Graphic novels are the best way to teach literature in high schools. For a number of years I taught Romeo and Juliet with a really good one. Why must students have to stagger through "classics" in the original language anymore? Take chivalric romances, which were all the rage

Many volumes have been written about castrati - perhaps because this is not your "normal" kind of history. While there were castrati in the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, they did not appear as singers in Italy until the 1550s. Castration was performed by cutting the blood supply to

Where are the Miguel de Cervantes pilgrimage sites? Start with Alcalá de Henares, Esquivias, Sevilla, Valladolid, and Madrid. Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, in 1547, but his family moved away when he was very young. He still dominates the town square anyway. Note the design on

Chiesa dei Santi Simone e Giuda (the Church of Saints Simon and Jude), on the via Domenico Fernelli, is one of the oldest churches in Mantua. It was rebuilt in 1593 and restored between 2001 and 2006. Before 2001 it was a rather blackened wreck. It is now open for

Shakespeare's Cordelia has not fared well in painting. There were, after all, only three acceptable poses - her disinheritance and banishment, her reconciliation with her father in prison, and her death. All three involve pathos. There never could be any paintings of her as a heroic warrior queen,

Many novels have inspired sequels, but how many have inspired them by people other than the original author, at least before the age of comics and spin-offs? Cervantes’ Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha) appeared in 1605. Before he published his sequel, someone else got there

There's an essay from 1860 by Turgenev, the Russian writer, called Hamlet and Don Quixote. In it, he contrasts two heroic types. There is the man who thinks he is strong, like Don Quixote, but who really isn't. He takes action, but he is ridiculous. Yet,

Ferrara was home to one of the main branches of the powerful Este family, named after the small town of Este to the north. It was a center of the arts and sciences, the birthplace of Girolamo Savonarola, and both Ariosto and Tasso lived and wrote there. The ancestral line

Were early versions of Hamlet influenced by events in Scotland? There are those who think so. Indeed there are those who believe that the Scots Invented the Modern World. But the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 undoubtedly impressed itself upon Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare and the other London

Could Hamlet have been influenced less by Danish politics and more by the French-Italian-Spanish political feuds of 1588 centered around the Spanish Armada? First, let's dismiss Denmark. The timing is right. Frederick II completed Kronborg castle in Helsingør (which sounds like Elsinore) in the 1580's and

James Crichton was born in 1560 into an aristocratic Scottish family and likely raised in Clunie, near Perth. His surviving writing does not support the idea that he was a great poet and polymath. His formidable reputation was developed in the 17th century, thanks to his enthusiastic Scottish prankster publicist,

Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, as everybody knows. But what if it were set in Mantua (Mantova)? They are connected already: it is to Mantua that Romeo is banished for killing Tybalt. It turns on the manner of Tybalt's death: Romeo is guilty of his murder.

Montaigne on the body, sex, marriage and everything else... Reading Montaigne is not for everyone, but one of its pleasures is stumbling across the many witty insights about the "rebellious and tyrannical" penis, women's dildos, huge codpieces, impotence and the like. As many have said, he

It was in Napoli that Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (and celebrated musician) murdered his beautiful wife, Donna Maria d’Avalos, and her lover, in 1590. No doubt Gesualdo relied on some assassins to do the bloody work. It is all the more interesting that later he became one of

The marriage between Desdemona and Othello was not the first cross-racial romance in Western literature. Perhaps Jason (from Greece) and Medea (from Colchis) were first, here. Cleopatra? Zenobia? By medieval times, it's Parzival's father, Gahmuret, who travels to Africa and marries the Moorish Queen Belacane (she

The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice once fascinated artists, perhaps because it questioned our understanding of death, from which we are so isolated today, and because it asked whether music and song could heal us. Orpheus goes to the land of the dead and returns, albeit in the end without

The story of Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) is loosely based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse ("The King Amuses Himself"). Hugo's play was written in 1832, but banned after one performance since it went out of its way to insult

Desdemona was not the only celebrated woman murdered by her husband in 16th century Italy. There were many others and here are some of them. A few have stayed around as ghosts. First, there was Laura Lanza, Baroness of Carini (in Sicily), and her lover Ludovico, who were murdered in

Much is made of Shakespeare's use of the Four Humors. Hamlet is melancholic, the characters in Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew and Othello are choleric, very few characters are sanguine since they lack drama, and no one seems to be phlegmatic since those characters

Elizabethan England owed some of its newfound civilized behavior to Italian (and a few Spanish) fencing instructors. In Italy and Spain, nobles already had the right to carry weapons, and this had fostered a sense of responsibility and a sense of honor. They no longer had to settle scores by

The most interesting sex scandals of the Jacobean era featured Lady Frances Howard. Not once but twice. After being married off at the age of 13 for political reasons in 1606, she never slept with her husband because they appear to have hated each other. He was whisked away to

Many of the events in this chapter took place against the backdrop of a mini-Ice Age in Europe, from the 16th century or even earlier through the mid-19th, being at its worst between 1560 and 1660. In 1608, the Thames froze over at London. It did so again several more

Were Italian, Spanish, Gascon and French cultures in the 16th century sophisticated but decadent? That perception certainly arose in Elizabethan England, in the decades before Shakespeare's plays. In France, for example, courtly behavior at the court of Henri III from 1574 until 1589 scandalized the English, with the

As Romeo discovered in Mantua, Italian cities had sophisticated quarantine systems in place, to keep some people in and others out. Quarantine derives from the Italian "quaranta giorni" (40 days) and the first lazaret (plague hospital) was built in Venice in 1423 on the island known today as