"Whose Memory? From the 'rossignuol' to Female Communities in Groto and Shakespeare"

This essay focuses on Luigi Groto’s La Hadriana (1578) as a rewrite of the Romeo and Juliet story derived from Luigi Da Porto and possibly Matteo Bandello in ways that are at the same time similar and very different from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Critics are divided between those who are sceptical about Groto’s intertextual presence in Shakespeare, and those who trace clear evidence of direct dialogue to the point of excluding, in some cases, polygenetic derivation. Through a discussion of gender constructions and female agency as major issues in both plays, the essay interrogates textual echoes within their co-textual occurrences and against the broader conceptual texture of the two dramas. By raising questions about whose memory allows us to identify analogies – the author’s own memory, or of empirical readers over time, or of the implicit reader in Iser’s formulation – it contends that, in this case, resonances function contrastively in ways that affect the sense of female agency in the two plays, where female communities are constructed in radically different ways.