Basso, bruto e sporco ingegno: A Hypothesis on the Allegorical Representation of Love in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

This brief enquiry aims at providing a skeptical interpretation of Romeo and Juliet and hypothesizes that the romance of the play has an allegorical value, its philosophical legacy being mainly Platonic and Neoplatonic. The starting point of this dissertation is represented by critical studies concerning the influence exerted by Italian Renaissance philosophy and, more specifically, by Giordano Bruno’s London dialogues on the cultural élite of Elizabethan England. Following a series of interpretations that date back to the second half of the 20th century, the present analysis is mainly inspired by more recent Italian investigations that expanded the seminal observations of Frances Yates, John Vyvyan and some German scholars. To be more precise, Hilary Gatti, Gilberto Sacerdoti, and Rosanna Camerlingo’s works are the theoretical basis of a reading that intends to prove the validity of an approach that the majority of English scholars has often neglected. The reasons behind this scarce attention basically consist in a supposed vagueness of the analo-gies between Shakespeare’s writings and Bruno’s Italian dialogues, and in the perplexing and sensationalistic historical reconstructions of Bruno’s sojourn in England. The monographic focus of this thesis therefore attempts at avoiding such vagueness, while the search for historical and biographical congruencies is completely replaced by direct textual comparisons. The title evidently quotes a famous passage of Bruno’s Eroici Furori, proposing an observation of the tragedy through the ironical lens of Bruno’s erotic allegory, yet the play is not reduced to the mere dramatization of a philosophical scheme. The partially provocative hypothesis suggested here is that Romeo and Juliet is not a love tragedy or, at least, is a love tragedy whose essence is neither imitative nor metaphorical. On the contrary, the emotional dimension of the play must be ignored in order to foster a rational decryption of its symbols, according to the principles of an emblematic and sapi-ential tradition that has its origins in Solomon’s Song of Songs.