The Use of Boccaccio in Shakespear Illustrated by Charlotte Lennox: Giletta of Narbonne and All’s Well

Many scholars have long acknowledged Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Italian novelists, Boccaccio among them. Few have recognised the importance of Lennox’s rewriting of sources and plays in Shakespeare Illustrated; Susan Green’s Cultural Reading of Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespear Illustrated is impressive. My paper purports to foreground Lennox’s translation of one of Boccaccio’s novels and her rewriting in prose of Shakespeare’s All’s Well, which are hypertexts of it. I will look for linguistic elements, omissions, or additions that testify to Lennox’s construction of herself as a critic and her lucid judgement about women’s societal condition. The metatextual and last section of each chapter of her book deserves due attention. What was only suggested by the juxtaposition of the two rewritings becomes evident in Lennox’s strictures on Shakespeare’s art. I consider it a distorting mirror offered to Shakespeare’s revered plays to reveal that the women in them are very different from the real eighteenth-century ones. Lennox’s criticism bites literary models which can no longer serve to educate young girls and need to adapt to a new idea of a woman. This idea is surprisingly found in Boccaccio.