Shakespeare and the Myth of Venice in Cromwellian England

• In Event: English and Italian Hybridity: Intertextuality and Anatopicality

Abstract

This paper considers the political context for publishing Shakespeare's Venetian plays during the Interregnum, examining a unique strain of English republicanism that emerged from the longstanding Myth of Venice. While Venice was once considered the exemplar of classical republicanism among scholars, its influence on English conceptions of self-governance has generally been neglected in favor of the Roman military populism that prominent English theorists adopted from Machiavelli, an oversight that persists even as recent scholarship has begun to expand our understanding of the range and scope of republican politics. Revisiting the impact of Venice on English political history, I argue that Venice furnished traditionalists an elite alternative to popular republicanism, its aristocratic structure and institutional stability offering the best prospects within a kingless state for securing law and order while maintaining traditional hierarchies. In publishing Shakespeare's Venetian plays, the bookseller William Leake recognized the topicality of Venice and its aristocratic republicanism.

Author

• Justin Kuhn, Ohio State University