From the time of Chaucer to the present we follow the sense of Italy and Italian thought and imagination which has directed and enlivened the works of major English writers—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne, Crashaw, and the Brownings among them.
Here, in his own translations and in original English versions of his own, Professor Praz has gathered many important essays central to his life’s work, in a continuous study of the vital currents which have flowed between two cultures, the English and the Italian. The classic writers of Italy—Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, and others—are studied in their effects on English literature.