| This dissertation examines the representation of the Italian palazzo in Jacobean English drama (1603-1625). A reinvention of the palaces of antiquity, the palazzo formed part of an iconographical program which both glorified and specified the ideal architectural environment of the Renaissance ruler. By the sixteenth century, the increasingly sumptuous, spectacular palazzo had become an architectural emblem of the Italian court.;In Renaissance England, the palazzo was visited, admired, and emulated as an example of Italy's aesthetic supremacy. At the same time, it evoked fears of alien politics and a foreign, papist culture. England's ambivalence towards the palazzo culminated in the hands of Jacobean playwrights, who loved to use it as a dramatic setting, yet characterized it as iniquitous, pernicious territory. Invested with degeneracy, the palazzo also masked an indictment of James I's own sybaritic, corrupt court at London's Whitehall Palace.;Chapter One traces the architectural and social history of the palazzo in Renaissance Italy. Chapter Two concerns the perception of the palazzo from the English perspective and the infiltration of Italian architectural ideals to England. Chapter Three considers the use of the palazzo as theatrical space, and the presence of the palazzo in Renaissance scenography. Chapters Four through Six analyze the palazzo in four Jacobean plays: John Marston's The Malcontent, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy and Women Beware Women, and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that the palazzo is a paradoxical example of diseased property, assuming attributes typically associated with three marginal spaces in Renaissance culture: the lazaretto (plague hospital), bordello, and prison. My analysis combines the history of the Jacobean court with the social context of early modern Europe, where plague, prostitution and vagrancy--architecturally embodied by the lazaretto, bordello, and prison, respectively--threatened patrician ideals of civic order. Rather than serve as a barrier from such threats, the palazzo, represented by Jacobean playwrights, is inverted from an apogee of Renaissance humanism to its perceived antithesis: a transgressive locus from which infection originates, circulates, and spreads. |
