A well-rounded education

"Take you the lute, and you the set of books;
You shall go see your pupils presently."

                                                              The Taming of the Shrew      (II, i)

Renaissance Italy seemed to have a particular hold on Shakespeare's imagination: its warm southern climate and reputedly hot-blooded, passionate populace added credence to the action and soaring emotions of so many of his plays. A delightfully mercurial Mercutio strolls the streets of Verona, peppering the likes of Romeo and Tybalt with his quips. A Jewish moneylender with unflinching tribal loyalties demands his bond in Venice. Petruchio comes to Padua and determines to have his Kate.

And Kate's father Baptista, like any good Italian patrician, wants his two daughters to be tutored in a manner deemed appropriate for Italian Renaissance women. Music, poetry, and the affairs of the home were high on the list of priorities for young women; the arts of war, of political aggrandizement, of business were left largely to the Italian male.

Pictured above is an Italian chitarrone, a bass or contrabass of the lute family, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, acquired from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the precise year of its making is uncertain, it bears characteristics of late 17th century workmanship.The sounding board has a parchment rosette surrounded by an ebony band, inlaid with ivory. Similar inlays are in the ebony neck and base of the instrument.

Baptista's daughters, Katharina and Bianca, would have used such a delicate instrument to accompany their equally delicate recitations of poetry or song, not necessarily playing and singing at once. Music was thought to soothe the more passionate impulses and in Shakespeare's Italy, there seemed to be plenty of that to go around.

One point should not be overlooked: Shakespeare might have chosen Italy as a venue for so many of his plays simply because by doing so, any political or social implications in action or speech onstage could be regarded as far removed from English contemporary political circumstances. Shakespeare was later to discover, in the aftermath of the quashed Essex Rebellion, just how precarious a playwright's life could be when his history play Richard II was exploited by the Essex faction for its supposed rabble-rousing potential. The rabble never roused, but Shakespeare and his acting fellows fell under suspicion nevertheless.

Plays set in exotic, far-away Italy must have seemed, for the most part, benign in comparison and ideal for Shakespeare.