A translational approach to Shakespeare’s transnational sources
Organisers: Laetitia Sansonetti, Alessandra Petrina, Iolanda Plescia
Description: This panel, which presents work by Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Alessandra Petrina (Università di Padova), and Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza Università di Roma), seeks to conceptualise Shakespeare’s relationship to his sources as possible acts of translation: specifically, and according to the different languages in which his sources were first composed – most often Latin, Italian, French, and English – as instances of interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation, to pick up again the thread of Roman Jakobson’s well-known and fruitful tripartite structure. Such a structure considers translation not as mere transposition but as the expression of a dynamic relationship within, and between, languages, and even at times within the same language.
Rather than try to demonstrate that Shakespeare was a translator in any current or literal sense of the word, the papers in the panel will use the translation category to apply pressure to Shakespeare’s creative process involving his use of transnational and multilingual sources, shedding light on the distinctive phases of their transmutation and transmission. His interlingual appropriations of sources in foreign languages or of mediating translations and his intralingual rewritings of sources in English are to be read on their own terms not as simple inspirations or revisitations but as the result of complex technical processes which adapt celebrated source materials for the stage.
Interesting implications arise when this model is adopted: Shakespeare can be seen as one of the protagonists of the process whereby English was trying to establish itself as a language with some prestige of its own with regard to the Continental languages and nations. His acts of ‘translation’ can be placed in a continuum from interlingual translatio linguarum to imitatio through paraphrasis: such a perspective can be understood by bringing together classical and early modern proto-translation theory with recent developments in the field, redefining intertextuality as a form of translation.
Drawing upon the outlined premises, and using three distinct case studies, the proposed panel will seek to answer some foundational questions. What is added, eliminated, amplified – terms which have direct applications in translation studies today – in order to obtain dramatic effect? What linguistic transformations are effected upon the source words? Can early reflection on translation and contemporary translation studies help us understand some of the dynamics at play? And finally, what does it mean to place Shakespeare at the centre, or consider his creative process as a node, of a network of wider, transnational cultural exchanges in which linguistic transformation takes main stage?
Laetitia Sansonetti
Shakespeare’s multilingual sources for Romeo and Juliet
For most people nowadays, the story of Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s. Of course Shakespeare scholars know that he borrowed the plot from an Italian tale which had circulated in at least two English translations via French. From Arthur J. Roberts’ “Sources of Romeo and Juliet” (MLN, 1902) through Silvia Bigliazzi’s “Whose memory?” (in Bigliazzi, ed., Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources, 2024) via Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957) and Jill L. Levenson’s “Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare” (SP, 1984), to mention but a few, there have been many contributions to the study of Shakespeare’s appropriation of his multilingual sources. What I would like to offer in this paper is of a slightly different nature. I would like to bring together Shakespeare’s written knowledge of the story, which he gathered from books, and Shakespeare’s aural knowledge of Italian, which he may have gathered from books too (in particular John Florio’s manuals for learners of Italian), but which he may have also acquired from direct contact with Italians living in London. I will focus more particularly on the language of fencing, comparing this technical lexicon (and more generally Italian words) as it appears in the 1597, 1599 and 1609 editions to test the hypothesis that the move from the Theatre to the Globe by Shakespeare’s acting company, by bringing him closer to the area where foreign fencing masters had their schools, may have changed his perception of and relation to the Italian language. I will thus analyse Romeo and Juliet as a transnational play where written and oral multilingual sources meet on stage.
Alessandra Petrina
A pilgrim everywhere: Petrarch and the Italian nation as a cultural model for Shakespeare
In the English Renaissance Italian texts were often servilely imitated, lifting words or phrases that the audience need not understand; they also were more freely translated and adapted, subtly used to enrich the text. Especially in his early plays, Shakespeare experimented with a wealth of literary sources and with the linguistic variety that is behind the importation of literature into England in the sixteenth century, offering us a variety of approaches that went from the parodic reproduction of an Italian sententia, as we can see in Love’s Labour’s Lost, to a complex interplay with the source text that goes well beyond our idea of translation and/or imitation, as can be seen in the great tragedies. Transnationality here takes the form of a critical overview of the heritage of a nation that has hitherto been proposed as a cultural model: Shakespeare’s act of translation is also a critical appraisal.
This is a topic that has been often and successfully studied, but there are areas that still repay critical analysis, and one such is the influence of Petrarch on Shakespeare. This topic has tempted a number of scholars; but their efforts have been mainly articulated upon the use that Shakespeare made of the sonnet. However, a direct filiation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the Canzoniere is impossible to demonstrate; any comparison yields unsatisfactory results. The suggestions emerging from the Triumphi, in this context, tends to be shelved.
This paper posits that it is useful – and indeed, revelatory – to tease out some strands and isolate contexts in which the Triumphi appear to play a role that goes beyond the evocation of the Roman ceremony. Shakespeare’s complex and critical use of the triumphal meditation he found in Petrarch also asks us to rethink the categories of translation and the relationship between source and target text, and suggests a dynamic, organic model of imitatio. Given Petrarch’s definition of himself as peregrinus ubique – a pilgrim everywhere – such an analysis yields fascinating results also on the relation between translation and transnationality.
Iolanda Plescia
Shakespeare’s ‘historical translations’
This paper proposes taking a fresh look at Shakespeare’s use of historical sources, drawing on current work for an edition and translation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, or All Is True. It posits that the use of a source such as Holinshed’s Chronicles – indeed, in principle any historical writing source – may be understood as an instance of intralingual and intersemiotic translation, in that it must be considered as an act of mediation both within the same language and towards the semiotic system of dramatic language. The paper will apply categories largely studied within contemporary translation studies to traditional source work to ask what insights can be gained from identifying the linguistic and cultural processes behind ‘lifting’ historical passages for dramatic purposes ; it will also consider the transnational theme of Henry VIII’s break from Rome as represented in different sources to ask how historiography is ‘translated’ on stage from varying points of view.