Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy PDF Free Download
1 / 28/28
100%
Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza (1580–1585). Architect: Andrea Palladio (1508–1580).
“Weaving together established Renaissance theatrical texts and newly discovered and
unfamiliar drama by women writers, Prof. Coller revises in a perceptive, intriguing
and thought-provoking way the history of early modern comedy and tragedy in
Italy. In her engaging reading, women (spectators, actresses, ctional characters,
playwrights) are shown not only as accompanying the rise of the dramatic genre but
as fundamental to its very success.”
—Valeria Finucci, Professor of Romance Studies and
Theater Studies, Duke University, USA
“Alexandra Coller’s comparative and contextual study of Italian drama moves
seamlessly from perceptive close readings to penetrating reections on the larger
stakes involved, as she makes more visible a body of fascinating plays, especially
female-authored ones, that have hitherto largely escaped critical attention. This
meticulously documented, compelling, and revisionist book opens up new direc-
tions for gender and theater studies in the Italian Renaissance with wide-ranging
implications for the larger literary and cultural history of early modern Europe.”
—Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor and Chair, Department of Italian,
Columbia University, USA
“These are exciting times for the eld of women’s theatre in early modern Europe,
and Prof. Coller is part of the vanguard creating this excitement. Women, Rhetoric,
and Drama in Early Modern Italy demonstrates that some women playwrights
were aware of and responding to the work of other women dramatists as well as
seeking the approbation of men. Analyzing the roles and rhetoric of female charac-
ters, Coller claims that what is most new about sixteenth-century Italian drama in
all three genres is the development of women’s roles and authorship, and suggests
that the opening of drama to female speech and rhetoric ultimately encouraged
female playwrights.”
—Janet Smarr, Professor of Theatre and
Italian Studies, UC San Diego, USA
Women, Rhetoric, and Drama
inEarly Modern Italy
Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed the rebirth of comedy, tragedy, and
tragicomedy in the pastoral mode. Traditionally, we think of comedy and
tragedy as remakes of ancient models, and tragicomedy alone as the inven-
tion of the moderns. Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy
suggests that all three genres were, in fact, remarkably new if dramatists’
intriguingly sympathetic portrayals of and sustained investment in women
as vibrant and dynamic characters of the early modern stage are taken into
account.This study examines the role of rhetoric and gender in early modern
Italian drama, in itself and in order to explore its complex interrelationship
with the rise of women writers and the role women played in Italian culture
and society, while at the same time demonstrating just how closely inter-
twined history, culture, and dramatic writing are. Author Alexandra Coller
focuses on the scripted/erudite plays of the sixteenth and rst half of the
seventeenth centuries, which, she argues, are indispensable for a balanced
view of the history of drama and its place within contemporary literary
and women’s studies. This is the rst full-length study published in English
that considers all three dramatic genres and explores them side by side. As
this book reveals, the ascendancy of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in
the vernacular seems to have been not only inextricably linked to but also
dependent on the rise of women as prominent stage characters and, eventu-
ally, as authors in their own right.
Alexandra Coller is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian Program
at Lehman College, City University of New York, USA.
This page intentionally left blank
Women, Rhetoric,
andDramain Early
ModernItaly
Alexandra Coller
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 Alexandra Coller
The right of Alexandra Coller to be identied as author of this
workhas been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77and78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identication and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Coller, Alexandra, author.
Title: Women, rhetoric, and drama in early modern Italy /
by Alexandra Coller.
Description: New York and London: Routledge, 2017. |
Includesbibliographical references and index.
Identiers: LCCN 2017008005 (print) |
LCCN 2017025089 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Italian literature—16th century—History
andcriticism. | Italian literature—Women authors—History and
criticism. | Italian drama—16th century—History and criticism. |
Women and literature—Italy—History—16th century. | Women in
literature. | Literature and society—Italy—History—16th century.
Classication: LCC PQ4055.W6 (ebook) | LCC PQ4055.W6 C63
2017 (print) | DDC 852/.4093522—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008005
ISBN: 978-1-4724-7881-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-54652-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
I dedicate this book to my mother and father,
Ana & Ovi
în onoarea sacriciilor făcute
pentru noi
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in
Early Modern Italy 1
PART I
Women as Protagonists inMale-Authored Drama:
Comedy and Tragedy 17
1 Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names: Women,
Rhetoric, and Education in Commedia Erudita 19
Coda: “Margherita Costa’s Li buffoni (1641): The First
(Extant) Female-Authored Scripted Comedy” 41
2 Fashioning a Genealogy: The Rhetoric of Friendship and
Female Virtue in Italian Renaissance Tragedy 73
Coda: Valeria Miani’s Celinda (1611) among Fin de
SiècleItalianTragedies 92
PART II
Women as Authors/Women as Protagonists: Pastoral
Tragicomedy 131
3 Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes
and Female-Authored PastoralDrama 133
Contents
x Contents
4 Isabetta Coreglia’s Dori (1634): Writing Pastoral Drama
Againstthe Backdrop of the Male Canon and an Incipient
Female-Authored Tradition 174
5 Isabetta Coreglia’s Erindo il do (1650) and Isabella
Andreini’s Mirtilla (1588): Using a Female-Authored
Classicas Paradigm 216
Appendix 247
Bibliography 251
Index 273
I extend my many thanks to the staff at the Marciana and Correr libraries
in Venice, the Forteguerriana library in Pistoia, the Biblioteca Governativa
in Lucca, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence. I am grateful
to the Research Foundation of the City University of New York for funding
my seven research trips to Italy from 2011 to 2015.
For their guidance and precious advice at various points over the many
years it took to complete this project, I would like to thank Virginia Cox,
Jane Tylus, Daniel Javitch, Richard Andrews, Valeria Finucci, Janet Smarr,
Giuseppe Gerbino, Marzia Pieri, Paula Loscocco, Francesca Bortoletti, and
Laura Riccò.
I am indebted to my brother, Thomas. For their unwavering support,
warmth, and encouragement, I am profoundly grateful to three life-long
friends: Michael J. Bauer, Silvia Stoyanova, and Gundula Löfer. This pro-
ject would have never reached its completion without their presence in my
life. My gratitude extends also to other cherished friends: Helena Sanson,
B.J. Karpen, Yunus Tuncel, Joseph Mauricio, Serdar Vardar, Rocco
Riccobono, Craig Lanza, Martin Maraoti, and Xavier Gabaix.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my partner, Claudio, for
his warmth, affection, and good cheer.
Acknowledgments
This page intentionally left blank
Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed the birth of comedy, tragedy, and
tragicomedy in the pastoral mode. Traditionally, we think of comedy and
tragedy as ‘remakes’ of ancient models and tragicomedy alone as the inven-
tion of the moderns.1 Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy
suggests that all three genres were, in fact, remarkably new if we take into
account dramatists’ intriguingly sympathetic portrayals of and sustained
investment in women as vibrant and dynamic characters of the early mod-
ern stage.2 This gender inclusivity constitutes a radical change with respect
to the ancient models, and much of it—in the Italians’ generic experimenta-
tion with dramatic scripts—is due to the degree to which dramatists mined
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a best seller of the Renaissance and
early modern period, a rich resource for dramatic plots, and a fundamental
starting point for the exploration of gender-related issues.3
Several female roles are worthy of discussion in Italian comedy and
tragedy, such as the matrona or mother gure, the cortigiana or courte-
san, the balia or female servant/wet nurse, the widow (young and old),
and the ruana or procuress; the present study’s focus is on the role of the
young and respectable—nubile or married—female character.4 Pastoral,
populated by Arcadia’s nymphs, also offers us a version of the young
nubile female protagonist who is often allotted a role as active as—and
in some cases more so than—that of her male counterpart, pastoral’s
shepherd.
If the opposite is true for comedy when compared to its ‘sister genre’, it
was in part as a result of Italian dramatists’ following in the footsteps of
the ancients that tragedy has gained a reputation for being regarded as a
feminized genre: some of the reasons underlining this label are addressed in
my second chapter.5
Very succinctly put, what does Renaissance drama inherit from the an-
cients, on the one hand, and from the Decameron, on the other? Aside from
the pervasive reappearance of generational conicts in comedy, the dialectic
of Love (Amore) and Fortune (Fortuna)—the elements that lie at the crux
of the one hundred tales—is fully exploited by dramatists composing in all
three genres. On the other hand, Italian playwrights’ far more pronounced
Introduction
Women, Rhetoric, and Drama
inEarly Modern Italy
2 Introduction
interest in women’s roles may also be explained by virtue of their observa-
tion of contemporary reality: the fact that women were beginning to gain
prominence on the peninsula as historical subjects and, signicantly, as
authors in their own right.6
Though the preceding may suggest the inclusion of commedia dell’arte,
this study focuses on the scripted/erudite plays of the sixteenth and rst
half of the seventeenth centuries, which, I argue, is indispensable for a
balanced view of the history of drama and its place within contemporary
literary, gender, and women’s studies.7 Though a valuable locus for analysis
and interpretation, the performance of scripted plays is still a vexed and
complicated area of theater studies, largely on account of the scarcity of
extant archival documentation; thus, while I allude to some preliminary
evidence and sometimes speculate about audience reception, performance
per se is not a central aspect of this study.8 Notably, the performance text
is mined and valued in and of itself.
More precisely, this study examines the role of rhetoric and gender in
Renaissance and early modern Italian drama, in itself and in order to ex-
plore its complex interrelationship with the rise of women writers, as we
keep in mind the heightened importance of women in Italian culture and
society, while at the same time demonstrating just how closely intertwined
history, culture, and dramatic writing are. Broadly speaking, the volume’s
title points to the use of rhetoric in the creation and dramatization of gender,
whether we consider the crossdressing topos in comedy, the stereotypical
pathos of a tragic heroine, or the laments of pastoral’s nymphs. Specically,
the title alludes to a tendency we nd in dramatic scripts: the use of rhe-
torical strategies (verbal and gestural) to expose, question, reevaluate, and,
ultimately, redress issues concerning normative gender categorization.
By virtue of its breadth, Women, Rhetoric, and Drama does not make
any claims to be either exhaustive or comprehensive. Whereas previous
studies have discussed each of the dramatic genres in isolation, the novelty
of this volume allows the reader to more accurately assess and ponder over
the rich contributions of all three genres—comedy, tragedy, and pastoral—
together with the inclusion and achievements of women writers—in a single
volume. What is also notable is that, in some cases, a single author offered
his/her creative energies across generic boundaries; although I do not have
the space to consider each case in turn nor do so exhaustively, the hope is
that my assessments open up avenues for future scholarship.9
A crucial issue many dramatic scripts expose and explore, and in certain
cases, rewrite from a less conservative stance, is the matter of women’s
speech. In order to understand the troublesome aspect of women’s speech
and the general restrictions imposed upon it by the patriarchal society of
Renaissance and early modern Italy, it is useful to glance at one of the
most popular texts of the period, namely, Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della
institution delle donne (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1545).10 In this
treatise, Dolce (1508/10–68), one of the most celebrated poligra of the
Introduction 3
period, gives advice on the proper upbringing and education of young girls.
On the matter of women’s speech, he states the following:
Cerca il favellare, non lodo che ella usi molta copia di parole tra le
donne, nonche fra gli uomini; non mi piace però che stia mutola, ma
che poco parli e consideratamente nei tempi e secondo che verrà la occa-
sione. Percioché oltre, che alle donne generalmente si disconviene usar
molta copia di parole, è molto necessario e utile che nella fanciullezza
s’avezzino a parlar poco: conciosia cosa che dalla lingua procedono
molti mali.
(29r)11
Though Dolce’s stance in this text is far from progressive, it does allow
for some exceptions to the rule, and his prole as a letterato was less
conser vative than one might expect, as noted in Chapters 1 and 2. Like
his contemporary, Lodovico Domenichi (1515–64), Dolce was a bit of a
wild card.12 While we cannot directly pin on either author what sound like
misogynist leanings, some of their pronouncements do indeed mimick the
rhetoric of the age and are reective of the limitations ideology placed on
women’s speech and equally restricted mobility. Just as paramount was a
woman’s uncompromised chastity; indeed, conduct manuals emphasized
virginity as a woman’s most prized “virtù.”13
A major contribution of the volume is its focus on the less well-known
and under-represented scripted plays of Girolamo Bargagli, Angelo Beolco,
Leonora Bernardi, Maddalena Campiglia, Giraldi Cinzio, Francesco
Contarini, Luca Contile, Isabetta Coreglia, Lodovico Dolce, Luigi Groto,
Angelo Ingegneri, Muzio Manfredi, Valeria Miani, Girolamo Parabosco,
Giambattista Della Porta, Niccolò Secchi, Barbara Torelli, and Pomponio
Torelli, among others. Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) is an exception in
that over the last two decades or so she has received ample attention from
various literary critics and musicologists.14 Her work as a dramatist is ana-
lyzed in Chapter 3, alongside that of Isabetta Coreglia in Chapter 4 and
again in the nal chapter. A number of the plays under examination do not
have modern editions and one exists only in manuscript form. In short, my
book’s revisionist stance aims to offer visibility to works that have largely
escaped critical attention.
Given these dramatic texts’ intriguing handling of female characters and
the current scholarly fascination with female-centered issues, it is surpris-
ing that they have received little attention. Therefore, the internationally
acclaimed dramatic works of Bibbiena, Ariosto, Machiavelli, the Intronati,
Trissino, Tasso, and Guarini make cameo appearances among what I argue
constitute some unrecognized ‘gems’ of Italian Renaissance and early
modern drama, including several female-authored texts, such as a pastoral
tragicomedy in manuscript, by a “Gentildonna lucchese,” now attributed to
Leonora Bernardi, a noblewoman from Lucca.15 Other pastorals are extant
4 Introduction
only in their sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century editions. Two such
plays are authored by Isabetta Coreglia, a native of Lucca, like Bernardi;
another by Valeria Miani, a learned woman of Paduan origin, whose
Celinda is the rst female-authored tragedy. A comedy by the Roman poet
and courtesan, Margherita Costa, published in 1641, is the only extant play
in its genre authored by a woman. Both Costa’s and Miani’s plays feature in
my lengthy codas to Chapters 1 and 2.
The pastorals of Miani and Coreglia, Amorosa speranza and Dori, are
forthcoming in two bilingual volumes translated and edited by me for The
Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series.16 All of these texts await care-
ful analysis and thoughtful integration within the early modern literary
canon. It is my hope that exposure of these particular less well-known plays
will result in a more nuanced understanding of early modern drama in Italy
and on the continent and invite sustained comparative and cross-cultural
reassessments along with more in-depth contextualizations.
Contemporary issues such as arranged and clandestine marriage, women’s
education, ideals of friendship, unusual or ‘aberrant’ forms of love, inheritance
rights, and the dowry system crop up in play after play, demonstrating
these playwrights’ interest in and active engagement with quotidian affairs.
In some instances, the plays under analysis debunk cultural stereotypes.
The fascinating dynamics between the sexes often prominently featured in
these dramatic texts form a sustained part of the discussion as Isurvey each
of the three genres and the intersections between literature, culture, and
gender. What underpins this study is the belief that literature— including
the handful of dialogues on the questione della donna and poli tical trea-
tises summoned as part of its investigation—represents and/or prescribes
human action while also evoking the power of texts to inuence its readers
and, in the case of performed texts, its spectators. Much of its power of
execution lies in the text’s deployment of a variety of rhetorical strategies.
At the same time, while contemporary discourses—some more, others less
‘progressive’—form a segment of my analyses, they are not the focus; in
fact, those texts become marginal as the volume progresses from its rst to
its second part. Throughout, I concentrate on the primary texts themselves
and the textual fabric each one weaves; for reasons stated earlier, Boccaccio’s
Decameron appears from time to time as an additional reference manual,
other times as an important model or source text. With some exceptions,
this study focuses on dramatic practice rather than the theoretical debates
surrounding it.17
Women, Rhetoric, and Drama aims to foreground the discursive and
gestural strategies women use in these male and female authored dramatic
compositions in order to gain prominence as characters and maneuver
agency vis-à-vis their male counterparts. Female characters employ rhetoric
as a means to affect, persuade, and elicit reader/audience sympathy. My
method of inquiry is the evaluation of rhetoric from different angles
throughout each of the ve chapters dealing with comedy, tragedy, and
Introduction 5
pastoral, respectively. Close textual analysis viewed through a cultural-
historical lens allows us to draw analogies and locate disparities between
Renaissance and early modern ideals of women and their dramatic rep-
resentation, on the one hand; on the other, the texts examined probe and
challenge ideals of femininity as they showcase the elusive nature of sex
and gender categorization.18 As will become apparent, sometimes the ideal
and the real merge, while at other times they stand in opposition. Needless
to say, it is intriguing to see how female-authored texts—in each of the gen-
res evaluated—manifest parallels as well as divergences when juxtaposed
to male-authored texts. It goes without saying that the lineaments of pro-
feminism are found in both male- and female-authored specimens in each
of the genres under discussion. While women writers can and do sometimes
display a difference in approach to a particular thematic, a difference in
the rhetorical strategies employed, or indeed, a stylistic variation in terms
of textual form and representation, I am not in agreement with (femi-
nist) scholars who believe that a male author cannot lend authenticity to a
female voice.19 In a similar fashion, a female writer may adopt a template
that verges on the misogynist and is, therefore, ostensibly framed ‘male.’
Overall, theater as a paradigm for social reection is mined as a resourceful
window into the dynamics between genders.
In his late sixteenth-century Discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca,
Torquato Tasso (1544–95) inuentially reopened the discussion on virtù
(‘worth’ or ‘ability’) and what that term implies when it is gendered masculine
or feminine. Several decades prior to Tasso’s theoretical discussion, at the very
outset of Angelo Beolco/Ruzante’s comedy, L’Anconitana, a major precedent
in the history of the genre, women are described as “amanti delle virtú.”20
The term “virtù” is a polyvalent one: etymologically, it derives from the Latin
virtus though it was commonly inextricable from vir meaning ‘man’ hence
its gendered rigidity; it can be used to mean ‘worth’, ‘ability’, ‘ingenuity’,
‘skill,’ ‘talent,’ ‘fame,’ ‘glory,’ but also ‘manliness’, ‘strength’, ‘courage’, ‘ex-
cellence’ and so forth depending on its immediate context.21 The implications
of Tasso’s contribution to the querelle des femmes cannot be underestimated,
in spite of the limitations it suggests for the female sex in general. As the works
of Plato and Aristotle on the subject of woman’s nature and her place within
the social spectrum are revisited, Tasso concurs: “Con molta ragion, dunque,
non sol dalla natura, ma dall’usanza ancora e da’ legislatori è stata intro-
dotta la distinzione delle virtù.”22 In his gloss on the ancients, Tasso points
to a factor of paramount importance: it is according to “custom” (usanza)
and “law makers” (legislatori) that virtù acquired its gendered distinctions.
The rest of Tasso’s pithy discourse is devoted to formulating a nal crucial
difference now focused on the female sex, that is, between “virtù femi nile”
and “virtù donnesca” (sometimes dubbed “virtù eroica”): aside from some
noteworthy exceptions, only noblewomen involved in governing a kingdom
can hope to acquire the latter set of virtues. Even so, the signicance of
Tasso’s Discorso is worth underscoring: as Maria Luisa Doglio explains, it
6 Introduction
is withthis publication that the Ferrarese author creates a niche for women’s
worth outside the connes of the domestic realm.23 One of the running
themes of the present volume is to show how women (as protagonists and
as authors) partake of virtù—in all of its incarnations as ‘worth’, ‘skill’,
‘ingenuity’, ‘ability’—a characteristic of the human mind that Tasso fa-
mously champions in a very small minority of the female sex.24
Women, Rhetoric, and Drama therefore demonstrates dramatists’
extremely rich and wide-ranging engagement with women’s voices. In tragedy
and pastoral, women’s victimization and powerlessness paradoxically be-
come the key to poetic power.25 In comedy, women’s voices are often heard
as direct symptoms of empowerment, in situations they themselves create
either through virtù (‘skill’) or ingegno (‘shrewd intelligence’). Their assign-
ment to the domestic realm becomes more complicated, problematic, and, in
some cases, untenable. Indeed, female protagonists’ (deant) self- assertion
is read as a basis for remarkably open criticism of and resistance to the
widespread double standards of Renaissance society’s social, economic, and
political systems and the inequities suffered by their sex. Even when covert,
women’s critical stance is striking and worthy of note. As a result, the pub-
lic and private spheres, gendered male and female respectively, become, at
least in the performance text and on stage, less distinct. Studying the rhet-
oric used by these female characters provides an important critical and in-
terpretive hermeneutic tool, one that engages many fronts of social life. As
this book reveals, the ascendancy of each of these forms of composition in
the vernacular seems to have been not only inextricably linked to but also
dependent on the rise of women as prominent stage characters and, eventu-
ally, as authors in their own right; this is an issue touched upon throughout
and that the nal chapter reemphasizes in its focus on the legacy of Isabetta
Coreglia and the literary kinship she developed with a far more prominent
writer, namely, Isabella Andreini.
The volume is divided into two parts. The rst part is primarily concerned
with male-authored representations of female protagonists, although it in-
cludes two codas on female-authored texts, the only contributions extant
in the genres of comedy and tragedy. The second part is chiey devoted to
female-authored texts and women writers’ engagement with the nascent
genre of tragicomedy in the pastoral mode.
My rst chapter, “Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names:
Women, Rhetoric, and Education in Commedia Erudita,” focuses on comedy
and the education of young, unmarried girls insofar as the subject is ap-
proached in scripts, as a by-product of father-daughter relationships and,
concurrently, as the topic is discussed and debated in treatises of the period,
with few exceptions, among all-male interlocutors. In sum, I seek to high-
light reasons more sophisticated than the traditional innamoramento for
women’s crossdressing on the Renaissance stage: the quest for an educa-
tion and, in some instances, for the acquisition of an inheritance. Therein,
rhetoric is studied in its relationship to education—indeed, as an end in
Introduction 7
itself for the virgo, the plays’ respectable young female role. As such, the
chapter offers sensitive analyses of several little-known sixteenth-century
plays. Foremost among them is Angelo Beolco’s fascinating, though often
neglected, ve-act comedy, L’Anconitana [‘The Woman from Ancona’],
analyzed alongside others that, I argue, followed its lead insofar as they all
promote women’s voices and their agency in these commedia erudita scripts.
Deemed indecorous for the respectable woman writer, there remains only
one female-authored comedy.26 A coda to Chapter 1 looks at the only ex-
tant specimen in the genre authored by a woman: Li buffoni (Florence,
1641).27 Its author, Margherita Costa, a fairly well-educated Roman
poet and courtesan, was arguably the most prolic secular woman writer
of the period. In her scripted commedia ridicolosa, Costa pokes fun at
male indelity while offering a strikingly unusual, enigmatic play popu-
lated by virtual caricatures of real-life protagonists at the Medici court
in seventeenth- century Florence. My reading of Costa’s ingenious use of
rhetorical strategies built into the composition itself and used to gesture at
the Medici court in a sometimes oblique, other times more straightforward
fashion, allows me to connect her comedy to what I believe is a veiled al-
lusion to the Medici women’s wielding of power in locations inuential, if
spatially peripheral, to the Florentine court of Ferdinand II, to whom the
author dedicates a number of her publications.
Chapter 2, “Fashioning a Genealogy: Female Friendship and Virtue in
Italian Renaissance Tragedy,” focuses on the tragedies of Giambattista
Giraldi Cinzio and Lodovico Dolce. The chapter investigates the ancient
ideal of friendship—a paramount male-centered Renaissance virtù—and
its celebration predominantly in female tragic characters. What is demon-
strated is how rhetoric is employed to elicit pathos, that is, as a means
whereby the tragic heroine excites the emotions and their end, maraviglia,
that sine qua non quality of tragic spectacle; pointedly, rhetoric is studied
as a form of virtù in its articulation of friendship among women. In turn,
female protagonists (rather than their male counterparts) are used to elicit
and enforce ‘didactic’ measures which the tragedies themselves espouse. As
such, theory and practice sometimes converge and do so largely on account
of a pronounced female presence.
A coda to Chapter 2 entitled “Valeria Miani’s Celinda Among Fin de
Siècle Italian Tragedies” examines the Paduan letterata’s contribution to
the exclusively male-authored canon. If Miani’s writing is derivative to
a certain degree, she also strives to depart from traditional paradigms. I
argue that she does so by incorporating theatergrams of comedy into a
tragedy that otherwise follows the genre’s standard structure, themes, and
macabre ending.28 In her tour de force handling of both gender and generic
boundaries, Miani delivers an original play even if not a ‘classic’ and does
so with skill and dexterity.
The second part of this book—comprising Chapters 3, 4, and 5—turns its
focus to pastoral tragicomedy and its remarkable rise to number one status
8 Introduction
on the late Renaissance stage—as famously observed by the contemporary
playwright/theorist, Angelo Ingegneri.29
Chapter 3, “Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes in Female-
Authored Pastoral Drama,” revisits the masterpieces of Tasso and Guarini
alongside those of Andreini, Bernardi, Bonarelli, Campiglia, Contarini,
Coreglia, Ingegneri, and Miani, among others, by focusing on the satyr
scene: an episode traditionally labeled as misogynist, fraught with gendered
implications, but also open to reinterpretation and revisionist opportuni-
ties. How do women writers confront one of literary canon’s dominant
narratives? While pastoral overshadowed both comic and tragic scripts, it
also absorbed a great deal from both genres in terms of stylistic devices and
theatergrams. What pastoral inherited and how women writers contributed
to its innovation as a ‘new’ genre is the subject of this and the nal two
chapters.
Both of the volume’s last chapters are dedicated to Isabetta Coreglia—
the least known gure among all the female authors discussed—even
to specialists in the eld. In an attempt to redress her isolated and over-
shadowed presence, Chapter 4, “Isabetta Coreglia’s Dori (1634): Writing
Pastoral Drama Against the Backdrop of the Male Canon and an Incipi-
ent Female-Authored Tradition” examines the Lucchese’s literary legacy as
well as some interesting intersections between her pastoral drama and her
other verse compositions.
Chapter 5, “Isabetta Coreglia’s Erindo il do (1650) and Isabella Andreini’s
Mirtilla (1588): Using a Female-Authored Classic as Paradigm” explores
Coreglia’s fruitful relationship with the writing of Isabella Andreini.
Taken together, all ve chapters aim to create a more nuanced view of
women and gender in early modern Italy. The second part of the volume
aims to give some compelling evidence of a budding literary kinship among
women writers in an incipient female-authored tradition of writing in the
pastoral mode.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 demonstrate how female-authors use various forms
of rhetoric—embedded in the generic form of tragicomedy—in order to
foreground female protagonists’ agency and, in some instances, in order
to showcase diminished masculine virtù. The latter is notably also the re-
sult of Costa and Miani in their respective engagements with comedy and
tragedy, though it is not the only means whereby they generate original out-
comes as women writing in an entrenched masculine canon. As in the case
of Coreglia, rhetoric is employed so as to establish connections between a
cultural artifact (the scripted text) and current sociopolitical and cultural
issues tied to the particular historical moment as well as their native or
adopted cities: Padua, Florence, and the republic of Lucca. Each, in turn,
rhetorically elicits the text as ‘witness’ and as ‘model’ for women’s inclusion
into the contemporary literary, political, and cultural arenas. Interestingly,
in Coreglia’s case, the author crafts an identity that beckons the gure
of Andreini, the Paduan letterata with whom—from the perspective
Introduction 9
ofsocial status and career—she could not have had less in common. On the
other hand, both Andreini and Coreglia reaped the benets of their con-
nections to members of Italian academies. Coreglia also shows admiration
for Margherita Costa’s compositional style, and there too the divide could
not be greater, once again from their respective chosen professions and the
Lucchese’s far less colorful social platform. Coreglia audaciously and self-
consciously alludes to and competes with and/or against the writing of both
these women; in openly appropriating textual fragments from the rst diva
of the European stage, she vicariously participates in the creative virtù and
the glamour of both writers.
Finally, Women, Rhetoric, and Drama seeks to provide further incentive
for Italy’s recognition on the European continent while it bears witness
to the Italians as the rst to theorize and experiment with the genres of
comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the pastoral mode well before their
neighbors in France, Spain, and England. The lacuna Italy suffered with re-
spect to tragedy in George Steiner’s survey and theorization on the genre in
The Death of Tragedy (Knopf, 1961), a genre deemed ‘unique to the Western
tradition,’ needs to be recalled and redressed.30 As Richard Andrews points
out, Italian classical tragedy, along with pastoral drama, helped to launch
music drama in the form of ‘early opera’; together, these are all forms of
composition inherited from the Italians.31 What we also need to keep in
mind is that female performers were allowed on the stages of Italy more
than one hundred years prior to the English, the French, and the Spanish,
for whom the Italians provided the impetus and blueprint for what has
only recently been recognized as their greatest innovation: “the unmasked
actresses who emerged in troupes in the mid-sixteenth century, playing
the elegant, volatile innamorata.”32 For several decades now, France and
England have received most of the attention of Anglo-American feminist
scholars, thereby overshadowing Italy and its prodigious proto-feminist ac-
tivity. In that respect as well Italy’s cultural prominence and its pioneering
status needs to be underscored.
My hope with the present volume is that its close readings of under-
represented texts will either help to refocus perspectives, alter or enhance
commonly held notions, or simply encourage a fruitful and ongoing debate
about women, rhetoric, and drama in early modern Italy.
Notes
1 A pioneer in Anglo-American studies of Italian comedy and tragedy, Marvin
Herrick claims that the Italian playwrights were “slavish imitators” of the
ancients: Plautus and Terence with respect to comedy; Sophocles, Euripedes,
and Seneca with respect to tragedy. See Italian Comedy in the Renaissance
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960) and idem., Italian Tragedy in the
Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965). Herrick’s two volumes
still serve as useful reference manuals. With a thesis attached to the idea that
the moderns simply ‘recycled’ the ancient models of Plautus and Terence,
10 Introduction
Maggie Günsberg adopts a distorted view of Renaissance Italian theater, one
that completely erases and undervalues the agency of its female characters.
See Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); see also, Richard Andrews,
Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. Chapter 2 and 114–6.
Providing a general overview while also taking stock of women’s entreé into the
nascent genre of pastoral drama, Lisa Sampson’s research is fundamental and
the present study is much indebted to it. See Pastoral Drama in Early Modern
Italy: The Making of a New Genre (Oxford: Legenda, 2006); see also Arnaldo
Di Benedetto, “L’Aminta e la pastorale cinquecentesca in Italia,” in Torquato
Tasso e la cultura estense (Florence: Olschki, 1999), vol. 3, 1121–49.
2 To date, studies that analyze gender in Italian Renaissance comedy are scarce,
and, though useful in some respects, they tend to lack depth and/or breadth.
See, for instance, Anthony Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern
Drama: Comic Elders on the Italian and Shakespearean Stage (Farnham,
UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009); Laura Giannetti, Lelia’s
Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Yael Manes, Motherhood and
Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy (Farnham, UK
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011). Critical studies that focus on
women’s roles in tragedy are even more meager, in both Anglo- American and
Italian scholarship. See, however, Alessandro Bianchi, Alterità ed equivalenza:
modelli femminili nella tragedia italiana del Cinquecento (Milan: UNICOPLI,
2007); Salvatore Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance (Lewis-
berg: Bucknell University Press, 2002) and idem., the last two chapters in The
Poetics of Imitation in the Italian Theater of the Renaissance (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 2013). A caveat, as we assess Di Maria’s contribution
to the eld, is an often-dated bibliography that omits American, British, and
Italian criticism. On the overall contribution of Di Maria 2002 and 2013, see
the reviews by Richard Andrews (Modern Language Review, vol. 98 no. 3
[July 2003], 732–3 and vol. 111 no. 1 [January 2016], 267–8).
3 Stock characters in Roman comedy featured the father or senex, the young
male lover, the wily servant, and the braggart soldier, various pimps, para-
sites, male servants, and slaves; some comedies included a matronly gure as
well as a meretrix, or courtesan. Respectable young girls of marriageable age,
when listed among the dramatis personae, often have no speaking part. More-
over, those women who do speak in Roman comedy conform to certain pat-
terns whereby their representations are reduced to generic “feminine speech
mannerisms” even when those same stereotypes cross gender boundaries (see
Dorota M. Dutsch, Feminine Discourse in Roman Comedy: On Echoes and
Voices [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]). The bibliography on the
Decameron’s inuence on Italian comic plots is ample though by no means
exhaustive. See, for instance, Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Birth of Modern
Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969);
Angela Guidotti, Il modello e la trasgressione: commedie del primo ‘500
(Rome: Bulzoni, 1983); Pamela D. Stewart, Retorica e mimica nel Decameron
e nella commedia del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1986); Andrews, Scripts
and Scenarios, 18–20, 115–6, and passim; Angelo Mazzocco and Elizabeth H.D.
Mazzocco, “The Decameron and Italian Renaissance Comedy,” in Approaches
to Teaching Boccaccio’s Decameron (New York: Modern Language Asso-
ciation, 2000), 142–8; Richard Andrews, “Erudite Comedy” in A History of
Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 39–43. Criticism on theDecameron’s engagementwith
Introduction 11
issuesofsex and gender is extensive. See, for instance, Teodolinda Barolini,
“‘Le parole son femine e i fatti sono maschi’: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the
Decameron (Decameron II.10),” Studi sul Boccaccio vol. 21 (1993): 175–97.
For a relatively recent volume that explores Boccaccio’s gendered ‘rhetoric’ see
Marilyn Migiel, A Rhetoric of the Decameron (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2003).
4 Pioneering to a certain extent, the comedies of Lodovico Ariosto often feature a
young nubile girl who is either silent or plays only a marginal role in the unfold-
ing of the plot. One such comedy, La cassaria (1508), is generally considered
as the rst play to usher in the modern’s experimentation in the genre. What
distinguished Cassaria from previous plays was its ‘stageability’ (see Giorgio
Padoan, L’Avventura della commedia rinascimentale, [Padua: Piccin, 1996],
15). For a succinct discussion of Ariosto’s contribution see Peter Brand, “Ariosto
and Ferrara” in History of Italian Theatre, 44–50; and Andrews, Scripts and
Scenarios, 35–47. If Ariosto paved the way for some playwrights, others forged
their own models and differed from him especially on the issue of the young
nubile girl’s more vivid presence in the balance of the plot.
5 Of the eighty or so tragedies produced in Italy between 1500 and 1600, more
than three quarters bear a female protagonist’s name in the title, but that attests
to only a supercial and rather obvious claim to the genre’s female- gendered
focus.
6 Radcliff-Umstead underscores playwrights’ close observation and subsequent
representation of daily life in a contemporary setting in his survey of Italian
Renaissance comedy; see also Di Maria 2002 and 2013. On women as histori-
cal ‘subjects’ and ‘agents’ more inuential than previously assumed, a prospect
that has prompted a re-examination of the patriarchal model in recent years,
see Alexander Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern
Venice (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 135–50
and passim. Virginia Cox’s Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and The Prodigious Muse: Women’s
Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2011) reveal the sustained nature of women’s writing in Italy throughout
the Cinquecento and into the Seicento. Cox’s publications provide the impetus
for my inclusion of some of the female dramatic authors studied in this volume;
in general, I owe a great deal to her meticulous archival research.
7 The term ‘erudite’ (sometimes referred to as ‘regular’) refers to the standardized
structural components of dramatic writing in the vernacular: the division into
ve Acts and relevant scenes and the observation of the unities of time, place,
and action, following neo-classical precept; importantly, the term also refers
to and distinguishes ‘scripted’ and ‘learned’ (that is, based on imitation of the
ancients) from ‘improvised’ dramatic composition and performance. That these
two facets of Italian drama began to intermingle around the mid-sixteenth
century with the rise of the commedia dell’arte phenomenon is by now an un-
disputed fact. See, for instance, Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios and Robert
Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002). With specic reference to ‘erudite’ comedy
see Andrews 1993 and 2006; and Donald Beecher, “Introduction: ‘Erudite’
Comedy in Renaissance Italy” in Renaissance Comedy: The Italian Masters,
vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 1–25.
8 On certain technical aspects of Italian Renaissance dramaturgy, see Di Maria
2002 and 2013; though this critic’s analyses are useful to a degree, some of his
assertions and conclusions have been called into question.
9 Some of the authors to whom I am alluding here are Giraldi Cinzio, Lodovico
Dolce, Luigi Groto, Pomponio Torelli, and Valeria Miani. On Giraldi, see the
12 Introduction
now-classic essay by Riccardo Bruscagli “G.B. Giraldi: Comico, Satirico,
Tragico” in Stagioni della civiltà estense (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983), 161–86;
on Dolce, see the recent festschrift ed. Paolo Marini and Paolo Procaccioli, Per
Lodovico Dolce: Miscellanea di Studi I [Passioni e competenze del letterato]
(Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2016); on Torelli see Il debito delle lettere: Pomponio
Torelli e la cultura farnesiana di ne Cinquecento ed. Alessandro Bianchi,
Nicola Catelli, and Andrea Torre (Milan: UNICOPLI, 2012); on Groto see
Giovanni Benvenuti, Il cieco d’Adria: vita ed opere di Luigi Groto (Sala
Bolognese: A. Forni, 1984).
10 Although Dolce’s dialogue was a rifacimento of Juan Luis Vives’s De institu-
tione feminae christianae of 1524, it was nevertheless one of the most popular
and inuential texts on the subject. The dialogue’s interlocutors are Flaminio,
the main speaker, and Dorothea, his pupil; it is divided into three books: the
rst gives instructions for the young, unmarried virgin, the second turns to
the married woman, while the third discusses the widow. According to Paul
F. Grendler’s account, Dolce’s dialogo numbered at least ve editions: 1545,
1547, 1553, 1559/60 and 1622. See Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy
and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989),
87 n. 2. On Dolce as a man of letters, theorist, translator, and editor, see Per
Lodovico Dolce. For a modern edition of Dolce’s dialogue see ed. Helena
Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA-Modern Humanities Research Association,
2015). I shall revisit Dolce’s treatise in Chapter 1; his tragedies form an integral
part of Chapter 2.
11 “On the matter of speaking, I do not commend her to be chatty around other
women let alone around men; though I do not wish her to be completely silent,
but that she speak little and according to the time, place, and the particular
occasion. For, generally, it is inappropriate for women to speak much, and so it
is very necessary and useful that during their childhood, they get accustomed
to speaking little: since, it is from the tongue that many ills issue forth.” The
same advice is reiterated at 30v–31r. Throughout this volume translations are
my own, unless otherwise stated.
12 Domenichi penned more than one treatise on women: La nobiltà delle donne
(Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1549) and La donna di corte (Lucca:
Vincenzo Busdraghi, 1564); while the rst may be described as ‘prowoman’
in its pronouncements, the latter is far less positive in its portrayal of women’s
‘nature.’ Among other positive contributions, in the earlier text Domenichi cre-
ates a self-conscious distinction between “slavery” (servitù) and “marriage”
(matrimonio), terms that were often condoned—or denounced as in Moderata
Fonte’s protofeminist dialogue, Il merito delle donne—for being almost
synonymous (Domenichi, 207v). Dolce, on the other hand, is among the rst to
condone marriage as a “partnership” (38r, 47r–48v, 52v and passim). I alert the
reader to some inconsistencies in pagination in the 1545, 1547, and 1553 edi-
tions of Dolce’s dialogue; citations come mainly from the 1547 edition. More is
revealed about Domenichi’s role with respect to women at the end of Chapter5.
Fonte’s dialogue remains a source of reference throughout this book.
13 Rehearsing a common, widely held view, Dolce writes: “[…] la castità, della
quale spesso io parlo, come reina di tutte le virtù” (28v and 55v); though he does
qualify this claim when discussing her education, as pointed out in Chapter 1.
The discourse continues in an equally conservative tone: “a questa [i.e. her
‘castità’] seguiranno le due inseparabili sue compagne, la vergogna e la so-
brietà: alle quali verrà dietro tutto il choro delle altre: la modestia, la conti-
nenza, la umiltà, la frugalità, la diligenza, e quella che tiene il primo luoco, la
pura e sincera religione” (ibid.). Dolce follows this list of ‘virtù’ with necessary
Introduction 13
restrictions that should be placed on a young girl’s movement: “torno a dire che
di rado esca di casa” (she should seldomly leave her home); and, when she does,
she should not do so unchaperoned.
14 See, for instance, Isabella Andreini: una letterata in scena, a collection of con-
ference proceedings ed. Carlo Mano (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2014); Rosalind
Kerr, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte
Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Anne MacNeil, Music and
Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth-Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
15 Bernardi’s pastoral is in preparation for The Other Voice in Early Modern
Europe Series (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies)
edited by Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson with Anna Wainwright, trans. Cox
and Wainwright.
16 Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2017 and 2018.
17 There was indeed an enormous amount of theorizing in the early part of
the sixteenth- century with the translation and commentary tradition on
Aristotle’s Poetics, the main text (made available in Latin translation only
in 1536) with which Italian theorists engaged. The interested reader will be
guided to the theoretical discussions behind the practice whenever necessary;
commentary and primary texts are available in Bernard Weinberg’s A History
of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961) as well as the four volume Trattati di poetica e retorica
del Cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 1970). For a brief, general overview of the
theoretical discussions which were mainly concerned with tragedy, see Andrews
(“Tragedy” in A Historyof Italian Theatre, 84–90).
18 Shifra Armon summarizes the ‘general consensus’ regarding textual representa-
tions of gender as follows: “gender ‘itself’ does not exist, embodied and un-
mediated, somewhere beyond language or action. To the contrary, speech and
action produce and reproduce gender, and it is in speech and action that gender’s
recombinations and relocations occur.” See Masculine Virtue in Early Modern
Spain (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 5.
19 On this fascinating topic see “Women as Authors: Letter Writing and the
Heroides” Chapter 3 of Carole E. Newlands’ Ovid (London and New York:
Tauris, 2015), 47–69. Newlands delivers an extremely lucid and highly sensitive
reading of the Ovidian text—in many ways, a pioneering trend-setter, well
ahead of its time.
20 Ruzante’s comedy forms an integral part of my discussion on comedy in
Chapter 1, as detailed below.
21 Therefore, if the term “virtù” is translated into English as ‘virtue’ (as I and
other critics do) one must keep in mind its intricate associations. The term was
theorized by Niccolò Machiavelli in the early sixteenth-century in chapter VI
of his treatise, Il Principe (The Prince) under the subheading “Of new princi-
palities that are acquired through one’s arms and virtù;” Machiavelli’s concept
gained currency in virtually every category of Renaissance writing. Much ink
has been spilled on deciphering this complex term; see, for instance, Russell
Price “The Senses of Virtù in Machiavelli,” European Studies Review vol. 3
no.4 (October 1973): 316–9; most recently, Erica Benner, Machiavelli’s Prince:
A New Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
22 Discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca [Venice: Bernardo Giunti, 1582], ed.
Maria Luisa Doglio (Palermo: Sellerio, 1997), 57.
23 Origini e icone del mito di Torquato Tasso (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002), 31. On
Tasso’s engagement with sixteenth-century polemics on the ‘woman question’
see Laura Benedetti, “Virtù feminile e virtù donnesca? Torquato Tasso, Lucrezia
14 Introduction
Marinella ed una polemica rinascimentale” and M. L. Doglio, “Il Tasso e le
donne. Intorno al Discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca” in Torquato Tasso
e la cultura estense, vol. 2, 449–56.
24 At the discourse’s conclusion, Tasso ushers in a number of contemporary and an-
cient women recognized for their virtù; among them are the Queen of England,
Caterina de’ Medici, Margherita di Savoia, Lucrezia Borgia, Isabella Estense
Gonzaga, Giovanna d’Aragona, Vittoria Colonna; Sappho, Corinna, Zenobia,
Diotima, Aspasia, etc. A few decades prior, in his dialogue, La nobiltà delle
donne, Domenichi lls up the text’s last pages with dozens of ancient and, no-
tably, contemporary ‘virtuous’ women, some of whose lyrics he would later an-
thologize in the rst such collection of poetry exclusively dedicated to women
writers (see La nobiltà delle donne, Book IV, 152rff. and Book V, 222rff; at
244r Mutio, one of Domenichi’s main speakers, summons up a number of cities
on the peninsula, beginning with Naples, whose ‘modern’ women he names
and praises for their beauty and various virtù).
25 The Petrarchan lexicon looms large in poetic forms and the rhetorical strategies
of women’s speech in both tragedy and pastoral; with a focus on tragedy, this
is the subject of a forthcoming essay, “Tragic Heroines and the Rhetoric of ‘Bel
Morir’: Petrarch’s Legacy and Italian Tragedy.” Limitations of space preclude
its inclusion into the present volume.
26 That said, Valeria Miani, who penned the only extant tragedy and a pastoral
drama, is also thought to have authored two comedies, though neither survives.
27 A bilingual edition and translation, entitled The Buffoons, by Sara Diaz and
Jessica Goethals, is forthcoming with The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe
Series (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2017).
28 The term ‘theatergram’ was coined by Louise George Clubb in Italian Drama
in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) to describe
any element or ‘unit’ of plot, action, character, language, or a combination of
these which is then used and reused by subsequent dramatists. The term will be
used throughout this volume in its various associations.
29 Angelo Ingegneri, Della poesia rappresentativa (Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini,
1598) ed. Maria Luisa Doglio (Ferrara: Edizioni Panini, 1989), 25.
30 The Death of Tragedy was reprinted in 1996 (New Haven: Yale University
Press). Ground-breaking in terms of resetting the balance with respect to the
Italians as pioneers in the dramatic genres is Louise George Clubb’s Italian
Drama in Shakespeare’s Time; in Scripts and Scenarios Andrews also recties
the debt owed to the Italians to a certain extent with respect to comedy, see
esp. 204–26; Radcliff-Umstead makes a similar point in the conclusion to
his 1969 volume, though again, limited to the comic genre; see also Beecher,
“Introduction: From Italy to England: The Sources, Conventions, and Inuence
of ‘Erudite Comedy’” in Renaissance Comedy: The Italian Masters, vol. 2,
3–20. Two recent and important contributions, edited by Robert Henke and
Eric Nicholson, promise to make more headway on this issue. See Transnational
Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ash-
gate Publishing, 2008) and Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater
(Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014). See also Michele
Marrapodi, Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories: Anglo- Italian
Transactions (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011).
31 Andrews, “Tragedy,” in A History of Italian Theatre, 89.
32 Pamela Allen Brown, “Dido, Boy Diva of Carthage: Marlowe’s Dido Tragedy
and the Renaissance Actress” in Transnational Mobilities, 113–30 at 113; Eric
Nicholson, “Ophelia Sings like a Prima Donna Innamorata: Ophelia’s Mad
Scene and the Italian Female Performer” in Transnational Exchange, 81–98;
Introduction 15
and, idem., “Romance as Role Model: Early Female Performances of the
Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata” in Renaissance Transactions:
Ariosto and Tasso ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1999), 246–69. See also Andrews, “The Renaissance Stage” in A History
of Italian Theatre, 31–8 at 31. If Linda Carroll is correct, the performance
troupe of Angelo Beolco (Ruzante) included women as early as 1529, and per-
haps even earlier.
