Shakespeare and Italy

The Milan Cortina 2026 Olympics got us thinking about Shakespeare and Italy.

Shakespeare’s plays are well stocked with merchants of Venice, gentlemen of Verona, and other Italian characters.

One-third of his plays are based, or partially based, in Italy. Florence, Milan, Padua, Rome, Sicily, Venice, Verona—these Italian settings play a crucial part in his plots, making them characters in their own right.

And it’s not just Italian settings—some of Shakespeare’s story ideas came from Italian novellas. The Merchant of Venice is based on an Italian story about a money lender. The names Romeo and Juliet may have been taken from poet Luigi Da Porto. Dante mentions two feuding families, the Montecchi and the Cappelletti.

But what did Shakespeare—and his audiences—really know about such distant places and people?

Graham Holderness, author of Shakespeare and Venice and professor of English emerita at the University of Hertfordshire in England, talked about Shakespeare’s Italy with our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Below are some highlights.

REBECCA SHEIR: Today we live in this era of mass communications and global travel. But I think we imagine people in the Renaissance had less exposure to all things foreign. I mean, after all, back then it could take you like a week to get across England, and families tended to stay in their own regions or their own villages for generations and generations.

So, it seems like a good way to start our conversation is to talk about just how familiar English people really were with foreign countries in Shakespeare’s time. We know Shakespeare didn’t travel overseas, but he does manage to set about a third of his plays in Italy. Why did Italy hold such a fascination for him?

GRAHAM HOLDERNESS: I think that’s the first thing to establish. If you sort Shakespeare’s plays by country, Italy is the majority country represented. Other countries hardly get a look. There are three plays set in Greece. There’s one play set in Denmark. There’s one play set in Vienna. Italy really is the biggest show in town, as far as Shakespeare’s choice of country location.

It is worth saying, of course, that perhaps travel in that period was more extensive than we often think. People lived there. People wrote accounts of their experiences in Italy, brought back opinions, brought back artifacts, brought back Italians. There were prominent, successful Italian merchants. Some work has been done recently on legal records about people who got into trouble with the law through involvement in prostitution. and there’s Italians acting as prostitutes, Italians using prostitutes, Italians pimping for prostitutes. The kind of dark underworld that’s a fantasy in Much Ado About Nothing is actually something of a reality in Elizabethan London. So, the impact is reciprocal, and there’s a circulation of what Stephen Greenblatt calls “social energy” or “circulation of cultures.”

SHEIR: I just think it’s so interesting that Shakespeare was so fascinated by Italy. I mean, you have something like The Tempest, which isn’t actually set in that country, but it’s about the aristocratic families of Naples and Milan. So, why was he so drawn into that country, and its people, and society, and culture?

HOLDERNESS: I think it’s important to recognize that Italy was acknowledged as a leading country. The interest in Italian education, language, art, and culture derived from the fact that Italians were very much in the forefront of politics, warfare, science and technology, philosophy, banking and finance, art and music, literature, performing arts, dance, and so on. So, it’s not really surprising that Italy was a beacon to anyone interested in culture, education, philosophy, politics.

At the same time, of course, the English attitude towards Italy was profoundly ambivalent. Italy was the home of the Renaissance, the country of Leonardo da Vinci, and Dante, Petrarch, and so on. But it was also the home of Machiavelli and the Pope. When William Thomas went to Italy, he talked about the Italian nation flourishing “in civility” more than any other at this day. But when Roger Ascham went there, he said, “I thank God that my abode there was but nine days” and that an Englishman returns from Italy “italianato è un diavolo incarnato.” You come back from Italy, Italianized and a devil incarnate.

SHEIR: Do we see that doubleness, that attraction and revulsion, in Shakespeare’s plays?

HOLDERNESS: We certainly do. The extent to which Shakespeare used Italian sources, Italian stories, is fairly obvious. But he also was not at all averse to using the more kind of clichéd images—Italians associated with passion, for example, jealousy, which you see in Othello; revenge, which you see in Much Ado About Nothing; corruption and violence, which you see in the Roman plays. So, there’s lots of stereotypical, fairly xenophobic, prejudices about the country which find a home quite readily in Shakespeare’s plays.

SHEIR: Graham, do you see examples of that in some of Shakespeare’s Italian plays?

HOLDERNESS: One of the things that I’ve been working on recently is Shakespeare’s Roman plays, which, of course, are Italian plays set in Italy, though they’re not normally included in the kind of conversation that we’re having now, because they’re wholly set within the ancient world. But if you dig a bit deeper, you can find in there quite visible traces of an understanding of what Rome was actually like in the 16th century. So, for example, working on Julius Caesar, you can find images, you can find poetic concepts, you can find references to the Rome that travelers actually saw when they went there in the second half of the 16th century—and that’s a Rome which, of course, was in ruins.

It seems to me that Shakespeare must have had access to some of the landscapes depicted by those travelers who went to that city and saw a kind of post-apocalyptic devastation that they’ve never seen before. So, I think Shakespeare knew that in order to arrive at a kind of suitable background for the assassination of Julius Caesar, you had to reconstruct a city that had been devastated. William Thomas, in his History of Rome, talks about seeing the huge fragments of the statue of Constantine, which is still in the Capitoline Museum in Rome: a head, a hand, and a foot. I think that’s in the background when Cassius talks about Julius Caesar as a Colossus, “he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus” and we little men “walk under his huge legs” and seek “ourselves dishonorable graves.” And also then, of course, when Caesar is assassinated and falls on the base of Pompey’s statue, you’re seeing the Colossus, itself, fall. So, I think the more you look at Shakespeare’s Italian plays, the more there is an awareness, even in those ancient Roman plays, of a consciousness, an understanding, a knowledge of the Rome of the 16th century. That, I think, is a new insight that we haven’t really seen in scholarship and criticism before.

Shakespeare’s Italy in the Folger Collection

SHEIR: With Italian writing, what sort of influence do we see with Italian literary styles coming into play when it comes to Shakespeare?

HOLDERNESS: If you think of Italian poetry, then, clearly, there are similar things to be said. Was Shakespeare familiar with Petrarch? Was he familiar with Dante? In Measure for Measure, he’s called upon to supply a character with a vision of hell. The lines that he produces are clearly indebted to Dante.

But probably the bigger question there would be whether or not we can establish any relationship between the Italian drama and the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A lot of scholars have struggled with this, because there clearly seem to be some kind of influence upon the English stage of forms like the commedia dell’arte, and other forms of Italian drama that clearly descended more directly from the classical models than our own plays.

SHEIR: Just to fill things in for our listeners, really quickly, if they don’t know what commedia dell’arte is. Can you talk about that form of theater?

HOLDERNESS:  Commedia dell’arte is a mixture of classical tradition, the erudite comedy, with stock characters and stock plots, a sort of folk drama that was very popular in Italy, as opposed to mime as the nearest sort of thing that we would be familiar with. It’s difficult to establish because it doesn’t appear that Italian actors came over to England and performed their drama in ways that would have made it as accessible as English drama was to Europeans when our players toured the continent. But scholars have started to put patterns that are visible in Italian drama, conventions, structures, alongside those of writers like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and are managing to establish, fairly clearly, that there is some kind of analogy, that there’s some kind of parallel. There’s a closer relationship between those two things.

SHEIR: In Shakespeare’s time, it’s tempting to think of England as being in opposition to France, whereas with Italy it’s trying to appropriate and absorb as much as possible. But it sounds now like that’s not quite the most accurate way to put it. Graham, what do you think?

HOLDERNESS: I think that probably is about right. I think that Italy is definitely a source of cultural treasures to appropriate, a source of things that can enrich social life, can enrich personal education, and so on, while at the same time, recognizing that there are aspects of Italy against which English culture needs to differentiate itself. So, it’s “we want to cherry-pick what they have to offer, and make sure that we end up as civilized, sophisticated, cultivated, able to write beautiful poetry, but we don’t want to end up Roman Catholic, and we don’t want to end up thinking like Machiavelli.”