FERRARA IN VOLPONE

ROCCO CORONATO

Cuckolds are painfully alert to the urban scene – at least in the Renaissance: as Corvino explains in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the scena di città, or urban scene, offers a natural habitat for their activities. Both jealous husband and potential bawd to his wife Celia, Corvino rants against the mountebank-show enacted by Volpone, disguised as the quack Scoto Mantuano, as if there were “No house but mine to make [his] scene”.1 For the urban scene can be seen in two ways, as Corvino himself well illustrates when he juxtaposes the perspicuity of the show with his own privileged viewpoint over the square: “No windows on the whole Piazza, here,/To make your properties, but mine? but mine?” (II.iii.5-6). As Corvino learns on his skin, the Italian Renaissance scena di città assigned an exemplary value to such properties. Building on the classical treatises on scenography and the tradition of Roman theatre, the urban scene combines the characters’ plots and passions within a place endowed with a perspective that naturally calls for a ruler. This perspective also calls for a sense of “publicity”, where making private matters go public equates with making them comprehensible. My working assumption is that such is the pervasiveness of the Italian Renaissance scena di città that it works even in the absence of any proven contact. In this study of the urban scene in Volpone, I will assume that the ideal city of is more real than Jonson’s mythical Venice, offering as it does the best “windows on the whole Piazza”.2

1 Ben Jonson, Volpone, II.iii.2. All quotations refer to the New Mermaid edition. 2 David McPherson investigates the connection between theatricality and Venice in Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice, proving the extent to which Jonson modelled the Venice of Volpone on “the reputations of both Imperial and Renaissance Venice” (100). For the mediation of Sir Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gasparo Contarini, see McPherson, “Lewkenor’s Venice and Its Sources”. The usage of splendour and spectacularity is scrutinized in Leo Salingar and Roberta Mullini in their contributions to Shakespeare’s : Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, eds M. Marrapodi et al, Manchester, 1993. 28 Rocco Coronato

One is advised to look no further: Ferrara was the ideal Renaissance city. Starting from the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Este Court hosted Piero della Francesca, Pisanello, Jacopo Bellini, Rogier van der Weyden and Mantegna, who rephrased European and Italian artistic themes in a plastic synthesis of the Renaissance principles of harmony and decorum.3 This artistic activity mingled with innovations in urban planning such as the Herculean Addition, a pioneering mediation between the medieval structure of the city, the rising needs of mercantilism and the Utopian nature of the ideal city. On a literary and scenographic level, the experimentation in the functional adaptation of Renaissance city architecture was implemented by the appropriation of the classics. In the latter end of the fifteenth century, Ferrara was the first Court to stage translations of the plays of Plautus, immediately followed by autonomous Italian works.4 The imitation and remodelling of the classical sources hinged upon the interpretation of the Vitruvian scenography, culminating in the scena di città, the “scenographic topos of the real-symbolic square”, as Lodovico Zorzi defines it, that would later be adapted in , Venice and other Italian cities.5 Two elements appealed most to Italian humanists’ theory of scenography: the subdivision of the orchestra and the three types of scena. The manuscript of Vitruvius’ De Architectura, found in 1414, did not in fact include any drawings, a lacuna that elicited copious conjectural reconstruction of the edifices described.6 Vitruvius reports that the design of the theatre is shaped by four equilateral triangles inscribed into a circle, and that “the stage will be made

3 For a general introduction to the study of the Este Court, see The Renaissance in Ferrara and Its European Horizons, eds June Slamons and Walter Moretti, Cardiff and Ravenna, 1984. An illuminating description of Ferrara’s “Stadtgeist”, ultimately questioning the canonical distinction between the tyrant courts and the republics, is Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Toward a Reinterpretation of the Renaissance in Ferrara”, Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance, 30 (1968), 267-81. A still unsurpassed exploration of art in Ferrara is Roberto Longhi’s Officina ferrarese (Opere Complete, 5 vols, Florence, 1956, V). André Chastel’s Renaissance méridionale (Paris, 1965) offers a general introduction to Ferrara and other centres of the Italian Renaissance. 4 The first period, from Carnival 1486 to Carnival 1503 (both marked by the performance of the Menaechmi), saw the enactment of Italian translations of Plautus, enriched by choreographic intermezzi, in the palaces and yards adjoining the Palazzo and the Piazza del Duomo. A second period intervenes in the years 1529-1532, with the creation of the Court theatre where the later plays by Ariosto were staged (Lodovico Zorzi, “Ferrara: il sipario ducale”, ch. 1 of Il Teatro e la città; Saggi sulla scena italiana, , 1977, 17-21, 26-30. 5 Ibid., 7. The translations in the text are mine. 6 For the appropriation of Vitruvius during the Italian Renaissance, see Ferruccio Marotti, “Per un’epistemologia del teatro nel Rinascimento: le teoriche sullo spazio teatrale”, and Cesare Molinari, “Il teatro nella tradizione vitruviana da Leon Battista Alberti a Daniele Barbaro”, both in Biblioteca Teatrale, 1 (1971), 15-29 and 30-46 respectively.