“I have decreed not to sing in my cage”. Melancholy at Court from Castiglione to Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i5.8770

Keywords:

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Castiglione, uncourtliness, melancholy

Abstract

In light of the well-established presence of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, I will focus on the villain of the play, Don John, and emphasise the hitherto unacknowledged similarities between his character and the melancholic courtiers against whom Castiglione had warned in his work. In so doing, I will underscore how Shakespeare did not limit to a simplistic construct of imitation and adaptation of his Italian model, but proved to be well aware of the contemporary debates surrounding the spreading and the dangerous effects of melancholy.

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Author Biography

Cristiano Ragni, University of Genoa

Cristiano Ragni is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Genoa. After earning his PhD in Perugia, he spent a year in Turin with a post-doctoral research fellowship. His main research interests lie in the connections between drama, political thinking, and theology in Elizabethan England. Besides several contributions published in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, he edited the first Italian edition of Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (2017), and authored the monograph La Nazione e il Teatro. Alberico Gentili, Shakespeare e l’Inghilterra elisabettiana (2020).

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Published

2021-12-20

How to Cite

Ragni, C. (2021). “I have decreed not to sing in my cage”. Melancholy at Court from Castiglione to Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (5), 395–411. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i5.8770

Issue

No. 5 (2021): Historical event, collective trauma and spatiality in contemporary literature and arts

Section

Varia

License

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