Courtesans - women who achieve wealth, status, or power through sexual transgression - have played both a central and contradictory role in literature: they have been admired, celebrated, feared, and vilified. This study of the courtesan in Renaissance English drama focuses not only on the moral ambivalence of these women, but with special attention to Anglo-Italian relations, illuminates little known aspects of their lives. It traces the courtesan from a wry comedic character in the plays of Terence and Plautus to its literary exhaustion in the seventeenth-century dramatic works of Dekker, Marston, Webster, Middleton, Shirley and Brome. The author focuses especially on the presentation of the courtesan in the sixteenth century - dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly view the courtesan as a symbol of social disease and decay, transforming classical conventions into English prejudices. Renaissance Anglo-Italian cultural and sexual relations are also investigated through comparisons of travel narratives, original source materials, and analysis of Aretino's representations of celebrated Italian courtesans. Amid these fascinating tales of aspiration, desire and despair lingers the intriguing question of who was the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.

This work outlines the bright and dark sides of the Myth of Venice, dwelling on four aspects: Venice the Rich, Venice the Wise, Venice the Just, and Venezia-citta-galante. After describing the channels through which Shakespeare and Jonson could have become aware of this myth, this work uses it to generate new understandings of the Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Volpone.

This intertextual reading of William Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I & II with François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel suggests that sufficient evidence exists to question the widespread denial of any knowledge of Rabelais on the part of Shakespeare. In each work, a prince participates in a process of education in preparation to succeed his father. Each prince shares adventures with an unconventional, comic companion. History and comedy form a hybrid genre, the Comical-Historical. Foundational chapters discuss the works of two other writers of hybridized genres, Lucian and Erasmus, as well as several visual artifacts of the time period. The figure of Socrates in a variety of guises appears in the work of the four writers. Shakespeare, this study suggests, extends the tradition established for the renaissance by Erasmus and augmented by Rabelais.

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