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“"The Meruailouse Site": Shakespeare, Venice, and Paradoxical Stages”
The other form was the argument contra opinionem omnium -- against received opinion -- and the locus classicus here is Cicero's Paradoxa stoicorum. In this book Cicero, for example, argued that virtue was its own happiness and that only the wise man could be truly rich. This literary form was brought to the Renaissance by Ortensio Lando's “Paradossi” of 1543. Twenty-five of Lando's thirty paradoxes were translated into French by Charles Estienne in 1553, and the first twelve of Estienne's were translated into English by Anthony Munday in 1593. Seven more of Landi's paradoxes ended up in Thomas Milles's “The Treasurie of Auncient and Moderne Times” of 1613. Somewhere along the line Shakespeare encountered this nexus of texts, and Edmund's speech on bastardy in King Lear is based on Lando's paradox "That the Bastard is more to be esteemed, than the lawfully borne or legitimate.”
COPYRIGHT 2001 Renaissance Society of America
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