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The First Italianate Englishmen

1961; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 8; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2856996

2326-0823

George B. Parks,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

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.