Chapter 9. “Your Mery Bookes of Italie”

Résumé 0

This chapter aims to show how, after the first publication of Painter’s Palace of Pleasure in 1566, Italy came to be the synonym of transgression in early modern England. Indeed, the success of Painter’s translations of Italian sensational stories was such that many other translators followed in his footsteps, sometimes writing fake translations of stories that had never been written in Italian. If the success of Painter’s stories was partly based on the transmission of Italian Renaissance ideas which fascinated the public, the fake Italian stories that followed rather answered and fed a desire for transgressive sensational plots. An Italian setting and a few Italian names seemed to be enough for a prose fiction writer to be able to write any kind of licentious and sensational story without risking being accused of immorality. Italy as the place or setting of transgression par excellence was further reinforced by the particular political climate in the 1570s, immediately following the Ridolfi plot: anything Italian or “Italianate” was necessarily the sign of treachery and crypto-Catholicism. Twenty years or so before Italy became a major locus for the theatre, particularly with Shakespeare, the Italian setting, far from being the place of transmission of the Italian Renaissance that Painter had in mind, had thus become a way to quench the readers’ thirst for licentious and immoral stories, and to serve the political interest of making the Catholic peninsula appear as a place of transgression in the eyes of the public.