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The First Italianate Englishmen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

George B. Parks
George B. Parks*
Affiliation:
Queens College, New York
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Extract

Though the Italianate Englishman is a well-known figure in the Elizabethan literary scene, our picture of him is drawn generally from plays and satires after 1590. a generation after Roger Ascham introduced the epithet. Moreover, each portraitist in turn strove to outdo the other in vehemence, as we judge from the broadening range of Greene, Lodge, Marston, Jonson, for example, who had themselves not traveled to Italy and might not therefore be able to judge whether their victim, the ‘affectate traveller’, had learned his vice or folly in Italy or France or Spain, or only at home. Presumably the Elizabethans did not care how far out of bounds the term went in describing extremes of cruelty or baseness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 8 , 1961 , pp. 197 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1961

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References

1 A good summary statement of anti-Italian and anti-Italianate feeling in the literature was made by Lewis Einstein in ch. iv of The Italian Renaissance in England (1902). An elaborate study appears in the unpublished dissertation of Z. S. Fink, Anti-Foreign Sentiment in Tudor and Early Stuart Literature, chs. v and vii (Northwestern University, 1931); again in the unpublished dissertation of Missjeannette Fellheimer, The Englishman's Conception of the Italian in the Age of Shakespeare (London University, 1935)—and I am grateful to the author for the loan of a copy; and recently in the dissertation of Robert S. Brustein, Italianate Court Satire and the Plays of John Marston (Columbia University, 1957). The most succinct statement of the Italianate in literary satire is I think in the article by Professor Fink, ‘Jaques and the Malcontent Traveler’, Philological Quarterly xrv (1935), 237-252.

2 Sig. A2.

3 Calendar State Papers Venice, VI, 1055, 1059.

4 Ibid., VII, no. 617.

5 Pierce Penilesse, in Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, I, 186.

6 Thomas Hoby noted 14 young Englishmen like himself at Venice and Padua in 1548-1549 (Camden Miscellany x, 8), and 13 others at Siena and Rome in the next year (ibid., 19, 24); in 1554-1555, 16 of student age were in Padua, plus elder refugees like Sir John Cheke (ibid., 116-117). In 1594, 10 English students matriculated in the English Law-Nation at Padua, the number including Fynes Moryson (Archivio Antico dell'Universita, MS. 30, fols. 103v-104r).

7 Letters and Papers of Henry the Eighth, xx, part ii, no. 997: Paget to the Council, 17 December 1546.

8 A Collection of [Burghley] State Papers, ed. Samuel Haynes, 1 (1740), 210.

9 I here correct the date of 1553 given in N.E.D.

10 Ms. Royal 18.B.xxiv, fol. 72: somewhat changed in The Schoolmaster (Arber ed.), p. 71. I am indebted to the Washington University Library for the loan of a photostat of the manuscript, and to the university for the original procurement of the photostat.

11 Arber ed., p. 20.

12 So written in the first draft, MS. cit., fol. 74v.

13 Arber ed., p. 78.

14 Ms. cit., fol. 74v; in the ed., pp. 81-82.

15 Ms., fol. 76r-76v.

16 P. 83.

17 Ms., fol. 76v.

18 Ms., fol. 77r-77v.

19 P.Q. XIV (1935), 239-240.

20 Historic of Italie, fol 4.

21 Arbered., p.78.

22 Cromwell to Throckmorton, cited by J. A. Froude, History of England, III, 228-229.

23 Summarized in Letters and Papers, XIV, part i, no. 867.

24 Calendar State Papers Foreign 1553-58, no. 24.0; abstract of a letter from Sir John Cheke to Sir William Petre.

25 The tutor Windebank to Sir William Cecil from Frankfurt, November 1562: in State Papers Domestic Elizabeth, vol. 25, no. 58, fol. 109.

26 Christina Garrett, The Marian Exiles (1938), ‘Census of Exiles’, pp. 67 ff.

27 See my English Traveler to Italy, I (1954), 475-490.

28 Andrich, I. A., De Natione Anglica et Scota Juristarum Universitatis Patavinae (Padua, 1892), pp. 21–40, 131-134Google Scholar.

29 Statuta … Universitatis Iuristarum … (Padua, 1551), fols. 3v-4r, cited by Kibre, Pearl, The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 128 Google Scholar.

30 Calendar State Papers Foreign 1547-53, no. 313 (5 April 1551), followed upinnos. 354, 409.

31 State Papers 70/88, fols. Ir-5r : summarized in Calendar State Papers Foreign 1566-68, no. 879.

32 Breviary of Health, fol. cxviv, cited in F. J. Furnivall's ed. of Boorde's Introduction to Knowledge, p. 78. I owe this reference to Z. S. Fink, op. cit., p. 132.

33 Calendar State Papers Domestic, Addenda 1547-1565, vol. III, no. 84.

34 Calendar State Papers Domestic 1547-1580, vol. 85, no. 27.

35 Ibid., vol. 85, no. 28: 29 January 1572.

36 A Collection of [Burghley] State Papers, ed. W. Murdin, II (1759), 43-44.

37 Ibid., p. 170, the duke's letter dated 23 January 1571 [-2].

38 See my article on William Barker in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America LI (1957), 126-140.

39 1605 ed., pp. 346-351, for the Italian influence. I give the original of the translated passages (pp. 346, 351): ‘Ibi tutus cum aliquot mensibus in ipsius Papae sinu gremioque consedisset, prodiit infatuatus & tanquam Circaeo exhausto poculo ex Anglo in Italum, ex Christiano in pontificium conuersus. Omitto hie quid ab ipsis Italis de nostratibus ad eos mutatis dici solebat, quantum & quam monstrosam Metamorphosim, & non modò contra humanam speciem ac naturam sed contra diuinam earn esse fingunt. Et quamuis Poli culpa omnem iam flagitet non modò acerbitatem, sed atrocitatem sermonis, tamen ne grauius aliquid in eum dicamus quàm id quòd ab ipsis pontificiis Italisqwe obiectum ei saepe fuit, latini sub suae simplicitatis specie illud à sapiente alienissimum sanè vitium quòd à morum facilitate Graeci rectè appellant… At ilia (credò) simplicitas primò vt in Anglo recta ingenuaqwe fuit, sed cum diuturna Romanae gentis consuetudine versutias eas calluisset, naturalis probitatis externam atque adumbratam retinuit speciem, dissimulationis vero atque fraudis vitium consuetudine contractum imo pectore fotum occultauit… . redit in patriam Polus, ex qua non vlla vi sed sua perfidia tamdiu abfuisset, reditqwe natura peregrina atque fera indutus, & Ecclesiae Anglicanae carnifex, ac flagellum, cuius iam Patronus atqwe tutor esse debuit atqwe potuit.’

40 ‘Neque sane aliter existimare conuenit, quin si pontificiis moribus deprauatus ad ambitionem, cupiditatem, & saeuitiam non deflexisset, naturae suae ac ingenuitatis propriae praeclaris dotibus doctrinaeque virtutisque singularis ornamentis omnibus praestitisset.'

41 Cardinal Morone to Cardinal Pole for Julius III, 21 December 1553: ‘quei popoli di natura feroci et instabili et assuefatti alle novità’; cited by Ludwig von Pastor, History of the Popes (English ed.), XIII, 448.

42

‘Beleeve mee Batte, our Countreymen of late

Have caughte such knackes abroade in Forayne lande,

That most men call them Devils incarnate,

So singular in theyr conceites they stande:

Nowe sir, if I shall see your maistershippe

Come home disguysde and cladde in queynt araye …’

— Works (Cambridge ed.), 1, 346.

43 ‘Description of Britaine’, in New Shakespeare Society ed., 1, 129.

44 Privy Council to John Whitgift (and to the other bishops), 16 December 1580, printed in John Strype, Life of Whitgift (1822 ed.), 1, 183-185.

45 N.E.D., s.v. Italianate, citing Anthony Andreson.

46 Harry R. Hoppe in 4 Library XIV (1933), 246, 264.

47 The reference is given in Tommaseo and Bellini, Dizionario della lingua Italiana, 11, i, 1714. The phrase in Vespasiano (1951 ed., p. 179, which does not appear in the Waters translation) is ‘die era italianato ed era d'acutissimo ingegno’.

48 The phrase appears on page 68 of the English version called The Traueiler (1575).

49 Henry Wotton, translator, A Courtly controuersie of Cupids Cautels (1578), p. 273, from the French of Jacques Yver, Le Printemps d’ Yver (1572).

50 Ed. Charles Speroni (1946, University of California Publications in Modern Philology XXVIII, no. 3), pp. 81-111.

51 Sig. *iv

52 Giusti's work was reëdited in 1956 by Gino Capponi as Dizionario dei proverbi italiani.

53 Mediceae Palatina Codex LXII, vol. III, fol. 18v.