A Reader’s Research Guide to Ariosto in Shakespeare’s England

This collection of essays by outstanding scholars from across the world, led by two major experts in the field, offers a wide-ranging investigation into Ludovico Ariosto’s multifarious presence in early modern English culture.

The volume reassesses the diverse forms of influence and intertextuality that have wrought on the period’s literature through direct and indirect reading, refashioning, rewriting, and adaptation of Ariosto’s works in Elizabethan England and beyond. The novelty of the volume lies in its careful attention to the impact, reception, adaptation, and appropriation of one of the landmarks of Western literature, Ludovico Ariosto and his works, on and in English literature at the time of Shakespeare.

The wide range of specialism, spanning from Shakespeare studies to Italian studies, from theatre to chivalric literature, from issues of race and gender to reception theory and cultural studies, will guarantee a high level of interdisciplinarity and make the book appealing to scholars and students alike of different fields.