sidney's copy of Francesco Guicciardini's La historia d’Italia (Venice, 1569) is his Italianised signature, ‘Philippo Sidneio Patauij. 20. Junij 1574’, an onomastic transformation suggesting that, at some level, this luminary of English Protestantism had fashioned himself into an Italianate humanist. 25 Likewise, Thomas Hoby, styling himself ‘Thomaso Hoby Inglese’ in his 1544 copy of Dante's Comedia, conjures the same playful, hybrid identity, an Italianised forename and residually native surname. 26 The tag ‘Inglese’ – used elsewhere by the Italophile English bookseller and printer John Wolfe, ‘Giovanni Vuolfio, inglese’ 27 – whimsically suggests an identity both English and not-English: one not simply ‘English’ but rather ‘Inglese’, an Englishness that had become attalianato (Italianated or Italianized), 28 a national identity filtered through another cultural lens. English travel to Padua opened up a type of nationhood fluidly partaking of both cultures.
Padua's ability to refashion educational travellers is well attested in late Elizabethan drama. The Taming of the Shrew opens with a conversation in which Lucentio, a gentleman from Pisa, explains to his servant Tranio his reasons for visiting this ‘nurserie of Arts’:
Lucentio's horticultural analogy envisages a programme of study consonant with Samuel Lewkenor's portrait of ‘this Academie’ at Padua as an ‘Emporie of good letters & ingenious artes’ and a ‘fruitfull vineyard’ of erudite labour, 29 if not also Thomas Palmer's depiction of Italy as ‘an ancient nurcerie and shop of libertie’ and an academy in which ‘Artes ingenious may be learned’. 30 Lucentio's label ‘ingenious’ is invitingly suggestive. On the one hand, it gestures to the near-interchangeable term ‘ingenuous’, denoting a course of studies befitting a noble disposition or ‘well-born person’, a programme that would be defined as ‘liberal’. 31 On the other, in a sense closer to its Latin root ingenium, it suggests an ‘aptitude for invention’, 32 and a range of literary-critical virtues connoted by the Italian ‘Ingégno’ (‘an artifice, an inuention’, ‘arte’, ‘discretion’) and ‘Ingegnóso’ (‘wilie, ingenious’, ‘full of inuention’), as glossed by John Florio. 33 This epithet ‘ingenious’ suggests the inventive capacity for refashioning associated most famously with the archetypal wily traveller Ulysses, ‘so eloquent, ingenious wise’, a figure often invoked in defences of travel. 34 ‘Ingenious studies’, then, may not necessarily mould the character of the traveller into a stable or complete form, but, conversely, augment the traveller's natural disposition to plasticity and pliability.
Travel and loss
Lucentio's ideal of serious-minded scholarship promptly falls into disarray. Tranio introduces pleasure – a digressive, Circean distraction – as the chief goal of this ‘course of Learning’ for the traveller to Padua:
Ostensibly intent on studying ‘Vertue and … Philosophie’ (1.1.18), Lucentio swiftly ditches his original resolve as Tranio privileges Ovid (presumably his Ars Amatoria, though the Metamorphoses befit the play's obsessions with protean characterisation) over Aristotle's Ethics, and pleasure over profit. The austerity of moral philosophy is offset by immersion in the aesthetic pleasures of music and Ovid's seductively irreverent poetry. Before even this first scene concludes, Lucentio has found in Ovidian mythography, specifically Jove's transformation when wooing Europa, a model for his own wooing of Bianca (1.1.166–9). Counterpointing Lucentio's praxis-driven, Aristotelian programme, Tranio's rival syllabus (more closely reflecting Ovidian tastes in late-Elizabethan England than Padua's historical reputation) mounts a challenge to Padua's moral and pedagogic utility. Tranio's Ovid promotes youthful hedonism, digressive suspension, and an increasingly loose definition of what might be gained from a Paduan education.
This tension, between the rigour of academic scholarship and the limitless possibilities of Ovidian transformation, plays out elsewhere in the period. Robert Greene's 1591 Greenes Farewell to Folly, part repentance pamphlet (fictionalising Greene's juvenile prodigality as a romance writer) and part playful colloquy in the vein of Castiglione's debate between courtly men and women or Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, ventures a caricature of the English traveller abroad. The host and primary interlocutor, Signor Farneze, depicts this motley specimen as ‘so defused in his sutes, his doublet being for the weare of Castile, his hose for Uenice, his hat for France, his cloake for Germanie’ that he ‘seemed no way to be an English man but by the face’. 35 The caricature comes during a wider discussion by the gathered courtiers about pride and sartorial folly, and in the frosty exchange between career soldier Bernardino and scholar Peratio as to which profession (military or academic) is most tainted by the folly of ‘selfe loue’ Bernardino directly impugns ‘the vniuersitie of Padua, where the youth of Florence chiefely flourishe’. In detailing how ‘selfe loue lurketh in a side gowne’ or ‘vnder a schollers cap’, Bernardino pointedly anatomises ‘the nature of our Mercurialists’ at the university (those devoted to the pliable arts of eloquence and ingenuity). 36 Peratio's piqued response excoriates all Florentines for being, like the composite English traveller, reducible to flamboyant apparel and imitative affectation, and his terms are explicitly Ovidian: in their ‘choise of apparell’, Florentine gentlemen invite comparison with ‘Ouids confused chaos’ such that, ‘did Ouid liue, he woulde make a seconde Metamorphosis of our estates’ from the ‘former estate’ of their Florentine ancestors. 37 The colloquy's admonitions against gaudy, motley attire are directed to Benedetto, a student at Padua (possibly an analogue for Shakespeare's ‘Signior Benedick of Padua’, likewise noted for his ‘fancy … to strange disguises, as to bee a Dutchman to day, a Frenchman to morrow’), 38 but also to the readership of English ‘Covrtiers and Schollers’ to whom Greene's dialogue is addressed. 39 Greene's cautionary exempla surface as Paduan scholarship cedes ground to a slippery, performative conception of character as something malleable, mobile, and bound up with the exterior figuration of clothing.
The paradigm recurs in The Taming of the Shrew, near-contemporary with Greene's pamphlet. The play's plot, partly inspired by George Gascoigne's Supposes (a loose, paraphrastic translation of Ariosto's prose commedia erudita from 1509, I suppositi), centres on the metamorphosis of characters into commodities or into the roles constituted by their clothes. Lucentio disguises himself as a humanist scholar from Rheims, adopting the apt pseudonym ‘Cambio’ (‘A change, an exchange’, in Florio's definition), consonant with the plasticity implied by Shakespeare's ‘Proteus’ and Jonson's ‘Amorphus’. 40 From the Induction scenes onwards, metamorphosis resonates as a motif, not least in the ‘wanton pictures’ ekphrastically lifted from Books I and X of Ovid's Metamorphoses: ‘Adonis painted by a running brooke’, ‘Citherea all in sedges hid’, ‘Io, as she was a Maid’, ‘Daphne roming through a thornie wood’ (Induction 2.48–55). The ruse concocted for Christopher Sly requires him to be ‘[w]rap’d in sweet cloathes’ so as to ‘forget himselfe’ (Induction 1.37, 40), initiating a pattern whereby sartorial metamorphosis engenders self-loss and amnesia. Within a few lines, he has rebranded himself in faux-Italianate trappings as ‘Christophero Sly’ (Induction 2.5), a nominal self-styling comparable to Hoby's Italianate signature. On this evidence, Padua threatens to warp selfhood and suspend native identity.
In English representations of the city, Padua's historical reputation as an academic powerhouse is put in jeopardy, as Aristotelian scholarship repeatedly yields to pleasurable enchantments. Tossing aside scholarly pursuits, Lucentio has, within 50 lines, fallen in love with Bianca, and by the second scene the Veronese Petruchio reveals his unashamedly mercenary reasons for travelling: ‘I come to wiue it wealthily in Padua’ (1.2.75). Padua increasingly becomes a metonym for something other than learning. Jestingly casting doubts on Padua's educative, formative credentials, Sidney's mentor Languet considers the possibility that Padua might waylay Sidney, ‘captured by the brilliance and the enticements of things Italian’, from his public commitments, ambiently gesturing to the Circean peril of forgetful distraction. 41 Two months later, Languet's fear is reiterated: ‘If you linger [in Italy] longer than you promised, I should say you had been enslaved by their enticements’. 42 Even the otherwise scrupulously diligent Thomas Coryate castigates himself for succumbing to Padua's more licentious offerings: failing to see the colleges of ‘so famous a Vniversity’, Coryate concedes that, rather than ‘not[ing] such other worthy things as are obseruable in so noble an Academy’, his ‘minde was so drawen away with the pleasure of other rarities’. 43 Padua-as-text seems increasingly to be schooling the wrong kind of reading.
In its literary, historical, and topographic treatments, Padua becomes the subject of an epideictic rhetoric – a fiction of both hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic apprehension – as an emblem of both supreme learning and distracting pleasures. Idealising Padua as a pedagogic utopia, William Thomas, the Italophile par excellence of Edward VI's court, helps inaugurate in The historie of Italie (1549) a model for English ‘gentilmen’ travelling to Italy ‘whose resorte thither is principallie vnder pretence of studie’ at ‘Padoa, Bononia,’ and ‘diuerse famouse citees, that be priuileged with great libertees for all scholers that come’. 44 Thomas's benign vision is countervailed a generation later by William Harrison who interrogates the sincerity and efficacy of English students’ motives for travelling to Italian universities: ‘One thing onlie I mislike in [English students], and that is their vsuall going into Italie, from whense verie few without speciall grace doo returne good men, whatsoeuer they pretend of conference or practise’. 45 Perhaps tinged by the polemically unflattering portrait of educative travel to Italy in Roger Ascham's posthumously published The Scholemaster (1570), Padua's pedagogic credentials are interrogated over these middle decades of the sixteenth century, and Thomas's earnest ‘pretence of studie’ dwindles to the cynical husk of Harrison's ‘whatsoeuer they pretend’. The educative ideal slowly unravels and becomes, by the 1590s, further subject to parody and inversion. Enumerating how Italy might ‘forme our yong master’, the banished English earl in Thomas Nashe's The vnfortunate traueller (a psychedelic travel narrative against travel and travel narratives) catalogues for the neophyte traveller ‘the art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of Sodomitrie’, a licentious inversion of the humanist syllabus. 46
In these neurotic forays into the terrifying potential of foreign travel, the resounding fear is that the traveller becomes misfashioned or even unfashioned, implicitly confirming Robert Tofte's aforementioned anxieties about loss of selfhood contingent on travel. Tofte conjures the spectre of Circean transformation – ‘No more a man (as once I was) am I’, his speaker laments at the end of the first part of The toyes of a traueller, ‘Since this new Circes … Hath changd me’ – by which mutation the subject becomes all surface. 47 The ideal of Odyssean plasticity is measured not in the accumulation of wisdom or humanist learning but in endless, modular repetition of sartorial substitutions. Shakespeare's zealously patriotic Faulconbridge dismisses the youthful traveller as a ‘picked man of Countries’ whimsically imitating foreign dress and mannerisms (King John, 1.1.189–93), just as Armado, the vainglorious ‘man of trauell’, is deemed ‘too picked’, ‘too affected’, and (in a Shakespearean coinage) ‘too peregrinat’ (Love's Labour's Lost, 5.1.100, 12–14). In this much-feared overlap between ‘educational travel and cultural disloyalty’, travellers are not so much fashioned by erudite acculturation as reduced to magpieish adopters of sartorial fashions and composite wardrobes. 48
These travellers come to resemble the buffoonish, yet inventive and socially adaptable, Amorphus, the leader of the gallants in Ben Jonson's self-styled ‘Comicall Satyre’ Cynthias reuels (performed in 1600 by the Children of the Chapel, published 1601 in quarto, and revised in the 1616 Folio). 49 A parody of the idealised Odyssean traveller, Amorphus treats identity as composite and performative, something ultimately residing in cherry-picked vogues and pliable apparel: He offers his impressionable acolyte Asotus – ‘the Prodigall … in imitation of the Traueller’ (Praeludium, lines 53–4) – a piece of decrepit headgear allegedly ‘the hat that acompanied the politique Vlisses, in his tedious, and ten yeares Trauailes’. Asotus can ‘alter’ the hat ‘to what forme [he] please’ (1.4.142–51), inviting parallels with the ‘Pythagoricall Breeches’ later invoked by Amorphus and so labelled due to ‘their transmigration into seuerall shapes’ (4.3.110, 116). 50 In his own flattering, alchemical self-portrait, Amorphus sees himself as ‘an Essence so sublimated, and refin’de by Trauaile’, ‘so alone in fashion’, and able ‘to speake the meere extraction of language’ (1.3.24–7) that he considers himself an amalgam greater than the sum of his parts. 51 Yet this is a traveller dismissed sardonically by his nemesis and antitype, the ‘retir’d Scholler’ Criticus (Praeludium, line 67), as a mere composite of ‘rackt extremities’ (1.4.36) and a devotee of Vanity's ‘ayery formes’ (1.5.24). 52 This effeminate, disingenuous courtier goes by the aptronym ‘Amorphus, or the Deformed’ (from Greek ἄμορφος, ‘shapeless, misshapen’), glossed by Mercury as ‘[a] Traueller, One so made out of the mixture and shreds of formes, that himselfe is truely deformed’. 53 For Mercury, Amorphus is reducible to a patchwork text or intertext of borrowed fragments: ‘all his behauiours are printed, his face is another volume of Essayes’ (a fashionable, affected form, in a surprisingly early appearance of the word), and his beard is ‘an Aristarchus’ (a scholiastic commentary appended to the main text of his face) (2.3.68–70). 54 This parodic version of Odysseus-as-traveller is, in the 1616 version from Jonson's folio Workes, designated by the onomastic compound ‘VLYSSES-POLYTROPVS-AMORPHVS’. 55 The aggrandising connotations of Odysseus’ epithet πολύτροπος [polytropos] – well-travelled, versatile – now give way to their debased antitypes (formless, distorted, fickle), attesting what Andrew Hadfield elsewhere calls the ‘potentially transgressive status of the traveller’, someone who ‘might be transformed himself by the experience of travel’. 56 These travellers sacrifice any core identity to the worthless, decorative miscellanea accumulated on their travels.
Travel and intertextual currency
Rather than enriching, travel risks deforming and depleting. Cautioning against the kinds of enticement envisaged by Languet, Roger Ascham warned his English readers of the ‘Siren songes of Italie’ and the ‘inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in England’. Given these ontological threats posed by travel to Italy, a commonplace solution was offered through books. Ascham proposes, as a prophylactic against the deforming pressures of travel, that would-be travellers instead read the English translation of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier by Thomas Hoby (paradoxically just the kind of English traveller to the Italian peninsular whom Ascham warns against). Castiglione's Courtier ‘aduisedlie read, and diligentlie folowed, but one yeare at home in England, would do a yong ientleman more good, I wisse, th[a]n three yeares trauell abrode spent in Italie’. 57 This motif of books as ‘a textual replacement for travel’ has the effect of ‘reducing Italy to a textual experience’. 58 The conceit is embodied in the title of Samuel Lewkenor's aforementioned work celebrating Padua as a neo-Athenian Areopage: ‘A discourse not altogether vnprofitable, nor vnpleasant for such as are desirous to know the situation and customes of forraine cities without trauelling to see them’. 59
This nexus of travel and reading finds succinct expression in sixteenth-century wordplay on ‘travel’ and ‘travail’, orthographically and phonetically indistinguishable.
60
This shared field of reference, invariably bound up with promises of ‘profit’ (as in Lewkenor's title above), is evidenced as early as William Thomas's 1549 Historie of Italie, a work begun soon after Thomas's return from Italy, having already completed in 1548 his Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer that he sent from Padua to his patron John Tamworth. The undisputed authority on Italy for mid-century English readers, Thomas, who fled to Venice charged with embezzlement and who, after repaying his debts, continued to Padua, Bologna, and Florence, exploits the polyvalent richness of his keyword ‘travail’: seeyng my trauaile at this present hath been to publishe vnto our owne nacion in our mother tounge the dooynges of straungers, and specially of the Italian nacion … me thought I coulde no lesse dooe for the incourageyng of theim that shall take this boke in hande, than partely reherse what profite thei maie gather by trauailyng therin.
61
Thomas's syntax leaves unclear what the nature of the travel or travail is – whether ‘therin’ takes as its antecedent ‘Italian nacion’ or ‘this boke’, and whether this profitable ‘trauaile’ is geographic or readerly, a topographic or a typographic activity (to recall the pun in Hugo Holland's commendatory poem prefacing Coryats crudities, acclaiming Coryate as ‘Topographicall Typographicall Thomas’). 62
This image system, in which travel and reading become analogous, perhaps reaches its clearest articulation in Sir Thomas Palmer's 1606 An essay of the meanes hovv to make our trauailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable. Palmer's Essay is indebted in its approach to Theodor Zwinger's Methodus apodemica (1577), an Aristotelian taxonomy of different types of travel divided by their causes, a classificatory schema that evidently inspired Palmer's fondness for procrustean Ramist tables and charts representing the various subcategories of travel and their respective purposes. Premised on the educative instrumentality of travel, Palmer's work, focusing especially on travellers from among the nobility, describes itself in its address ‘To the Reader’ as an ‘Essay’ (another early usage) advising English travellers how ‘to make their trauailes somewhat more profitable and honourable’. Palmer recognises a disjunction between the ideal of what ‘might and ought to be done by Trauaile’ and the muddy actuality of ‘how few haue arriued vnto that perfection’. 63 Profit is recalculated in terms of reading, foreclosing the potential loss of selfhood risked by physical travel.
Palmer encourages travel to most places, except Italy. Palmer's Italy is an antiquarian's thesaurus, a ‘speciall gallerie of monuments and olde aged memorials of histories, records of persons and things to bee seene thorowout the Countrey’, yet it engenders the wrong type of reading habits: it serves as ‘a fantasticall attracter, and a glutton-feeder of the appetite, rather than of necessarie knowledge’. Italian speech corrupts English travellers, Italy's monuments fuel appetite rather than learning, and its forms of government are better read about than encountered. Weighing the appeal of speaking ‘the tongue and residencing in the notable Vniuersities there found’, Palmer contends that ‘in vaine it is to goe so farre for that, which at home with small paines may singularly bee attained vnto’. A native course of learning ‘can make men (if they be as studious therin, as abroad, to enforme themselues) perfect in ciuility & good maners, & obseruant enough’: character formation (enforming) can be conducted within the tame confines of England's shores. 64 A decade later, the vituperative Joseph Hall, in his indictment of physical travel, Quo Vadis (1617), encouraged his English audience to engage in just such a metaphorical mode of transport: lauding book-study, Hall claims to have known ‘some that haue trauelled no further th[a]n their owne closet, which could both teach and correct the greatest Traueller, after all his tedious and costly pererrations’, lamenting how unprofitably we ‘lose the benefit of so many iournals, maps, hystoricall descriptions, relations, if we cannot with these helps, trauell by our owne fire-side’. 65
Shakespeare seems responsive to these paradigms by which Italy is not only a place to visit and absorb at first hand, but also a text or intertext to read, imitate, and excerpt from the comfort of one's home – ‘without stirring our feete out of a warme studie’, as Nashe puts it with quaint homeliness. 66 Shakespeare's textual construction of Italy is suggested by his lifting of phrases from John Florio's Italian language-learning books for English audiences, reproducing Italy in the form of commonplaced Italian snippets which substitute travel with vicarious interlingual contact. Shakespeare's borrowings from Florio are well attested: Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost (4.2.95–6) quotes from Florio's 1578 Firste fruites, specifically from the section of ‘Prouerbes’ the phrase ‘Uenetia, chi non ti vede, non ti pretia … Venise, w[h]o seeth thee not, praiseth thee not’. 67 The same text, particularly Florio's section labelled ‘Parlar familiare’ (polite greetings), supplies Shakespeare with some of the courteous clichés and conventional phrases that litter The Taming of the Shrew's early dialogues. 68 That play's characterisation of Padua as a copious, fertile site of learning no less obviously derives from Florio's next bilingual dialogue, Florios second frutes (1591), an introduction for Elizabethan readers to Italian culture, manners, language, and idioms: Lucentio's aforementioned introductory speech (1.1.1–4) is indebted to Florio's phrase ‘La Lombardia è il giardino del mondo’, ‘Lombardy is the garden of the world’. 69
Such borrowings attest a pattern whereby the fruits of travel to Italy are conceived of in lexical rather than topographic terms. Half a century earlier, Thomas Wilson had articulated fears about a kind of linguistic hybridity, a verbal equivalent to the mishmash of sartorial fashions adopted by impressionable travellers like Amorphus: ‘farre iorneid ientlemen … pouder their talke with ouersea language’ no less readily than they appropriate ‘forrein apparell’, as when the newly returned traveller from Italy ‘choppes in with Angleso Italiano’. 70 This anxiety about the cosmetic, synthetic bastardisation of language perpetuated by returning travellers lingers on in Jonson's Cynthias reuels. Language, no less than fashion – ‘Shoo-tyes, and deuises’ (4.3.306), both borrowed currencies reduced to disposable trinkets that quickly devalue – is composite, malleable, commodifiable. Amorphus advocates adopting ‘some parcels of French, or some pretty Commodity of Italian … if you would be exotick, and exquisite’. The lexicon becomes a fabric to embellish – ‘embroyder or damaske your discourse with them’ (3.5.75–7, 96–7). 71
Yet counterpointing these suspicions about linguistic corruption or devaluation are, around the turn of the century, more sympathetic claims for the enrichment of the English language through travel. The antiquary Richard Carew, in his essay ‘The Excellencie of the English tongue’, later published by William Camden in the second edition of his Remaines, concerning Britaine (1614), outlines a kind of lexical commerce between Italy and England: ‘Soe haue our Italyan trauilers brought vs acquainted with their sweet relished phrases, which (soe their condicions crept not in withall) weere the better tolerable’. 72 The phrase, productively ambiguous in its referent as to whether the ‘trauilers’ are Italian or, conversely, English visitors returning from Italy, describes a kind of linguistic trade: words, an ‘imported’ commodity or ‘Riches’ brought in by a kind of interlingual ‘retayle’, are borrowed from foreign tongues, to ‘renewe the store’ of the native language in a process Carew calls, in a marginal note, ‘Encrease on borrowinge’. 73 Through this inflationary transaction, travel to Italy is now measured in terms of a linguistic legacy and intercultural trade. The ‘profit’ of Italian travel is gauged by lexical increase and the replenishing of a native word-hoard with Italian borrowings.
Educational travel to Italy, then, beyond its obvious topographical manifestations, takes place through lexical transactions. The profit of these verbal encounters, trading in Padua's currency as one of Coryate's aforementioned ‘Mart townes of learning’, is measured in terms of borrowings, imports, and coinages. Shakespeare's idiom bears the trace of this intertextual Italian stamp, especially in his plays set in Italy: his Italian imports and possible Italianate borrowings from Florio often cluster around images of negotiation and trade (an unsurprising association for the Veneto). In The Taming of the Shrew, ‘Marcantant’ (4.2.64), apparently Shakespeare's coinage, is a direct borrowing from the Italian ‘mercatante’, glossed by Florio as ‘a merchant, a trafficker, a chapman, a trader’. Equally, Shakespeare is credited with coining or importing ‘compromise’ in The Merchant of Venice (‘compremyz’d’, 1.3.74), to denote an agreement or mutual concession, recalling Florio's ‘Compromettere, to compromise, or arbitrate’, not to mention ‘negotiate’ in Much Ado about Nothing (2.1.168), possibly recalling Florio's ‘Negotiare, to exercise, to negociate, to deale … to exercise merchandize, to occupie a woman’. 74 For Shakespeare's early audiences, the reading experience (or theatregoing experience) lies in a kind of linguistic travel. Linguistic traces of contact with Italy offer an index of intercultural exchange, and enact, at the level of word and phrase, a kind of Italian odyssey: travel and trade now happen lexically, the word alone providing a potent substitute for the thing itself. Italy as a metaphorical text read through firsthand travel is replaced by Italy as a literal, literary text quoted and imported in new English contexts.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to Professor Alessandra Petrina (University of Padova) and Professor Laura Tosi (Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice) for their intellectual generosity, kindness, and support.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author would like to thank the Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari (DiSLL) at the University of Padova for generously funding attendance at the ‘Shakespeare and Padova’ 2016 conference, which enabled the research and writing of this article.
