English And Italian Culture

English culture was greatly influenced by Italian culture in the XVI century. The process of the “Italianization” of English culture began with business relationship, thanks to the work of seamen and bankers who settled in England between the XV and XVI centuries.

Many Italian products were known in England, such as Venetian mirrors or silk damask or Muranian glass. Many artists from Italy lived at the Court of Henry VIII and they influenced the taste of the king and the court in architecture, literature, painting.

Elizabeth I was also strongly influenced by Italian culture; she learnt Italian and spoke it like a native. It was usually to find among Italian papers State documents and the politics of the Queen could be considered deliberately Machiavellian. Even her signature “Elizabeth R” is commonly known as Italics.

The literary form that most influenced English culture was the “novella”: a short tale famous in Italy as a realistic tale. This is an anecdote which concentrates on characters and their manners, sentiments and in what happens to them. It was a very important form in Italy. It derived from the tradition of Boccaccio that the novelists of XVI century followed and imitated. The “novella” had a basic plot, but told a complete story with real characters and their real problems and situations. The “novella” influenced the English novelists who had to find a prose style for the English language.

English prose was not well established in the period that we are examining. The English language spoken, but it was difficult to find a written expression to this “rough”, as it were, language. On the other hand, the scholar studied “Rhetoric” at the University as the Renaissance culture imposed. English prose is a sort of compromise between written and spoken language. The method of composition of Elizabethan writers shows precisely that. In fact, when an Elizabethan writer composed a passage in prose, he spoke it aloud and this method influenced also the punctuation based on meaning, rhythm and logical contrasts.

There is a great difference between the Italian prose of the Renaissance and the English prose of the same period. English writers were more affected and inclined to “Euphuism”, so they forgot the lesson of clarity of Italian prose writers. The XVI century was the century of translations from the Italian. The Elizabethans translated many tales from Italian writers, from Boccaccio, Bandello and Giraldi Cinthio in particular. The main sources of the book that we are considering are Italian.