Italian romance and Elizabethan comedy : Ariosto, Robert Greene and Shakespeare

Abstract

It is surprising how little attention has been paid to the relationship between Ariosto and Shakespeare given their prominence in their respective cultures and the acknowledged derivation of elements in at least two of Shakespeare's plays from Ariosto. For Croce, in a study published in 1920, Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille, the differences between the two poets were more remarkable than the resemblances. 'Quali poeti sembrano, e sono anche, piu diversi tra loro che lo Shakespeare e l' Ariosto ?' What they did have in common, in Croce's view, was their ability to look beyond 'i particolari affetti' and achieve a harmonious vision of the human condition, Ariosto thanks to an all-pervasive irony, Shakespeare by means of a balanced tension between different emotional states, so that the two writers can both be called 'poeti cosmici' . Apart from these brief and rather vague statements however, Croce has almost nothing to say about the relationship between the two poets or their cultural achievements - his book consists of self-contained essays on the individual writers. And his brief comparison of the two men is flawed by his persistent misjudgement of the Furioso which he thought sacrificed everything in a search for 'armonia' : Croce thus fails to do justice to the seriousness of the poem and its commitment to attitudes and values which could, and I believe did, appeal to Shakespeare; and he ends up with a stark distinction between an Italian poet morally indifferent to the troubled world around him and an English dramatist who provokes a deep concern for the fundamental problems of existence.