Fabio Battista

From the love suicide of Elizabeth Tudor to the monstrous birth of Oliver Cromwell, this dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. “Cultural Translation in Early Modern Italy” studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how English affairs entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a privileged channel to expose and challenge issues as crucial as the legitimacy of female power, the ethics of rulership, the crisis of divine right, and the constraints of identities within the state.