OPPORTUNITIES FOR RESEARCH IN THE ITALIAN DRAMA OF THE RENAISSANCE

Abstract

Within the last fifteen or twenty years several libraries in the United States and Canada háve so increased their collections of sixte e nth ̂century Italian plays that the student of early Italian drama can almost by-pass the libraries in Rome., Florence , Paris, and London0 At all events, the student can now do most of his work in North America. Harvard and the Library of Congress have long had a good many Italian plays « Now the University of Toronto has an excellent collection«» (See Beatrice Corrigan 's Catalogue of Italian Plays , 1500-1700, in the Library of the University of Toronto,, 1961») The University of Illinois has a comparable caTLeciion,, probaBXy more sixteenth-century plays than at Toronto o I havs known for some time that Illinois has a good number of Italian comedias s and, in working through sixteenth«»century Italian tragedy, I have found that we have most, if not all , of the important tragedies o I understand that the University of Chicago and Indiana University havs valuable collections, and there may well be other American libraries that can rival those I have named e Perhaps the time has come when American scholars can cariy on the work started by Italian, French, and German scholars 0