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AN UNUSUAL COPY OF Shakespeare's Second Folio of 1632 survives today in Venice's Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Bearing the traces of its early modern Continental owners, this book's very existence complicates [...]

SAMUEL DANIEL'S The Queenes Arcadia (1605; originally titled Arcadia Reformed) is usually recognized as the first English attempt at the pastoral tragicomic form popularized by Battista Guarini's II Pastor fido [...]

Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance by A. E. B. Coldiron. Cambridge University Press, 2015. In a brief afterword, A. E. B. Coldiron offers what may be [...]

On account of its setting and its emphasis on domesticity, critics traditionally recognize The Merry Wives of Windsor as Shakespeare's "English comedy." Building on the work of scholars interested in the play's non-English elements, however, this essay argues that the cacophonous mixture of foreign words and phrases represents precisely the comedy's objective. Merry Wives looks different when read in relation to the multiplicity of polyglot dictionaries and phrasebooks circulating in the playwright's moment, some of which—such as Noël de Berlaimont's ultra-popular Colloquia et Dictionariolum —drew a link between translation and seduction. Against this book-historical background, the essay examines how Merry Wives ' accented immigrants and crafty women join forces against the lascivious monoglot (and colonizer) Falstaff, whose plans to "translate" Mistress Ford and Mistress Page "out of honesty into English" end up reversing upon him. At the center of these dealings is Mistress Quickly, an immigrant-employed "go-between" whose language can be understood not as "malapropism," but rather as playful mixings of foreign wines and words. Seen freshly in these terms, this play stands as Shakespeare's "cosmopolitan comedy." [A.K.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Experience of Authority: Hamlet and the Political Aesthetics of Majesty (pages 476-502) Graph. [Extracted from the article]

An essay on friendship is presented featuring the literary work "Essays," by French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne in accordance with the paratextual English translation from Italian linguist John Florio. The author evaluates the relationship between the 13 individuals depicted in the book and reflects on the textual platform showing hierarchical kinship. He explains the concept of self-discipline for meditation manifested in the reading.

The article critiques Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto's use of a pun on the similarities between rings and the female body in his piece "Satires," particularly comparing it to the use of a similar pun in the play "The Merchant of Venice," by William Shakespeare. It addresses Shakespeare's familiarity with Ariosto's works, bawdiness in literature, and issues with translating figures of speech.