INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are avælable for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 CIRCE’S COURT: ITALY AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN ENGLISH WRITING, 1530-1685 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Thomas George Olsen, B.A., M.A. **** The Ohio State University 1997 Dissertation Committee: Professor John N. King, Adviser Approved by Professor Frank Donoghue Professor Christopher Highley i L . Adviser Department of English IMI Number: 9801752 Copyright 1997 by Olsen, Thomas George All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9801752 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Thomas G. Olsen 1997 ABSTRACT This study analyzes the ideological functions of Italy in early modem English writing. I argue that English authors consistently fashioned a multitude of imaginary locales called “Italy”—imaginary in that none reflected the political or cultural realities of the peninsula, and because they proceeded from a specifically English mixture of admiration and anxiety. Jacobean playwrights perhaps most obviously demonstrate this tendency to make “Italy” a staging ground for questions of national identity, but throughout the period, writers of historical, political, educational, moral and doctrinal works also used versions of “Italy” as convenient (and, I argue, necessary) opposites or analogues. These “Italies” could function as models for personal conduct or civil society, but also as much darker threats to English political life, Protestantism, or the frequently vaunted capacity of the English to be direct and plain. Chapter One contrasts William 'ïhomzs's Historié o f Italie (1549) with Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), locating in their differences two divergent traditions of representing Italy. Chapters Two and Three analyze the discourses of diet and of originary myths—the former in a range of imaginative and descriptive works, and the latter in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Chapter Four examines Milton’s ideological resistance to Venetian republicanism late in the Interregnum period, inside a tradition that includes, especially, James Harrington’s Oceana (1656). The final chapter argues that Aphra Behn’s The Rover {\61Q) and The Second Part of the Rover (1681) construct yet another imaginative Italy in order to reconstitute the royal exile and the interregnum as forms of recreational and educational “grand touring.” As an account of “Italy” in its imaginative and polemical deployments from the first years of the English reformation through the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, this project analyzes not only works usually considered high art, but also a number of other less-studied genres such as cookery books, herbals and dietaries, educational and historical treatises, political theory, religious polemic, language and conduct manuals, travel writing, and correspondence. I conclude that “Italy” proved not only uniquely useful but also necessary within the decades-long project of English national and cultural self-fashioning. Ill For Marinella IV ACKNOWLEGEMENTS This project has benefited fi’om the support and encouragement of many individuals and institutions. I would like first to thank my dissertation adviser, John N. King, and my readers, Christopher Highley and Frank Donoghue, for their sustained interest in and careful criticism of my work. All three taught me in graduate seminars in which aspects of this study emerged or evolved, and I owe a real debt to them. David Frantz read and encouraged the project as a fourth reader, and consistently lent his own considerable experience in matters Anglo-ltalian, and Albert Mancini of the Ohio State Department of French and Italian ofiered a wealth of information in connection with Chapter 5. I am very grateful to both. Several other members of the English department offered insightful criticism and welcome support at various points; John Norman, Dorry Noyes, Nancy Miller, and Paul Miller. In addition, fiiends and colleagues in other institutions read works in progress or offered other assistance; Robert T. Fallon, Peter Lindenbaum, Muriel McClendon, Andrew Mousley, Daryl Ogden, Tanya Pollard, Kristen Poole, and especially Brian Rugg. Steve Pincus allowed me to read one of his works in progress and Nigel Smith offered several helpful suggestions. I am thankful to my cyber-colleagues on the Milton and Ficino discussion lists, who have provided many more ideas than I have offered in return. More times than I can recall I was helped by librarians and archivists in the United States and Europe. James Bracken, Librarian of the English, Theater and Communication Library and a great resource to all who have the pleasure to work with him, was a constant source of information and advice. Elva GrifiSth and GeofiP Smith of the Ohio State Rare Books Room provided me with many resources, as did Steve Parks of the Osborn Collection of the Beinecke Library and the staffs of the Houghton Library and British Library. The archivists of the University of Padua, especially Emilia Veronese, and of the Venetian State Archive were helpful early in my researches. I was very significantly aided in this project by a number of generous grants and fellowships: The Ohio State English Department’s Summer Fellowship and Estrich Dissertation Fellowship; the Ohio State Graduate School Alumni Research Award (GSARA) and Presidential Fellowship; and small travel and research grants from the Ohio State Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, which especially under its new director, Nicholas Howe, has been a sanctuary and resource to graduate students—as has the English Department under James Phelan. Most of all, I thank my wife Marinella and son Alessandro for their patience, and for proving over and again that, enduring stereotypes notwithstanding, ultramontanes and citramontanes can live in happy, productive accord. VI VITA October 31, 1959.................................Bom—Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1984.....................................................M.A. Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies, The University of Kent at Canterbury (U.K.) 1993 - 1997......................................... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Thomas G. Olsen, “Thomas Berthelet.” The British Literary Book Trade, 1475-1700. Dictionary of Literary Biography 170 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996): 24-30. FIELDS OF STUDY Major field: English VII TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................. ii Dedication............................................................................................. iv Acknowledgments................................................................................ v Vita........................................................................................................ vii List of Figures....................................................................................... be Preface................................................................................................... 1 Chapters; 1 Introduction: Circe’s Court ............................................. 14 2 William Thomas, Roger Ascham, and the Uses of “Italy” 32 3 The Italian Sallet: Poison, Vegetables, and the Englishman’s Beef and Mustard ........................ 97 4 “Drug-Damn’d Italy” and the Problem of British National Character in Cymbeline.................................... 137 5 Joannes Miltonius Anglus and the Venetians ............... 182 6 “Amongst Our Dull English”: Aphra Behn’s Rovers, Naples, and the Myth of the Interregnum 227 Bibliography ............................................................................. 263 V lll LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Frontispiece; James Howell, S. P. Q. V : A Survay of the Signorie o f Venice, O f Her admired policy, and method o f government. 1651 ...................... 215 IX PREFACE A very revealing conjunction of political events