Books by Tania Demetriou
Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition, ed. Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell (Manchester: MUP, 2021), 2021
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Papers by Tania Demetriou
What Is a Greek Source on the Early English Stage? Fifteen New Essays, 2024
This article approaches the relation between Shakespeare and Greek tragedy by looking at... more This article approaches the relation between Shakespeare and Greek tragedy by looking at one of the main known sources for the Claudio-Hero plot of Much Ado about Nothing, Matteo Bandello’s novella of “Timbreo and Fenicia”, and its French rewriting by François de Belleforest. It considers the generic implications of the transition from novella to histoire tragique, in light of the French rewritings’ key role in the reception of ‘Bandello’ in England. After exploring certain intersections between the early modern reception of Greek tragedy and the project of the histoires tragiques, it looks closely at the notable presence of Euripides in “Timbrée et Fénicie”. It concludes by arguing that, out of all the proposed sources of Much Ado, Belleforest’s rewriting of this tale is the one most likely to have led Shakespeare to Euripides’ Alcestis, which it re-proposes as an intertext in the ending of Much Ado. This layering of texts seems to have resonated with the playwright for over a decade, since, in The Winter’s Tale, he is thought to have returned not only to the same moment from Alcestis, but also to the same story in ‘Bandello’.
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In 1579, Gabriel Harvey bound together in a composite collection a surprising group of texts: an ... more In 1579, Gabriel Harvey bound together in a composite collection a surprising group of texts: an Italian grammar, an Italian translation of Terence’s comedies, Lodovico Dolce’s Italian rifacimenti of Euripides’ Medea and Seneca’s Thyestes, and Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Erasmus’ Latin. The volume is now dispersed, but all its parts survive. This essay explores the story of this hitherto unknown artefact and what it reveals about Harvey’s reading practices and his engagement with drama, especially Greek tragedy. Parsing the elaborate system of signs with which Harvey multifariously annotated these works, it argues that he read tragedies with an emphasis on situation and utterance rather than extractable sententiae, as has been suggested. Harvey probed local detail in the tragedies with attentiveness, and with an eye to recurring observations that revealed the ‘thought’ of these works. He was drawn especially to the political dimension of this ‘thought’. Reading tragedies in juxtaposition, he became interested in their different exploration of rulers’ obligation to rule by their people’s consent. And he found Euripides’ plays particularly endowed with political wisdom, no doubt partly because he believed that they had been co-authored by Euripides’ mentor and Harvey’s own icon of pragmatic wisdom, Socrates.
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Review of English Studies, 2019
Gabriel Harvey’s extant copy of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer has attracted attention since th... more Gabriel Harvey’s extant copy of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer has attracted attention since the eighteenth century because of a marginalium which potentially sheds light on the date of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The note has been the focus of intense scrutiny leading to contradictory conclusions. This essay looks at this Shakespearean scholarship, focussing on the primary evidence it has circumstantially turned up over the years. Properly appraised, it is argued, this evidence clarifies ambiguities in Harvey’s note that have often been deemed intractable and yields some indications as to the form in which he is likely to have encountered Shakespeare’s play. More importantly, it provides a fascinating, detailed picture of Harvey’s reading of Thomas Speght’s Chaucer. It shows Harvey engaging with this edition’s philological and literary critical priorities to develop a poetics of his own, with its own distinctive idiom and material articulation. In this sense, Harvey’s Chaucer invites us to nuance some of recent scholarship’s lessons on early modern reading and to make space for the unpragmatic and the unpredictable—for the literary—even in the key exponent of what Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton describe as ‘studying for action’.
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Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, edited by Janice Valls-Russell, Charlotte Coffin and Agnes Lafont, 2017
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This article considers a set of annotations on Homer by Gerard Falkenburg of Nijmegen (1538–78) t... more This article considers a set of annotations on Homer by Gerard Falkenburg of Nijmegen (1538–78) that reveals a type of philology not usually associated with the Renaissance. Falkenburg probed the epics’ histories by analyzing their textual fault-lines, as F. A. Wolf would do in 1795, when he ignited the Homeric question. One of a handful of sixteenth-century philologists to engage in such work, Falkenburg alone arrived at a methodology for it. This previously unnoticed scholarship contextualizes famous insights on the Homeric text by philologists like Isaac Casaubon, but also raises the question of why it did not revolutionize the study of Homer at this time. Fascinatingly, part of the answer lies with these marginalia. While Falkenburg never published his observations, Obertus Giphanius used them liberally in the first published full commentary on Homer (1572). Giphanius, however, had only a vague understanding of their originality. Falkenburg’s work inspired Giphanius to write a striking preface, often cited in histories of the Homeric question, yet he gave a very flawed account of the methodology that could have enabled readers to extend this approach. Falkenburg’s annotations thus considerably nuance our picture of the early modern history of the Homeric question.
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The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, 2015
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Translation and Literature, 2006
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Books by Tania Demetriou
Papers by Tania Demetriou