There is a belief in Italy that as regards character types the Pisans should never be trusted, at the same time as the Florentines can be relied upon to take things at face value – and I was reminded last week that none other than the great playwright William Shakespeare himself had used this quality to substantiate a plot!
The reason that the Pisans use to substantiate their premiss was that the Florentines fell hook , line and sinker for the offer of a pair of matched Porphyry pillars that they offered as a gift to Florence to decorate the Baptistery on either side of the golden doors now known as the Gates of Paradise.
The Pisans told the Florentines that if they looked deep into the polished stone they would be able to recognise the face of a treacherous person -so the Florentines who had been sent to inspect the pillars thought that this would be awfully useful feature and accepted the gift. The laughing Pisans then sent the two gigantic stone pillars back up the Arno smoked to the extent that they were nothing like such pillars should be – as shown below.
The sad fact was that the pillars were no longer even shiny, let alone capable of a deep mirror image of an enemy!
One of the pillars can be seen , dark purple- red -and not a shine remaining , on the left of the doors in the photo below!
So when Shakespeare was writing “Much Ado About Nothing” I believe he had heard this story or something similar when he chose to make Count Claudio a Florentine general – why else would someone so supposedly clever at dealing with an enemy in battle be so stupid as to accept at face value the sight of someone going in through Hero, his fiance’s window – on the ONLY night she had ever slept alone in her life – was that of her sexual partner?
Florentines were also known to be pretty keen on counting the Florins, and so it was useful for Claudio on hearing that the disgraced Hero had died of grief to learn that there was a mirror image of his one true love close to hand who would be endowed with the same rich dowry – should he be prepared to accept her to atone for his hasty denunciation of his previous love!
So poor gentle Hero was wheeled out again, this time as her own cousin, to finally persuade the in-gallant Florentine to tie the knot, – and goodness knows but I have my doubts that they lived as happily-ever-after as did the real heros of the play, Benedict and the wonderfully quick-witted Beatrice!
Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones play an elderly version of the sparring couple Benedict and Beatrice at the Old Vic until the end of this month – the partnership has had some tough reviews but the play itself is always too good to miss!
Much Ado about Nothing is one of 13 of Shakespeare’s Play set in or around Italy -the others being :- All’s Well that Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice , Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter’s Tale –which goes to show that even back in first Elizabethan age there was already a real sense of Italy in the Anglo-Imagination
