Challenging Male Authored Poetry:

Margherita Costa’s Marinist Lyrics (1638–1639)

Julie Louise Robarts ORCID iD 0000-0002-1055-3974

Submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

February 2019

School of Languages and Linguistics The University of Melbourne

Abstract:

Margherita Costa (c.1600–c.1664) authored fourteen books of prose, poetry and theatre that were published between 1630 and 1654. This is the largest printed corpus of texts authored by any woman in early modern Europe.

Costa was also a virtuosa singer, performing opera and chamber music in courts and theatres first in Rome, where she was born, and in Florence, Paris,

Savoy, Venice, and possibly Brunswick. Her dedicatees and literary patrons were the elite of these courts.

This thesis is the first detailed study of Costa as a lyric poet, and of her early works — an enormous production of over 1046 quarto pages of poetry, and 325 pages of love letters, published in four books between 1638 and 1639:

La chitarra, Il violino, Lo stipo and Lettere amorose.

While archival evidence of Costa’s writing and life is scarce due to her itinerant lifestyle, her published books, and the poetic production of the male literary networks who supported her, provide a rich resource for textual, paratextual and intertextual analysis on which the findings of this study are based.

This thesis reveals the role played by Costa in mid-century Marinist poetry and culture. This study identifies the strategies through which Costa opened a space for herself as an author of sensual, comic and grotesque poetry and prose in Marinist and libertine circles in Rome, Florence and Venice. The most striking feature of Costa’s lyric corpus, and the central focus of my analysis, is her production of hundreds of female and male poetic voices in her poetry and love letters. This research project follows from Costa’s unique position as a female author within the Marinist tradition, and interrogates her

– ii – use of gendered poetic voices, and the implications to our understandings of authorship, representations of gender relations and baroque poetics.

Four main questions will be addressed:

What were the opportunities for female cultural production in courts,

academies and literary circles, and how did Costa access these

opportunities?

What challenges to both genre conventions and gender representations are

then mounted in Costa’s authorship of gendered poetic voices?

What are the rhetorical and ideological implications for female authorship and

the representation of gender relations of the Lettere amorose?

How does Costa stretch the boundaries of the baroque grotesque through

female authorship?

Most broadly in this thesis I argue that Costa’s lyric corpus continued and innovated baroque poetic conventions to keep Giambattista Marino (1569–

1625) and Marinism present in literary culture, in defiance of policies of the

Church in Rome that sought to censor and silence sensual poetry and prose.

Costa’s corpus is shaped to represent Marino’s central works, and Costa is presented as a new Marino.

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Declaration

(i) This thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD.

(ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material

used,

(iii) the thesis is fewer than the 100,000 words in length, exclusive of

tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Signed:

Julie Robarts Date

– iv – Acknowledgments

I thank Associate Professor Andrea Rizzi, and Associate Professor Stephen Kolsky for their guidance throughout the project. I thank Andrea, as my principal supervisor, for his unfailing kindness and positivity in all stages of progress, and all challenges, and his impeccable advice on academic style. I thank Dr Catherine Kovesi for her encouragement and warm support. I warmly thank Dr Diana Hiller for her final draft read through, for punctuation and clarity. A number of scholarships provided financial support. From the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, a Helen MacPherson Smith Scholarship. Support for research in Italy was funded by an Emma Grollo Scholarship also from the Faculty of Arts, and a Cassamarca Scholarship from the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. Travel bursaries to attend conferences were received from the Australian and New Zealand Medieval and Early Modern Society, the Renaissance Society of America, and the University of Western Australia Medieval and Early Modern Group. I have also benefited from an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship throughout my candidature. I thank Professor Lorenzo Geri, Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” of Rome, for an encouraging conversation that also brought a vital secondary source to my attention. I am grateful for the kind assistance of librarians in the National Libraries of Rome, Florence, and Venice, the Biblioteca Governativa Lucca, the Biblioteca Giovardiana, Veroli, the Vatican Library, and especially Dr Isabelle de Conihout, formerly of the Mazarin library, who shared her knowledge about the bindings of Costa’s books in that library. I also thank the librarians and administration at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard Centre for the Renaissance, for the use of the library and other facilities generously made available to the scholarly community, for eight weeks in 2017. I thank my family, Stephen Robarts, Annice and Irma for their loving support and patience with my pre-occupation, especially in the last intense months of writing and editing. I thank my mother Susan for all her practical grandmotherly care and love over these years of graduate research. I thank my father Geoff for his enduring enthusiasm for all things Italian. I thank Carol, wonderful musician and dear friend for tempting me back to music with some Monteverdi. I thank my brother, Stephen Braybrook, for taking care of so much in the last two years, that made it possible bring this ship into port. I thank my graduate research peers and friends, Amy, Elizabeth, Josh, Jonathan, Amie, Giuseppe, Ruth, Samira, Joan, Janet, and many others who have offered encouragement, and have supported my family during my absences, throughout my candidature.

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Table of Contents

Abstract:...... ii Declaration ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi A note on the transcription of texts ...... viii Chapter One — Introduction...... 1 Costa’s early lyric poetry and love letters...... 2 Costa’s literary networks ...... 7 Venice and the Accademia degli Incogniti ...... 12 The female voice in Marinist poetry ...... 15 A new approach to female authorship in the Italian Baroque ...... 18 Voice ...... 19 Gendered authorship and the poetic subject ...... 26 Simulacrum ...... 34 Baroque form ...... 37 The grotesque ...... 40 Approach and Methodology...... 42 The limits of the text ...... 42 The paratext ...... 45 Intertextuality ...... 45 The book as a social institution ...... 48 Reading female textual authority in the pornographic tradition ...... 50 Literary collaboration: community of interpretation ...... 52 Thesis outline ...... 53 Chapter Two — New opportunities for female voice in Marinist poetry ...... 56 From female performance to poetry publication ...... 57 Opportunities through praise: Costa as a Diva, Muse and Siren ...... 65 Costa’s corpus as a simulacrum of Marino ...... 70 Opportunities for pro-woman literature in Florence ...... 77 “Dotta beltà,” Adimari’s praise of Costa’s authorship ...... 88 Making a female Marinist author ...... 92 Chapter Three — Costa’s Bella donna and her challenge to male dominated lyric ...... 94 The Bella donna and the libertine poet(ess) ...... 95 The effects of authorial gender and narrative metalepsis ...... 100

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The Bella donna: a virtuosa in a garden, and a courtesan at war ...... 101 Marino’s courtesan poems, in the persona of the Bella donna ...... 104 Costa’s parody of censored material — the ‘Violamento di Lilla’ ...... 112 Simulation, dissimulation, and the lyric persona ...... 124 Costa and Adimari’s Tersicore — Giving voice to the female grotesque .... 129 Chapter Four — From Bella donna to Donna libera ...... 139 The implications of epistolary dialogue in the Lettere amorose ...... 139 Costa’s Lettere amorose: Continuity and innovation ...... 142 Epistolary dialogue: reciprocal and reversible roles ...... 145 Costa’s Ovidian eroto-didactic authority...... 147 Pupils of the arts of love ...... 152 “Ch’ io libera nacqui”: a manifesto of the Donna libera ...... 154 Gender parity in eloquence and desire ...... 162 Chapter Five — Stretching the Boundaries of the Baroque Grotesque ...... 179 Baroque grotesque female authorship ...... 187 Costa’s La chitarra as grotesque hybrid text ...... 191 Costa’s hybrid paratext ...... 193 La chitarra as canzoniere-amoroso-giocoso ...... 202 Performing grotesque gender and genres ...... 207 Stretching baroque grotesque gender ...... 217 Chapter Six — Conclusion ...... 226 Margherita Costa — baroque female authorship ...... 229 Future directions ...... 231 Bibliography ...... 233 Manuscript sources ...... 233 Primary sources ...... 233 Secondary sources ...... 236 Costa Portraits ...... 247 Figure 1. Frontispiece, La chitarra...... 247 Figure 2. Frontispiece Lettere amorose...... 248 Figure 3. Frontispiece Lo stipo...... 249 Appendix A. La chitarra Schematic Table...... 250 Appendix B. List of Authors named in Costa’s texts...... 253

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A note on the transcription of texts

In this thesis, transcription of early printed texts and manuscripts adheres to the following criteria: a) Variant spelling and accents, typographical errors, etymological and pseudo-etymological h, capitalisation and punctuation that do not affect the meaning of the text are transcribed with no changes. b) I have distinguished between u and v, and expanded words contracted with the ~.

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Chapter One — Introduction

This research on Margherita Costa’s early lyric works offers a new insight into female authorship in the Italian literary baroque.1 Costa was one of only a few female writers whose lyric poetry was published in the Italian peninsular in the mid-Seicento.2 While Costa’s close association with Marinist circles has been noted, this thesis is the first detailed study of Costa’s first four books of poetry and love letters.3 To define Costa’s place in this male dominated world of sensual poetry I have developed an innovative approach to gender and voice in intertextual poetic analysis that I outline below.

My interpretation of Costa’s large, heterogenous, and unconventional corpus applies a critical methodology developed in the most recent analyses of

Marino’s poetic works. This approach emphasises the importance of macro- structures organised around conceptual models for understanding Marinism, and seventeenth century poetry.

Non è nella curvatura di una metafora o in un variante ortografica

1 The literary baroque in Italy “defines the period from the death of Tasso (1595) to the foundation of the Accademia dell'Arcadia (1690).” Paolo Cherchi, "Chapter 16: The Seicento, The Baroque," in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature ed. Lino Pertile and Peter Brand, 301. 2 Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),, 204–210. The Prodigious Muse: Women's Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) 47–49. 3 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 213–14. Jessica Goethals, "The Bizarre Muse: The Literary Persona of Margherita Costa." Early Modern Women 12, no. 1 (2017), 53. For Costa’s theatrical works see Sara Díaz and Jessica Goethals, eds., The Buffoons: A Ridiculous Comedy: a Bilingual Edition / Margherita Costa (Toronto: Iter Press, 2018); Jessica Goethals, "The Patronage Politics of Equestrian Ballet: Allegory, Allusion, and Satire in the Courts of Seventeenth-Century Italy and France," Renaissance Quarterly, no. 4 (2017). The forthcoming book, containing case studies of both Margherita and her sister Anna Francesca Costa (fl. 1640-1654) will shed more light on Costa’s life: Courtney Quaintence, Performing Women: Opera, Literature, and the Female Voice in Early Modern Italy. – 1 –

che sta, che si può leggere la ‘rivoluzione’ mariniana. È la struttura nel suo complesso a fare la differenza. E nel caso della Lira…è il libro intero il luogo dei significati, nella sua scansione e nel suo gioco (asemantico, in quanto tale) di corrispondenze.4

The key stylistic feature of these books — a multitude of poetic and epistolary voices, male and female — at first appears at odds with the concept of an over- arching macro-structure. This copia is, however, a mark of the gender of the corpus. It signals the relationship between the model, Marino, and the copy or simulacrum — Costa, as one of inferiority.5 As I explore in this thesis, the corpus created by Costa and her Marinist and libertine supporters unfolds all the riches of baroque paradox and literary play, with questions about gender and knowledge as the motivating force.

Costa’s early lyric poetry and love letters

I consider the four books La chitarra, Il violino, Lo stipo and Lettere amorose, as a corpus.6 Superficially, the proximity of the years of publication of these books,

1638 and 1639, is one factor that brings them together. They are Costa’s only works that contain prefacing encomia, with a number of authors providing poems for several of the publications. The two works published in 1638 share

4 Luana Salvarani, "La machina versatile (introduzione)," in La Lira: 1614 (Lavis (Trento): La finestra, 2012), VII. 5 Daniel W. Smith, "The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism," Continental Philosophy Review 38, no. 1–2 (2005): 9. 6 Margherita Costa, La chitarra della Signora Margherita Costa Romana. Canzoniere amoroso, dedicata al sereniss. Ferdinando II, gran duca di Toscana (Francfort: Daniel VVastch, 1638); Il violino della Signora Margherita Costa Romana dedicato al sereniss. Ferdinando II, gran duca di Toscana (Francfort: Daniel VVastch, 1638); Lo stipo della signora Margherita Costa Romana, dedicato al Serenissimo Principe D Lorenzo de Medici (Venezia: 1639); Lettere amorose della Signora Margherita Costa Romana dedicate al Ser. Prencipe Gio. Carlo di Toscana, Generalissimo del Mare (Venetia: 1639). – 2 – publication details stating ‘Francfort’ ‘Per Daniel Wastch,’ and both 1639 books indicate Venice, with no printer, although Lo stipo is marked “Venezia,” and the

Lettere amorose is marked “Venetia.”7 La chitarra and the Lettere amorose share a portrait of Costa, creating a visual connection between the two books, and indicating that the publishers, if they were different, shared a plate of the image.8 There is also a visual connection between the Lettere amorose and Lo stipo: the roundels containing Costa’s image in the portraits of both books are encircled by a laurel wreath, the poet’s crown.9

Heterogeneity of literary form and register is a significant characteristic of this corpus. La chitarra and Il violino appear to be twin volumes, with letters of dedication to Ferdinando II de’ Medici dated within months of each other, on

April 15, and June 24. La chitarra is titled as a canzoniere, that is a poetry collection loosely arranged around one poetic persona, called the Bella donna.

The importance of this figure, which appears in La chitarra and Lettere amorose, will be explored throughout the thesis. The book is introduced and concluded with a comic capitolo a terza rima, the first published example of

Italian female-authored burlesque verse. The letter of dedication is also written in a comic and grotesque register. Appearing after the canzoniere is a poetic tenzone: three prose and verse letters each with a different collective voice, the

Begl’imbusti, the Caramoggi, and the Donne. The heterogeneity of La chitarra’s textual structure, outlined in Appendix A, is analysed in Chapter Five. The

7 The relationship between Lo stipo, La chitarra and Il violino is revealed in Chapter Two. 8 See Figures 1., 2., and 3. The differences between these portraits are analysed in Chapter Four. 9 Meredith Ray, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). – 3 – second book in the corpus, Il violino, is much shorter, 168 rather than 584 pages, with the subtitle Rime amorose. It is a poetry collection without a defined narrative, written in a variety of male and female poetic voices.

Lo stipo (cabinet or treasure box), is dedicated to Don Lorenzo de’ Medici

(1599–1644) the uncle of Ferdinando II. It is a collection containing five chapters, called cassettini, of encomia for members of the Medici establishment and Florentine intellectual circles, and nine Florentine academies, ending with a sixth chapter of humorous grotesque poems with titles including the “Astrologo offeso da Morbo Gallico.”

The Lettere amorose was dedicated to Giovan Carlo de’ Medici, the brother of Ferdinando II, to celebrate his appointment as General of the

Mediterranean fleet by the King of Spain. Costa had contact with Giovan Carlo and his younger brothers in their work as impresarios. They managed public theatres in Florence and the Medici stall of singers that included Margherita

Costa’s sister Francesca. The fictional love letters in the book fall into two distinct sections, with the first half relating experiences of love and antipathy in contemporary voices, and the second half relating comic and grotesque scenarios in the voices of personae defined by a variety of grotesque physical attributes, including illness.

In this early, Florentine, period of Costa’s authorship much of her verse draws on comic and burlesque traditions broadly defined in the period as poesia giocosa, many of which had Florentine associations. In 1641 she published a highly risqué comedy, Li buffoni, dedicated to a Medici court entertainer,

Bernadino Ricci, or Il Tedeschino. The play was a parody of the Medici court, and the fraught relationship between the Ferdinando II de’ Medici and the

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Grand Duchess Vittoria delle Rovere. Costa’s formal choices situated her writing in her Tuscan, courtly context. The editor of Li buffoni, Jessica Goethals defines Costa’s burlesque, Florentine texts in these terms:

By adopting a comedic approach to a number of these texts, Costa inserted herself into the city’s burlesque literary tradition. With important fourteenth- and fifteenth-century roots, including works by figures like Lorenzo de’ Medici, this tradition embracing the sexual, sardonic, and irreverent elements of carnivalesque poetry and song rose to greater prominence over the course of the sixteenth century. The genre championed by Francesco Berni and his followers, who ranged from scholars to artists, found its practical and etymological origins in the burla, the joke or jest.10

As I will explore in the thesis, Costa’s use of poesia giocosa and the baroque grotesque, which I define below, in her poetry and love letters also connects her writing with contemporary examples of these genres. Poesia giocosa frequently combined humour with critique of poetic conventions, social mores, or powerful individuals through parody and satire. The Ragionamento dello Academico

Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de Greci, de' Latini, e de' Toscani… (1634) by

Florentine Nicola Villani (1590–1636) proposes a wide range of lyric forms and registers that sit within poesia giocosa. He lists Marino as an author of parody alongside Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), and Venetian Maffio Vernier (1550–

1586):

Habbiamo poi un nembo di altre poesie, che né dramatiche sono, né narrative; ma sono per lo più sentenze, capricii, e fantasie, che dell’istesso poeta ne vengono rappresentate. E queste sono i Capitoli, le canzoni, le canzonette, i cantici, i sonetti, i Madrigali. le

10 Jessica Goethals, "The Bizarre Muse: the Literary Persona of Margherita Costa," Early Modern Women 12, no. 1 (2017): 53.

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frottole, i rispetti, i disperati, le ballate, le barzellette, le stampite, i riboboli, gli strambotti, gl’indovinelli; e tutte le altre maniere somiglianti, che sotto il capo vengono della Lirica poesia.

Queste, o pudiche esser possono, o lascive. — dei Parodiografi, del Casa, Maffeo Veniero, P. Aretino, Cav. Salviati, Curtio Marignolli, e del Cav. Marino…. Ben ve ne hanno alcune che lascive sono in sostanza, e pudiche sembrano in apparenza…. Quelle poi che pudiche sono… di due maniere — toscane e mista con altre idiomi.11

Erotic and pornographic (lascive) texts also sat within this range of genres.12

The four books in this corpus are Costa’s only clandestinely published works. Although they include publication details, and three include the formula indicating permission to publish “Con Licenza de’ Superiori” on the title pages, these details are most likely false. There are no declarations of Inquisition readers and censors in any of the works. The misleading publication details might have been used in these cases to protect the printer(s) from prosecution, as the poetic genres Costa employs in the first three books, love poetry and comic poetry, were subject to censorship, and publishing any collection of love letters was prohibited by the Congregation of the Index.13

11 Niccola Villani, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de' Greci, de' Latini, e de' Toscani, con alcune poesie piacevoli (Venetia: G P Pinella, 1634), 71-72. 12 The critical label of “anticlassism” for this poetry is a problematic term that fails to account for the fact the most authors wrote in both “high” and “low” genres, they cannot easily be divided into two camps with regard to poetic tradition. Ivano Paccagnella, "La lettaratura anticlassicistica e dialettale, Il "Manierismo"," in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Enrico Malato (Roma: Salerno, 1995), 1141, Davide Messina, "Introduzione," in La Tina: equivoci rusticali di Antonio Malatesti (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014), 31. 13 Jennifer Helm, Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 138–39, 89–92, 96–97. – 6 –

The evidence that connects Costa’s books with Marinist and libertine circles in Rome, Florence and Venice, particularly the Roman Accademia degli

Umoristi, includes clandestine publication, ‘lascivious’ and burlesque themes, and the named network of male authors who provided encomia for the books.14

These connections are explored in the thesis through analysis of the formal and intertextual relations between Costa’s poetry and love letters and the poetry of these literary circles. I also explore a significant number of allusive references to poems by Marino that had been censored.

Costa’s literary networks

The literary network that supported Costa forms a web that connects Venice,

Rome and, most importantly, Florence. Despite the title pages claiming publication in Venice and Frankfurt, in Chapter Two I present new evidence to suggest that at least three works in this corpus were published in Florence, a city rarely studied for its involvement in Marinism or libertine clandestine publishing.

Mid seventeenth-century Marinism and libertinism were simultaneously literary, social and political labels. While Marinist poetry derives thematic and stylistic features from the writing of Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino, those individuals I label Marinist for this period were also Marino’s contemporaries, friends and peers.15 Marino had briefly been president of the Accademia degli

14 See Appendix B for list of authors of encomia. 15 Cherchi notes thematic and stylistic features that characterise ‘Marinist’ poetry: “their poetry has a propensity for emblematic images, for representation of concrete objects, including a more varied typology of women than the one imposed by the Petrarchan model. They set a higher value than previous poets on the themes of life's transience and of death.” Cherchi, "Chapter 16: The Seicento, Lyric Poetry.", 308. See also Franco Croce, "Introduzione al barocco," – 7 –

Umoristi, in 1623, the year of the election of Maffeo Barberini (1568–1644) to the papacy as Pope Urban VIII. The period that followed was one of deep disappointment for intellectuals and artists who had at first applauded the

Barberini papacy, as the cultural policy of the Holy See became increasingly conservative.16 In the late 1620s and early 1630s, members of the Umoristi, including Marino’s close friend Antonio Bruni (1593–1635), defended Marino and his works from the instruments of the Papacy, the Roman Congregations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and the Index.17

Marino’s poetry had faced scrutiny from ecclesiastic institutions from

1604, and gaining permission in Italy for re-publication or Italian editions of his works had proved difficult. The author experienced ongoing pressure and threats of imprisonment due to denunciations for impiety and obscenity in both published works and circulating manuscripts.18 Marino’s poetry was targeted due to its sensuality and sometimes explicit eroticism, use of classical images, and terms that bordered on blasphemy. Various attempts to correct the Adone

(Paris, 1623) to the satisfaction of the church repeatedly faltered and were finally suspended in 1629.19 One focus of both Marino’s defenders and opponents after his death in 1625 was the clandestine publication of his burlesque and satirical poems that had previously only circulated in

in I capricci di Proteo: percorsi e linguaggi del barocco; atti del convegno di Lecce, ed. Franco Croce (Rome: Salerno, 2000), 24-40. 16 Luisella Giachino, "Cicero-libertinus. La satira della Roma Barberiniana nell'Eudemia dell'Eritreo," Studi secenteschi 43 (2002): 185-215; Elena Tamburini, "Dietro la scena: comici, cantanti e letterati nell’Accademia Romana degli Umoristi," Studi secenteschi 50 (2009): 103-112. 17 Clizia Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura (Roma: Ed. Antenore, 2008), Chapter 10 “1625–27 La censura degli Umoristi, Il “Padre Mostro” e la condanna definitiva dell’Adone,” 242–68. 290–91. 18 Ibid., 1–6, 11. 19 Ibid., 280. – 8 – manuscript.20 This burlesque production bears directly on Costa’s La chitarra. I consider the connections between La chitarra and La murtoleide in Chapter

Two.21

All four of the books in Costa’s lyric corpus have Medici dedications.22

Historians indicate the importance of the late 1630s for the Grand Duke of

Tuscany Ferdinando II de’ Medici (1610–1670). It was in this period that he established his own court after the deaths of the Tuscan regents, the

Archduchesses Maria Maddalena, d. 1631, Christine of Lorainne, d. 1637.23

Ferdinando appears to have only had a brief window of public cultural engagement as a literary patron, due to involvement in various Italian fronts of the Thirty Year War, the 1642–1644 conflict with the Barberini over Castro, and significant fiscal problems in the following decades.24 Reflecting this,

20 Ibid., 275. 21 Giambattista Marino, La murtoleide fischiate del Cavaliere Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola. Aggontovi le Strigliate a Tomaso Stigliani, e L’Innamoramento di pupolo de la pupola, et altre curiosita piacevoli (Norinbergh,1649). Available in a modern edition, Sonia Schilardi, ed. La murtoleide del Marino: satira di un poeta "goffo" (Lecce: Argo, 2007), 100–1, appearing in multiple editions between 1626 and 1649. 22 Costa published four more books in Florence from 1640–41, and one presentation manuscript, Margherita Costa, La selva di cipressi, opere lugubre di Margherita Costa Romana, Dedicata al Ecc.mo Sig. Carlo di Lorena, Duca di Ghisa (Firenze: La Stamperia nuova di Massi e Landi, 1640); La flora feconda, drama, dedicato all'Altezza serenissima di Vittoria della Rovere G.Duca di Toscana (Fiorenza: nella stamperia d'Amador Massi e Lorenzo Landi, 1640); La flora feconda, poema, dedicato Ferdinando Secondo Duca di Toscana (Fiorenza: nella stamperia d'Amador Massi e Lorenzo Landi, 1640); “Festa reale per ballo de’ cavalli di Margherita Costa romana," Shelf mark II.II.371. (Magliabechiana: Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, 1640); Li buffoni, comedia ridicola (Fiorenza: Massi e Landi, 1641). 23 Franco Angiolini, "Il lungo seicento (1609–1737): Declino o stabiltà," in Il Principato mediceo, ed. Elena Fasano Guarini (Firenze: Casa Editrice le Monnier, 2003), 71. On a shift in visual, philosophical and literary culture see Carlo Del Bravo, "La "fiorita gioventù" del Volterrano," Artibus et Historiae, no. 1 (1980): 58. 24 Alessandro Lazzeri, Il principe e il diplomatico, Ferdinando II tra il destino e la – 9 –

Ferdinando received ten book dedications in the twenty-two years between

1622 and 1636, fourteen dedications in the five years between 1637 and 1642, and four in the following years to 1650.25

Florentine author Alessandro Adimari (1579–1649) is identified as a key supporter of Costa through his authorship of encomia in every book in the

1638–39 corpus. While a number of authors contributed poems to several works, Adimari’s is the only name to appear in all four. Adimari’s encomia are analysed in the course of this study as valuable chiavi di lettura for the texts they preface. This is one of many subtle signs of Adimari’s investment and involvement in Costa’s Florentine patronage, perhaps as her mentor and patron broker.26

Adimari was a member of many academies in Rome, Florence and

Venice, including the Umoristi, Apatisti, and the Incogniti, and an influential figure in the moderate baroque.27 He was also an important literary figure during the effective regency of Christine of Lorraine (1565–1637) that lasted from 1609

storia (Firenze: Edizioni Medicea, 1996), 70–78; Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del Granducato di Toscan sotto il governo della casa Medici, vol. III (1974), 514. 25 Census taken from search of catalogue of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze. Around 250 works were published between 1630 and 1650. Thirty of these had dedications to Ferdinando II. 26 Goethals, "The Bizarre Muse: The Literary Persona of Margherita Costa." Early Modern Women 12, no. 1 (2017), 53. The formative study on the dynamics of patron brokerage in Florence for this period is Janie Cole and Michelangelo Buonarroti, Music, Spectacle and Cultural Brokerage in Early Modern Italy: Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 2 vols (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 2011). 27 Sara Mamone, "Li due Adimari," in La passione teatrale: tradizioni, prospettive e spreco nel teatro italiano: 800 e 900. Studi per Alessandro D’Amico ed. G Tinterri (Rome: Bulzone, 1997), 223–27. Paola Marongiu, "Introduzione," in Alessandro Adimari, Tersicore, ed. Paola Marongiu (Torino: Edizioni Res, 2009), VII. Franco Croce, "Introduzione al barocco," in I capricci di Proteo, 24. – 10 – until her death, designing the gynocentric decorative program at Christine’s Villa

La Quiete in 1627.28 Historians have identified a significant pro-woman court culture during Christine’s oversight of the Tuscan Grand Duchy, shared with her daughter-in-law Maria Maddalena of Austria (1589–1631) after the death of

Cosimo II, between 1621 and 1631.29

Adimari’s most notable work was a prestigious translated edition of

Pindar’s Odes, with permissions to publish in Rome, Florence and Venice.30 He also undertook a program of publishing nine volumes named after the muses, of which six were published between 1628 and 1642.31 They contained fifty

28 Kelley Harness, "'La Flora' and the End of Female Rule in Tuscany," Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 3 (1998), 18; Alessandro Adimari, La quiete overo sessanta emblemi sacri: trenta cavati dal test.o vecchio et trenta dal nuovo; con l'immagine iconologica dell'istessa Quiete et due fontane per ornamento della villa di madama ser.ma Cristina di Loreno granduchessa di Toscana (Firenze: Zanobi Pignoni, 1632). 29 Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown, eds. Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany, trans. Monica Chojnacka (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015); Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 30 Horace, Ode di Pindaro ... tradotte in parafrasi ed in rima Toscana da A. Adimari ... Con osservazioni e confronti d'alcuni luoghi immitati ... da Orazio Flacco (Pisa: Tangli, 1631). 31 Alessandro Adimari, La tersicore: o vero scherzi, e paradossi poetici sopra la Beltà della donne, fra' difetti ancora, ammirabili, e vaghe (Firenze: Massi e Landi, 1637); Henceforth I cite the modern edition of this work: Alessandro Adimari, Tersicore, ed. Paola Marongiu (Torino: Edizioni Res, 2009); La Polinnia, ouero cinquanta sonetti ... fondati sopra sentenze di G. Cor. Tacito con argom: a ciascuno d'essi, ch' vniti insieme formano un breue discorso polit: e morale (P. Cecconcelli: Firenze, 1628); La Calliope o vero cinquanta sonetti morali con altrettanti documenti fondati sopra sentenze della scrittura sacra opera di Alessandro Adimari (Firenze: Massi e Landi, 1641); La Clio ouero cinquanta sonetti sopra piu persone della famiglia o casata degli Adimari che da che s'ha notizia del suo principio in Firenze fino all'anno 1550 sono stati per qualche virtù o dignita meriteuoli di memoria. Opera d'Alessandro Adimari fondata su'l testimonio d'istorici, o di scrittori degni di fede (Firenze: Massi e Landi, 1639); La Melpomene, ouero cinquanta sonetti funebri con altrettanti elogii oratorio-poetici (Firenze: Massi e Landi, 1640); L'Vrania, o vero 50 sonetti spirituali sopra piu santi et altre diuozioni fondati & esplicati con frasi della Scrittura Sacra (Firenze: Massi e Landi, 1642). – 11 – sonnets on political, historical and literary themes. Costa’s encomia for Adimari in Lo stipo indicates the esteem in which he was held as a teacher and scholar for these works:

L’arti del Cantor Greco ogni un comprende. E son gl’arcani suoi fatti palesi; Ond’ogni spirto al suono tuo s’accende, Ed ha gli spirti suoi di gloria accesi. Quasi da fonte alti pensieri prende A spander rivi di virtude intesi: In te la Grecia ha dilettoso il canto, E l’honore di lei fatto è tuo vanto.

Nè men il Choro delle dotte suore Cinge famoso, memorando alloro, E per te chiaro d’immortale honore Tesse di dotti carmi alto lavoro. Ogni Musa con rime a noi canore Per te saggia favella; e gemme, ed oro Spiega a noi di dottrine; e l’Appenino È per te di virtù Pindo divino.32

Adimari’s La Tersicore, o vero scherzi, e paradossi poetici sopra la beltà delle donne fra' difetti ancora ammirabili, e vaghe (1637) is an important intertext for

Costa’s lyric corpus, especially her Lettere amorose, and is crucial for this study.

Venice and the Accademia degli Incogniti

In Chapter Four of this thesis I propose a connection between Costa’s Lettere amorose and the Venetian academy of the Incogniti. From the 1630s Venetian

32 Costa, Lo stipo, 118. – 12 – printing was dominated by Giovan Francesco Loredano (1607–1661), founder of the Incogniti.33 The publication of heterodox texts, and clandestine printing, was possible in Venice in the mid Seicento as the city was still relatively free from Jesuits, after the Venetian Interdict, and Church censorship was weak.34

Loredano had written a biography of Marino in 1633, early in his literary and political life. By doing so he aligned his literary identity with the poetic achievements of the deceased author, and declared his sympathy with the embattled state of the publication of Marino’s works in Italy.35 The modern editor of this biography, Simone Bortot, considers Loredan’s choice to have been a calculated one:

Si trattava di una presa di posizione insieme audace ma anche non troppo compromettente, in grado di concorrere al lancio di una carriera ambiziosamente moderna e militante, senza rischiare di bruciarla con posizioni eterodosse che esulassero dall’ambito meramente letterario e retorico. Scelta, va precisato, di natura ideologica, intellettuale, morale.36

33 “[Loredano] è un mediatore-impresario la cui creazione, gli Incogniti, più che una regolare accademia sembrerebbe un’associazione per la stampa e divulgazione del libro. Un istituto che esiste in primo luogo per pubblicare le opere dei propri iscritti ma anche (forse soprattutto) che intende impiegare la rete di accademici sparsi in tutta Italia per pubblicizzarle e diffonderle.” Maurizio Slawinski, "Gli affanni della letteratura nella corrispondenza di Guidubaldo Benamati ad Angelico Aprosio (1629–1652)," Aprosiana. Rivista annuale di studi barocchi 10 (2002): 28. cited in Simona Bortot, "Introduzione," in "Il Marino viverà": edizione commentata della Vita del Cavalier Marino di Giovan Francesco Loredano (Venezia: Edizioni Ca' Foscari-Digital Publishing, 2015), 11. 34 Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini: la teoria dell'impostura delle religioni nel seicento italiano (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1983); Edward Muir, Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (Harvard University Press, 2007). Loredano founded the Incogniti in 1630. 35 Gian Francesco Loredano, Vita del cavalier Marino, di Gio. Francesco Loredano, ... al clarissimo sig. Giulio Maffetti (Venetia: G. Sarzina, 1633). 36 Bortot, "Introduzione," 12–13. – 13 –

A recent definition of libertine thought emphasises the continuity in the world views of Marino, Loredano and the Incogniti. This consisted in an encyclopedic, or omnivorous approach to representing the world and human experience, in poetry and prose. Simona Bortot and Clizia Carminati qualify Marino’s mixing of the sacred and profane not as adherence to a system of heterodox thought but as the effect of an “unfailing irreverence,” and a disinterested approach to religion.37 To this was added:

un classicismo inclusivo e onnicomprensivo, costituzionalmente portato alla contaminazione, al sincretismo, ad un enciclopedismo culto ed onnivoro. E si arriva, così, … che il marinismo di Loredano in altro non si risolveva, in fondo, che nella “volontà di riflettere il mondo in una arguta enciclopedia.”38

A seventeenth-century definition of libertinism from a 1623 anti-libertine diatribe by French Jesuit Padre Garass is paraphrased below by Giorgio Spini. It outlines the contemporary reputation of libertines as atheists, who subscribed to a materialist, Aristotelian philosophy.

A libertine is…he that identifies God with nature, that denies transcendence and miracles, the immortality of the soul and a destiny of man beyond this world, that annuls individual will and responsibility with a naturalistic determinism, that holds the ‘political’ theory of religions, sneers at the imposture of priests, embraces the ethic of instinct, and derives from this the most brazen practical consequences.39

37 Bortot, "Introduzione," 15. Bortot cites Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura, 155, 240. 38 Bortot, Ibid. Bortot cites Marzio Pieri, "Memorie per una lettura anche stilistica dei romanzi secenteschi," in Sul romanzo secentesco. Atti dell’Incontro di studio, ed. Gino Rizzo (Galatina: Congedo, 1987), 171. 39 Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, 149. (My translation.) – 14 –

Libertinism and libertine remain contested terms in historiography of the period.

According to a recent study, the libertine, perceived as a threat by both the

Church, absolutist monarchies and the nascent modern state, aspired to “la libertà di coscienza, la liberta di pensiero, la libertas philosophandi. Questo atteggiamento viene percepito dalle istituzioni come un cattivo uso della libertà individuale, che comporta una duplice minaccia, etica e politica.”40

This definition accurately reflects the publishing activities of the Incogniti.

In Chapter Four I consider how the strong voices of Costa’s female fictional letter writers in the Lettere amorose challenge male-authored libertine texts that use female voices to communicate their philosophical agenda with no regard for concomitant freedoms for women.

The female voice in Marinist poetry

In this study I focus in particular on authorial gender, and gendered poetic voices in baroque poetry. That is, I consider the difference made by Costa’s female authorship of texts and textual traditions that were predominantly authored by men, some of which used female poetic voices, or female tropes.

Costa’s many poetic voices must be read alongside Marinist and libertine fascination with the disruptive potential of the female voice and perspective.

This is seen in the production of poetry, opera libretti, epistole eroiche, novelle and pornographic dialogues. Many of the female voices and tropes that appear in the sensual literature of the Italian baroque belong to the Ovidian tradition.

They dras on the Heroides and the advice on the arts of seduction to men and

40 A. Metlica, “Marino e i libertini. L'encomio del re alla prova delle guerre di religione” in Studi secenteschi, 55, 2014: 63-64. – 15 – women in the Ars amatoria, and the female figures who appear in the Amores.

In the seventeenth century, the voices of Ovid’s poetry, and women from classical historiography such as Tacitus’ Annales, were the subjects of opera libretti, sung by female virtuose in opera and chamber performances. They were also represented for readers in print production, including vernacular re- workings of the Heroides, given the title Epistole eroiche.41 These verse epistles expanded the classical voices of Ovid’s Heroides to include women from recent history, and heroines of Romance poetry.42 The production of women’s voices had a number of overlapping spheres in addition to the impresarios’ world of commercial opera and theatre. Chamber performances of musical poetic settings and improvised musical performance by female musicians occurred in the mixed gender social spaces of the academies, veglie and courts. These female performances were described in poetry that was published in collections of encomia for singers.43

In the 1630s and 1640s, libertine intellectuals such as members of the

Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti used representations of women, and female performers (in opera for example) to communicate heterodox religious, radical political, and anti-papal sentiment.44 An example considered in Chapter Four is

41 Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), 48–81; "Tacitus incognito: opera as history in 'L'incoronazione di Poppea,’" Journal of the American Musicological Society, no. 1 (1999). 42 Lorenzo Geri, "L'epistola eroica in volgare: stratigrafie di un genere seicentesco. Da Giovan Battista Marino ad Antonio Bruni," Studi (e testi) Italiani: Semestrale del Dipartimento di Studi Greco-Latini, Italiani, Scenico-Musicali 28, no. 2 (2011). 79-80. 43 Amy Brosius, "‘Il Suon, lo sguardo, il canto’: Virtuose of the Roman Conversazioni in the Mid-Seventeenth Century" (Doctoral dissertation, University of New York, 2009). 44 Mauro Calcagno, "Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera," The Journal of Musicology, no. 4 (2003); Heller, – 16 – the writing of Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–1644), secretary of Loredano, and

Incogniti member, whose satirical and pornographic books targeted the

Barberini papacy and the Jesuits. In 1644 the Church made an example of

Pallavicino, capturing him through deception and executing him.45

A significant number of pornographic texts circulating this period were dialogues with female narrators in which female textual authority was equated with sexuality. James Turner’s research has situated libertine pornographic literature at the confluence of two debates: the philosophical question of embodiment — whether the mind is sexed — and the political question of women’s education.46 The contemporary pedagogical philosophies that these texts explored, or exploited, emphasised the importance of “direct sensuous knowledge as the basis for acquiring complex ideas,” that required the “fusing of

(physical) passion and (intellectual) reason.”47 The status of a female centred knowledge, and female sexuality, within these texts is almost impossible to interpret. Like most heterodox literature, these dialogues employ a variety of antiphrastic and parodic techniques that disrupt any clear reading, including internal contradictions, multiple perspectives, and the incorporation of other texts.48 Costa’s social status as a courtesan virtuosa, discussed in Chapter

Two, and the possibility that the publication of her Lettere amorose had the support of the Incogniti brings this libertine intellectual context to bear on the

Emblems of Eloquence, 48–81. 45 Paolo Fasoli, "Bodily Figurae: Sex and Rhetoric in Early Libertine Venice, 1642–51," The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies no. 2, (2012), 99-102. 46 James Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 158. 47 Turner, Schooling Sex, 18, 20, 24, 31. 48 Paolo Fasoli, "Bodily Figurae: Sex and Rhetoric in Early Libertine Venice, 1642–51." The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, no. 2 (2012): 98 – 17 – interpretation of her texts, and her authorship.

The subtext of Costa’s corpus as a whole is a libertine, Marinist literature to be enjoyed by the conoscenti, with the risk of censorship or prosecution managed by Costa’s powerful dedicatees, false publication details, and through textual strategies to diffuse and confuse interpretation. I argue that authorial gender and gendered poetic voices were exploited by libertine and Marinist authors for the effects they had on poetic interpretation. Costa’s lyric production contributed to libertine resistance to Church hegemony by re-presenting

Marinist and libertine themes, deploying a variety of gendered poetic voices across prefaces, poetry and love letters, and by allusively referencing a significant corpus of Marino’s poems that had been censored in the preceding decades.

A new approach to female authorship in the Italian Baroque

In the following section I will set the ground for my innovative approach to the study of female baroque poetry and love letters by reviewing and exploring key concepts and terms that have influenced my research. The central terms and concepts in this thesis, ‘voice,’ ‘gender,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘form,’ the ‘baroque,’ and

‘grotesque’ require working definitions, to which I will return in each chapter.49

The voices of Costa’s prefaces, poems and love letters are diverse; however the use of first-person address in all the poetry and prose of the four books in this study offers a formal unity that helps to define the corpus and focus

49 On the complex historiography of the literary baroque see Emilio Russo, ‘Sul barocco letterario Italiano. Giudizi, revisioni, distinzioni,’ in Le dossiers du grihl [on line] 2 (2012): 1-15, http://journals.openedition.org/dossiersgrihl/5223 ; DOI: 10.4000/dossiersgrihl.5223. – 18 – theoretical exploration.

Voice

Costa’s lyric corpus has many male and female poetic voices. This characteristic challenges models of female poetic voice discussed in recent studies of female authorship that find a close proximity between author, poetic voice and poetic themes. For example, the poetic production of earlier Italian courtesan authors such as Veronica Franco (1546–1591) or Tullia D’Aragona

(c. 1510–1566) in each case presents a close connection between the author

50 and her social roles in contemporary literary coteries. Likewise, authors contemporary to Costa, Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti, crafted authorial voices consistent with their academic decorum in the first example, or polemic mission in the second.51

50 Veronica Franco’s published works were the Terza rime (1575) and the Lettere familiari (1580). See Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992); Tullia d’Aragona’s works were Rime della signora Tullia di Aragona, et di diversi a lei (Venezia: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1547), Dialogo della signora Tullia d'Aragona della infinità di amore (Venezia: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1547), Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino, fatto in ottaua rima dalla signora Tullia D'Aragona (Venezia: Giovan Battista, et Melchior Sessa fratelli, 1560). See Julia L. Hairston, ed. The Poems and Letters of Tullia d'Aragona and Others, A Bilingual Edition (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014). 51 See Stephen Kolsky, "The Literary Career of Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653): The Constraints of Gender and the Writing Woman," in Rituals, images, and words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. F.W. Kent and Charles Zika (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); Meredith Kennedy Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater, "Introduzione," in Lettere familiari e di complimento di Arcangela Tarabotti (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005), 25–30. Julie Robarts, "An Example of Ambivalent Seventeenth-century Dante Reception: Arcangela Tarabotti's Uses of the Commedia in her Semplicità ingannata," Renaissance studies 31, no. 4 (2017); "Dante's Commedia in a Venetian Convent: Arcangela Tarabotti's Inferno monacale," Italica 90, no. 3 (2013). – 19 –

Jessica Goethal’s recent study of Costa supports my approach that the many voices of Costa’s lyric corpus are central to interpreting her texts.

Goethals writes that Costa brings the technique of “rhetorical ventriloquism”:52

to her Florentine corpus at large in order to articulate a spectrum of

voices on issues of gender, love and courtiership. Costa’s plurality — in

genre, register, and content — made her especially adept at using

literary and theatrical play as a way of crafting her multifaceted authorial

persona and approaching the literary trends of her day.53

Voice, as an element of style consciously crafted by authors, does contain a notion of flexibility. Albert Ascoli’s study of Petrarch’s role in shaping early modern understandings of the author and the reader, cites Petrarch’s claim in the first letter of his Familiares that every letter depicts “a different ‘self’ … because each is shaped to conform to the specific circumstances of writing and, especially, to the needs and temperament of the intended reader.”54 The heterogeneity of Costa’s corpus is in stark contrast to the production of other female authors, and it is the range of genres, with their variety of registers that provides the stage for her many voices. I argue in Chapter Five, however, that this heterogeneity is not an accident of Costa’s broad experience as a performer, but a formal characteristic intended to shape reception of the corpus and a comment on female authorship.

52 Goethals borrows the term “rhetorical ventriloquism” from Meredith Ray’s brief comparison of Costa’s Lettere amorose with those of actress and author Isabella Andreini (1562–1604). Ray, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections, 181–82. 53 Goethals, "The Bizarre Muse," 52. 54 Albert Ascoli, Favola Fui: Petrarch Writes His Readers (New York: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 12. Ascoli cites Petrarcha, Fam 1.27–30. 29, “[C]ogitare quisnam ille sit cui scribere propositum est, qualiter ve tunc affectus, cum ea que scribere instituis lecturus est.” – 20 –

In this study, I make a distinction between two levels of voice, authorial and poetic, which appear in different parts of Costa’s texts, and are defined by the textual conventions that relate to their placement. Authorial voices are the versions of her authorial self that Costa presents to her patrons and readers in the paratext.55 For example, in the opening letter of dedication of La chitarra, addressed to Ferdinando II de’ Medici: “Sereniss. Gran Duca. Doppo un lungo combattimento di variati accidenti della mia vita, la mia avversa fortuna sazia, o per dir meglio, stanca di più tiranneggiarmi… .”56 Costa shapes a variation on this authorial voice in the preface of each book in letters addressed to two types of reader: the letter of dedication to the patron, and the letter to the reader. In the prefacing allographic encomia, the voices of named male authors, and some anonymous authors, present and praise Costa’s authorship. They appear in the same textual zone as Costa’s letters of dedication and to the reader, and at the same ‘narrative level,’ a term I define below.

Poetic voices are the many different poetic personae identified as the speaking subjects of Costa’s poems, often defined in the title of the poem, for example ‘Virtuoso innamorato di Bella Donna’ and ‘Risposta di bella Donna al virtuoso Innamorato.’57 These personae range in frequency from the strongly present Bella donna, to single examples of male and female subjects speaking from many varied social positions and circumstances in Costa’s poems. In the

Lettere amorose, Costa’s prose love letters appear as the voices of fictional male and female authors — epistolary voices, indicated in the titles as anonymous Amanti and Donne, or defined by particular physical characteristics,

55 See page 44 for definition of the paratext. 56 Costa, La chitarra, v. 57 Ibid., 184, 187. – 21 – for example letters from the ‘Amante lentigginoso a Donna butterrata da

Morviglioni.’58

The theory of narrative levels articulated by Gerard Genette assists in thinking about the crafted authorial voice, described in Petrarch’s Familiares, and used by all early modern authors including Costa, and the relationship between this authorial voice and the poetic voice.59 A collection of familiar letters, or a preface, is in the voice of the authorial persona. This type of poetic voice is one narrative level ‘down’ from the social and historical context (termed by Genette as the extradiegetic context) of the author, but still a step above the diegetic (narrative) level of the lyric ‘I’, or the poetic voice, of a poetry collection.

The main poetic voice of La chitarra is not the unmarked lyric ‘I’ that implied a close connection between author and poetry, modelled on Petrarch’s Rime sparse. Rather, Costa names the main poetic voice of La chitarra the Bella donna, a generic title allusive of Costa’s social roles of singer and courtesan, and of a prominent female trope of the Marinist poetic sub-genre, the Bella donna poem, explored in Chapter Three.

Identifying the main poetic persona with a poetic trope disrupts the conventional expectation of a close association between the lyric ‘I’ and the author, enabling the effect defined by Genette as narrative metalepsis: an

“intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe,” and “a deliberate transgression of the threshold of embedding.”60 Costa’s La

58 Lettere amorose, 16–179, 288–91. 59 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 60 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 234–35; Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 88. On the figure of metalepsis in the Renaissance see Brian Cummings, "Metalepsis: The Boundaries of Metaphor." In Renaissance Figures – 22 – chitarra and Lettere amorose further exploit this figure of narrative metalepsis by producing closely related variations on the Bella donna persona, such as the

Donna libera, that depend on Costa as author for some measure of their ethos, that is, the implied qualities of these personae.61

The effects created by the presence of the Bella donna persona and her near-copies are as Genette describes: “…such intrusions disturb, to say the least, the distinction between levels. But the disturbance is so strong that it far transcends simple technical ‘ambiguity’, it can be set down only to humour… or to the fantastic… or to some mixture of the two.”62 These effects are particularly strong in Costa’s poems that allusively reference, or in some cases rewrite, male-authored Marinist poems, analysed in Chapter Three.

As I describe in more detail in Chapter Three, the poetic persona of the

Bella donna is one example of Costa’s use of poetic models by male authors writing about women or using female tropes. The term ‘female trope’ here refers to the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia (personification), although it is frequently applied to describe the use of recognisable recurring female types such as the prostitute. The Bella donna can be understood as a poetic persona that Costa, as author, ‘performs’ through her poetry. In classical rhetoric the term ‘persona’ refers to the mask of a character, worn by an actor, and is also conceived as

‘voice’ in the classical rhetorical figures of prosopopoeia, and ethopopoeia.

Gavin Alexander describes the “metonymic chain [that] runs from face to

of Speech, ed. Sylvia Anderson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 216–33. See the discussion of metalepsis and baroque metaphor, page 39. 61 Roger Cherry, "Ethos vs Persona, self representation in written discourse," Written Communication 5, no. 3 (1988): 252–54. 62 Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 88. – 23 – person to moral character, [that] to an extent...also runs from outer person

(prosopon) to inner person (ethos).”63 In early modern literary prosopopoeia, as opposed to classical drama or oratory, only the voice remains to stand for all the parts, and identity is understood to be performed through voice:

No mask is seen, but the words spoken stand for it; there may be no real moral character but only a simulacrum of one to be inferred from those spoken words. The figure of prosopopoeia and the related doctrine of ethos have an innate tendency, therefore to ignore interiority and to elide performance with identity. Because of this inheritance, personhood as it is configured and enacted in Renaissance fictions is built on the rhetorical idea that a self is the word it speaks.”64

This idea of the poetic voice as a performed self is also supported by David

Nowell Smiths’ wide-ranging definition of voice in poetry that encompasses rhetorical and later critical approaches to voice that foreground subjectivity.

Nowell Smith’s critical rehabilitation of voice in literature addresses Derrida’s critique of ‘phonocentrism,’ that resulted in a reluctance to apply the term

‘voice.’65 Nowell Smith writes that voice can be conceived as both figured as and figured through rhetorical and prosodic forms and techniques:

Voice is figured as speechsound, as persona, as subjectivity, but also, making greater use of a metaphorical/metonymic palate, as an authentic self, or as an individual or collective identity… . But it

63 Gavin Alexander, "Prosopopoeia: the Speaking Figure," in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Anderson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99. 64 Ibid. 65 David Nowell Smith, On Voice in Poetry: the Work of Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 8. Nowell Smith claims that overstatement or misrepresentation of Derrida’s critique of “phonocentrism” has led to critics avoiding the use of the term voice for the last four decades,” and with it the impoverishment of our thought,” Ibid., 6. – 24 –

is also figured through the prosodic and rhetorical repertoires available to poetry: ‘figures of sound’ such as alliteration and assonance; figures of speech such as interjection, prosopopoeia, apostrophe…, meter and other prosodic patterns [; and through] the poem’s conversation with an ongoing tradition.66

Smith’s definition of voice in poetry foregrounds performance and reception, approaching poetry through auditory thinking that implies a practice of listening.67 This definition of voice in poetry is useful for Costa’s early modern context as a performer, as it situates voice both in the text and in the body of the performer.68 It has been argued that just such a “practice of listening” was an explicit discourse in the seventeenth century, as I discuss further in Chapter

Two.69

The virtuosity of Costa’s singing voice figures large in her self- representation and poetic reception, creating a connection between her poetry and musical performance. In this way Costa’s ethos as a performer supports both her authorial persona and the poetic personae that resemble her.

The poetic culture of the early modern period did not distinguish between poetry recited or performed in song and considered both acts of social communication. In a recent study exploring the role of the Petrarchan poetic subject in the composition and performance cultures of both the madrigal and opera, Mauro Calcagno writes that in academies and courts:

the contiguity between verbal and musical performances — for example, reading a poem aloud and then performing it as set to

66 Ibid., 3. 67 Ibid., 7. 68 See also David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7–8, 23. 69 Andrew Dell'Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). – 25 –

music — can be interpreted not only as a mere social obligation or a self-fashioning act; rather, that connection bespeaks deep- seated relationships between two modes of performance, delivering speech and making music. It is the same subject, the same body, that performs in both, whether it is poetry or texted music: a subject that performs to someone and is thus located in a dialogic, relational situation.70

What is missing in this theory of voice and performance, so far, is the fact that every voice is gendered, and every body is sexed. In the following section I consider ways of accounting for the gender of the authorial and poetic voice, and the differences that might result from male and female authorship of male and female poetic voices.

Gendered authorship and the poetic subject

Current research sees Renaissance female authorship as a negotiated status, standing in a complex relationship to the male norm. The ways in which women gained access to this status, in other words the way they established authority, was by positioning themselves in relation to earlier and contemporary male and

71 female authorial models. Formal choices such as genre, poetic form, and authorial voice are also inflected by authorial gender, and by the material

70 Mauro. Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 71 Danielle Clarke, "'Formd into words by your divided lips': Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition," in 'This Double Voice ': Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 77. See also Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens, "Introduction," in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989). For female authorship see Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, "Introduction," in Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers & Canons in England, France, & Italy, ed. Pamela Joseph Benson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). – 26 – conditions of production, such as the author’s social status and literary networks.72

One defining factor to which I pay attention in my textual analysis is the relationship between authorial and poetic voice as it is revealed through the difference or concurrence of authorial gender with the gendered poetic voice.

The authenticity or sincerity of female poetic voices written by male authors, or vice versa, is a not a question here. Helen Swift responds to this issue in her critical analysis of Medieval male-authored defences of women that ventriloquise female figures. Swift convincingly describes the complicity of author, patron and reader, in the terms of Hans Jauss’ reader reception theory:

Instead of being judged according to a criterion of sincerity, the ventriloquising act is understood as a rhetorical strategy: from the poet’s perspective, it forms part of the apparatus of his imaginative fiction; for the reader, it is an element of the ‘horizon of expectation’ that constitutes his or her hermeneutic engagement in the structure of the Advocate’s monologue.73

When considering female-authored texts, however, Danielle Clarke has articulated a problem with the reception of early modern female authorship that the current generation of scholars of women’s writing inherited from second- wave feminist criticism. Clarke argues that feminist criticism enabled readings of female voiced, male-authored texts that effectively revealed the constructed complexity of the female voice when written by a male author, such as Swift’s

72 Danielle Clarke and Marie-Louise Coolahan, "Gender, Reception, and Form, Early Modern Women and the Making of Verse," in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott- Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 73 Helen J. Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France, 1440–1538, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 189. – 27 – reading above. At the same time, however, studies of female-authored, female- scripted texts perpetuated readings proceeding from “the body, from the interior spaces of experience, maternity and privacy” rather than being understood as a motivated choice:

The gynocritical tendency to attribute certain qualities to the text on the basis of the writer’s sex has proved a valuable critical and political tactic, but it now looks simplistic as a methodology, and it disables any attempt to examine the ways in which texts themselves contribute to the networks of meaning hovering around gendered authorship.74

Approaches relying on an unproblematic identification between the authorial and poetic voices and the historical author, a form of biographism, persist: a recent edition and translation of Costa’s poetry has the title Voice of a Virtuosa and Courtesan: Selected Poems of Margherita Costa.75 Clarke instead situates women’s voices “in the context of the gendered constructedness of all literary voices.” She poses “the relationship between the woman as a textual trope and woman as a historically situated speaking subject” as an important question that can be approached through rhetorical textual analysis.76

Clarke applies these concerns to the analysis of early modern female poets’ use of female voiced, male-authored poetic forms. Similar forms served as Costa’s models, often with topical themes, such as Ovid’s Heroides. Clarke

74 Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke, "Introduction," in 'This Double Voice ': Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 2. 75 Natalia Costa-Zalessow, ed. Voice of a Virtuosa and Courtesan: Selected Poems of Margherita Costa, A Bilingual Edition (New York: Bordighera Press, 2015). 76 Clarke and Clarke, "Introduction," 2; Danielle Clarke, "'Formd into words by your divided lips,'” 63. – 28 – points out that female authors writing in a female voice in the early modern period accessed tropes that had already been occupied by male authors, but the author’s gender changed the way these tropes made meaning:

[T]he space of the feminine is already constructed, already occupied by male projections of the ‘female’ voice. Despite her exploitation of the superficial analogy between [the Ovidian] complaint poem and female voice, when a woman writes this form, the trope is defigured, literalized and made actual. This is not to say that a female-authored complaint is ‘true’ but that the intervention of an author whose sex is continuous with that of the constructed speaker serves to reconceptualise the trope which underwrites the form.77

In her analysis of twentieth-century lyric poetry Barbara Johnson raises a similar problem. Johnson reminds us of the high stakes of the gendered voice, asking whether there is "any inherent connection between figurative language and questions of life and death, of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given society."78 She concludes:

It is, of course, as problematic as it is tempting to draw general conclusions about differences between male and female writing on the basis of these somewhat random examples. Yet it is clear that a great many poetic effects may be colored according to expectations articulated through the gender of the poetic speaker. Whether or not men and women would “naturally” write differently about dead children, there is something about the connection

77 Clarke, "'Formd into words by your divided lips,’' 77. For other, valid approaches to the female voice in Italian see Helena Sanson, "'Femina proterva, rude, indocta [...], chi t'ha insengato a parlar in questo modo?' Women's 'Voices' and Linguistic Varieties in Sixteenth an Seventeenth-Century Written Texts," Italianist 34, no. 3 (2014) and Ray, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections. 78 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184. – 29 –

between motherhood and death that refuses to remain comfortable and conventionally figurative.79

The problem gestured to in these two quotations is that gender and voice are inextricable one from the other and central to reader reception, including literary-critical interpretation. This applies to both levels of voice, authorial and poetic. However, gender generates asymmetrical difference in every category it marks, including voice and authorship.80 Male and female poetic voices, male and female authorship, cannot be understood as equivalent to one another in the production and reception of early modern literature.81 This difference was exploited by Costa, and by male Marinist and libertine authors.

Käte Hamburger’s Logic of Literature (1957, 1971) assists in locating one of the asymmetrical effects of gendered authorship on the lyric voice.82

Hamburger applied the phenomenological linguistics of Edmund Husserl to the problem of defining literary fictional-mimetic and lyric genres within a general theory of language, as opposed to aesthetics.83

79 Ibid., 198. 80 Silvia Stoller and Camilla R. Nielsen, "Asymmetrical Genders: Phenomenological Reflections on Sexual Difference," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2005). Following Irigaray and Levinas, Stoller and Nielsen refer to “ontological” asymmetry as a relation between the sexes that they see as fixed by our embodiment, as opposed to “political” asymmetries that must be changed. In the convincing analysis of Stoller and Nielsen the ontological asymmetries between male and female resulting from embodied gender, include: irreversibility, nonreciprocity, irreducibility, and non- substitutabilty. 81 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 232. “Female writers were not simply writers who happened to be female; they were a separate cultural category, with distinct cultural functions, including a highly distinctive vocation.” 82 Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart: Klett, 1957). Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2nd, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). Citations are from this edition unless specified. 83 The importance of Hamburger’s insights was recently taken up by Jonathan Culler, "Poetics, Fictionality, and the Lyric," Dibur Literary Journal 2, no. Spring – 30 –

In Husserl’s formulation, the predicative act (stating a simple sentence like ‘she runs’) simultaneously creates the signified real object ‘the woman running’ and what he called the “transcendental ego.” The importance of

Husserl’s theory is to argue that the ‘I’ originating the statement is a function of the sentence, not an historical individual nor a cognitive or epistemological ‘I’ that exists outside the statement.84 Husserl’s phenomenological conception of the speaking subject was later taken up by Lacan, and named the subject of the enunciation, and by Benveniste, as the speaking subject.85

Hamburger applied Husserl’s definition of the speaking subject to establish her Logic of Literature, that aimed to investigate language “with reference to the logico-linguistic functions that govern it as it produces the forms of imaginative literature.”86 In Hamburger’s theory, the speaking subject that is created by the stating function is called the “statement subject.” Mimetic genres of narrative and dramatic fiction are defined by the absence of the stating function. Instead, in these genres, language constitutes “fictional realities in their entirety” in which characters function as autonomous subjects.”87

Hamburger shows that in contrast to the mimetic genres, the lyric genre uses every-day language to make statements.88 This predicative construction is accepted as a statement of a ‘statement subject’ who is the lyric ‘I.’89 The lyric ‘I’

(2016) and Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 9. 84 Julia Kristeva, "From One Identity to Another," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (London: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 130–31. 85 Ibid., 128–28. 86 Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 7. 87 Gérard Genette, "Preface," in The Logic of Literature trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2nd, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xi. 88 Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 232–93. 89 Ibid., 234. – 31 – may, or may not, be the historical author, and the things or experiences (termed

“objects” and “experience field”) produced by the poem may or may not, be experiences of the author; however, given the statement form of the lyric poem, the reader accepts them as such.90 For the reader, the lyric voice is uncoupled from the historical author by this indeterminacy.91

An important, and controversial, feature of Hamburger’s thesis is her inclusion of fictional first person narrative, including epistolary fiction, as a special case sharing essential features of the lyric genre that is, of making statements that are accepted as the experience of the speaking subject.92 This makes Hamburger’s theory useful for the analysis of Costa’s entire 1638–1639 corpus, including the Lettere amorose, and Costa’s letters of dedication and letters to the reader.

Significantly, Hamburger notices that the indeterminate relationship between the author and the lyric ‘I’ is disrupted in poems in which the gender of the author is not the gender of the poetic voice. In this case a degree of simulation is certain, rather than possible, and the reader will judge the voice not as a statement subject, but as a ‘feigned’ statement subject.93 Hamburger’s description of this effect as ‘degrees of feint’ is more clearly and usefully articulated by Genette’s concept of narrative levels, and the figure of narrative metalepsis — the intrusion of a voice from one narrative level into another — discussed above.94 Genette’s theory did not, however, envisage the voice crossing narrative levels also to be crossing gender.

90 Ibid., 274–75, 84. 91 Ibid., 275–76. 92 Ibid., 311, 18. 93 Ibid., 310. 94 Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 87–88. – 32 –

Hamburger’s thesis can explain the difference made by authorial gender to the reader’s reception of poetry: if the author was male, the readers were predisposed to read a female prosopopoeia as figurative, because the male- authored female voice is a clear simulation, and the experience related by this voice is received by the reader as fictive. In contrast, the female-authored female poetic voice had an indeterminable relationship to the author: poetic forms that had safely been experienced as probable fantasy, suddenly became possible reality.95

This difference is the ambiguous space of play that is exploited both by

Costa, and by male authors writing in a female voice. Hamburger’s theory helps to situate the effects created by the gender of poetic voice relative to authorial gender in the terms laid down by Clarke: as one of “the ways in which texts themselves contribute to the networks of meaning hovering around gendered authorship.”96 In summary of this section, the effects of ambiguity, humour, or the fantastic in Genette’s description of narrative metalepsis are amplified by the asymmetrical effects of authorial gender on the reception of gendered voice, identified by Johnson and Clarke. The ways in which these effects are played out through Costa’s intertextual engagement with traditionally male-authored poetic forms and genres are explored in Chapters Three and Four of this thesis.

Costa’s social roles as courtesan virtuosa, which she uses to craft the ethos of authorial persona, also contribute to the ways in which she uses gendered voices in her poetry and epistolary prose.

95 Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 310. 96 Clarke and Clarke, "Introduction," 2. – 33 –

Simulacrum

I argue that the asymmetrical effect of female authorship is deployed on a macro-level in the shaping of Costa’s lyric corpus. In the following chapters I will explain how the form of Costa’s corpus alludes to the form of Marino’s corpus, and the Bella donna relates to the male libertine poetic subject. In this section I lay out the theoretical ground for my understanding of Costa’s corpus as a simulacrum — broadly understood as a copy in form, but not content — and the relationship between imitation, gender and paradox.

The formal shaping of Costa’s corpus can be explored through the concept of the simulacrum, both in its seventeenth-century usage, and in an early nineteenth-century definition. In the later definition, the simulacrum is a product standing in a complex and ambivalent relationship with its model:

“something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities.” Early modern uses of the term included the classical definition of a simulacrum as a representation of a deity or sacred thing.97

As an imitation of Marino’s corpus, Costa’s books do not rival but are a parody of the male-authored texts. Margaret Rose writes that parody “in its broadest sense and application may be described as first imitating, and then changing either, and sometimes both, the ‘form’ and the ‘content,’ or style and subject-matter or syntax and meaning of another work, or, most simply, its vocabulary.”98 Parody does not necessarily imply a critical stance towards the

97 Oxford English Dictionary, "simulacrum, n." (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 98 Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 45. – 34 – original text. Because of its “dual structure,” parody is able “to have an ambivalent, or ambiguous, relationship to its ‘target,’” signalling a range of attitudes from admiration to criticism, or a number of attitudes at once.99

While Rose points out that specific techniques of parody are best studied within texts, her general description sets up a hierarchical relationship between the two texts:

The overall function of these devices used by the parodist is to assimilate ‘Text B’ into ‘Text A’ as its second code, and (after fulfilling other functions, such as the evocation of the expectations of the reader) to ironise, criticise, or refunction Text B in some comic fashion. In the course of the parody, Text B can also be used as a mask for the parodist or for the target and/or its readership as well as an important structural part of the parodist’s own text.100

As a parody of the Marinist corpus, Costa’s corpus inverts the power relation between texts B and A implied in Rose’s description. The general parody created at the level of the corpus is one of admiration of Marino, rather than criticism; however the polyvocal and heterogenous form of the corpus, explored in Chapter Five, marks it as inferior to its Marinist model. Costa’s corpus has all the characteristics of Plato’s concept of simulacrum — multiplicity, internal difference, and competing voices destroying imperatives of non-contradiction:101

‘Copies’ (eikones) are well-grounded claimants, authorized by their internal resemblance to the ideal model, authenticated by their close participation in the foundation; … ‘simulacra’

99 Ibid., 47. 100 Ibid., 79. Rose also notes that the parody’s reception is “influenced by the reception of the object of criticism,” or admiration. 101 Smith, "The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism," 99. – 35 –

(phantasmata) are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or deviation from the Idea.102

Imitation, however, can set up a paradoxical relationship between the copy and the original.103 In his dialogue the Sophist, Plato defined the sophist as the true philosopher’s simulacrum “a Protean being who intrudes and insinuates himself everywhere, contradicting himself and making unfounded claims on everything.”104 However, Plato discovered that the definition of a perfect counterfeit undermines the very concept of the model. “In the final definition of the Sophist, Plato leads his readers to the point where they are no longer able to distinguish the Sophist from Socrates himself: the dissembling or ironical imitator, . . . who in private and in short speeches compels the person who is conversing with him to contradict himself.”105 The Sophist becomes the enemy, limit, and double of the Platonist.106

As I will discuss further in the thesis, Costa’s corpus embodies the paradox posed by the relationship between the simulacrum and the model, allowing the possibility of a female-authored corpus undermining the Marinist model.107

102 Ibid., 100. 103 Also see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 75. “A true copy makes recognition impossible. The paradox, like the analogies, creates an area of uncertainty for speculation to play with.” 104 Smith, "The Concept of the Simulacrum,” 99. 105 Ibid. Smith cites Plato, Sophist, 268b 106 Smith, “The Concept of the Simulacrum,” 99 cites Gilles Deleuze, "Plato, the Greeks," in Essays critical and clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 136. 107 Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976), xii, 5-6, 12. In the Renaissance paradoxy was a tradition of questioning knowledge through self- contradiction: praising the unpraisable or saying the unsayable. It was not contained to one literary form. – 36 –

Baroque form

Reflecting on Margherita Costa’s Marinist themes, and distinctive formal choices, Virginia Cox has described Costa as the most baroque of early modern

Italian female authors, the product of a culture alien to almost every other female writer whose work has been studied to date.108 Labelling the essential characteristics of Costa’s work baroque is the first step in a process of better understanding the nature of, and reasons for, its formal and thematic qualities, and appreciating the literary culture that nurtured her writing. Recent studies of

Costa’s theatrical texts are already leading to further clarity and detail on her deft deployment of contemporary genres, and the politics of literary patronage, and beginning to redress the paucity of anglophone writing on Seicento poetics.109

Form is a key term in this analysis because Costa’s voices, both authorial and poetic, are contained and mediated by authorial conventions, genres and poetic forms. The patterns made by form can be perceived on a macro scale — that of the corpus or book — to the micro scale of the form of an individual poem, or a rhetorical figure.

A study of female-authored English texts by Clarke and Coolahan asserts that the implications of formal choices of early modern female authors has received insufficient attention in the critical reception of women’s poetry.110

108 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 209. 109 See especially Goethals, "The Patronage Politics of Equestrian Ballet: Allegory, Allusion, and Satire in the Courts of Seventeenth-Century Italy and France." And "The Bizarre Muse."; Diìaz and Goethals eds. The Buffoons. One exception, offering an overview is Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman eds., Culture and Authority in the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 110 Clarke and Coolahan, "Gender, Reception, and Form,” Here I paraphrase the authors’ abstract in the chapter printed from Oxford Scholarship Online: – 37 –

Clarke and Coolahan’s study makes the case for the ways in which gender and form work together to shape reception of a text. Their broad definition of form applies to both close reading of individual texts, and intertextual analysis:

…form (by no means a stable term) is not necessarily purely and simply an authorial category, but … might be understood more broadly as a key element in reception, … which in its techne (verse form, rhyme, metre, layout, stanza divisions, paratexts, and so on) mediates its meanings in ways that shape reception. Form, as is widely acknowledged in theoretical and technical discussions, is also a kind of allusion, a way of creating inter- texual relationships, as well as being part of the complex relationship between invention and style.111

In this understanding, form, a central concern in baroque poetics, has rich potential as a term of analysis. Paolo Cherchi defines the literary baroque

(1595–1690) by the boundaries of style and form that it challenged and stretched, that had both aesthetic and ethical ramifications:

the main characteristic of Baroque literature is its ‘irregularity’ with respect to ‘regular’ cinquecento literature based on the classical notions of ‘decorum’ and the morality of art. It is an ‘irregularity’ with a system, which,… when using rhetoric privileges dispositio over inventio; when using mimetic notions pushes them so far as to reach a crude realism; and when using metaphoric notions disdains obvious similarities in favour of those which reveal unseen analogies.112

In effect, given artists’ and authors’ fascination with hybridity and

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198702818.003.0009, accessed 27 September 2017. 111 Ibid., 144–48. 112 Cherchi, "The Seicento, Lyric Poetry," in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Lino Pertile and Peter Brand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 301–302. – 38 – metamorphosis, form could be seen as the ‘material’ of baroque literature.

Franco Croce introduces Proteus, the shape changing sea god, as the symbol of the Baroque, calling to mind:

la tendenza delle singole arti a mescolarsi in un intreccio, dove la poesia emula la pittura e la pittura si nutre di emblemi e ‘concetti’ poetici, dove, fuori e dentro il melodramma, parola e musica si fondono con rinnovato impegno…113

Cherchi writes that in Marino’s Adone:

words in their materiality are the content of the poem, …and form is its concept. …Marino conceived his poem as a grandiose metonymy, whereby the ostensible content (the metamorphosis of Adonis) becomes the form of the poem itself. Indeed, the Adone is a work which transforms itself through its repetitions and symmetries; and its dispositio creates a message of relativity.114

This applies particularly in Costa’s lyric corpus to the juxtaposition of high and low poetic forms and registers, that I define as a use of dispositio, or textual ordering. Paul Smith’s study of dispositio in French Renaissance literature convincingly argues that textual ordering carried meaning in a variety of ways, both at the “micro level of syntactic sentence structure”… and the macro level of the poetry collection or book.115 For example, as I explore in Chapter Five, the subtitle of La chitarra, “canzoniere amoroso,” gestures toward a Petrarchan poetic form, but the collection includes poesia giocosa — both burlesque, and grotesque. Use of these forms situates Costa’s corpus in a Tuscan literary context, using form to make connections that mediate reception, to use Clarke’s

113 Croce, "Introduzione al barocco," 25. 114 Cherchi, "The Seicento, Lyric Poetry," 306, 307. 115 P. J. Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 7, 11. – 39 – terms.

The grotesque

Baroque preoccupations with form and hybridity, are explored as a key to interpreting Costa’s lyric corpus in Chapter Five of this thesis; both the corpus as whole with its contrasting books, and the hybrid form of La chitarra. The use of grotesque metaphors and images, also a feature of Marino’s writing, are a baroque form unique to Costa as a female author in this period. My definition of the grotesque draws on a recent theorisation by Shun-Liang Chao. Chao’s study defines the early modern grotesque through the “fleshly metaphors” of

English religious poet Crawshaw, whose most characteristic poems were translations and re-workings of Marino’s religious poetry.116

Marino crowded his religious and lyric texts with grotesque bodily metaphors and appeals to sensual experience, techniques common to baroque poetry and Seicento visual piety and “sensuous worship” in the tradition of the

Spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.117 Jesuit poetics and rhetoric, and the poetics of meraviglia (evoking wonder) in literary theory, were shaped by the diffusion of Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime from the late sixteenth century.118

Visual and sensual metaphors had been defined by Longinus as instruments for

116 Shun-Liang Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte (London: Legenda, 2010), 72. 117 Shun-Liang Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 72. cites Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous worship: Jesuits and the art of the early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 29–55. 118 Eugenio Refini, "Longinus and the Poetic Imagination in Late Renaissance Literary Theory," in Translations of the Sublime the Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre, ed. Caroline van Eck (Boston: Brill, 2012), 37. Refini cites Marc Fumaroli, L'Age de l'éloquence: rhétorique et "res literaria,” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Genève: Droz, 1980), 33–51. – 40 –

“evoking ecstasy or powerful emotion in the mind of the reader.”119

The power of grotesque metaphors resides in setting two images side by side, one of which is bodily, that prove resistant to resolution. For example

Marino uses the image of the wounds of Christ’s passion as mouths, singing a message of repentance:

E che altro sono quelle sante piaghe, se non tante canore bocche le quali a tutte l’ore n’invitano e chiamano a penitenza? Ma specialmente dalle labra di quel fianco aperto che parole si sentono uscire da fare altrui traboccare di tenerezza?120

This grotesque body, as a metaphorical construction, “tampers with the normal, or symbolic, operation of metaphor,” that is to “lead the attention away from the literal (concrete discordance) towards the figurative (conceptual similitude).”

Instead, the grotesque body makes the “superficial or literal level of dissimilarity” visible. These metaphors of contradiction, rather than concordance, give “rise to a powerful effect of the biologically horrible and the logically absurd.” 121

Adimari’s Tersicore, a key intertextual resource for Costa’s grotesque

Lettere amorose discussed in Chapters three and five, is shaped in response to the burlesque and Marinist trope of the ugly/deformed woman — one of the most powerful examples of the baroque poetic of ‘meraviglia,’ and the ‘real.’122

This aesthetic ideal is described by Ferrante Pallavicino: “Sono gloriosi que’

119 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 72. 120 Giambattista Marino, Dicerie sacre, ed. Erminia Ardissino (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014), 237–38. 121 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 57. 122 Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). – 41 – pittori che colpiscono nell’amirabile dipingendo oggetti diformi. La brutezza e’ colpa dell’originale, non dell’effige.”123

The bodily grotesque metaphor described by Chao is one form of baroque metaphor that brings discordant images together. The trope that describes the transition between one image and another in a contradictory or

‘far-fetched’ metaphor is the classical figure of metalepsis.124 Renaissance use of metalepsis is defined as “a process of transition, doubling, or ellipsis in figuration, of replacing a figure with another figure, and of missing out the figure in between in order to create a figure that stretches the sense or which fetches things from far off.”125 The signigicance of the figure of metalepsis for the intepretation of Costa’s corpus as a simulacrum is considered in more detail in

Chapter Six.

Approach and Methodology

The limits of the text

The findings of this study offer a new understanding of the gender politics of poetry authorship in the baroque, largely based on the evidence in Costa’s published books, rather than archival evidence that is scarce for itinerant musicians such as Costa. I align my textual analysis with the social and cultural histories that inform our understanding of the social contexts and material

123 Quoted in Laura Coci, "Introduzione," in La retorica delle puttane, Ferrante Pallavicino (Milano: Fondazione Pietro Bembo 1992), XCII. 124 Brian Cummings, "Metalepsis: The Boundaries of Metaphor," in Renaissance figures of speech, ed. Sylvia Anderson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 219. Cummings cites Quintillian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.38. 125 Cummings, "Metalepsis: The Boundaries of Metaphor," 219. – 42 – processes of musical performance, authorship, and poetry production and publication in this period.

This historical context is essential to my method of textual analysis, placing my textual interpretation within limits set by what Umberto Eco calls the

“intention of the text.”126 The intention of the text, as opposed to the intention of the author, or the reader, is “what the text says by virtue of its textual coherence and of an original underlying signification system” and “what the addressees found in it by virtue of their own systems of expectations.”127 These expectations are shaped by stylistic conventions dictated by genre, and by writing practises, such as approaches to imitation.128 This historicity of language is described by Thomas Greene:

It is the transitory character of the literary code as it plays upon language that requires the exercise of the historical imagination. To read a text, we have to know not so much what as how the words mean, and this how depends on experience which is lost to us. Culture teaches us what to expect of a (contemporary) reader when we write, and how to translate into meaning the ambiguous contemporary constructions we read.129

The clandestine publication and the libertine literary context of these works indicate the need for counter-reading strategies aimed at discovering messages that are disguised or hidden in the works, or by which readers might be deliberately misdirected.130 Techniques for producing multiple interpretations of a text were practiced by libertine authors. Even subversive, sexually explicit

126 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., 65. 129 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy, 21–22. 130 Helm, Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy, 3. – 43 –

Incongiti texts:

suggest the possibility of an antiphrastic, oblique, counterintuitive, even moralistic reading. The texts might be seen as instruments for dissuasion (as revealing fraudulent practices) rather than as instruments for persuasion. In both texts, the reader is left wondering if this interpretation is the legitimate one. Is the dissuasive aspect merely a contrivance to allay censors?131

My textual interpretation rest on inductive propositions derived from textual evidence of consistent messages communicated within and between Costa’s books from the scale of the corpus as a whole — down to the smallest units, such as titles, and mise en page. Eco outlines three conditions under which textual evidence may be significant: “that it cannot be explained more economically; that it points to a single cause (or a limited class of possible causes) and not to an indeterminate number of dissimilar causes; and that it fits in with the other evidence.”132 My aim is not to fix a text’s meaning, rather, as

Catherine Belsey explains, to engage in “critical practice…as a process of releasing the positions from which the text is intelligible.”133 The possibility of new textual interpretations is present, on the discovery of new evidence, making any interpretation provisional.

In addition to analysis of the poetry and love letters in Costa’s books, the prefacing and postfacing texts, and their literary conventions, are critical sites of investigation, because their purpose is to shape reader reception and influence textual interpretation.

131 Paolo Fasoli, "Bodily Figurae: Sex and Rhetoric in Early Libertine Venice, 1642–51." The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, no. 2 (2012): 98 132 Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 161. 133 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 139. Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 180. – 44 –

The paratext

Paratexts considered in the thesis include, but are not limited to, main titles and publication details (defined by Genette as the “publisher’s peritext”), letters of dedication and to the reader, encomia, section titles, poem titles, printer’s decorations that mark sections, and concluding materials — a postfacing authorial exculpation, notes from the editor about errata, and in one case a final sonnet from the printer addressed to the author.134 I approach paratexts in the terms outlined by Gerard Genette, as the discourses and practices found in these liminal spaces. Genette has shown them to be highly self-aware passages through which reader reception is managed:

…this fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that — whether well or poorly understood and achieved — is at the service of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies).135

Intertextuality

Costa’s “allies,” contemporaries, and models are present in this corpus not only in allographic encomia, but also through quotation, allusion, parody, dispositio, and theft: all forms of intertextuality used productively in Costa’s polyvocal lyric corpus.136 Greene points out the humanist understanding of imitation followed

134 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16–33, 55, 117, 44, 237. 135 Ibid., 2. 136 Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 174. Orr argues for the enduring importance of theories of “influence, imitation – 45 –

Seneca’s concept of ‘polyvocality’ that described the gathering of many sources in one work through the metaphor of a chorus of many voices, and instruments.137 The difference between humanist and baroque polyvocality (and decorum) is important, however. While Seneca and the humanists would have the many voices in harmony, Marino, Costa and other baroque authors set them in competition and dissonance. A use of dispositio, textual ordering that was particularly associated with Marino, was the imitation and incorporation of earlier texts. This is identified by Cherchi as “a type of plagiarism which arranged stolen materials in a different and original way to create new meanings,” or to disguise meanings.138 Marino’s self-defence prefacing the

Sampogna is the locus frequently cited to describe this technique:

[N]on nego di aver imitato alle volte, anzi sempre in quello stesso modo (se non erro) che hanno fatto i migliori antichi, e i più famosi moderni, dando nuova forma alle cose vecchie, ò vestando di vecchia maniera le cose nuove. … Sappia tutto il mondo, che infin dal primo dì ch’incominciai a studiar lettere, imparai sempre a leggere col rampino, tirando al mio proposito ciò ch’io ritrovava di buono . …Le statue antiche, e le reliquie di marmi distrutti, poste in buon sito, e collocate con bell’artificio, accrescono ornamento e maestà alle fabriche nuove. … Perciò se, … razzolando col detto ronciglio, ho pur commesso

and quotation” for “critics interested precisely in the contexts of cultural production and the making of meaning.” 137 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy, 75–76. 138 Paolo Cherchi, "Marino and the Meraviglia," in Culture and Authority in the Baroque, ed. Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 69. Cherchi emphasises Marino’s experimentation in dispositio were a development of trends that had begun in the later sixteenth century. “In the second half of the Cinquecento the notion of imitatio underwent a crisis [that] gave importance to the dispositio, especially through the rhetorical innovations of Petrus Ramus.” Ibid. – 46 –

qualche povero furtarello, me ne accuso, e me ne scuso insieme. …Assicurinsi nondimeno cotesti ladroncelli, che nel mare, dove io pesco, e dove io traffico, essi non vengono a navigare, nè mi sapranno ritrovar’ addosso la preda, s’io stesso non la rivelo.139

Marino’s letter outlines a range of practices of imitation that he used and claimed as conventional, and also under threat — “sicome i legni hanno i tarli, che gli rodono, così i poeti hanno i Censori, che gli flagellano” — because both poetry and the classical models hidden within the poems were the target of censorship.140 New texts could be ‘dressed’ in the style of earlier texts, or earlier texts could be altered and arranged alongside new material.

One of the ways in which dispositio could be subversive, and was therefore a red flag for censors, was the new meanings that could be generated by the proximity of recycled texts. The juxtapostion of texts was a technique of parody that could be either comic or serious in effect.141 The problem for censors, and a defensive ruse for authors, was the difficulty in determining the tone of textual juxtapostions, that could imply criticism, comedy, or praise:

Despite the fact that parodies may be both critical of and sympathetic to their ‘targets,’ many critics have continued to describe parody as being only, critical, or only sympathetic, or playful, or agitatory, or engagé, or blasphemous, or ironic, or imitative, or counter-imitative, and so on. In addition to being a

139 Giovanni Battista Marino, La sampogna (Venetia: Giunti, 1621), 34–35. For an overview of the complexity of Marino’s use of sources, and a bibliography of the critical literature from the seventeenth century on, see Emilio Russo, Marino, (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2008), 277-78. 140 Ibid., 39, 40–42. Helm, Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy, 7. 141 Michel Jeanneret, "The Renaissance and Its Ancients: Dismembering and Devouring," MLN, no. 5 (1995); Silvia Longhi, "Propogata voluptas: Henri Estienne et la parodie,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, no. 3 (1985). – 47 –

device which is able, because of its peculiar dual structure, to have an ambivalent, or ambiguous, relationship to its ‘target,’ parody is able to be used to demonstrate several of the above characteristics at once, if, or when, an author chooses.142

Costa’s polyvocal lyric corpus contains many contrasting voices, registers and forms. Many of these cite and allude to Marinist and libertine texts and earlier textual traditions that contained female voices and represented female performance and tropes. This thesis shows the ways in Costa’s intertextuality both enlarges and critiques the textual traditions she draws on.

The book as a social institution

In the sixteenth century, semi-public coterie circles were linked to female print production.143 In Costa’s case, the forms of the book substitute for the sorts of social support that had been available for some female authors in the sixteenth century.144 The male authors present in Costa’s paratexts can be considered her coterie. Costa’s intertextual engagement with the work of authors in this virtual literary circle is analgous to coterie collaboration in the circle of Veronica

Franco, described by Anne Rosalind Jones:

142 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern, 47. 143 Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter- Reformation in Sixteenth-century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). and "Courtesans, Celebrity and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice," in Italian women and the city: essays, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003); Julie Campbell, Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-cultural Approach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 144 Aileen Feng describes the Rime of Gaspara Stampa (1523?–1554) as representing an “imagined community”, pointing to Robin’s interpretation of poetry anthologies as virtual communities. Feng "Desiring Subjects: Mimetic Desire and Female Invidia in Gaspara Stampa's Rime," in Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry ed. Unn Falkeid and Aileen Feng (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) 91 cites Robin, Publishing Women, xxii. – 48 –

I approach women poets as both readers and producers, audiences as well as performers of erotic rhetoric — typically, in fact, co-performers with the male poets they cite, revise, and challenge. …Group improvisation, the circulation of manuscripts before they were printed, and coterie collaboration in publishing also positioned writers as audiences and producers simultaneously.145

An approach to the printed book as a manifestation of social institutions is synthesised in Martha Feldman’s analysis of published Venetian madrigal books, in which she identifies the importance of what she terms "dialogic genres” growing out of the rapid acceleration in demand for and production of printed books from the mid-sixteenth century.146 Feldman argues that a

“remarkable number of texts … utilized some mode of direct address or concrete reference, or concocted a world of imaginary interlocutors.” These

“dialogic genres fashioned transactions in the form of letters, poetic addresses, and counteraddresses, that fictionalized the interchanges of salons, academies, and schoolrooms, or constructed discourses of address in dedications, dedicatory prefaces, letters, and occasional or encomiastic poems." By reproducing in print the previously private social structures of academies and patronage relationships, they enabled the best authors "to manipulate their social situations, reshape their identities, and, in the most inventive cases, mobilize their own professional rise.”147 Feldman understands these published

145 Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 3. 146 Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 47–8. Feldman also quotes Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: Canzonieri, lirici e libri di rime nel Rinascimento. (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1990), 46. 147 Ibid., 48. – 49 – collections as “storehouses” and "carriers of relationships.”148

Reading female textual authority in the pornographic tradition

Focussed attention on the female voices and tropes in critical analysis of

Marinist and libertine literature has been rare. One exception relevant to Costa’s authorship is James Turner’s analysis of the pan-European libertine corpus of erotic/pornographic dialogues of the Incogniti and their circle. Turner traces an uninterrupted cultural continuity between the world of Pietro Aretino and Giulio

Romano and the erotic/pornographic libertine texts of the Incogniti, both in Italy and France.149 Turner’s textual analysis balances contemporary political and classical literary influences to account for the ways in which women were represented in libertine literature.

Contemporary gender politics and the question of women’s education were deeply implicated in libertine eroto-didactic literature (teaching about

Eros). This was underlined by the form of the works, in which the narrators were female, and the texts were dialogues between women. In the case of the Satyra

Sodatica, written by Nicholas Chorier (1612–1692), the purported author was a real woman and scholar, Aloisa Sigea, who was constructed in the text as a

“sexually emancipated female author, collapsing together the Renaissance humanist and the courtesan-poet tradition.”150

In these texts, Turner writes, “narrative authority is gendered female.”151

On the question of the use of the female voice by male authors, or female

148 Ibid., 50, Feldman draws on Natalie Zemon Davis and Greenblatt. 149 Turner, Schooling Sex, 73. 150 Ibid., 168. 151 Ibid., 8. – 50 – ventriloquism” in Chorier’s text, he writes that although the female characters were “thinly veiled female impersonations.”

It does not follow … that male-authored male characters (and female-authored female) somehow come closer to an authentic reality unmediated by representational codes. Chorier’s fictional persons can be analysed as provisional theses or speculations, embodiments of his theory of female desire, even if not accepted as ‘real’ women. And it would be naïve to assume that such characters — or any aspect of the text, for that matter — can be wholly determined by the author’s controlling intention. …Chorier creates figures who exceed his ideological purpose.152

The real courtesan author Tullia d’Aragona laid claim to classical female textual and sexual authority, rewriting herself as Socrates’ Diotima.153 The idea of a classical female genealogy of female poetic and sexual knowledge, or even of the female and sexual origin of knowledge itself, would appear to be an important aspect of libertine writings. Judging the tone of such ideas in libertine writing is another matter, given the frequent use of irony and paradox in any writing relating to women.154 Other classical works in which early modern authors found examples of female textual authority are Lucretius De Rerum

Natura, and Venus’ triumph over Mars, Virgil Georgics (III. 242, 267), and

Lucian Dialogues of the Hetaerae, and the lesbian genealogy of Sappho as the

Tenth Muse, giving women “special authority over the depiction of eros.”155

152 Ibid., 190. 153 Ibid., 38. 154 Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 53. Incogniti interest in female figures is discussed in Chapter Four of this thesis. Irony is the principle of saying the opposite of what you want to be understood. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 9.2.50. 155 Turner, Schooling Sex, 14, 15, 197. – 51 –

Literary collaboration: community of interpretation

Costa’s books complemented the intellectual projects of contemporary authors who were already invested in writing about women, and in the female voice, such Alessandro Adimari, Antonio Bruni, or in the promotion of women as performers, such as the author and librettist Ottavio Tronsarelli (1586–1648), and Giovan Carlo and Mattias de’ Medici (1613–1667) who acted as empresarios of music and theatre.156 Cultural capital also accrued to the patron, and to those identified as Costa’s literary and musical supporters, through advertising their status and virtuosity in print. Maclean’s conclusions on patronage seem acute here: “[t]he strategic and relation-building work of networking is quintessentially cultural. This cultural work simultaneously seeks resources and constructs identities.”157

The Roman and Florentine Marinist circles, and the Venetian Incogniti, were the men who “created” Costa’s authorship: as Stallybrass and Chartier remind us “books create authors when scribes, editors, or publishers bring together a range of texts under an authorial name.”158 Voice, form, and gender in texts are shaped by, and speak to “communities of interpretation”:

How are we to understand the ways in which the form that transmits a text to its readers or hearers constrains the production

156 The Lettere amorose is dedicated to Giovan Carlo, and there are encomia in La chitarra and Lo stipo for Giovan Carlo and Matthias. Tronsarelli writes encomia for Costa in La chitarra and Lo stipo. Sara Mamone, "Most Serene Brothers-Princes-Impresarios: Theater in Florence under the Management and Protection of Mattias, Giovan Carlo, and Leopoldo De’ Medici." Journal of Seventeenth Century Music 9, no. 1 (2003). 157 Paul Douglas McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 6. 158 Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, "What is a Book," in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 200. – 52 –

of meaning? The appropriation of discourse is not something that happens without rules or limits. Writing deploys strategies that are meant to produce effects, dictate a posture, and oblige the reader. It lays traps, which the reader falls into without even knowing it, because the traps are tailored to the measure of a rebel inventiveness he or she is always presumed to possess. But that inventiveness itself depends on specific skills and cultural habits that characterize all readers, inasmuch as everyone belongs to a community of interpretation.159

The commitment to the female voice, and female cultural production within the community of interpretation, production and transmission of Costa’s lyric corpus, will be explored in Chapter Two. I will consider the textual evidence that shows how the form of the corpus, and paratextual elements of the books, both authorise and situate Costa’s poetry and love letters in her Marinist and libertine literary community of interpretation.

Thesis outline

In order to better understand the interdependence of Margherita Costa and her literary supporters, Chapter Two reveals the productive connections between libertine ideology, clandestine print production, and female cultural production. It explores some ideologies of female performance and voice that supported, and some that attempted to silence, women’s authorship and performance in the mid-Seicento. In this chapter I reveal the intertextual evidence linking Costa’s lyric corpus and Marino’s corpus, to demonstrate the macro-textual framework within which Costa becomes a new Marino. I also demonstrate the intertextual

159 Roger Chartier, Forms and meanings texts, performances, and audiences from codex to computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 1. – 53 – connections with Alessandro Adimari’s Tersicore, and its Florentine pro-woman context.

In Chapter Three I introduce the main poetic subject of La chitarra, as

‘every-woman,’ the Bella donna. This female libertine subject can be loosely mapped onto the narrative of Costa’s itinerant musical life, but can even more strongly be identified as Marinist — almost a new Marino. From the secure position of authority gained through her Marinist persona, Costa’s poetry and love letters challenge the ways in which female voices and tropes had been used in Marinist poetry. Through intertextual analysis, I reveal the ways in which

Costa’s authorial, poetic and epistolary voices, male and female, reuse and reposition existing poetic voices and forms, creating dialogue, consonance and dissonance with her Marinist contemporaries and earlier traditions, demonstrating the disruptive differences that can be achieved through female authorship of baroque lyric, epistolary and grotesque forms.

In Chapter Four I explore the implications for female authorship, and the representation of gender relations that follow from Costa’s Lettere amorose.

The Lettere amorose contains more than one hundred male and female voices in fifty-six fictional letter exchanges, half of which are contemporary voices, and half of which are comic and grotesque. Like all epistolary correspondence,

Costa’s love letters model the reciprocal and reversible roles of writer and reader: in responding to a letter the reader becomes a writer, and vice-versa.160

The dialogic format of the Lettere amorose, combined with a version of Costa’s authorial voice with Ovidian eroto-didactic authority, have significant

160 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 88, 111. – 54 – implications for understanding gendered authorship and new possibilities for gender relations. The interactions of fictional male and female authors corresponding in the Lettere amorose strongly contrast with the female tropes and voices proposed in libertine literature of the period, making the strongest statement about the rhetorical, sexual and social power the female authorial voice can command — both Costa’s voice, and the many voices of her fictional letter writers.

Chapter Five explores both the ethics and aesthetics of representations of gender in the baroque grotesque. An innovative reading of the hybrid form of

Costa’s La chitarra reveals the gendering of baroque textual form and structure as a meta-critical technique. I also explore a living tradition of the grotesque for parody, critique and entertainment. Costa’s theatrical and lyric talents combine through intertextual citation of court related texts, and Romance poetry, that explore the grotesque theme of the dwarf. Finally, the Lettere amorose reveal

Costa’s fearless presentation of the pornographic and anti-erotic potential of the baroque grotesque. When Costa’s fictional male and female letter writers stretch lyric boundaries to persuade and move each other, the category of the abject grotesque, which was firmly gendered female in classical and libertine poetics, is generously and subversively shared by both male and female figures.

– 55 –

Chapter Two — New opportunities for female voice in Marinist poetry

In this chapter I present the literary strategies used by Costa and the

Umoristi academicians to open opportunities for female authorship and Marinist poetry in mid-Seicento Rome and Florence. These strategies bear traces of conflicting ideological positions on female performance in the mid-Seicento.

Theoretically there was no place for female performance in post-Tridentine

Rome. Despite sustained private patronage for chamber performance, early opera and religious theatre, aesthetic theory promoted by religious authorities proposed spiritual transcendence as the desirable outcome for audiences of music, poetry, and theatre.1 The Church could not sanction secular women as public performers and co-producers of art, as they were seen to embody worldly, rather than spiritual, passion. At the same time nuns, unseen behind the grills of convent churches, (spiritually) ravished their audiences with their disembodied voices.2

In this chapter I discuss the social position of Margherita Costa, as a courtesan virtuosa. I situate support for Costa’s authorship in relation to a culture of musical performance and poetry production in the 1620s and 1630s, that flourished at mixed gender gatherings called conversazioni and veglie.3

1 Andrew Dell'Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 75. 2 Craig A. Monson, Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Bonnie Gordon, "The Courtesan's Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy," in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 191. Gordon makes the connection between the two arenas of female performance. 3 Amy Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto’: Virtuose of the Roman Conversazioni in the Mid-Seventeenth Century" (Doctoral dissertation, University of New York, 2009). – 56 –

The publication of Costa’s books must have circumvented Church control, as printed love poetry, poesia giocosa, and love letters were subject to censorship by the Inquisition in most cities.4 The Marinist academicians who supported

Costa’s authorship in Rome and Florence can be located in a libertine counter- culture of connoisseurship and publishing that actively opposed the Counter-

Reformation Church’s negative position on secular female performance.

Through paratextual and intertextual analysis of Costa’s La chitarra and Il violino in this chapter, I identify connections to clandestine publication in Roman and Florentine Marinist circles, and formal evidence of the use of textual strategies such as allusion, imitation, and paradox to disguise, diffuse, or disclose for particular readers, interpretation of the corpus.

This chapter reflects on the interdependence of male authors and female singers in mid-Seicento poetry production. It demonstrates a level of collaboration between Costa as lyricist, and her Marinist supporters as text producers, to elevate Costa from the ephemeral position of renowned performer to the enduring, and unique, position of female Marinist author.

From female performance to poetry publication

Costa’s connection to Marinist circles is dated in Roman sources as early as

1626, the year after Marino’s death, when her patron, Roman nobleman Giovan

Giorgio Aldobrandini, commissioned an opera based on Marino’s Adone.5 The opera was to include a scene staging a vocal competition between Costa and a

4 Jennifer Helm, Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy, 138–39, 89–92, 96–97. 5 Simona Santacroce, “‘La ragione perde dove il senso abonda’: La catena d'Adone di Ottavio Tronsarelli," Studi secenteschi 55 (2014). – 57 – virtuosa employed by another family.6 Before the performance Aldobrandini’s wife, Ippolita Ludovosi, had the female singers replaced by castrati from the

Papal chapel, to avoid a scandal.7 It was some time shortly after this event that

Costa moved from Rome to Florence, finding the patronage and support of the

Medici, and the prominent Florentine author Alessandro Adimari.8

Female musical virtuose performed at gatherings of the elite held in semi-private spaces such as palazzi and villas, cardinal and ambassadorial courts, and academies in Florence and Rome. Elite women could be present at conversazioni and veglie as patrons or hosts, but could not participate, and in consequence female virtuose performed music and substituted for elite women in conversation in these gatherings.9 For elite males, such gatherings were an opportunity for social networking, and part of an ongoing aesthetic and poetic education.10 Female virtuose were mainly from the artisanal or mercantile class, and were placed in two categories by contemporaries: singers perceived to

6 Giovanni Vittorio (G N Eritreo) Rossi, Iani Nicii Erithraei, pinacotheca imaginum, illustrum, docrinae vel ingenii laude, virorum, qui, auctore superstite, diem suum obierunt, (Koln: Colon. Agrippinae, 1648), 61. 7 Santacroce, ""La ragione perde dove il senso abonda,” 137. 8 The marriage of Ferdinando II and Vittoria della Rovere was celebrated publicly in 1628, and Costa may have sung in the staged festivities. Kelley Harness, "'La Flora' and the End of Female Rule in Tuscany," Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 3 (1998). Costa’s first book was published after the Florentine plague, around 1631. This court relazione used the diaries of Ferdinando II’s segretario di camera Benedetto Guerini (1596–1657) to write a detailed narrative Ferdinand’s journey to Rome, and Germany, just before his majority. Margherita Costa, Istoria del viaggio d’Alemagna del Serenissimo Gran Duca di Toscana Ferdinando Secondo (Venezia[c.1633]). 9 Tessa Storey notes that the same terms were used for evenings of musical and poetic performance hosted by courtesans. While the activities of musical performance, conversation and games were common to both, Storey defines the veglia as a less formal, and the conversazione as a more formal gathering. Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 188, 208–10. 10 Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 138. – 58 – possess the key female virtue of onestà “were expected to follow the social rules for noblewomen,” and “those women who were publicly known as unchaste… followed the social rules for courtesans.”11 While cortegiana was a more positive, though contested, term for a prostitute, it did not exclude the possibility of artistic and literary skills.12 Margherita Costa’s training in vocal and instrumental performance, and poetic composition, must have prepared her to meet elite demands for musical performers, and also to establish a home-based salon, to attract clientele as a courtesan.13

Some powerful women did choose to patronise courtesan virtuose, including Donna Olimpia Pamphili (1591–1657), sister-in-law to Pope Innocent

X, who offered protection to Margherita Costa and her sister Francesca in the mid-1640s. A Roman avviso related the scandal caused by the Costa sisters travelling in Donna Olimpia’s carriage, and gaining permission to place her coat of arms over their door:

Le Coste che sono donne assai diffamate e pubbliche in questa Corte compariscono in Carozza nelle solennità maggiori perchè la Signora D. Olimpia dopo esser' stata regalata dalle medesime, si è contentata di prenderle sotto la sua Protettione; le ha permesso

11 Storey, Carnal Commerce, 116–25; Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 3. 12 "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 30; Elizabeth S. Cohen, "'Courtesans' and 'Whores' Words and Behavior in Roman Streets," Women’s Studies 19, no. 2 (1991): 204. 13 Costa’s dedication of her Selva di cipressi (1640) indicates that her dedicatee, Charles of Lorraine, Duc de Guise, had been in her home, or had associated with her household in Florence: “Si compiaccia dunque … di gradire questa dovuta offerta in testimonio de’suoi innumerabili meriti, e delle molte obligazioni de’ favori, conche ella hà sempre honorato la casa mia…” Margherita Costa, La selva di cipressi, opere lugubre di Margherita Costa Romana, Dedicata al Ecc.mo Sig. Carlo di Lorena, Duca di Ghisa (Firenze: La Stamperia nuova di Massi e Landi, 1640), 6. The rigour of musical training in Rome is described in Giovanni Bontempi, Historia Musica…, (Perugia: Consantini, 1695), 170. – 59 –

che mettano l'Arme di S. Ecc.za sopra la sua Porta; et le ha conceduto che vadino in Carrozza senza risguardo alcuno come se fossero honorate. E perchè quando fu fatta la proibizione delle Carrozze alle Donne cattive fù creduto che ci fosse fine di cavarne grossi emolumenti, il caso delle Coste verifica tutto questo et insegna alle altre quello che devono fare per godere tanta commodità et honorevolezza.14

Recalling the 1647 visit of the Margherita and Francesca Costa to Paris, Nicolas

Goulas (1603–1683) records a similarly censorious reaction in his Mémoires, of a Roman matron who threatened to throw the Costas out of the window, should the French Queen have them perform in her presence.15

The authors of the encomia prefacing La chitarra (1638) were members of the Accademia degli Umoristi, the Roman academy that had been closely associated with Marino, described by Mario Rosa as a covert “centre of libertine thought.”16 Published collections of poetry written in response to musical performance within the academies, or at conversazioni and veglie, are an enduring material form of these oral, social activities. Amy Brosius, in her study of the female virtuose of Rome, emphasises the interdependence of the male

14 Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 106. Brosius quotes Archivio di Stato Modena, Ambasciatori d’Italia, Roma 243, 30 Aug. 1645, n.p. 15 “L'on dit qu'un jour, comme la Reyne demanda à la femme du préfet Barberin, si elle ne la voyoit pas souvent quand elle étoit á Rome et ne la faisoit pas venir chez elle, chantant si bien et ayant tant d'esprit, cette femme superbe, qui était fille du connétable Colonne, ne luy répondit rien d'abord, et, Sa Majesté la pressant, elle échappa et dit: ‘Si elle y fut venue, je l'aurois jeter par les fenestres,’ ce qui surprit fort la Reyne et l'obligea de changer de propos.” Nicolas Goulas, Mémoires 1627–1651, vol. II (Paris: Societe de l'Histoire de France, 1879–1882), 212–3. Quoted in Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 105n.209. Goulas was a courtier of Gaston D’Orleans, brother of King Louis XIII. Jean-Marie Constant, "Les Mémoires de Nicolas Goulas (1626–1651) une source historique incontournable," Cahiers Saint-Simon 40 (2012): 38. 16 Mario Rosa, "Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700," in ed. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82. – 60 – and female participants of these events:

Despite the individual differences along the lines of gender, social status, and roles enacted in the conversazioni, everyone who actively participated in the process of musical performance was considered a virtuosa/o. While both groups were actively engaged in the musical process, each performed a different role: while the women demonstrated their virtù through practical musical and conversational performances, the elite men demonstrated their virtù mainly by engaging in rhetorically elaborate assessments of the quality and effects of the performances.17

The encomia by members of the Umoristi prefacing Costa’s books, which

I analyse later in this chapter, belong to this poetic genre, and praise her beauty, musical abilities and her writing. In this way Costa’s roles of “Diva,

Muse and Siren” are celebrated, and carried from her performance practice into her authorship.

In his study of music connoisseurship and reception in Counter-

Reformation Rome, Andrew Dell’Antonio describes the very different objectives of musical and poetic performance proposed by the Church and the academies.

The Barberini papacy promoted a practice of “recte sentire” (correct feeling, hearing, or understanding) for spiritual education and edification.

Much evidence points to a significant awareness of the rhetorical potential of music to work both for and against the purposes of religious edification. Certainly, an increasing interest in guiding the ‘proper’ evaluation of visual or verbal artifacts — particularly those that could be understood as sensual or erotic — was part of the project of the Roman curia in the early Seicento. The burden of understanding potentially ambiguous messages as spiritual and transcendent rather than earthly or sensual was increasingly

17 Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 27-28. – 61 –

placed upon the discerning individual, whose ‘correct’ taste would be informed by spiritual, as well as protoaesthetic, connoisseurship.18

In its application, spiritual connoisseurship excluded women, both as musical performers and as co-creators of correct, spiritual, knowledge in the form of poetic or prose responses to performance.19 Although women performed in private gatherings such as veglie, Urban VIII enforced an earlier ban on women’s public performance in Rome and the papal states.20 Conflict arose in the Accademia degli Umoristi because the same skills of aesthetic discernment were applied by Marinists to sensual descriptions of musical performance.

Elena Tamburini writes that the Marinist preoccupation with sensual experience caused a rupture in the academy:

è in realtà il Marino il punto dolente in cui si misurò — e si ruppe — l'unità dell'Accademia: uno dei motivi di fondo della quale è infatti la divisione tra marinisti e antimarinisti, ossia tra chi sosteneva una meraviglia diretta, marinisticamente, molto più ai sensi che all'anima e chi invece era teso unicamente alla meraviglia del sacro.21

18 Dell'Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy. 66. 19 Lucrezia Marinella states in her Essortatione alle donne… (1645) that “men do not want women as their partners in knowledge.” Cited in Jessica Goethals, "The Patronage Politics of Equestrian Ballet: Allegory, Allusion, and Satire in the Courts of Seventeenth-Century Italy and France," 1404n.21. Lucrezia Marinella, Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please, ed. trans. Laura Benedetti. (Toronto: Iter Inc. and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 57. 20 Sixtus V 1588 ban on women’s public performance in the papal states was enforced by Urban VIII Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 231. Maffeo Barberini’s two exemplary collections of poetry, one vernacular and one Latin were published together in 1635, Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura, 252 n.19. 21 Elena Tamburini, "Dietro la scena: comici, cantanti e letterati nell’Accademia romana degli Umoristi," Studi secenteschi 50 (2009): 104. – 62 –

Encomia prefacing La chitarra identify members of the Roman Accademia degli

Umoristi as Costa’s most important audience. Within two years of the publication of La chitarra (1638) the same members of the Umoristi who supported this work, Lo stipo and the Lettere amorose with encomia, produced two books based on performances of another Roman virtuosa. The singer

Leonora Baroni and her musical family were the focus of the Applausi poetici alle glorie della signora Leonora Baroni (1639), and the Idea della veglia

(1640).22

These books present the participants, processes, and products of male sociability and creative responses to female performance.They function in a manner very close to the books identified by Feldman as “dialogic genres,…modes [that] involved speaking to and among others.” Feldman argues that this genre makes private social situations and relationship public, acting as a “storehouse of social and cultural capital,” giving authors an enduring platform to shape their public image and advertise their patronage networks and their skills.23

The Applausi contains around ninety-four encomia in praise of Leonora

Baroni written by fifty-seven authors.24 The encomia of singers in the Applausi and La chitarra have their model in poems about actresses and singers in

22 Francesco Ronconi, ed. Applausi poetici alle glorie della signora Leonora Baroni (Bracciano: 1639). 23 Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, 48. 24 Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 296; Bianca Maria Antolini, "Cantanti e letterati a Roma nella prima metà del Seicento: alcune osservazioni," in In cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta on his 80th birthday, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Franco Piperno, and Nino Pirrotta (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1989), 354. The applausi was dedicated Eleonora de Melo, ambasciatrice of Spain, in whose court Baroni performed. The Idea della veglia was dedicated to Olimpia Aldobrandini Borghese, Principessa di Rossana, a patron of both Baroni and the Costa sisters. Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 21, 400–403. – 63 –

Marino’s Lira, which included descriptions of performances of Isabella Andreini and Adriana Basile, Leonora Baroni’s mother.25 One purpose of this poetry,

Andrew Dell’Antonio writes, was to fix the affective and transcendent experience of music in memory through discourse.26

The 1639 Umoristi publication, the Idea della veglia, displays both the processes and products of social and collaborative poetry composition and reception in a mixed gender context. The book describes an evening gathering held in Rome at the home of the Baroni/Basile family, including collaborative authorship and impromptu debates on questions of love. Evidence of the poetic skills of Leonora and Caterina Baroni are displayed in a short collection of poetry by each singer appended to the book; they are not the focus of the publication. The collaborative composition processes that produced some of the poetry printed in the Applausi are also described by the narrator:

Ong'uno per se piglia un foglio di carta, e notandovi sopra l'argomento, che più gli piace, dà principio al Sonetto col primo verso. Fatto questo fà passar chiascheduno il suo fogio à chi gli siede sù la man dritta, ricevendo quello del Cavaliero, ch'egli hà sù la sinistra...fà il secondo verso, e poi come sopra...onde in un tempo medesimo tanti sonetti vengono à comporsi, quanto sono i Cavalieri del giro.27

Women like Costa and Baroni were present in libertine circles as performers and co-producers of knowledge marked by the Church as illicit. The four

25 Giovanni Battista Marino, La Lira: 1614, ed. Luana Salvarani (Lavis (Trento): La finestra, 2012), 18, 23, 447–51. All citations of Marino’s poetry are from this edition unless indicated. 26 Dell'Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy. Chapter 1, 74. 27 Cosimo Ruggieri, ed. L’idea della veglia (Roma: per gli heredi di Francesco Corbelletti, 1640), 33–34. – 64 – clandestinely published books of Costa’s lyric corpus stand as a challenge to the “recte sentire” of Counter-Reformation aesthetic education, belonging instead to the counter-cultural, libertine culture of the Marinists. Costa’s books were produced for the consumption of the groups for whom Costa was a diva, muse and siren — including the Barberini Papal nephews, the Aldobrandini and the Florentine court of Ferdinando II de’ Medici.

Opportunities through praise: Costa as a Diva, Muse and Siren

Costa’s flexibility in embodying the social roles of chamber and opera singer, poet and published author can be seen in the encomia prefacing La chitarra, considered below. The manuscript Raccolta di varie compositioni of Lucchese

Isabetta Coreglia’s (fl. 1628–1650) also contains a poetic portrait of Costa made towards the end of her musical and publishing activity.28 In two sonnets,

Coreglia records Costa’s 1650 appearance in Lucca where she performed the role of Isfile in Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone, with the touring opera company, the Febiarmonici.29

Margherita Costa Romana / Anagramma ‘Grat’,hor’mai Sirena Canta’

Scender dal Tebro, ed arricchir le sponde Del Arno, ecco vegg’io Musa Canora, Donn’, che col suo Carme il Mondo honora Diva, ch’ogni tesor nel petto asconde.

28 Isabetta Coreglia, "Raccolta di varie composizioni della sig.ra Elisabetta Coreglia," (Biblioteca Governativa, Lucca, n.d.). Martino Capucci, “Isabetta Coreglia,” Dizionario Biographico degli Italiani, Vol 29 (Rome: Treccani, 1983) 29 Nicola Michelassi, "Balbi's Febiarmonici and the First "Road Shows" of Giasone (1649–1653)," in Readying Cavalli’s Operas for the Stage, ed. Ellen Rosand (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 312. – 65 –

Fatto un Eco al suo dir Febo risponde s’ella desta d’Eroi tromba sonora; e se parla d’amore, anch’innamora Dei Marini entro le gelid’onde

Ma poi che del mio Serchio al bel sereno gionta la miro, hor sì, che dir poss’io qui, di Pindo è traslato il fonte ameno.

Correte o Ninfe al dolce mormorio GRAT,’HOR SIRENA CANTA, e chiude in seno Virtù, che MAI non può temer d’oblio.30

Per la Sigra Margherita Comica rappresentando Isfile nel Giasone

Qual hor ’d’alba Regina i tinti honori, rappresenti con volto, e con l’ingegno scopri spirto sì vivo, e così degno, che merti veri applausi, et veri Allori.

Tù col canto n’aletti, e mostri a i cori, che tratti di Virtù lo scettro e ‘l pegno Margherita d’onor ch’al certo segno vai di costanza, in maritali amori.

Quindi è ch’al tuo valor Pollinia bella mentre al suon de sospiri, a gloria aspiri tributaria si rende ogn’Alma ancella.

30 Coreglia, "Raccolta di varie composizioni della sig.ra Elisabetta Coreglia." M 205 19R. Reproduced in Alexandra Coller, Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy (New York: Routledge, 2017), 278–79. My italics. – 66 –

Cosi se parli, o canti, o ridi, o miri sempre fai da più sen’ preda novella che son’ tua calmita anco i respiri.31

Coreglia brings Costa’s performance to life, naming the powerful effect every word, gesture or breath the Diva has on her audience: “Cosi se parli, o canti, o ridi, o miri/ sempre fai da più sen,’ preda novella/ che son’tua calmita, anco i respiri.32” The ethos and narrative Costa constructs for her main poetic persona, the Bella donna, musical Diva and poet, and woman who moved freely between courts, cities and states, are noted by Coreglia using the key images for female cultural engagement in this period — Diva, Muse, and Siren.33 At the mid-point of the poem, Coreglia shows Costa as a siren charming sea gods, as these female figures appear in the Odyssey: “se parla d’amore, anch’innamora/Dei

Marini entro le gelid’onde.”34

In her study on the Roman virtuose Amy Brosius notes that Costa was only mentioned as a singer and courtesan in Roman documents, not as an author; however the emphasis in La chitarra encomia by Umoristi authors is on

Costa as a singer and poet.35 Costa’s poetic and singing voices coexist, along with her beauty and physical presence, to be re-experienced by the reader through the poetry. Bernardino Biscia wrote in La chitarra:

Rimango a i carmi, e alla beltà conquiso

31 Ibid., M205 24V. 32 Ibid. 33 Coller, Women, Rhetoric, and Drama, 10–11, 278–79. 34 Elena Laura Calogero, "'Sweet aluring harmony': Heavenly and Earthly Sirens in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Literary and Visual Culture," in Music of the sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 65-66. This trope is discussed further below in this Chapter. 35 Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto,’" 146n.35. – 67 –

Che gl’uni, e gli altri angelici nel vanto Apron (fatti dui Poli) un Paradiso; Ond’io stupido, qui conchiudo in tanto C’habbia i Cigni Costei, ch’emula al viso, Vinti al candore, e poi confusi al canto.36

The encomia present Costa’s singing voice as the source of her poems and an important locus of her authority to write. A number of poems emphasise the continuity and contiguity of the rhetorical force of Costa’s voice as both author and singer — the creator and performer of verse, who moves her audience both through song and her singing pen — “dolci accenti…penna canora….”37 Her success in both is measured by the power to make her audience fall in love with her: “[m]a scriva, o canti i Cuor sempre innamora.” Andrea Barbazza imagines

Costa’s text to be the wounds of love printed on the souls of her audience, “Far loquace l’inchiostro, eterno il canto!/ Stampar nell’Alme altrui piaghe vitali!”38

Other encomia gesture to Costa’s performance and her physical presence, linking her singing voice and beauty as the main source of her power:

“Fia poi, che l’Arno al dolce canto done,/ E alla beltade; onde’imprigioni i

Cori./… doppie Corone.”39 The paratext of the Lettere amorose also contains a poem praising the power of Costa’s singing, writing and intelligence, through the topos of the dying swan, a figure for the lyric poet:

O se spieghi talhor voce canora, O se tratti tal’hor penna immortale Sempre il tuo ingegno al Ciel s’inalza, e sale, Sempre la tua armonia l’alme inamora

36 Costa, La chitarra, xi. 37 Costa, La chitarra, x. 38 Costa, La chitarra, x. 39 Costa, La chitarra, viii. – 68 –

Non fù di te Donna più saggia ancora, Ne sia, dolce scrivendo, altra mai tale, Non scioglie il canto al tuo bel canto uguale Cigno, che lieto in sul Meandro mora. …40

The Umoristi encomia that focus on the bodily effects of Costa’s singing and poetry on the listener and reader emphasise the importance of sensual experience in the creation of knowledge that I introduced as a particular interest of libertine authors in the first chapter.41

There are also more conventional elements of praise for Costa’s authorship in the encomia. Poems by members of the Umoristi and Florentine authors praise Costa’s authorship through neoclassical and neoplatonic ideals such as wisdom and harmony. The classical poets Corinna and Sappho were evoked as exemplars of female authorship to praise Costa: “Fatta Musa gentil’

Saffo novella.”42 These are the same justifications identified by Anne MacNeil to authorise the public performance of female actresses in the Commedia dell’arte, from the 1570s, including Isabella Andreini.43 Pompeo Colonna, Principe di

Gallicano (c1600–c1660) casts Costa as Theban poet Corinna, who in some accounts had won poetic competitions against Pindar.44 He writes “Vidde la

Grecia in lirica contesa/Il gran Pindaro suo ben spesso vinto;… Tù novella

Corinna alla tenzone/T'apparecchia a cantar più dolci amori.”45 The

40 Margherita Costa, Lettere amorose, 14. ‘Il Signor D. Alphonso de Oviedo Spinosa. Loda la Signora Margherita Costa di Poesia, e di Musica.’ 41 Turner, Schooling Sex, 18, 20, 24, 31. 42 Costa, La chitarra, xi. 43 Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 75, 88, 93. 44 I. M. Plant, Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). Chapter 23. 45 Costa, La chitarra, viii. – 69 – identification of Costa with Corinna may also have emphasised her close association to Adimari, the translator of Pindar’s Odes.46

Adimari’s encomia of Costa in La chitarra, which follows Colonna’s, will be considered below in my discussion of the importance of Costa’s Florentine connections in the shaping and publication of her corpus. The two literary contexts of the Roman academy and the Florentine court offered different opportunities for Costa’s authorship. They also presented different possibilities for the promotion of a clandestine Marinist agenda that I trace below through intertextual, and macro-textual allusions in my discussion of Costa’s corpus as an imitation of Marino’s lyric works and published letters.

Costa’s corpus as a simulacrum of Marino

The strategies that established Costa as a Marinist poet and located her production in a Marinist and libertine intellectual context were not all as transparent as the presence of Umoristi authors in the paratexts of her books. In this section I set out the intertextual evidence that links Costa’s corpus with that of Marino, as the first step in an interpretation of her lyric corpus as a Marinist imitation. The other important element in this imitation, the connection between the poetic persona of the Bella donna and Marino’s authorial persona, is

46 I acknowledge the concern of my reviewer as to the degree to which conventional poetic tropes are useful in textual interpretation. However, I wish to defend subtle readings where a cumulative effect across a corpus can be demonstrated. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander makes a case for allusion. He writes that intertextual echoes “represent or substitute for allusion as allusion does for quotation. …Poetic echo ... may be unconscious or inadvertent, but is no less qualified thereby. …The reader of texts, in order to overhear echoes, must have some kind of access to an earlier voice, and to its cave of resonant signification, analogous to that of the later text.” The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 64-65. – 70 – explored in Chapter Three. As I foreshadowed in Chapter One, I present my interpretation of Costa’s authorship and lyric corpus as a simulacrum of Marino in Chapter Six. The formal characteristics of Costa’s corpus explored throughout the thesis suggest a complex and ambivalent relationship between the copy and the model, strongly inflected by competing attitudes towards female authorship, performance and the place of female voices and tropes in the production of knowledge.

Costa’s lyric corpus can be interpreted on a macro-level as an imitation of the main books of Marino’s lyric corpus, through allusive references that create an intertextual dispositio of the two corpora. The organisation of the formal structure of texts around a concept or theme is affirmed as a technique of Marinist poetics in recent studies of Marino’s Lira, and the Adone.47 The editor of a modern edition of the Lira (1614), Luana Salvarani, characterised

Marino’s collection as a “machina versatile,” capable of generating a multitude of meanings: “è il libro intero il luogo dei significati, nella sua scansione e nel suo gioco (asemantico, in quanto tale) di corrispondenze.”48 Imitation of

Marino’s entire corpus has also been identified as an aspiration of other Marinist authors, as I will show below.

Costa’s lyric corpus is an imitation of Marino’s corpus through allusions in

47 Luana Salvarani, "La machina versatile (introduzione)," VII; Paolo Cherchi, La metamorfosi dell’Adone (Ravenna: Longo editore, 1996); Giuseppe Alonzo, Periferia continua e senza punto: Per una lettura continuista della poesia secentesca (Pisa: ETS, 2010). 48 When Lira I and Lira II (1602) were added to the new section Lira III to form the Lira (1614), the earlier collections were redacted and reframed by this 1614 publication. “La ripresa quasi integrale delle Rime del 1602 nella Lira del 1614…permette al Marino un’operazione…di risignificazione totale di un testo già divenuto canonico (le Rime) tramite l’aggiunta di una nuova sezione…,” Luana Salvarani, "La machina versatile (introduzione), VII. – 71 – the titles, the length of the books, and in the poetic forms and registers they contain. The titles of Costa’s four works, La chitarra, Il violino, Lo stipo and

Lettere amorose allude, in diminutive or subordinate forms, to the titles of

Marino’s lyric corpus and published letters: the Lira, Sampogna, Galleria, and the posthumous Lettere del Cavaliere Marino, Gravi, Argute, Facete, e

Piacevoli. Costa’s titles correspond to Marino’s in the following ways: two musical instruments: La chitarra = Lira; Il violino = Sampogna; one form of collection/display Lo stipo = Galleria; and the Lettere amorose = Lettere Gravi, acute, facete e piacevole. Like the three-part Lira, Costa’s La chitarra is the longest of her works, and at 584 pages is very long by any measure for a canzoniere.49 Like the Sampogna, which is much shorter than the Lira, the main poetic form in the much shorter Il violino is the idyll. And like Marino’s Lettere,

Costa’s Lettere amorose contain serious and comic letters. The cassetini of encomia in Lo stipo provide verse portraits of many members of the Medici court and famiglia, and Florentine academies, rather than describing artworks like much of the Galleria. Marino’s Galleria, however, does contain burlesque portraits of individuals and types, and Lo stipo concludes with a chapter of grotesque caricatures, for example the “Astrologo offeso da Morbo Gallico.”50

Alessandro Adimari’s encomium of Costa in Il violino may support the hypothesis that this work was intended as an imitation of Marino’s Sampogna.

Adimari’s description of Costa in the poem might be read as alluding to three of the idilli in Marino’s work, ‘Siringa’ by name, ‘Dafne’ as the “alloro,” ‘Orfeo’

49 The Lira was published in three volumes, Rime I (1602), Rime II (1602) and finally another section was added and all were published as one volume as the Lira (1614). Alessandro Martini, "Le nuove forme di canzoniere," in I capricci di Proteo, 202–03. 50 Margherita Costa, Lo stipo, 218. – 72 – through reference to Orpheus’ instrument the cetera (lyre):

S’All’armonia d’un venticel sonante Tra Siringa mutata in canna, e in fronda Il Dio Pan s’arrestò tutto anelante Dell’umido Ladone in su la sponda E s’in Riva a Peneo tra i rami, e l’onda Corse per un alloro Apollo amante Deh quanto maggior pregio all’Arno abbonda Per più bel suono, e per più bel sembiante! Non verde legno, o Canna habbiam vicino. Ma Trasformata, a bella COSTA appresso La Cetera d’Apollo in Violino; Onde con più ragion dovrebbe adesso Correre intorno a questo suon divino Pane, e Febo non sol, ma Giove stesso.51

The understanding of Costa’s lyric corpus as an imitation of Marino’s corpus can be compared to similar attempts by Marinist authors to keep Marino present in literary culture. Antonio Bruni’s (1593–1635) extensive production of epistole eroiche followed from Marino’s claim to have produced a volume of letters modelled on Ovid Heroides that was never realised.52 Lorenzo Geri writes of

Bruni’s determination, shared by other Marinist, and the risks of this endeavour.

Sino a quando ci sono margini per farlo, infatti, il Nostro si sforza di tenere insieme sodali umoristi e la cerchia di poeti vicini a Urbano VIII, l’emulazione di Marino e le nuove parole d’ordine

51 Costa, Il violino, vi. 52 Lorenzo Geri, "Le Epistole eroiche di Antonio Bruni tra Umoristi e Caliginosi," in Le virtuose adunanze: la cultura accademica tra XVI e XVIII secolo, ed. Clizia Gurreri and Ilaria Bianchi (Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2014), 174. Bruni’s Epistole eroiche had fifteen editions between 1627 and 1720. In the letter prefacing the Lira III, written by Marino, ‘Honorato Claretti a chi legge,’ in La lira (1614), 397-98. Lorenzo Geri, "L'epistola eroica in volgare: stratigrafie di un genere seicentesco. Da Giovan Battista Marino ad Antonio Bruni," 81. – 73 –

della poetica barberiniana alla quale concede un formale assenso. Al di là delle cautele e delle ritrattazioni, delle opportunità e delle ambigue dissimulazioni, nel corso di tutta la sua carriera Bruni ambisce ad emulare l’opera mariniana nel suo complesso, tanto le opere effettivamente realizzate, quanto quelle destinate a rimanere per sempre sulla [sic], come, appunto, le Epistole eroiche. Da questo punto di vista il poeta leccese mostra una fedeltà ostinata e costante a Marino, quasi un tratto generazionale che sembra condividere perlomeno con una parte dei sodali umoristi, come Andrea Barbazza, non a caso ricordato più volte nelle sezioni di corrispondenza dei canzonieri bruniani come amico del poeta dell’Adone.53

Geri emphasises that the Marinists used caution and subterfuge, “ambigue dissimulationi,” in their attempts to maintain Marino’s cultural primacy. Jennifer

Helm’s recent study of the ways in which censorship affected poetry production in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries found evidence that readers for the

Inquisition looked for “counter strategies employed to hide ideas in the semantic structure of a literary text.”54 At the same time to reduce deliberate circumvention by authors, the Holy office kept rulings and guidelines for censors secret.55 As a subterfuge, dispositio was a form of imitation particularly suited to evading censors, because of the range of interpretative possibilities it created.

The formal imitation of Marino’s corpus is one of the ‘intentions’ that guide interpretation of Costa’s corpus.56 It is an example of the use of form to create intertextual relationships.57 The textual ordering of Costa’s corpus in

53 Ibid., 180. My italics. 54 Helm, Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy, XI. 55 Ibid., 57. 56 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64–65. 57 Clarke and Coolahan, "Gender, Reception, and Form,” 145. – 74 – relation to Marino’s is on a broader scale than Paul Smith found in his study of dispositio within poetry collections.58 However, Smith’s comparative analysis of editions of Fabule that re-used and reordered the same text and illustrations does provide a support for proposing Costa’s corpus as a co-production with

Marinist supporters. Smith finds that in these works:

poetic disposition is not only a tool for literary expression, aiming to inform the reader directly and overtly on the degree of imitation, emulation and originality of the collections at hand. It can also, indirectly, inform us about the material circumstances in which the collections were produced: the collaboration (or lack thereof) between poet/translator and illustrator, between poet/illustrator and printer.59

Allusions to, and quotations from, clandestine Marinist texts in La chitarra also strengthens the association between the production of Costa’s corpus and clandestine Marinist publication. Andrea Barbazza (1581–1656), mentioned above by Geri as an active Marinist, authored an encomium of Costa in La chitarra. He was also a key figure in the most important clandestine publication after Marino’s death, La murtoleide, fischiate del Cavlier Marino con la

Marineide risate del Murtola Aggiontovi le Strigliate a Tomaso Stigliani, e l’innamoramento di pupolo e la pupola et altre curiosità piacevoli, which appeared in multiple editions dated between 1626 and 1649.60

58 Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering, 12–17. 59 Ibid., 17. 60 Giambattista Marino, La murtoleide fischiate del Cavaliere Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola. Aggontovi le Strigliate a Tomaso Stigliani, e L’Innamoramento di pupolo de la pupola, et altre curiosita piacevoli (Norinbergh,1649). Available in a modern edition, Sonia Schilardi, ed. La murtoleide del Marino: satira di un poeta “goffo” (Lecce: Argo, 2007); Schilardi, Sonia. "Le edizioni seicentesche del Murtoleide," in La murtoleide Del Marino: Satira Di Un Poeta Goffo (Spira, Appresso Henrico Starckio, 1629) ed. Schilardi (Lecce: Argo, 2007). 100–1. – 75 –

This multi-author collection contains Marino’s comic and satirical portrait of his rival Murtola, Murtola’s poems to Marino, and satirical sonnets addressed to Tomaso Stigliani by Barbazza, using the pseudonym Robusto Pogommega.61

The Murtoleide also contains poems written by or addressed to other Marinist authors who appear in Costa’s La chitarra, including Pompeo Colonna and

Antonio Bruni.62 La chitarra shares its title with a burlesque capitolo in the

Murtoleide, by Girolamo Magagnati (1563–1619).63 The first two poems in La chitarra, a Bernesque capitolo and a comic sonnet, contain quotations from

Magagnati’s poem; I will explore these further in Chapter Five as part of Costa’s contribution to the baroque grotesque.64

The false publication details of La chitarra and Il violino were another necessary subterfuge. They would protect the printer, should the publication be discovered, while the clandestine printing of Costa’s texts would act as a precaution against having the works censored or banned. The place of publication of Costa’s La chitarra and Il violino , “Francfort,” also links these works to the first editions of the Murtoleide (1626). Frankfurt was one of several false locations commonly used to protect Italian printers from ecclesiastical authorities.65 Clues to the real place of publication of La chitarra, Il violino, and

Lo stipo, however, are found in another set of textual allusions: in the paratexts and the mise en page of these three books, that I explore in the following

61 Marino, La murtoleide, 3, 85, 198. 62 Ibid., 264, 68, 79. 63 Ibid., 324–36. 64 Costa, La chitarra, 1–5, 6. Allusions to and citations of this poem in Costa’s La chitarra are considered in the Chapter Five discussion of poesia giocosa. 65 Marino Parenti, Dizionario dei luoghi di stampa: falsi, inventati o supposti, (Firenze: Le lettere, 1996), 93. Schilardi, "Le edizioni seicentesche del Murtoleide," 102. – 76 – section.

Opportunities for pro-woman literature in Florence

Florentine literary culture has not traditionally been at the centre of studies of

Marinist or libertine literature, or clandestine printing. The Medici dedications of

Costa’s 1638–1639 corpus and the prominence of Alessandro Adimari in the prefaces of Costa’s books open new possibilities for mid-Seicento Florentine literary historiography. In the following section I consider evidence in La chitarra, Il violino and Lo stipo that suggests that these works were, in fact, published in Florence. This paratextual evidence includes the name of the printer (in the printer’s peritext) postfacing comments by the printer, a dedicatory sonnet from the printer to Costa, and decorative scrolls marking the end of poems in the books — mise en page.66 I will also discuss the ways in which some of these clues conceptually link La chitarra and Il violino to

Alessandro Adimari’s Tersicore (1637) in such a way as to defend Costa’s authorship from contemporary criticism of female performance.

A sonnet by the printer appears in the final pages of La chitarra, dedicating his work (the printing) to Costa. The printer’s sonnet praises Costa in terms that would indicate sympathy with a pro-woman position shared by

Adimari, in his Tersicore, overo scherzi, e paradossi poetici sopra la beltà delle donne fra’ difetti ancora ammirabili, e vaghe, a collection of fifty sonnets that challenges the Marinist and burlesque trope of the ugly/deformed woman.67 The printer writes:

66 Genette, Paratexts, 16. The “publisher’s peritext” includes ‘the cover, the title page, and their appendages,” 67 Adimari’s Tersicore is discussed in Bettella, The Ugly Woman, 128-30. – 77 –

LO STAMPATORE Alla Sig. Margherita Costa. Poiché, sotto altro Clima, il Ciel’ non vuole, Ch'eguale al Tosco suon, lingua favelle; Fò (MARGHERITA) alle tua glorie sole In vece del parlar, le mani ancelle; Quindi per inalzar l'opre tue belle, Ond'una eterna fama al Ciel sen'vole, Vorrei, che i piombi miei fossero Stelle, Carta l'istesso Ciel, Torcolo il Sole: Ma poiche ciò non posso, e conviemmi hora Por negra tinta a'tuoi splendori intorno, Non disprezzar la mia fatica ancora: Suol essere il mio fosco, in lume adorno, Ove l'altrui Virtù sempre hal'Aurora, Che la Notte anco è negra, e porta il Giorno.68

The sonnet contains an intertextual allusion to a poem in Adimari’s Tersicore, in the image contrasting the black ink, the medium of his art, with the brightness of its effect — the dawn of Costa’s glory: “Che la Notte anco è negra, e porta il

Giorno.” This conceit is close to the final line of the ‘Bella negra’ in the

Tersicore: “Alfin negra è la notte, e porta il giorno” (Florence, 1637) that is, in turn, modelled on Marino’s ‘Bella schiava’: “Porta la notte, e ha negli occhi il giorno.”69 An implicit thematic consonance between the printer’s sonnet and

Adimari and Marino’s poems is the idea of rehabilitation, or making a “black” reputation shine brightly.

Defending the value of the female artist is the theme of Adimari’s original

68 Costa, La chitarra, 584. 69 Ibid, 583, 84; Paola Marongiu, "Introduzione," in Alessandro Adimari, Tersicore, xiv; Marino, La Lira (1614), 415. – 78 – manuscript dedication of the Tersicore to Cristoforo Bronzini (1580–1640). This dedication was printed in the 1637 edition.70 Adimari wrote to Bronzini as a dear friend and mentor, placing his work in dialogue with the Dialogo della dignità e nobiltà delle donne (1624–1632) that celebrated both present and past women, including female artists and authors.

Mi son risoluto a mandarne anticipatamente questa prima copia a V.S. poiché trattandosi del pregio delle donne, ella, che n’è, per dir così, tesorier generale, mediante i dotti ragionamenti dei suoi graziosi dialoghi deve raccogliere ogni altra moneta, o censo a loro spettante. E questo mio non sarà forse d’altra valuta che d’autenticare in qualche modo i suoi detti; poiché s’il merito delle donne è tale, che fin tra l’ombre de’naturali e accidentali difetti risplende, di qual fede sarà degno, chi della DIGNITA’ e NOBILTA’ delle donne senza paradossi ragiona?71

Adimari’s dedication to Bronzini focuses on the recuperation of the Sirens, who he claims were the daughters of Tersicore, the muse of dance and music.

Adimari’s letter reads as a program for a re-evaluation of female cultural production. In his discussion of the role of the Muse of his title, he writes that

Tersicore was:

…madre delle Sirene, le quali non solamente furon insieme dilettose e belle, ma furono prese dagl'ingenosi ritrovatori delle favole per quel suon di voce che, lusingando e adulando, addolcisce la mente umana. Patorisca adunque la nostra Tersicore non quella viziosa adulazione che tentava

70 Bronzini’s unfinished pro-woman work Della Dignità, and Nobilità Delle Donne ; Dialogo, Diviso in Quattro Settimane; E Ciascheduna Di Esse in Sei Giornate was published in several volumes, one part dedicated to Maria Maddalena d’Austria, published in 1622, a second part dedicated to Cristina de Lorena in published 1628 and 1634, Martino Capucci, “Bronzini, Cristoforo,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol 14, (Rome: Treccani, 1972). 71 Adimari, Tersicore, 8. – 79 –

d'addormentar Ulisse, e i compagni per divorarli, ma quell'eccesso di lode che si deve a chi molto merita, quali son le donne, per maggiormente gradirle.72

Adimari plays on the etymology of Tersicore, suggesting the name includes the idea of washing, and that as the muse of dance and music, and the mother of the sirens, she both inspires and purifies women’s performance:

E se volessimo scherzar sopra l'etimologia del nome, forse non senza qualche fondamento, potremo dire che la voce Tersicore ci significa l'obbligo, ch'ella ha di far belle e terse le donne, dal verbo 'tersaino,’ quod est 'astergere' e 'kore,’ quod est 'puela,’ come nota Eustazio.73

The themes of female authorship, blackness, and rehabilitation in La chitarra’s printer’s sonnet resonate with Adimari’s ‘washing’ (purification as recuperation) of women, women’s song, musical performance and dance outlined in his letter to Bronzini. The intertextual association of Adimari’s Tersicore with La chitarra and Il violino, through the printer’s sonnet, challenges the negative cultural associations that may have followed from Costa’s status as a musical performer and courtesan virtuosa.

A familiarity with the author and her situation indicated by the printer’s sonnet and other paratextual notes would also lead Frankfurt to be questioned as the place of printing. After the list of errori in the final pages of the text, the

La chitarra printer excuses the many remaining mistakes, claiming they were due to the author’s indisposition:

Vi si troveranno di molti più errori, tanto di stampa, quanto d'Artogrofia in questo volume per essere, ch’ all' Auttora mancò il

72 Adimari, Tersicore, 7. 73 Ibid. – 80 –

tempo di poterle rileggere, e ben correggere essendo stata da una lunga, e pericolosa infirmità oppressa, però dove si troverranno, si potranno per discrizzione intendere.74

This is confirmed in the dedication Costa wrote to Ferdinando II in Il violino:

Nelle Vigilie della notte, cagionatemi dall'inquietudine della mia infirmità, non ho potuto sì frenar la penna, che'ella non habbia di nuovo voluto machiar le carte degli suoi rozzi, e mal correnti inchiostri, gli quali come già in posesso delle grazie di V.A.S. ardisco di nuovo soggiogarli a' suoi piedi.75

These paratextual clues are strong indications that work was very likely printed by the Florentine printers Massi and Landi, who printed the Tersicore, Adimari’s other poetic works, and Costa’s later Florentine works.76 The definitive proof, however, of Florentine printing of La chitarra and Il violino by Massi and Landi is found in the decorative woodblocks that mark the sections of the text in Il violino, containing the printer’s initials “A.M.” — Amadore Massi — nestled in the topmost curved pendants, left and right.

74 Costa, La chitarra, 583. 75 Il violino (Francoforte [Italy]: Daniel VVastch, 1638), iii. 76 See Chapter One page 11n.28 for a list of Adimari’s works. See Chapter One page 8n.19 for Costa’s works. – 81 –

Figure 4. Amadore Massi Woodblock a). Costa, Il violino, 8, 26, 33, 80.

Figure 5. Amadore Massi Woodblock b). Il violino, 49, 93.

Lo stipo, despite stating “Venezia” on its title page, is also ‘signed’ by

Amadore Massi in the same way, through the insertion of a decorative scroll as the marker between poems.77

77 Lo stipo was dedicated by Costa to Don Lorenzo de’ Medici who was also – 82 –

Figure 6. Amadore Massi Woodblock c).

Lo stipo, 21, 26, 31, 45, 50, 58, 63, 75, 91, 94, 99, 105, 113, 116, 134, 143,

146, 221.

The same scroll is identified in a Massi and Landi imprint in a study of the politics of Medici historiography in this period by historian Caroline Callard.

Callard’s research confirms the participation of Massi and Landi in the publishing of sensitive texts, including in clandestine printing of Scipione

Ammirato’s censored Istorie fiorentine in 1637–1640, in defiance of the

Inquisition.78 She defines a period of resistance by the Florentine state to

Roman censorship, triggered by a 1637 territorial dispute with the papacy.79

Callard identifies a work with a false Frankfurt imprint, dated 1639, that is otherwise identical to an edition later published with permission in 1641 by

Lorenzo Landi, the editor’s, dedicatee of the printed Tersicore. Adimari, Tersicore, 3-4. 78 Caroline Callard, Le prince et la République: histoire, pouvoir et société dans la Florence des Médicis au XVIIe siècle (Paris: PUPS, 2007), 102–03. One version of Ammirato’s text was marked “Franckfurt.” 79 Ibid., 101–03. The papacy attempted to impose taxes in San Sepolcro, a territory on the border of Tuscany and the Papal State. – 83 –

Massi and Landi.80 Callard proposes that the false imprint was used by the

Florentines as a form of blackmail to secure permission to print, by proving they were able to bypass the Inquisitor, as was already happening in Venice.81

Callard identifies another history printed by Massi and Landi in the same years through the appearance of decorative scrolls identical to those in an impression of Paganino Gaudenzio’s (1595–1649) elegy for Costa ‘De Dicessu

Costae Margaritae’ by the same printers:

L'impression était d'une certaine façon ‘signée’ par Massi et Landi qui y avaient inséré des rinceaux que l'on trouvair dans d'autres ouvrages prevenant de leurs presses (comparer la page 323 d'Inghirami et la page 5 du De Dicessu Costae Margaritae de Gaudenzio, publié par Massi en 1638).82

The ‘De Dicessu Costae Margaritae’ appears at pages 139–140 of Lo stipo, with the scroll on page 143, after Costa’s reply to Gaudenzio, thus connecting this work, along with La chitarra and Il violino to Florentine clandestine publishing. In the next part of the chapter I consider the ways in which paratextual connections between Adimari’s Tersicore, with its focus on gender and the use of paradox, shapes interpretation of Costa’s Marinist corpus.

A closer look at of Adimari’s use of the paradox genre in the Tersicore can support an understanding of Costa’s corpus and her authorship as a cultural project related to the problem of female cultural production — writing and performance. In the previous sections I introduced the Florentine pro-

80 Ibid., 102. 81 Ibid. “Cette affaire met en lumiere la possibilite que surent se procurer la autorites toscanes de court-circuiter la censure romaine lorsque'il falliat.” 82 Ibid., 103n.34. Callard does not provide any bibliographic detail for this document. The scroll also appears on the fifth page of this poem in Lo stipo, Callard places Gaudenzio as active in this controversy. Ibid., 145, 166, 170, 216 – 84 – woman culture that characterised Adimari, and Bronzini’s writing during the long regency of Christine of Lorraine and Anna Maddalena of Austria. The full title of the Tersicore parades the work’s innovative premise, composite textual structure, and polyvocality:

La tersicore: o vero scherzi, e paradossi poetici sopra la Beltà della donne, fra' difetti ancora, ammirabili, e vaghe. Opera del sig. Alessandro Adimari ridotta in 50 sonetti fondati principalmente sopra l'autorità di A' Seneca il morale, & concatenati in un capitolo. I terzetti del quale servon per argumenti.

Each of the fifty subjects is presented, in the prosimetrum tradition seen in

Dante’s Vita nuova, with a combination of two poetic forms and one prose form.

Each poetic subject is presented with a title, for example “Argomento XIII,

Adirata,” followed by a tercet that captures the positive and lovable aspect of the difetto: “S’adiri pur la generosa e forte:/L’ira è cote d’Amore fra genti amate,/E soffresi in altrui con minor sorte.”83 This is followed by short prose

Latin quotations with the title Sentenze, from authors including Seneca the younger and elder, and Petrarch, that authorise the praise of each difetto. The sonnet is the final text of each section. The initial tercets are concatenated at the end of the book in a capitolo a terza rima that functions both as an index, and summary of the argomenti, of the book.84

Each sonnet in the Tersicore describes a woman with a particular imperfection, in the voice of her lover who demonstrates how she is loveable.

Again, the Bella Adirata:

83 Adimari, Tersicore, 24. 84 Adimari might be playing with the form of Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione, in which the three tailed sonnets preceding fifty canti in terza rima are an acrostic of the intitial letters of each terzina. Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, ed. Vittore Branca (Firenze: G.C. Sansoni, 1944). – 85 –

Qualor commossa a generoso sdegno Gonfi le labbra, e torci il guardo in giro, Sì bella, o bizzaretta, io ti rimiro, Che di Pallade il volto appar men degno…85

Adimari’s work is an example of a rhetorical paradox fitting precisely Rosalie

Colie’s definition of this form in Renaissance humanism.

The ‘rhetorical paradox’ or the formal defence, [was] organized along the lines of traditional encomia, of an unexpected, unworthy, or indefensible subject. The rhetorical paradox was an ancient form designed as epideixis, to show off the skill of the orator and to arouse the admiration of an audience, both at the outlandishness of the subject and the technical brilliance of the rhetorician.86

The decision to place this work on one side or the other of the serio-ludere divide must be made in relation to contemporary Marinist poetic representations of women. Adimari’s approach is revisionist in relation to Marinism, and the longer tradition treating female ugliness and transgressive beauty that had included anti-petrarchism, poesia giocosa, and invective.87

In her critical edition of the Tersicore, Paola Marongiu locates Adimari’s poetry within the category of the “barocco moderato,” proposed by Franco

Croce. She emphasises the strength of a typical counter-reformation piety founded on Christian stoicism throughout the Tersicore, consistent with

Adimari’s wider production.88 Adimari’s theme of deformity and illnesses in women was not unusual for the period, but his ethical position in relation to his

85 Adimari, Tersicore, 24. 86 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 3. 87 Bettella, The Ugly Woman. 129. 88 Marongiu, "Introduzione," viii, x. Franco Croce, "Introduzione al barocco," 28. – 86 – subject is. Adimari’s sonnets respond to the women’s difetti with acceptance and love, rather than using the material as a pretext for cruel or grotesque scenarios, or misogynous comedy.89 Editor Lorenzo Landi indicates the pro- woman project, and moral scope, of the Tersicore in his letter to the reader:

Il frutto, che trar se ne deve oltre al diletto, sia che ogni marito ami la moglie, anchorché non perfettamente bella: perché la donna onorata non ha difetto, che lodare e sopportar non si possa…90

Adimari’s use of classical and vernacular poetic forms to present his paradox extends his challenge to representations of women in lyric poetry and the classical tradition. The ethical position taken in the sonnets themselves revises the idealised object of Petrarchan poetry, the generic impersonality of the Bella donna themed poems, and the burlesque and Marinist sexual objectification of female imperfections. Adimari’s dispositio of classical authorities, the sonnet, and terza rima forms in the Tersicore allude to textual traditions that had been used in both positive and negative discourses on women. His chosen forms encompass classical Latin auctoritates of erudite humanism that informed the querelle des femmes, or the vernacular and enduring classical and neo-Latin erotic tradition. The terza rima point to Dante’s Commedia and the didactic tradition, or the capitolo of poesia giocosa. Sonnet form is shared by the

Petrarchan lyric tradition, and the bernesque or pornographic sonnet. By combining these textual forms to present his paradox, Adimari turns the paradox on the traditions themselves, questioning the negative representations of women within them, or that they had been used to support.91 Colie explains

89 Marongiu, "Introduzione," viii. 90 Adimari, Tersicore, 6. 91 Bettella, The Ugly Woman. 128–32. Bettella’s brief analysis of Adimari’s text, while defending it from earlier dismissive jugdments of Praz and Belloni, does – 87 – that paradox always involves a challenge to orthodoxy, and is “an oblique criticism of absolute judgement…or convention.”92

The publication of Costa’s La chitarra and Il violino by “Daniel Wastch” assigns the status of author to an unconventional female performer, a courtesan virtuosa. Set beside Adimari’s vision for the Tersicore as ‘washing’ the negative reputation of the Sirens, the daughters of the muse of music and dance, Costa’s lyric corpus also appears as a paradox — drawing “attention to the limitation it questions and denies.”93 As I show in the following section, Alessandro Adimari also explicitly defended Costa’s positive qualities as a performer and her authorship against those who chose to conflate female performance and the

‘dangers’ of female sexuality.

“Dotta beltà,” Adimari’s praise of Costa’s authorship

While Counter-Reformation aesthetics precluded public female performance in

Rome, female cultural engagement was also actively under attack by an anti- theatrical movement, represented by the published writing of Florentine Gio.

Domenico Ottonelli (1581–1670). This long-lived Jesuit was the author of the six volume work Della christiana moderatione del theatro.94

The cultural currency of the mid-century debate over female performance

not credit the complexity of the structure, nor the ethical position noted by Marongiu. 92 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 6–7. 93 Ibid., 12. 94 Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli et al., Della christiana moderatione del theatro libro terzo detto le risolutioni di alcuni Dubbij, e casi di coscienza intorno agli spettatori delle comedie poco modeste (In Fiorenza: Nella Stamperia di Luca Franceschini & Alessandro Logi, 1649). A re-edition of the third volume, published in 1649 contained a Spanish anti-theatrical tract translated into Italian by Alessandro Adimari. – 88 – is shown by Ottinelli’s treatise Della pericolosa conuersatione con le donne… published in 1646. The same female tropes and attributes that appear in encomia of Costa are also found in Ottinelli’s discussion of the spiritual dangers for men of social contact with women such as actresses, singers, or “donne academiche.” Such women are to be avoided, even if one should appear at first to be “una saggia, e giuditiosa Giovanetta,..quasi virtuosa Sirena.” Ottinelli quotes a modern satirical treatise on the reputations of two ancient poets frequently associated with early modern female authors, including Costa, “è pur anche ver. che’han trista fama Saffo, e Corinna; perche furon dotte.”95 Adimari’s encomium would appear to directly address this criticism.

Adimari’s encomium of Costa in La chitarra challenges negative judgements about female cultural production in a way that closely follows the support of women’s performance in the Tersicore. Adimari’s focus on the figure of the Siren in the Tersicore, one of the tropes most frequently taken up in both praise and blame of female singers, is echoed in his encomia of Costa in La chitarra.96 The terms associated with female performance and authorship used

95 Gio. Domenico Ottonelli, Della pericolosa conuersatione con le donne, ò poco modeste, ò ritirate, ò cantatrici, ò accademiche, opera del p. Gio. Domenico Ottonelli dà Fanano, sacerdote della Compagnia di Giesù, oue si risoluono molti casi di coscienza: si narrano alcune marauigliose storie antiche, e moderne, e si risponde à molte obiettioni di coloro, che poco stimano il pericolo di tale conuersatione (Fiorenza: La Stamperia di Luca Franceschini e Alessandro Logi, 1646), 396, 4–5. Moderata Fonte takes the name Corinna for her own mouthpiece in her dialogue. Moderata Fonte, The worth of women: wherein is clearly revealed their nobility and their superiority to men / Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo) ; edited and translated by Virginia Cox, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). ; The bibilography on Sappho and early modern female authorship is vast, see Jane Tylus, "Naming Sappho: Gaspara Stampa and the recovery of the sublime in early modern Europe," in Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the canon of Renaissance poetry, ed. Unn Falkeid and Aileen A Feng, Women and gender in the early modern world (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 96 Calogero, "'Sweet aluring harmony’.” 65-66. – 89 – by Adimari are the same as those seen in the encomia of Umoristi authors and

Isabetta Corelia, discussed above: sirena, dotta beltà, and the images of the theatre, the realm of the Diva.

The following analysis shows the ways in which Adimari’s encomium in

La chitarra appears as a key to reading Costa’s text, acknowledging the social and poetic contradictions the author presented. He resolves the contradictions of her ethos as courtesan virtuosa and poet in the synthesis of “dotta beltà.”

This formula stands against Ottonelli’s negative judgement of female performance and knowledge. The sonnet is a blazon that introduces Costa to readers in parts, borrowed from the Petrarchan and Provençal lexicon.97 The author nests physical attributes with spiritual and intellectual qualities in groups of three throughout the poem: “chioma..volta…alma” in the first quatrain,

“senno…sembiante…salma” in the first tercet.

The first quatrain combines Petrarchan and classical references, introducing Costa’s hair and face, linked with a classical invocation to the muses. Adimari claims her crowning as a poet for Florence rather than Rome.

VENITE, o Muse, a coronar la chioma D'un bel volto, ch'annida alma serena Non trova Alloro il Campidoglio, o Roma, Che possa al merto suo far ombra appena:

The second quatrain and first tercet present two more versions of Costa’s social identity, the theatre and comedy, each carried by a clear and contrasting trope.

COSTA tanto il valor per cui si noma, Ch'e’ poco il dirle in un Perla, e Sirena: A chi vince l'invidia, e'l tempo doma,

97 Nancy J. Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1981): 266. – 90 –

Teatro e'l Mondo, e l'Universo e Scena.

Adimari presents Costa’s value through metonyms of her name cost/value, margherita/pearl. With a pivotal word “Sirena” (a daughter of Tersicore) Adimari places her as a performer in the baroque commonplace of the ‘world as a stage.

A comic element is introduced in the final line of the first tercet through references to giants and pygmies (and bodily remains) .

Quel, che vedi, o Lettor, senno, e sembiante Raccolto in queste carte, e breve salma Anzi un Pigmeo del suo saver Gigante.

These references to the place of dwarfs and in Medici and court culture are taken up in the contrasto, "I caramoggi” found at the end of La chitarra, that I consider in chapter Five. It also gestures towards Costa’s burlesque ‘Capitolo scherzoso…’ her first poem in La chitarra.98

The final tercet resolves these conflicts with a positive value judgement that fuses nature and culture, with the image of a sea of love, becalmed by

Costa’s learned beauty, “dotta beltà.”

Ahi, che dotta beltà vince ogni palma. E veggio al fin, che d'ogni core amante Amore e Mare, e saggia Donna e Calma.99

In Adimari’s encomium of Costa, and through the intertextual connections suggested by the false publication details, the tropes of the singer and performer are given positive cultural associations. Adimari’s image of Costa accommodates the full range of poetic forms and voices Costa performs in La chitarra — lyric, theatrical, and comic.

98 Costa, La chitarra, 567-73. 99 Margherita Costa, La chitarra, v. – 91 –

Making a female Marinist author

In this chapter I have considered the strategic positioning of Margherita Costa, virtuosa Romana, as the author of a large and varied lyric corpus, in spite of, and possibly to spite, contemporary attempts to limit female performance.

Clandestine publication was a necessary condition of the production of these texts, to avoid censorship and to protect the printer, and may have marked a textual filiation with the Marinist Murtoleide. Textual relationships with Roman and Florentine Marinist production are also indicated through titles and peritextual and paratextual clues in La chitarra and Il violino that hint at printer, patron broker and ideologically align the works with Adimari’s pro-woman position in the Tersicore.

All these clues cohere in a global vision for this corpus: homage, reminiscence, and a metamorphosed embodiment of Marino. There is a sense in which Costa was instrumental in this production: a production that could only have been created through the careful organisation of an extensive poetic production. Costa’s reputation as Diva, Muse and Siren positions her authorship alongside Marinist poetry in praise of singers.

For Marinists who no longer saw the possibility of publishing Marino’s poetry with official sanction, bringing a female voice to Marinism was a novel and indirect way to keep Marino present in literary culture, without risking prosecution, imprisonment or worse.100 The creation of a female Marinist author makes a strong statement about one of the most radical and disruptive cultural interventions of libertine culture — the centrality of female performance, and the

100 Clizia Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura (Roma: Ed. Antenore, 2008), 291. – 92 – female voice, in the presentation of political and aesthetic knowledge.

Costa’s corpus with a Marinist form also had a Marinist voice: the main poetic persona of La chitarra, the Bella donna. In the chapters that follow I explore how, from this ideal stage, Costa’s poetry effectively upsets and rewrites libertine, Marinist, and moderate baroque expectations (exemplified by

Alessandro Adimari), and the baroque grotesque. This is achieved even while borrowing the techniques, images, words, and sharing the authorial models of her male peers. Costa’s intertextual engagement with male-authored poetry exploits the differences created by female authorship of male and female poetic voices.

– 93 –

Chapter Three — Costa’s Bella donna and her challenge to male

dominated lyric

In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Costa’s female authorship of traditionally male-authored literary forms challenges both genre conventions and gender representations. Costa’s poetry and love letters disprupt the baroque lyric, epistolary, and grotesque forms that she references and allusively cites. The effects of gendered authorship are shown through intertextual analysis of poems and letters that appropriate, quote, or allusively cite male- authored poetry, including texts by Antonio Bruni, Marino, and Alessandro

Adimari.

The poetic voice of the Bella donna is crucial to Costa’s positioning as a female Marinist author. Danielle Clarke, in her study of gender and form in female-voice poetry, questions the relationship between “woman as textual trope and woman as a historically situated speaking subject.”1 I consider the main lyric voice of La chitarra, the Bella donna, to deliberately confuse the categories proposed by Clarke. In this chapter I show that the Bella donna is allusive of Costa’s social roles as a courtesan virtuosa, is a prosopopoeia of a female Marinist trope, and is an imitation of the libertine poetic persona Marino shaped in the Lira.

As I introduced in Chapter One, Costa’s authorship “defigures” female poetic voices and tropes, compared to the male-authored female-voiced tradition.2 Poetic voices securely received as fictive, when written by a male

1 Danielle Clarke, "'Formd into words by your divided lips': Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition," in 'This Double Voice': Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 63. 2 Ibid., 77. – 94 – author, suddenly have an “indeterminate” quality; they could possibly reflect the experience of the female author.3 The persona of the Bella donna reinforces this effect because the qualities attributed through the poetry to this figure (its ethos) depend on Costa’s social role as a courtesan virtuosa. I will also show how Costa exploits the inverse of this gendered effect when she imitates a male-voiced poem by Marino — creating a distance between the author and the poetic voice that enables critique of the earlier poem. Narrative metalepsis is another effect of the close association between Costa and the Bella donna.

Poems addressed to named patrons, for example “Bella donna al Serenissimo

Prencipe di Pollonia innamorata di Lei, mentre Lei ama altro Amante” disrupt narrative levels by coupling the Bella donna persona with historical figures.4 As I will show, Costa defends her authorship of love poetry in the final capitolo of La chitarra by describing the effects of irony such as simulation and dissimulation explored in this chapter. Costa explicitly claims these techniques as ways to manage the distance between her authorial self and her poetic voices.

The Bella donna and the libertine poet(ess)

Costa’s Bella donna, the main poetic voice of La chitarra, shares its name with the object of a major sub-genre of seventeenth-century Marinist lyric, the Bella donna poem. These poems describe the desirability of every possible type of woman, in every possible situation. The beloved appearing at the opening of

Marino’s Lira I (‘Il tempo, e la guisa del suo innamoramento’) is named only by the periphrasis “Donna oltra le belle bella,” and is referred to as “sua Donna”

3 Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 310. 4 Margherita Costa, La chitarra, 70. – 95 – and by the initial “D.” in several subsequent poem titles.5 Many women are praised and desired in the three books of the Lira, both before and after the death of this particular, anonymous woman. Just four sections later in the Lira I,

Marino’s Donna is the object of sixteen of the Rime lugubri.6 Marino’s imitation of Petrarch and Dante, in the deaths of Laura and Beatrice, could not be more explicit: he addresses these women in elysium, asking them to leave off dancing with his beloved for a while, should she be there, and notice his grief.

“DEH (SE PUR TRA VOI SPATIA, e con voi stàssi/ Ne l’Elisia magion la mia

Fenice)/Penelope, Lucretia, Laura e Bice,/Fermate alquanto i vostri balli, e i passi….”7

Marinist authors also multiplied the female desired objects of lyric poetry.8 Bella donna poems were collected in manuscript and published poetry collections throughout the seventeenth century. In the titles to these poems, the object was frequently reduced to the initials of her generic name: “BD.” Antonio

Bruni’s chapter of rime amorose, in Le tre grazie contains more than eighteen

Bella donna poems including “BD vestita d’un drappo a color d’argento,” “BD dipinta in atto di dipingere” “BD avara.”9 A zibaldone of Florentine author

Antonio Malatesti contains Bella donna poems composed by the author and

5 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 10, 11–21. Emilio Russo notes the Petrachan origin of this idea, found at Petrarca, Rvf 289 1 (L'alma mia fiamma oltre le belle bella), which also appears in an manuscript lettera amorosa by Marino discussed in Emilio Russo, “Due ‘amorose’ inedite del Marino,” in Versants, 56 (2009): 36n. 25. 6 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 163–72. 7 Ibid., 169. 8 Massimo Danzi, "Petrarca e la forma "canzoniere" fra quattro e cinquecento," in Lezioni sul testo: modelli di analisi letteraria per la scuola, ed. Emilio Manzotti (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 1992), 104. 9 Antonio Bruni, Le tre grazie rime del Bruni (Roma: Guglielmo Facciotti, 1630), 49, 53, 57. – 96 – others he had collected. The topics include ‘Bella donna chiamata innocenza,’

‘Bella donna ha paura sognando,’ ‘Bella donna muta,’ ‘Bella donna domanda quante ore sono,’ ‘Bella donna ha paura di un Terremoto.’10

The classical source for this multiplication of love objects, and their position relative to the male libertine poetic subject that evoked them, was

Ovid’s catalogue poem, “One hundred reasons,” Amores 2:4.

I won’t defend my faulty morals. Wouldn’t dare. And wouldn’t lie to make what’s foul seem fair. No, I confess — for all the good it does — my sins (My half-crazed soul is where such crime begins). I hate myself, and what I can’t not be, I hate. Oh, Atlas-like, I long to drop my fate. Too weak to rule myself, all self-restraint now lost, I ride the waves, a toy ship turned and tossed. There is no one fixed type that sets my heart aflame; A hundred causes make me play The Game.11

Ovid’s catalogue of women runs from lines eleven to forty-five, describing women by shapes, sizes, colour, character and creative skills, including a musician, singer, and a woman critical of Ovid’s poetry.12

10 Antonio Malatesti, "VII: 359," in Magliabecchiana, Provinenza Marmi (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, c.1638), 230, 34, 53, 58. Malatesti is known for his collection of pornographic sonnets exploiting an equivocal burlesque vocabulary, with a central female protagonist, La Tina: equivoci rusticali, ed. Davide Messina. (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014). I located a manuscript tailed sonnet by Malatesti, written about Costa, c. 1638, at MAGL. VII. 359, p 78. “Va vi nello scrittoio Margherita/e recami quel foglio ch’è sul desco…” 11 Ovid, Ovid's Erotic Poems: "Amores" and "Ars amatoria,” trans. Len Krisak and Sarah Ruden, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 2:4, 1–10. 12 Ovid, Ovid's Erotic Poems. Am. 2:4, 20–28. – 97 –

In the last poem of the amori of Lira III, Marino rewrites Ovid’s catalogue of women in his “Amore Incostante, Al Sig Marcello Sacchetti.”13 In this poem

Marino models a poetic persona on Ovid’s desultor Amoris, invoking the mutability of the chameleon and the metamorphic powers of Proteus in order to seduce the hundreds of women who attract him.14

Chi vuol veder, Marcello, Protheo d’Amor novello, novel camaleonte, A me giri la fronte, Ch’ognor pensier volgendo Forme diverse e color vari apprendo. … Non ha sol'uno oggetto Il mio bramoso affetto, Cento principii, e cento Trov'io del mio tormento, Ove che vada, o miri, Sempre ho nove cagioni, ond'io sospiri.15

Marino proceeds, over the next one-hundred lines, to describe many of the types of women in Ovid’s poem, including a singer and musicians, and ending with one woman who enjoys, and the other who corrects, his poetry:

Havvi Donna gentile Ch’al ciel alza il mio stile: Costei, che ama il mio canto,

13 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 495–97. Marino’s text is considered alongside Ovid’s in Emilio Torchio, "Marino amante ovidiano," Studi secenteschi 41 (2000): 89–121. 14 M. L. Stapleton, Harmful eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 57–8. The desultor amoris, “circus rider of love,” is the name given by Stapleton to the Ovidian poetic persona in the Amores. Ovid, Ars amatoria 1:759–762. 15 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 495. – 98 –

Amo e bramo altrettanto, E stato cangerei Sol per esserle in sen co’versi miei. Altra qualhor mi legge Mi riprende e corregge: Allhor convien ch’io dica: “O pur l’havessi amica! O soggiacer felice A sì bella maestra e correttrice!”16

Costa’s Bella donna gives voice to this female figure, creating a prosopopoeia of the Marinist ‘every-woman’ trope. The Bella donna is a poetic subject, shaped from the object of Marinist lyric poetry and Ovidian elegy. Of the two hundred and twenty-two poems in La chitarra, two hundred and nineteen indicate in the title that the voice or persona of the poem is the Bella donna. The ethos of the Bella donna persona depends on Costa’s social role as a courtesan virtuosa. The narrative of the Bella donna, presented both in La chitarra and

Lettere amorose, can be loosely mapped onto Costa’s itinerant musical life. In

La chitarra this narrative is traced by the poems of the central canzoniere section (pages 80 to 395), and describes the Bella donna moving between several ‘beloveds.’ Twenty-three of the poems identify the main beloved in

Costa's canzoniere with the pastoral name Tirsi, and the central love affair narrated by the poems follows the Bella donna with Tirsi, in Rome. Bella donna rejects Tirsi after he is unfaithful, she seeks other lovers, and finally settles down in Florence with one man to domestic life, renouncing the world in favour of family, the spindle and needle.17

16 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 497. 17 Costa, La chitarra, 387–97, 494, 516–18. – 99 –

I also argue that the Bella donna is a prosopopeia of Marino’s Ovidian persona. It is an active, female libertine subject, modelled on the male libertine poetic subject. Marino’s libertine persona is given flesh and a history in the poem cited above for Marcello Sacchetti, but is activated more broadly across the Lira by Marino’s poems for many types of women. Alexander shows that the analogy of an earlier voice haunting its later evocation is implicit in the definition of prosopopoeia as a figure that can “resurrect or summon up lost or absent voice.”18 The libertine narrative of the Bella donna persona strengthens the connection between Costa’s La chitarra, and Marino’s poetic persona in the

Lira, the Ovidian lover.

The effects of authorial gender and narrative metalepsis

The textual structure of La chitarra and its twin volume Il violino stages degrees of proximity between Costa as an author, and the authorial and poetic voices of the text, moving from the greatest to the least proximity. The letters of dedication and to the reader in the paratext are signed by Costa, and reference the processes of writing: “Nelle Vigilie della notte, cagionatemi dall’ inquietudine della mia infermità, non ho potuto sì frenare la penna….”19 These are at the level that is closest to the historical author and singer, that Genette calls extradiegetic.20 The next degree of distance from the author is found in the poetry between pages seven and seventy-nine of La chitarra. These poems are

18 Gavin Alexander, "The Ghost in the Shell: On the Reuse of Poetic Form," in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materaility in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143; "Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure," 112. 19 Costa, Il violino, ii. 20 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 234–5. – 100 – encomia and laments in the voice of the Bella donna directed to named patrons from the Florentine and Roman circles in which Costa moved in the 1620s and

1630s.21 This pairing of the Bella donna with historical addressees creates the greatest effects of intrusion of one narrative level to the next, similar to

Genette’s definition of narrative metalepsis that I discussed in Chapter One. I explore the effects of narrative metalepsis in two of Costa’s Bella donna voiced poems that cite poems by Bruni and Marino both written in a female voice.

Kate Hamburger defines the key characteristic of the relationship between author and lyric voice, when the gender of both is the same, as an

“indeterminable” identification, and this is found in the central section of La chitarra running from page 80 to page 544.22 This is the canzoniere of La chitarra, containing the poems that form the loose narrative of the libertine persona of the Bella donna.

The greatest distance between Costa as author and the poetic voices is found in the poems of Il violino that has no Bella donna voiced poems. This collection of idylls and canzonette has the largest number of poems in a male voice of any of Costa’s books, with twenty-nine of a possible thirty-nine poems in a male voice. The example I analyse from Il violino is Costa’s intricate parody of two poems by Marino, her male-voiced ‘Violamento di Lilla narrato dall' istesso amante.’

The Bella donna: a virtuosa in a garden, and a courtesan at war

Costa’s occupation of the Marinist trope of the Bella donna is exemplified by the

21 Costa, La chitarra, 70. 22 Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 310. – 101 – literary ‘theft’ of a poem that appears in La chitarra. This poem appears within the first eighty pages, among those in the voice of the Bella donna addressed to named patrons. This Bella donna poem presented in La chitarra as if it is

Costa’s own work was most likely authored by Antonio Bruni about Costa. It is one of a pair of poems describing a liaison between a Bella donna and Angelo

Contarini (1598–1666), a member of the Venetian nobility and ambassador to

Rome between 1627 and 1629.23 The ottava with the title “Al medesimo mentre si disportava in un Giardino con altra Donna del medesimo nome” in Costa’s La chitarra was published in the Tre grazie (1630) with the title "Effetti di gelosia d'una Signora, detta Margherita; dopo che il Cavaliere amato si diportava con altra Dama del medesimo nome, in un Giardino."24 Bruni’s poem is preceded in

Costa’s collection by a related poem with the title “BD al S. Angelo Contarini

Inbasciadore di Venezia in Roma.”

The first poem describes a passionate affair, and love at first sight:

Sovra à Carro terreno Ei trionfante L’Alme prendea nell’Amorosa rete: il viddi à pena, e ne divenni Amante; ond’accrebbi al desio l’hore più inquiete. per sì bella caggion fatta incostante, sparsi in’ogni altro Amor l’onda di lete: corsi in grembo alle gioie in’un momento, mà provai col piacer misto il tormento.25

Bruni’s poem that follows relates a melodramatic scenario of mistaken identity,

23 Angelo Contarini, Relazione di Angelo Contarini, ambasciatore ordinario alla corte di Roma. 1627–1629, vol. 1, Relazioni degli stati europei al Senato dagli ambasciatori veneti nel secolo decimosettimo Ser. 3 (Venice: Venice - Senato, 1877). 24 Costa, La chitarra, 34–40, 40–43; Bruni, Le tre grazie, 202. 25 Costa, La chitarra, 34. – 102 – or a substitution of another singer named Margherita for Margherita Costa: “una perla abbandoni, un’altra n’abracci.”26 The speaker in the poem suggests that one Margherita is a true lover, while the other’s motives are mercenary.27

The complexity of the language, density of the classical references, and the pastoral style of the second ottava would indicate Bruni’s authorship. It has a much broader and more aulic vocabulary (for example “unqua”), and no repetitions of words within lines, or as rhyme words, that is a feature of most of

Costa’s ottave. Consider, for example, two treatments of the same theme — an appeal for the lover to return. The poem printed in both La chitarra and Bruni’s collection has longer phrases with more complex syntax, uses future tense, and develops a description of the effects of music on the senses:

Torna, ch’io pur saprò con dolci accenti temprar gl’affanni acerbi, e i giorni amari: in te il mio Cor, se non nell’aria i venti rilegherò con modi amici, e cari: alle fughe canore i senzi intenti faran, ch’a fuggir altra omai tu impari: esprimerà ‘l tuo Cor, d’amore esangue il languir d’una voce un Cor, che langue.28

A poem to addressed to another ambassador, the “Bella donna al Signor Duca di Pastrana Ambaciadore di Spagna mentre Egli parte da Roma” demonstrates

Costa’s short phrases that finish within the line. Costa uses simple language, and much repetition:

Deh, torna per pietà, torna mio Bene, vuolgi tuoi vaghi lumi ai miei martiri;

26 Margarita is Latin for pearl. 27 Costa, La chitarra, 42. 28 Ibid., 43. – 103 –

consola, o mio Tesoro, le mie pene, è rendi omai più lieti i miei desiri: lascia, bell’idol mio, l’hibere arene, torna, ch’io struggo in fervidi sospiri: torna mio Sol, torna, e consola l’Alma, che senza te da me sen vola.29

Through the textual appropriation of Bruni’s poem Costa boldly involves herself in Marinist circles through one of Marino’s closest associates. She also takes control of Bruni’s representation of ‘Margherita,’ and re-frames the power relations of Bruni’s poem. While Bruni named the subject of his poem

Margherita in his title and concealed the man’s name, Costa takes the opportunity to name the Cavaliere as Angelo Contarini, but makes the Bella donna the speaker in the title. While Costa’s (ostensible) authorship of this poem makes the genders of the author and poetic voice concur, shifting the poem closer to being a ‘possible’ scenario, substitution of Costa’s name for that of the Bella donna de-personalises the poetic voice of the poem. By naming

Contarini, Costa personalises the addressee, or love object, making the poem conform to the section of La chitarra in which it appears. By publishing a poem providing narrative depth to the purloined poem published in Bruni’s Tre grazie

Costa witnesses to her involvement in this literary circle.

Marino’s courtesan poems, in the persona of the Bella donna

The next of Costa’s poems that I consider is the ottava “Bella donna al

Serenissimo Prencipe Mattias de’Medici mentre Egli lontano da Lei si ritrova nelle guerre in Alemagna.” This poem contains brief citations and allusive

29 Ibid., 66. – 104 – references to the first five of Marino’s ten sonnets written “ad istanza et in persona di cortegiana….” Three sonnets of this sequence were among Marino’s poems censored in 1612 during the preparation of the Lira.30 The ottava written by Costa is in the female voice of the Bella donna that is closely connected to the ethos of her authorial persona, as I described above. Below I compare

Costa’s female-authored, female-voiced poem to Marino’s male-authored, female-voiced poems in the voice of a courtesan for the effects created by gendered authorship, and the intrusion of and historical figure into the narrative of the poem — narrative metalepsis.

Costa’s ‘theft’ of Bruni’s poem connected the Bella donna figure to the musical and poetic culture of Rome in the 1620s. Costa’s allusive appropriation of Marino’s courtesan poems ties her poetry to the circulation of Marino’s censored poetry. These poems were censored on the grounds of erotic images and Marino’s citation of classical sources with homo-erotic themes.31 The censors’ judgements act as rare example evidence of the reception of poetry in which the gender of the poetic voice does not concur with the authorial gender.

The theme of Costa’s poem and Marino’s sequence is the Ovidian theme of the conflict between Mars and Venus, or war and love. This was conceived as the war of, or on, love. In Costa’s and Marino’s poems, the courtesan attempts to convince the young man to choose her love rather than going to war. This theme, which first appeared in Ovid’s elegiac poetry, was taken up in the courtly love tradition of the middle ages, but was pervasive in poetry, music

30 Clizia Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura (Roma: Ed. Antenore, 2008), 343. 31 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 79. By taking an earlier text into its structure the reception of the new text is “to some extent influenced by the reception” of the old. – 105 – and art from the late sixteenth century reaching a peak in the seventeenth century.32 For example, Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals, the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi was published in 1638, and set to music texts by Marino, and such Marinist authors as Ottavio Rinuccini.33

In the poem for Mattias de’ Medici (1613–1667), Costa pits the Bella donna’s professed love against the prince’s desire for military glory, and also exploits Marino’s secondary theme of youth contrasted with experience. Unlike the youth, Ligurino, of Marino’s sonnets who is poised to leave on a crusade, in

1638 Mattias was already a soldier, serving in the Thirty-year war from the age of eighteen, and the Bella donna begs him to return.34

Marino’s courtesan sonnets are among the few poems in the Lira in a female voice.35 The rubric that precedes the sonnets points to and justifies the innovation of the sequence.

È da sapersi, che questo sonetto, et anche altri nove che gli vengono appresso, furono composti ad instanza et in persona d’una cortegiana, la quale si era fortamente invaghita d’un giovane: i cinque primi in occassione che il suo vago si avea cinta la spada per ire alla guerra; negli altri cinque loda la lanugine che

32 For the influence of Ovid generally across this period see Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence. See 115-132 for Petrarch’s reception of Ovid. Marisa Biaggi, "‘Ogni Amante è Guerrier’: Monteverdi and the War of Love in Early Modern Italy" (Doctoral Dissertation, Princeton University, 2006), 1n.2, 21. Ovid states in Amores 1.9 “Militat omnis amans” (“Every lover makes war”). Part one of Biaggi’s thesis traces this topic in painting, poetry and musical composition from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. 33 Biaggi, "‘Ogni Amante è Guerrier’: Monteverdi and the War of Love in Early Modern Italy," 513–729. See Part two of Biaggi’s thesis “Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi.” 34 Giambattista Marino, Rime amorose, ed. Ottavio Besomi and Alessandro Martini (Ferrara: Panini, 1987), 132. The name of the young man and particularly the ninth sonnet in the sequence reference Horace, Odes, 4.10. The Rime amorose is the first section of the Rime I, that became the Lira I, in 1614. 35 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 252–57. – 106 –

incominciava a spuntargli in su ‘l mento. Et in tutti s’introduce a parlar sempre la femina.36

Modern editors of the Rime amorose (from Rime I) Besomi and Martini, note that the sonnet that precedes this sequence ‘Loda un picciolo figliolo d’un principe, chiamato Ascanio’ acts as an epilogue on the theme of the war of love, and specifically male beauty. However this poem is in the generic (male) voice of the collection.

…O di quai piaghe, o di dolce ardore, or d’un bel guardo armato, or d’un bel riso perché resti altri acceso, et altri ucciso, lusingando la vista, offende il core.37

Censors appear to have ignored Marino’s insistence that the sonnet sequence that follows was an innovation in persona of a courtesan, both speaker and instigator of the poems. They appear to have judged the female voice to be a dissimulation, and read the poems with the authorial gender in mind. Reading forward from Marino’s sonnet for Ascanio, they condemned this and the first two courtesan sonnets as “treating masculine love.” The fifth courtesan poem was condemned for impiety.38

Costa’s imitation of Marino’s poem consists mainly of quotation and allusive references, with the condensed images of the sonnets expanded and liberally dispersed through the sixteen strophes of the ottava rima. Costa’s poem for Mattias de’ Medici commences with the same words as Marino’s first sonnet “Tu pur…,” and the first two lines end with words commencing with the

36 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 26. 37 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 25. Sonnet 32. 38 Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura, 343. Appendix II, “Censura della Lira,”: “agunt de amore masculino” poems 39–41, and “pietati adversatur epigramma” poem. – 107 – same letter as the final words in Marino’s first two lines. Marino writes:

Tu pur, ben mio, fra armi e per gli ondosi campi n’andrai de l’Ocean vorace? E più per l’onde infide errar ti piace, Che goder nel mio seno i tuoi riposi?39

Costa begins:

Tu pur lunghi dall’Arno a crudi orrori di battaglie di Morte altero vivi; seguage sol dell’armi, de gl’ honori … come a gl’ardori miei tanto impietate usar mi puoi? s’ Amor per ti mi sface? 40

In the second and third strophe, Costa takes up the theme of Marino’s second sonnet, Mattias’ youth, and his choice of the arms of war instead of love.

Costa’s use of “fior,” and reference to beauty in the first and third line recall the first line of Marino’s sonnet that precedes the courtesan sequence “Questi, ch’ha in sè d’ogni bellezza il fiore.”41

Ma come in fior degl’anni in verde etate nel petto tuo matur ardir soggiace? come non hai pietà di tua beltate? come sprezzi d’Amor l’ardente face? … Ah, che l’Anima tua di gloria altera sdegna d’Amore i lacci, e prende avile; sol dell’Arme di Marte alto bandiera spiega contenta in rigoroso stile …

39 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 26. Sonnet 33. 40 Costa, La chitarra, 67. 41 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 25. Sonnet 32. – 108 –

sembra Marte alla mano, Amor’al volto.42

Marino’s second sonnet presents a reflection on the contradiction of the very young man wearing a sword, and the contradiction of resembling both Mars and

Love.

Sovra il tener fianco il duo peso sostener de la spada empia e mortale, garzon pronto al tuo danno, a l’altrui male, ond’hai superbo e rigidetto appreso? … O di Marte e d’Amor vago guerriero, nè men che vago e bello, ardito e forte, nè men che forte, oimè, crudele e fero

Ah non bastava per mia dura sorte negli occhi averla e nel bel viso altero, se non portavi in mano anco la morte.43

The next three sonnets in Marino’s sequence catalogue the youth’s physical qualities both as weapons of love which provoke desire in the courtesan, and real weapons and actions of war, comparing and contrasting injury and death in battle with sex:

…

Ah pon giù l’armi, e ‘l ferro aspro e pungente sia dal bel fianco omai discinto e sciolto: disarma d’ira il cor, d’asprezza il volto, semplicetto omicida et innocente.

Sol quell’armi adoprar t’insegni Amore contro cui nulla val difesa o scudo,

42 Costa, La chitarra, 67. 43 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 27. Sonnet 34. – 109 –

che non erano mai colpo in mezo al core. Che (se nol sia), fanciul superbo e crudo, fanno piaga i tuoi sguardi assai maggiore, et assai più ch’armato offendi ignudo.44

Son del bel volto tuo l’ire e i furori grazie e vezzi amorosi; e quando sfidi, giovinetto feroce, e quando ancidi più d’amore che di sdegno infiammi i cori … Ma se le guerre alfin seguon le paci, ferito esser da te fia dolce assai, pur che le piaghe poi saldino i baci.45

Costa’s poem casts the Bella donna as willing victim of Matthias’ eyes, and hands, also playing on the euphemism of submission and death as sexual union:

Altri feri colà, ed io ferita qui da te resto in sempiterni guai: altri uccidi col ferro, a me la Vita mi togli sol col tormi i tuoi bei rai: altri guerra ti chiede, io chiedo aita, e sol fra dolce pace ti bramai: ... Lascia, lascia il ferir col forte braccio, e me torna a ferir col tuo bel sguardo torna al mio ardor il tuo bel sen di giaccio,46 … O felice quell'alme; a cui la sorte permette di morir per la tua mano;

44 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 27. Sonnet 35. 45 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 27. Sonnet 36. 46 Costa, La chitarra, 69. – 110 –

vita si dee chiamar non cruda morte; ... che da i bei colpi di tua mano ardita morte non saria no, ma dolce vita.

Qual più felice, e fortunato giorno bramar potrei che di morirte avante: alta gloria trarrei d'ogni mio scorno, morrei tua preda, e fortunata Amante.47

The focus on death intensifies in the last three strophes, a pattern repeated frequently throughout Costa’s poetry, as will be seen below in the final words of the male lover abandoned and betrayed by the nymph Lilla. The lament of the abandoned Bella donna recalls the suicidal Dido in Ovid’s Heroides:

Moro dunque, crudel, moro Spietato, uccisa dal mio duol, dal mio martire; e già, che morte ancor mi nieghi, Ingrato, farammi il mio tormento omai morire: moro (è pur ver) sol per haverti amato, moro, sol perche te bramai servire; e moro, oh Dio, sol perch’a te la vita bramai donar dai sguardi tuoi ferita.48

Costa’s allusions and references to Marino’s poems in the persona of the courtesan alter reception of these poems in several ways. The questions of

“masculine love” and dissimulation as a concern of the censors are avoided by the gender of the lyric voice being concurrent with the gender of the author.

47 Costa, La chitarra, 70. 48 Costa, La chitarra, 72. Costa uses this theme, and allusively references Dido’s letter to Phaon, in other laments addressed to patrons. La chitarra, 20, 23, 63. see Ovid, Heroides, 15.169–71. Patricia Phillippy "'Altera Dido': The Model of Ovid's Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco." Italica 69, no. 1 (1992): 1–19. – 111 –

Rather than being a dissimulation, the voice of the Bella donna stands in an indeterminate relation to the author. By publicly enacting a patron/client relationship with a named patron, the Bella donna’s narrative in Costa’s poem uses narrative metalepsis, a combination of the indeterminate position of the

Bella donna with the dramatised references to real events to maintain ambiguity in the interpretation of the poem. These shifts in gender and narrative level serve to mask the quotations from Marino’s poetry, and naturalise the Ovidian topos of the war of love.

Costa’s parody of censored material — the ‘Violamento di Lilla’

In the following analysis I will examine Costa’s ‘Violamento di Lilla narrato dall' istesso amante,’ the longest idyll in Il violino, that is a rewriting of an erotic canzone of Marino, ‘I Trastulli Estivi.’49 Marino described the ‘Trastulli’ as a translation of Ovid’s Amores 1.5 that describes the narrator’s first encounter with Corinna.50

Costa’s imitation of Marino’s poem in the ‘Violamento’ can be defined as a formal parody — it is substantially based on the poem, but stands in an ambivalent, critical position to the original, using female authorship to create

49 Noted in Sara Díaz and Jessica Goethals, "Editors' Introduction," in The Buffoons: A Ridiculous Comedy: A Bilingual Edition (Toronto: Iter Press, 2018), 11; See also Virginia Cox, Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 214–5, and Natalie Costa-Zalessow, "Margherita Costa," in Seventeenth-century Italian poets and dramatists, ed. Albert N Mancini and Glenn Palen Pierce, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2008), 116. Margherita Costa, Il violino, 17– 27. 50 In a prefacing letter to the Sampogna, Marino wrote he had “trasportate da due Elegie d’Ovidio et stampate nella terza parte della mia Lira, cioè a dire i Trastulli estivi et l’Inconstanza d’amore.” Torchio, "Marino amante ovidiano," 49 cites La sampogna, ed. Ugo Guanda (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1993), 44. – 112 –

“comic incongruity between the original and its parody.”51 Costa maintains the male voice of Marino’s poem, but shifts the power dynamic between the protagonists. This is explicitly achieved through the narrative and implied through the shift in position of the gendered lyric subject relative to the gendered authorial voice. Costa also challenges Marino’s reading of Ovid through competitive use of alternative citations and allusions from their common model. Costa’s allusive references and citations of Marino’s ‘Trastulli estivi,’ and a second poem ‘Durante il bagno,’ also have a controversial political dimension, as both poems were censored by the Congregation of the Index during the prolonged production of the Lira III, from 1612–15.52

Marino’s ‘Trastulli estivi’ follows the outline of Ovids Amores 1.5, however, as seen in the poem above ‘to Marcello Sacchetti,’ the author draws on multiple Ovidian sources to support and amplify the imagery and the libertine ideologies communicated by the poem. In his canzone Marino combines two loci from the Amores and the Ars, the conquest of Corinna from Am.1.5 and the abduction of the Sabine women at Ars.101–34, to describe the sexual conquest

(rape) of a young woman, to whom he gives the pastoral name, Lilla. Marino’s opening stanza describes the temporal setting of the poem as high summer, or the “solleone,” in great detail. This is the season that opens the Ars, during which the lover is advised to walk in the porticoes near the theatres of Rome for shade, in search of his lover.53 Marino writes:

Era nela stagione quando ha tra noi Più lunga vita il giorno,

51 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 45. 52 Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura, 153–54. 53 Torchio, "Marino amante ovidiano," 98, note to lines 1–11; Ovid, Ars, 1.67–8. – 113 –

…. Allhor, che ‘l sol, congiunto Con la stella che rugge, Dal più sublime punto Saetta i campi, e i fiori uccide e strugge;54

In Ovid’s Ars.101–34 the advice to search the theatres leads into a description of the abduction and rape of the Sabine women to procure wives for the Roman soldiers. While Corinna, the likely protagonist of Amores 1.5, is married,

Marino’s Lilla is described as a virgin, “Et ecco alhor soletta a me vid’io/Venir

Lilla la bella,/Lilla la verginella,” as are the Sabine women in Ars 1.

Ovid’s account of these events at the opening of the Ars sets an equivocal tone for his advice on seduction, and Marino also cites the passage in which Ovid takes the theme of rape up again towards the end of Book One. Marino writes:

Vidi per prova allor sì come e quanto Mal volontier contrasta, O ritrosetta e casta Vergine, e qual sia l’ira e quale il pianto: Falso pianto, ira finta; Ancorché pugni e neghi, Vuol pugnando esser vinta: …Dar non vuol mai né tor la giovanetta Ciò che brama in suo cor, se non constretta.55

The spurious female psychology used to justify rape in Marino’s sixth stanza is taken from Ars 1.673–4, “You may use force; women like you to use it, they often wish to give unwillingly what they like to give,” and 705–6, “in truth, just as there is shame sometimes in beginning first, so when another begins it is

54 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 460. Lines 1–2, 5–8. 55 Torchio, "Marino amante ovidiano," 95–96. Marino, La Lira: 1614, 459. – 114 – pleasant to submit.”

The final lines of Marino’s poem “Canzon, lasciar intatta/ Da sè partire amata

Donna e bella/ Non cortesia, ma villannia s’appella” is a close translation of the

Ars 1.670–2, “Oscula qui sumsit, si non et cetera sumet/ Quantum defuerat pleno post oscula voto?/ Ei mihi, rusticitas, non pudor ille fuit.”56

Costa’s renaming of the poem from Marino’s euphemistic trastulli to the accurate violamento describes the action of the poem, and the theme of the sections of the Ars amatoria that Marino combined with Amores 1.5. However,

Costa does not shift the disturbing ambivalence surrounding sexual violence seen in much early modern literature, or the poem’s erotic tone and vocabulary.57 One important change she does make is to choose a pastoral setting, shifting the action from a room to a forest. Costa’s nymph, Lilla, takes the same pastoral name as the object of Marino’s poem.58

Marino’s poem, like Ovid’s, dwells first on the anticipation of the encounter, and the half open window:

Io tutto acceso d’amoroso affetto Col cor tremante in seno, Stavami in parte e, pieno

56 This allusion is missed by Torchio who notes the tone as “di massima distanza da Ovidio” but typical of Marino. Ibid., 104. 57 See Courtney Quaintance, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). There are also echoes of Andreini’s ‘Movea dolce un zefiretto,’ ed. trans. Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 181. Especially, l. 43 “Dolci pomi e acerbetti,” 58 Female authors, including Isabella Andreini, modified pastoral satyr scenes with a victorious nymph. See See “Editor’s introduction” in Mirtilla : a pastoral / Isabella Andreini ed. Valeria Finucci, trans. by Julia Kisacky, (Toronto: Iter Press, 2018), 37-40 and Alexandra Coller, “Chapter 3: Satyr Scenes and Female Authored Pastoral Drama,” in Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy. – 115 –

Di desir, di speranza e di diletto, Già misurando l’hore Del mio promesso bene… Dela finestra havea L’una parte appannata e l’altra chiusa.59

In Costa’s poem the meeting is by chance, with the man discovering the naked nymph as she sleeps:

Scinta e nuda giacea Lilla, la giovinetta, E con il nudo fianco I rugiadosi fiori In sonnachioso oblio, quieta, premea; … Onde io, che giunto appena, Rivolsi, ahi, lasso, i lumi A cotanta bellezza, Immoto e semivivo Restai fra tema e speme;60

In both Marino and Costa’s poems the sexual desire of each partner is implied, but Marino’s rationale for (seen above), and description of, the encounter strikes an ambivalent tone. The woman’s resistance, accusations, and bloody de- flowering all fuel male satisfaction. In Marino’s poem the woman asks:

“Che fai crudel? — dicea — crudel che fai? … “Non curi, ingordo di furtive prede, Di macchiar la mia fama e la tua fede?”

Tre volte a questo dir, giunto assai presso

59 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 460. Ovid, Amores, 1.5.1–5. 60 Costa, Il violino, 17, 18. – 116 –

ale dolcezze estreme, Qual’huom che brama e teme, Fui de’ conforti miei scarso a me stesso, E del suo duol pietoso Il mio piacer sostenni. … Ala piaga d’Amor cadde traffitta, E vinta al dolce assalto … Io vinicitor guerriero Dela nemica essangue, Quasi in trionfo altero, Portai nel’armi e nelle spoglie il sangue.61

Costa’s poem undermines both the calculated actions and martial imagery in

Marino’s poem, the virility of Costa’s narrator falters in moments in which he is almost overwhelmed, on the verge of losing control of himself. His first glimpse of the nymph foreshadows both his pleasure and his loss at the end of the poem:

Pur fatto ardito, l’avido desire, Mi condusse a morire, A morir sì, poiché sperando aita Perdei me stesso, ahimè, perdei la vita. … Forza mi sento far, nè so che sia Il mio nuovo furor, la forza mia. Alfin non più in mia mano È il superar me stesso, Ma l’infocata voglia, Mentr’io mi vengo meno,

61 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 461 – 117 –

Tronca d’ogni timor l’invido freno.62

Costa’s poem registers a victory for Lilla, and for Costa in her competitive allusions to the Ovidian model. Where Marino commences and ends his poem with allusions to the Ars that focus on acts of violence, Costa alludes to the final verses of Ars II that emphasise the superiority of mutual sexual pleasure. In Ars these passages act as a possible palinode of Ovid’s preceding advice for men on seduction and introduce book three, to be addressed to women. John

Henderson writes that at this turning point between books two and three Ovid shifts his attitude to female pleasure.

The manual presses upon readers the goal of simultaneous, mutual, reciprocal orgasmic intercourse. This involves full recognition of the necessity, for the realization of Ovid’s training programme, that his male graduands should incorporate parity between self and female other. The point is put in terms of the metaphor of ‘winning,’ as if in battle, of ‘victory’ (uinco,uictoria). Male partners must be ‘defeated’ by their females if they are themselves to ‘overcome.’ The logic that ‘Women must overcome, too’ is, to all appearances, a surprise twist, as the conclusion to two books of all-out predation, assault, seduction, and sexploitation.63

Marino places only a little emphasis on female pleasure as acquiescence. He ends the poem focusing solely on the male ‘victory,’ using Ovid’s term against the female partner — she is ‘vinta’ defeated, rather than a victor herself. In contrast, Costa’s male protagonist describes the nymph’s “victory” as well

62 Costa, Il violino, 18, 20. 63 John Henderson, "In Ovid With Bed (Ars 2 and 3)," in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, ed. Roy Gibson, Steven Green, and Alison Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 77. – 118 – timed, mutual pleasure:

“Oh Dio, non più martoro, Lasciami (traditor) lascia, ch’io moro.” Ond’io di nuovo al vago furto attento Con più dolce contento, Con egual gioia e con egual desire, Con più riposo e più soave ardore Colsi di nuovo il bel piacer d’amore.64

Costa also ends her poem with the arguzia — the unexpected reversal of genre expectations — of Lilla’s abandonment of the man who had expected to claim his right to marry her. Instead of fulfilling his hope, Costa’s Lilla takes the masculine role of Ovid’s desultor amoris:

E al chiaro fonte poi Lavato il petto, il seno e ‘l molle volto, Con pegno d’imeneo Da me volse il bel piè nudo e disciolto. … Credei di rinnovare i miei contenti… O Dio, ch’in van sperai! Lilla non più rividi Lilla la cruda e fera Ad’altri si donò, ad’altri in braccio Cinse (l’infida) del infido laccio.65

In her rewriting of Marino’s poem Costa reframes the sexual encounter in the narrative following the advice of Ovid’s preceaptor amoris on mutual pleasure.

She feminises the male subject, and assigns an active, masculine, response to the female victim. Although Costa presents Marino’s rape narrative, her flexible re-assignment of gender tropes portion victory to the violated nymph, and

64 Costa, Il violino, 18, 20. 65 Costa, Il violino, 24–26. – 119 – humiliation and loss to her aggressor. After his abandonment the heartbroken lover dies, sharing the fate of four of Ovid’s heroides, and a feminine trope that recurs with great frequency throughout Costa’s lyric corpus.

O mostro d’impietà, di pietà gnuda, Vuoi chi’io mora? … Moro, spietata, io moro, Perfida, sì ch’io moro e nel morire Lilla, Lilla pur chiamo. Moro, Lilla crudel, moro e t’adoro.66

Il violino and La chitarra were clandestinely published, and it appears that they never attracted the attention of the Congregation of the Index, even though

Marino’s Trastulli estivi had been ordered to be excised from the 1613 edition of the Lira III in 1615. Costa’s ‘Violamento di Lilla’ contains even more subversive allusions than those quoted above, found in the description of the body of the nymph that cites another poem, ‘Durante il bagno.’ This poem appeared only in a small clandestine print run of a princeps edition for the Lira III, for which the

Venetian publisher, Ciotti, was fined and imprisoned.67

In Marino’s Trastulli estivi, the narrator generally recounts his actions rather than what he sees, describing the woman’s body under her sheer dress only briefly, “onde di viva neve/le membra, ch’onestà nasconde e chiude,/eran pur ricoverte e parean nude.”68 Costa’s Lilla — nude, sleeping, partially covered only by her long hair — allows opportunity for the description of every detail from head to foot, with the longest description dwelling on her pudendum. This

66 Costa, Il violino, 26 67 Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura, 135–40, 37– 38n.27. 68 Marino, Poesie varie, ed. Benedetto Croce (Bari: Laterza, 1913), 46. – 120 – long passage, nineteen lines of the 179 line poem, commences, ends, and proceeds with repeated phrases emphasising the gaze of the protagonist that urge the reader to “look here”:

Pur vago di mirar maggior tesoro, Ahi lasso, ch’io mi moro, Né forza ho pur di dir come mirai La soave cagion degli miei guai. Avidi gli occhi miei Di mirar più nascoso, Al fonte degli amanti Affissaron gli sguardi Alla fonte bramata, Ove ciba ogni core Il lusinghiero e dispietato Amore. Quivi, quivi mirar più intento ammiro, Fra due basi d’argento, Conchiglia di tesor, colma di gioie, A cui di fila aurate Per man d’Amor tessute Facean, quasi per scherzo, Lascivetto riparo. O tesoro d’Amor, pregiato e caro! Qui gli occhi affisso e miro E taccio e poi sospiro; E tutto oppresso da novello affetto, Sento ch’in un istante Vigor m’acresce e manca il cor nel petto.69

This long contemplation of what is, or ought to be, hidden motivates the protagonist’s desire and subsequent actions — it is the engine of the poem. At

69 Costa, Il violino, 19–20. – 121 – lines twelve and thirteen, just below the ‘cor’ of this twenty-three line passage lies the treasure “fra due basi d’argento/conchiglia di tesor,” alluding to the first line of ‘Durante il bagno.’

Marino’s ‘Durante il bagno’ plays games with the viewer’s gaze, and the reader’s ability to assemble flesh from solid and reflective surfaces (gold, silver, alabaster, pearls), and desired action from classical and biblical allusions:

Sovra basi d’argento in conca d’oro io vidi due colonne alabastrine dentro linfe odorate e cristalline franger di perle un candido tesoro.

— O — dissi — del mio mal posa e ristoro, di natura e d’amor mète divine, stabilite per ultimo confine ne l’oceán de le dolcezze loro;

fossi Alcide novel, ché i miei trofei dove mai non giungesse uman desio, traspiantandovi in braccio erger vorrei;

o stringer, qual Sanson, vi potess’io, ché, col vostro cader, dolce darei tomba a la Morte, e morte al dolor mio!70

In Marino’s poem, the woman’s legs, as she bathes in a golden basin, are compared to alabaster columns. A series of allusive references in the poem make these columns: the pillars of Hercules marking the edge of the known world; the columns of the temple that Samson crushed in order to kill his captors, killing himself in the process; and the central column of a Roman circus

70 Marino, Poesie varie, 77. – 122 –

(méta). In Costa’s poem the diminutive “conchiglia di tesor,” as the “fonte bramata,” elides the suggestive golden basin of clear fluid (conca) in Marino’s first line, with the ambiguous singular “candido tesor” in the last line, making a variation of Marino’s dispersed image the explicit centre of her own poem.

Allusions to ‘Durante il bagno’ resurface in the scene of the nymph bathing at the end of the poem, beyond the reach of the abandoned protagonist, “E al chiaro fonte poi/lavato il petto, il seno e ‘l molle volto….”71

Costa’s ‘Violamento di Lilla’ is a parody combining ‘Durante il bagno’ with the ‘Trastulli estivi,’ effecting both comic incongruity and criticism of these works in several ways. Costa’s positioning of images from the ‘Bagno’ at the centre of her rewriting of the ‘Trastulli’ render Marino’s allusive images sexually explicit.

Costa also uses hyperbole, through repitition, to draw the reader’s attention to the citations, and to the male gaze.

The effect of female authorship of these male voiced poems is to introduce an incongruity with relation to the original texts: the authorial gender is no longer continuous with the poetic voice, perspective, or subject position.

Costa’s authorial gender is, in this case, the “controlled discrepancy… between the parodied text and its new context… the chief source of the comic effect” of this parody.”72 The discrepancy between the authorial gender and the gendered voice, creating a degree of distance, prevents the reader from being co-opted to share the objectifying male gaze.73 Rather, Costa’s rhetorical amplification through repetition — the insistence “to look here” — shifts the focus of the poem

71 Costa, Il violino, 26. 72 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 32. 73 Laura Mulvey, "Unmasking the Gaze: Some Thoughts on New Feminist Film Theory and History," Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, no. 7 (2001). – 123 – from the process of objectification of the female sexual object to the predatory and objectifying male gaze itself.

The narrative of Costa’s poem and her characterisation of the protagonists, are subversive of existing poetic presentations of power relations between genders, and genre expectations. The citation of Marino’s censored poetry may have had a further target, other than the justice or injustice of the gender relations inscribed in the conventions of lyric poetry. It is possible to read Costa’s Marinist intertextual borrowings, especially the explicit erotic language used in Costa’s rewriting of Marino, as a site of resistance to attempts by the Church to limit the creative expression of Marinist authors. The circulation of censored images in Costa’s poetry expands our understanding of the reach and victims of the abuse of power, patriarchal or ecclesiastic, beyond the personal (and female) to the public and cultural spheres.

Simulation, dissimulation, and the lyric persona

Costa’s flexibility in the use of male and female poetic voices, seen in the examples cited above, displays her skill in the rhetorical performance of poetic voices. In case, however, her readers confused the performance with the poet, or the Bella donna with Costa herself, the closing poem of La chitarra ‘Capitolo scherzoso dell'Auttora per quegli, che potessino tacciare le sue rime di troppo vestite d'Amorosi affetti, o vero in altro’ makes the relationship between Costa and her poetic voices explicit:

Perche credo vi sia, che in le mie rime lingua mordace possa dir tal’hora ch’i troppi affetti in lor me stessa opprime, Ripigliar vuò la penna in sù quest’hora;

– 124 –

e bench ogn’un riposi, io vuò vegliare per discolparmi, ch’il tacer m’accora. 74

Costa opens the capitolo with deictic references that represent the lateness of her self-defence (the final poem in the book) through lateness of the hour

(night). She rebuts her detractors’ image of her as overwhelmed by the emotions in her poetry (“i troppi affetti in lor me stessa opprime”), with the self- control and discipline of rousing herself to self-defence (“io vuò vegliare per discolparmi.”)

In the Capitolo Costa defends and justifies her authorship of love poetry by building on her reputation as a performer, a feature of the encomia by

Coreglia and Adimari discussed in Chapter Two. Costa does this through allusions to the poetry of the most successful author/actress of the late sixteenth century, Isabella Andreini, and to Ovid, through allusive references to his elegaic and eroto-didactic works. In a familiar letter, Petrarch describes his poetic style with the metaphor of a well-cut gown that he puts on when he writes, and he presented the actor’s practice of changing voices - wearing a variety of costumes, as the antithesis of this ideal.75 For female authors, however, there were social and literary risks in wearing their authorial voices, as it were, too close to their own skins. Costa draws on the proem of Isabella

Andreini’s Rime, in which she defended and positioned her authorial voice as acting, or simulation — fingendo. For Costa and Andreini, describing their

74 Costa, La chitarra, 567. Costa’s capitolo is framed as a defence from critics, and coming at the end of the book, implies (or creates the fiction of) a reception of her text in an earlier form. 75 Ronald Martinez, "Petrarch's Lame Leg, and the Corpus of Cicero," in The Body in Early Modern Italy, ed. Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 47–8,. cit. Petrarch, Fam. 22.2.16–17. – 125 – poetics as one of simulation works to dissociate the poetic persona from the social author, and opens wide possibilities of modelling authorial personae and the lyric subject.

Andreini declared the poetics of her Rime to be closely associated with her acting practice:

S’Alcun sia mai, che i versi miei negletti Legga, non creda à questi finti ardori, Che ne le Scene imaginati amori Usa à trattar con non leali affetti:

Con bugiardi non men con finti detti, De le Muse spiegai gli alti furori: Talhor piangendo i falsi miei dolori, Talhor cantando i falsi miei diletti;

E come ne’ Teatri hor Donna, ed hora Huom fei rappresentando in varie tile Quanto volle insegnar Natrua, ed Arte.

Così la stella mia seguendo ancora Di fuggitiva età nel verde Aprile Vergai con vario stil ben mille carte.76

In imitation of Andreini’s proem, Costa uses the verb fingere three times in the following passage undermining Petrarchist tropes and symptoms of love. In addition to pretending (fingendo) she describes her poetic voice as joking or playing (burlare, per gioco, mottegiare) for her own enjoyment (”per spassarmi un poco”).77

76 Anne MacNeil, ed. Selected poems of Isabella Andreini (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005), 30. 77 Costa, La chitarra, 568, 571, 572. – 126 –

Mi finsi, ch’in amor mille catene mi cingessiro il Cor, L’Alma, e la vita,… fingei Cor simulati, e Cor sinceri.. Fingei gelar nel gelo, arder nel foco, e nel gel non gelai, ne in foco ardei…78

Costa and Andreini’s self-defence of simulation is very close to Ovid’s self- defence written from exile in his Tristia, where he claims that most of his works have been fictions.

Believe me, my conduct differs from my poetry

(my life modest, my poetry immodest),

and the better part of my work is fictive, unreal;

it has permitted itself more license than its creator has enjoyed.

A book is not the index of one’s soul but an honourable manifestation of the will.79

Like the Ovidian model, Costa makes a distinction between her performance in the poetry and her own feelings, stating that although her poetry moves others, her heart remains unmoved:

Ma ch’io mai per Amor spargessi pianti non lo credete… Non perch’io stimi l’Amor vitupero, o biasmo d’una Donna… Ma sol perche il mio Cor visse nemico delle gioie d’Amor frà suoi piaceri, e sol fù sempre di se stesso amico.80

Costa points out the distance between her chaste self, the “core… che fu sempre di se stesso amico,” and the performance that the reader enjoys in the

78 Costa, La chitarra, 571. 79 Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence, 1; Ovid, Tr. 2.353–57. 80 Costa, La chitarra, 570. – 127 – poetry — that is pretence. She also comments suggestively, that if this performance moves her readers, she is only doing her job.

E s’il Cor vostro in ciò fosse ostinato, vendicatevi pure, e dite ch’io La Poetessa son di buon mercato.81

She also makes her Ovidian model clear in the capitolo, naming both the

Metamorphosis, and the Ars amatoria, that had the title De arte amandi, or

L’Arte di Amare in some printed vernacular translations from the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries:82

Nell’arte di amar pena, e dolore, Tormento, Gelosia, Fortuna e Sorte solo si puon trattare senza rossore… …Cercai sotto altro nome altrui coprire, e in mille metamorfosi provai, che l’arte dell’amar non è gioire: …Però, se nel mio dire Altri offendei, sono di scusa degna, e escusare mi vuoglio di quel mal, che pur non fei: Lo faccio volentier, poi che sdegnare molto conosco al naso, a gl’occhi, al volto delle mie rime, e del mio motteggiare.83

Costa’s crafting of the Bella donna narrative to resemble her own, moreover,

81 Ibid., 572. 82 There are 177 printed vernacular editions of the Arte Amandi, Metamorfosi, Epistole, Remedi d’Amore, and Disadventure (Elegies from Pontus) listed on the USTC 1472–1600. Incognito academician Pietro Michele made a translation of the Ars, with the title, L’Arte degli Amanti published in Venice in 1632. Filippo Argelati and Angelo Teodoro Villla, Biblioteca degli volgarizzatori, o sia Notizia dall'opere volgarizzate d'autori, che scrissero in lingue morte prima del secolo XV, Opera postuma del segretario Filippo Argelati bolognese. Tomi 4. Coll'addizioni, e correzioni di Angelo Teodoro Villa milanese comprese nella parte, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Milano: Federico Agnelli, 1767), 158. 83 Costa, La chitarra, 570. My italics. – 128 – makes Costa’s assertion of simulation — appearing to be what she is not, also a dissimulation — feigning not to understand what she is perceived to be.84 The persona of the Bella donna was used to create distance or proximity to her authorial persona and her real patrons in different parts of La chitarra.

Costa and Adimari’s Tersicore — Giving voice to the female grotesque

In the first part of this chapter I have shown a number of ways in which Costa’s corpus uses gendered authorship and parody. This is seen at the level of poetic voice, through the Bella donna persona’s double prosopopeia of the Bella donna trope, and the Marinist libertine lyric subject. Within Costa’s poetry, parody is a technique for the critical incorporation, and rewriting, of male- authored Marinist texts, using the female (or female-authored male) voice as the point of incongruity between the cited and new texts. In the final section of this chapter I will consider Costa’s use of the genre of intellectual paradox to critique relations of gender and power. I will analyse Costa’s prosopopoeia of figures from Adimari’s volume of fifty paradoxical sonnets, the Tersicore in the

Lettere amorose.

Costa’s collection of Lettere amorose contains fifty-six fictional epistolary exchanges between male and female personae, of two, three, or four letters each. It is the most virtuosic text of the 1638–9 corpus, displaying Costa’s flexibility as an author in the production of over one hundred male and female fictional authorial voices, in prose letters. Each letter is followed by a poem that condenses the emotional position of the author expressed in the letter.

84 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 29–30 cites Quintillian Institutio Oratoria 6.3.85. – 129 –

Following the paratext, the text has a symmetrical structure consisting of twenty-eight contemporary, realistic scenarios, followed by twenty-eight comic and grotesque exchanges.

As I considered in the previous chapter, the traditional male lyric voice, and female love object, are already placed in question by Adimari’s Tersicore in his polyvocal work of fifty sonnets in fifty male voices. These male subjects describe their love for fifty imperfect female objects. Many of these are tropes drawn from the longer tradition treating female ugliness and transgressive beauty that had included anti-petrarchism, poesia giocosa, and invective.85 In his letter to the reader, editor and printer Lorenzo Landi clarifies the relationship between Adimari as author and the poetic voices of the text. He writes that the author adopts the perspective of a man in love with a particular woman: “per dar forza a questi capricciosi concetti, fingendosi che sopra ciascheduna materia parli un amante, non si devono considerare come affetti dell’autore, ma come passioni di chi secondo il gusto innamorato ragioni.”86

Fifteen of the epistolary exchanges in the comic, second half of Costa’s lettere amorose, share one of the disabilities, illnesses, or negative physical or moral characteristics defined as difetti, in the Tersicore. This number represents twenty-one of the fifty-four characters, male and female. It is clear that Costa was writing with Adimari’s Tersicore in mind, or in view, from the order in which the sets of letters that borrow difetti appear in her text. The letters that reference characteristics from the Tersicore are presented in two blocks, the first a group of five, and the second a block of ten. Within these blocks there are a number of

85 Bettella, The Ugly Woman, 129. 86 Adimari, Tersicore, 5. – 130 – instances where characteristics found adjacent to each other in Adimari’s text are also adjacent in Costa’s text, either as a pair writing to each other, for example the “Amante Muto a Donna Sorda,” or appearing in adjacent sets of letters.87 While the first pairing Muto/Sorda is logical (and makes for a very interesting conversation) the two other instances of adjacent difetti share no such logic: Nasuta/Monca, and Lentigginosa/Grassa.88 Costa also applies defects to male personae in her letters that were only applied to women in

Adimari’s text. She sets characters defined by these defects in relation to each other in the correspondence, and also proposes new defects, that she pairs with some of those from the Tersicore. Costa draws most of the new characteristics from a wider tradition of poesia giocosa, or theatre.

Costa’s use in the Lettere amorose of textual allusions to and citation of

Adimari’s text effects a transformation of the sonnet form (monologic, with woman as object) into a dialogue between male and female subjects. As I discussed in Chapter Two, the debate over the nature and value of female cultural production, and an examination of the female object of male voiced lyric poetry, is at the heart the Tersicore. Costa’s Lettere amorose give voice not only to a host of fictional female authors. They also create other male and female writing subjects with grotesque identities, defined by illness, deformity and subalternity, that would normally not be considered writers; producers of knowledge. Dividing the Lettere amorose equally between comic and contemporary voiced letter exchanges grants the grotesque figures the status of subjects through writing. Such a possibility presents a paradox as equally

87 Costa, Lettere amorose, 219; Adimari, Tersicore, 15, 16. 88 Costa, Lettere amorose, 248–51, 88–92; Adimari, Tersicore, 46–47, 52–53. – 131 – forceful as Adimari’s fifty encomia for imperfect women. Many of Costa’s comic epistolary exchanges use equivocal burlesque language to stretch and amplify paradoxical representations of gender and the grotesque.

Costa’s prosopoeia of figures from the Tersicore transforms Adimari’s text at the levels of form, theme and register. The letter form moves the silent female object of lyric from a monologic male-voiced space, to a dialogic male- and female-voiced narrative and discursive space. For example, some of

Costa’s female authors offer their own view on having their identity defined by a diffetto. In the letter from the Donna Brutta, we hear the object of Adimari’s poem answering her lover, disagreeing both with being defined by, and being loved for, her fault. This woman rejects the lover’s suit, and demands that even if she is ugly he ought not say so. Being ugly does not worry her, but being called ugly does.

…non sapete voi, che non maggiore ingiuria si può dare in Cuor di Donna che di brutta appellarla? s’io son brutta non mi curo, ch’altri me’l dica?89

The lover is disillusioned by the woman’s response that displays both pride and dishonesty, demonstrating to him that her soul is as ugly as her body:

“hora, che da quella svelato in te scorgo altrettanto biasimevole animo, quanto brutto petto.”90 The central idea of Adimari’s sonnet for the “Donna totalmente brutta” is that the soul is superior to the body: that the woman’s appearance

(”Negro il sen, torto il naso, occhio ineguale”) does not in any way contaminate or detract from her virtue.91 In speaking for herself, however, Costa’s Donna

89 Costa, Lettere amorose, 237. 90 Ibid., 239. 91 Paola Marongiu, "Note," in Alessandro Adimari, Tersicore, 106. Adimari, Tersicore, 57. – 132 – brutta contradicts Adimari’s assumptions, while confirming the principle of his argument.

The editor’s letter to the reader in the Tersicore insisted on the work’s moral project; however, the move from sonnets to the love letters also shifts Adimari’s descriptions of conjugal love to the imaginative social space of the lettera amorosa.92 This context is implicitly adulterous or illicit, altering the firm

Christian-stoic emphasis of the Tersicore. Costa’s engagement with equivocal, grotesque and sexual imagery and language from poesia giocosa also crosses boundaries not broached by Adimari, moving from the erotic to anti-erotic, and pointing to a wider anti-classical canon including Bernesque capitoli.93

Analysing the intertextual play between Adimari’s “Argomento V, Zoppa” and Costa’s letter and response, the “Amante a Donna Zoppa” can illustrate the techniques of Costa’s intertextual engagement with Adimari’s text, and her engagement with the equivocal burlesque register. Adimari’s sonnets are generally composed by weaving through his Latin authorities and adding classical mythological references. The six Latin quotations for the ‘Bella zoppa’ address two themes, the moral — preventing the physical defect from imputing evil to the holder, and the physical — describing uneven movement.

Bella Zoppa Su due basi ineguali, idol del cuore, Questa vaga belleza oggi si vede,

92 “Il frutto, che trar se ne deve oltre al diletto, sia che ogni marito ami la moglie, anchorché non perfettamente bella: perché la donna onorata non ha difetto, che lodare e sopportar non si possa.” Adimari, Tersicore, 6. 93 Laurie J. Stras. "Introduction," in Eroticism in Early Modern Music, ed. Bonnie Blackburn and Laurie J. Stras, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), v. “Obscenity—is sexual content that mocks, offends or disgusts—is anti-erotic….morover the binary created by erotica and obscenity is intrinsically linked to moral hierarchies.” – 133 –

Né però ci si mira, o ci si crede Fallo dell'arte, o di natura errore:

Quasi dea della fiamma e dell'ardore Alternandosi anch'ella, or s'alza, or cede; E dritt'è se Vulcano ha zoppo il piede, Ch'abbia la sua Vulcana anch'oggi Amore.

Così forse men fero e meno audace Si mira, amanti, il suo corporeo velo Chino ad ogni suo passo, e men fugace.

E così forse a portar caldo e gelo, Zoppo (per dir così) con l'aurea face, S'inchina e sorge in su due poli il cielo.94

Costa’s imitation most frequently focuses on one or two images or ideas, repeating them in different forms throughout the letters (polyptoten) and the poems. In this case, the first adjective in Adimari’s first line, ineguali, is used in the salutation of the first letter: “Inegual modo d’ogni mio gioire.” The description of uneven movement as bending or bowing (chinare) seen in the eleventh and the final line of the sonnet is repeated twice in the first passage of the letter: “dal chinar del vostro piede traggo maggior dolcezza” and “s’ad altri fosse noto la gioia di quello inchino, forse non con tanta temerarietà taccerebbono queli, che di essa si godono.” 95 The analogy of Vulcan seen in lines seven and eight of

Adimari’s sonnet is taken up by Costa, “fu solo eletto alle gioie dell’amorosa

Dea lo Dio Vulcano.”96

94 Adimari, Tersicore, 16. 95 Costa, Lettere amorose, 215–16. 96 Ibid., 216. – 134 –

Costa introduces the term “discorciare,” the artistic technique of foreshortening, again using repetition in two forms to draw attention to the misuse of the term as a source of humour: “dal vostro discorciato passo si discorciano i miei martiri,” and in the valediction “Di voi, che scorcia adoro.” This may also be an allusion to Adimari’s description in the fourth line to the beloved’s limp being no mistake; “fallo di arte.”97

In the ottava following Costa’s letter from the Amante, the same term, chinare, is repeated six times in five lines, and the antithesis between drizzare and chinare, also used in the letter, is taken up again.98 The trope of the beloved as a source of light for the lover, with particular reference to the sun, seen in the last line of Adimari’s sonnet, appears in Costa’s first two lines:

China, mio vago sol, nel chino piede De’tuoi splendenti rai la vaga luce Al mio drizzato ardore, alla mia fede, Che chinata beltà gioie produce. Solo dal tuo chinar traggo mercede, E da’ tuoi inchini Amor dritto m’adduce; Nè saprei nell’amar maggior dolcezza Augurare in Amor di tua chinezza.99

In the flexible narrative space created by the letter exchange Costa also exploits the theme of the female body that is central to Adimari’s collection — all but eight of the fifty difetti are physical. The sonnet is a static space of contemplation and praise, of ideas not action, where the female body is displayed. Within many of Costa’s letters the fictional authors aim to move each

97 Costa, Lettere amorose, 217. 98 Ibid. “Quella, ch’ al vostro inchino indrizza Amore.” 99 Ibid. – 135 – other not only on an emotional level, but to convince the other of the urgent necessity of a physical meeting. Movement and physical contact, remembered or anticipated, within the narrative is used in this letter exchange as an opportunity to expand Adimari’s antithesis of “chinare/drizzare” to encompass a range of equivocal meanings.

The amante writing to the Donna Zoppa makes it clear in his letter that he would like to meet her, and that he is writing because she had not appeared in the usual place on a previous occasion:

…ti prego, mia vita, che non ad’altro permetti l’incognito camino dell’Amor tuo. Saró al solito, dove dalla vostra mancanza mi viene aumentato ogni bramato desire, ed ivi esporrovvi, quanto mi sia grato quello, di che empia Natura a voi fú ingrata.

Di voi, che scorcia adoro. Quello ch’al vostro inchino indrizza

Amore.100

The woman happily accepts the lover’s desire is increased by her limp, and agrees to meet him:

Non mai resi mercede a Natura del mancamento, che in me produsse nè di quello altera mi dimostrai, se non dopo la certezza, che mi date del suo merito e che di esso m’havete scoperto l’impalese aumento d’amoroso diletto: gradisco si fortunato avviso…

…attendete dunque voi, a Cui il Cielo permesse sì favorevol sorte, e piú lieto d’ogni altro gloriatevi, ch’in Amore trà il mio inchinato ristoro più d’ogni altro gioite.

Di voi, d’ogn’un più lieto. Quella, che nel chinar dritto vi rende.101

100 Ibid., 216–17. 101 Ibid., 217–18. – 136 –

Other iterations of the antithesis chinare/drizzare through the letters could be read to refer to the woman’s uneven gait. They also indicate the direction of love, seen above in the signature of the lover’s letter “Quello ch’al vostro inchino indrizza Amore.” However, the woman’s echo of this signature above can easily be read as a sexual reference to the man’s erection, and anticipated consummation of the relationship.102

The difference between the representations of relationships in Costa’s

Lettere amorose and the Tersicore is shaped by their differing rhetorical and formal characteristics. Even though the task of the speaker of the sonnet in the

Tersicore and of the lettera amorosa is to enumerate the positive qualities of the beloved, the ideal end of the imagined narrative of lettere amorose is usually intimacy, while demonstrating the ‘lovability’ of each woman is the aim in the

Tersicore. In Adimari’s work the form of the poetry and sentenze dictates a male perspective and precludes female responses. In the example of the Donna

Zoppa, while echoing an ethos of mutual regard, Costa’s letters modify the central terms in Adimari’s poem. By shifting these common terms into a burlesque mode, they become equivocal, carrying sexual references. Costa’s translation of Petrarchan and neoplatonic and stoic references in Adimiri’s sonnet into equivocal, physical references places the second half of her Lettere amorose in a long tradition of comic, erotic, or in some cases pornographic poetry and prose. Other examples of Costa’s comic and grotesque letters are explored in Chapter Five of the thesis.

The comic and entertaining qualities of Costa’s lettere amorose cannot be denied. However, Costa also entered into the ethical dimension of Adimari’s

102 Ibid., 218. – 137 –

Tersicore by giving voice to categories of people — ill, deformed, disabled — who were outside lyric decorum. The genre of paradox both questions and critiques its objects. Colie writes:

Operating at the limits of discourse, redirecting thoughtful attention to the faulty or limited structures of thought, paradoxes play back and forth across terminal and categorical boundaries — that is, they play with human understanding, that most serious of all human activities.103

Costa’s intertextual engagement with male-authored poetry unsettles lyric conventions and representations of gender relations. By maintaining the male voice, Costa’s female-authored parody of Marino’s erotic canzoni introduces a distance between authorial gender and poetic voice, producing an incongruity that satirises the male protagonist and the male gaze. A second joke is played upon the readers who have been evaded — the Holy Office of the

Inquisition — through the publication of sexually explicit poetry combining and amplifying previously censored poems. Costa’s re-writing of Adimari’s Tersicore sonnets likewise indulges in a double process, of creating writing subjects from figures outside lyric tradition, mirroring the process of creating the authorship of

Costa herself, and re-interpreting a Christian-stoic (Marinist) text in a burlesque mode. The next chapter explores further implications for the paradox of equality between the fictional male and female authors of Costa’s Lettere amorose, considering the first half of the book, in which Costa presents contemporary anonymous voices of Donne and Amanti corresponding with each other.

103 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 7. – 138 –

Chapter Four — From Bella donna to Donna libera

The implications of epistolary dialogue in the Lettere amorose

In this chapter I explore Costa’s use of the formal structure of the Lettere amorose to create a new representation of gender relations between her male and female correspondents. Costa’s Lettere amorose is the only collection of love letters published in the seventeenth century in which every letter has a reply. This structure creates an equal number of female and male fictional authors in the text. The implications — the unstated, but implied meanings — of this dialogic format are several. Costa creates a fictional literary context in which male and female authorship is equally visible. She creates fictional scenarios in which both male and female epistolary personae successfully assert their desire, or antipathy — they have equal rhetorical power. Costa’s fictional gender dialogue exposes the ambivalent use of female tropes and sexuality in Incogniti texts that promote an ideal of male liberty while undermining and instrumentalising the female voice. The strongest epistolary persona in the Lettere amorose, Costa’s Donna libera, asserts an equal right to express her will and desire, as a female libertine.

In Chapters Three and Five I consider the second half of Lettere amorose; roughly twenty-eight exchanges containing comic letters that give voice to some of the grotesque figures in Alessandro Adimari’s Tersicore. In this chapter I consider the first half of the Lettere amorose that has different stylistic features.1 These letters are in anonymous contemporary voices, mostly

1 The only recent study considering Costa’s Lettere amorose is Luca Piantoni, “Le Lettere amorose di Margherita Costa tra sperimentalismo e ‘divertissement’,” Studi secenteschi 59 (2018): 36-51. – 139 – designated as Amanti and Donne, with some significant exceptions that I explore below. I situate the first half of Costa’s Lettere in the lettera amorosa tradition, and in relation to contemporary libertine uses of female voices and tropes by authors in the Venetian academy of the Incogniti that the Lettere amorose echo.

There is a pattern in the formal structure of Costa’s texts, in which innovation signals a strategic undermining of genre to make space for new female tropes, and a new expression of female authorship. Chapter Two shows the use of this device on a macro-scale by mapping the four books of Costa’s lyric corpus onto Marino’s books. Chapter Three reveals Costa’s prosopopoeia of the Marinist Bella donna and the lyric objects of Adimari’s Tersicore sonnets as simultaneously reanimating and challenging Marinist poetry. In the Lettere amorose the parity of authorship implied through the equal number of male- and female-authored letters is made explicit through the scenarios of two versions of the Bella donna persona. The first can be recognised from the Bella donna narrative presented in La chitarra, the second is a new Bella donna persona in a militantly libertine iteration — the Donna libera.

The phrase “donna libera” was noted by Tessa Storey in her study of prostitution in seventeenth-century Rome, Carnal Commerce, as a new self- justification offered by some women charged with breaking the laws around prostitution. These women argued that they were unmarried, and were therefore

‘donne libere,’ meaning free to use their bodies as they chose.2 The importance of the Donna libera figure in the Lettere amorose is signalled by its location near the mid-point of the text, another example of dispositio that I introduced in

2 Storey, Carnal Commerce, 121n.26, 226. – 140 –

Chapter One, and will discuss further in this chapter.3

Costa’s authority to write this text is established in the paratext, in which

Costa positions and shapes her authorial voice through Ovidian allusions.4 As I illustrate below, the dedication and encomia present the Lettere as a didactic work — a conventional claim for a book of letters — but with the Ovidian aim of teaching about love, rather than letter writing.5 Costa’s Ovidian eroto-didactic authorial voice allusively links the Lettere amorose to a pornographic tradition that presented erotic knowledge through female narrators. This tradition included Aretino’s Ragionamenti, Pallavicino’s Rhetorica delle Puttane, and later seventeenth-century French texts such as the Ecole des Filles and the

Satyra Sotadica de Arcanis Amoris et Veneris.6

The concurrence of Costa’s female authorship with the female epistolary personae of the Lettere amorose, however, changes the anaphrastic and parodic effects of the male-authored, female voiced, eroto-didactic tradition.7

Some of these effects are explored below in Ferrante Pallavicino’s Retorica delle puttane. Costa’s female authorship creates an “indeterminate” effect discussed in my analysis of the Bella donna poems in Chapter Three. That is, the female epistolary persona sharing the gender of the author creates the possibility that the experience related by that persona might reflect the

3 Costa, Lettere amorose, 195–200. Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering, 15. 4 On the relationship between imitation and the “need to establish authority as a precondition for writing” see Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens, "Introduction," in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 3. 5 Amedeo Quondam, ed. Le "Carte messaggiere": retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento (Roma: Bulzoni, 1981), 21–32. 6 Turner, Schooling Sex, 45, 168, 83. 7 Ibid., 33. – 141 – experience of the author. In the Lettere amorose this effect, combined with the ethos of the Bella donna persona (closely associated with the author’s courtesan virtuosa status) strengthens Costa’s claim for the parity of male and female authorship. These formal and structural characteristics make the Lettere amorose Costa’s strongest statement about the rhetorical, sexual, and social power that the female voice can command.

Costa’s Lettere amorose: Continuity and innovation

Costa’s Lettere amorose was her only work to have subsequent editions, all printed in Venice (Turrini, 1643, 1674) and her only writing to be anthologised in the seventeenth century.8 Published love letters enjoyed a wide diffusion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serving as an accessible repertoire of communication about love.9 The first section of the Lettere amorose, sixteen exchanges, was included in the Scielta di Lettere amorose di F Pallavicino,

Luca Asserino, Margarita Costa Romana, Gerolomo Parabosco et d'altri piu eruditi scrittori Italiani that was republished six times between 1662 and 1675, despite being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.10

8 These Turrini editions appear to be pirated, they are a small format, 12”, and the printers make their own dedications. Margherita Costa, Lettere amorose della Signora Margherita Costa Romana (Venice: Li Turrini, 1643); Lettere amorose della Signora Margherita Costa Romana, con tutte l'aggiunte (Venice: Giacomo Turrini, 1674). 9 Amedeo Quondam, Le "Carte Messaggiere,” 101. “Un testo in grado di costituirsi in prontuario per un publico de lettori-utenti…un macro-repertorio discorsivo — in più generi — del dicibile (citabile) ‘amoroso.’” 10 Ferrante Pallavicino and Girolamo Parabosco, Scielta di lettere amorose di F. Pallavicino, L. Asserino, Margarita, Costa ... G. Parabosco ... et d'altri ... scrittori Italiani. Con una raccolta di rime amorose, et aliquante lettere de Cupido, con sua risposta (Venetia: Giaomo Bartoli, 1656). Individual authors are not signalled within the text. Costa’s letters are found at 97–169. Pagination varies between editions. See also Maiko Favaro, " La retorica della schiettezza: Sulle Lettere amorose (1642) di Girolamo Brusoni," Italianist 37, no. 1 (2017): 21–22. – 142 –

Costa’s comic and grotesque letters present novel and innovative voices, as I show in Chapters Three and Five of this thesis. The letters in the first half of the book, while marked by baroque characteristics of word play, hyperbole and wit, also share characteristics with collections of love letters published from the mid-sixteenth century. Some of these sixteenth-century collections were miscellanies of letters by a single author, or several authors collected in one volume, while others purported to present a single affair. Demand for the genre can be gauged by the number of editions produced: for example, the four volumes of Lettere amorose by Girolamo Parabosco were reprinted thirty-one times between 1545 and 1617, and the Lettere amorose di Madonna Celia,

Gentildonna Romana, also attributed to Parabosco, had eleven editions between 1562 and 1628. The Lettere amorose of Alvise Pasqualigo, a correspondence of 563 letters following one relationship, had sixteen editions between 1563 and 1606.11

Amadeo Quondam has described Parabosco’s popular volumes as pastiche, a sort of non-genre formed under the sign of “interference.” They use the letter form to express the highly codified Petrarchan and neo-Platonic discourses of love, while also presenting other literary forms and genre, including poetry and novelle.12 While the majority of Parabosco’s letters are in a male voice showing little characterisation, there are also examples of female voiced letters, some purported to be written on behalf of women, and others that are replies to male voiced letters.13 Costa’s inclusion of poetry alongside the

11 Quondam, Le "Carte messaggiere," 103–107. 12 Ibid., 97–101. 13 Gerolamo Parabosco, Delle Lettere amorose. 2. Con alcune sue novelle e rime (Venetia: Gherardo, 1556); Girolamo Parabosco, Il terzo libro delle lettere amorose, di m. Girolamo Parabosco: con un dialogo amoroso, et alcune stanze, – 143 – letters may reflect Parabosco as a model.

The only other Italian contemporary female-authored collection of love letters was the posthumous Lettere (1607) of Isabella Andreini. Meredith Ray notes in her study of Andreini’s Lettere that both Costa and Andreini adopt a theatrical approach to the construction of character in their letters to produce many fictional voices, rather than shaping an authorial persona in the tradition established by Aretino’s familiar letters.14 Ray locates the use of male and female voices or characters by Andreini and Costa in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, in which letters of the male and female primi innamorati, the role Andreini played, were frequently read on stage.15 This theatrical context was also shared by Parabosco and the other prolific sixteenth-century author of lettere amorose Andrea Calmo.16 Ray notes one difference between Andreini’s and Costa’s letters: the latter’s engagement with the literary baroque, including her use of burlesque, and the “baroque predilection for intriguing imperfections.”17

There are, however, a number of other differences that point to the importance of Incogniti and Marinist models that I will explore below. Andreini’s letters are in an erudite register, drawing on her stage role of prima innamorata,

in lode di alcune gentildonne venetiane (Venetia: Gio. Griffio, 1555), 17, 33. Ortensio Lando (1512–1560) also authored, or co-authored letter collections in the voices of historical and fictional women. See Ray, “Female Impersonations: Ortensio Lando's Lettere di molte valorose donne” in Ray Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections, 45–79. 14 Ray, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections, 31. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 Xenia von Tippelskirch, "Reading Italian Love Letters Around 1600," EUI Working Paper, European University Institute HEC, no. 2 (2004): 77–78. 17 Ray, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections, 181–2. See also Virginia Cox, Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 214–5. – 144 – and the cultural prestige of her membership of the Accademia degli Intenti of

Pavia, while Costa’s letters relate quotidian events in an everyday register.18

Also, although Andreini’s collection presents many male and female voices reflecting on a variety of aspects of love, most letters stand alone, without replies. Costa’s Lettere amorose is the only sixteenth or seventeenth collection of fictional letters in which every letter has a reply, and the implications of this innovation in the genre are analysed below.

Epistolary dialogue: reciprocal and reversible roles

In Chapter Two, I showed the ways in which Umoristi used their encomia to position themselves both as a musical audience, and as readers for Costa’s poetry. This had the effect of situating Costa’s authorship in a continuum with her vocal performance. In contrast, the paratext and the text of the Lettere amorose shape reader reception around the silent, private, activities of reading and writing. Costa’s Lettere amorose use, and transform, the conventions of the published letter book, including the first person voice, and an irresistible movement toward dialogue. The Lettere amply demonstrate Kate Hamburger’s understanding of the epistolary voice as similar to the lyric ‘I.’ That is, the ‘I’ of a fictional letter is also a statement-subject that compels the reader to accept that voice’s experience-field as reality.19 The reader of the letter stands in direct relation to the statement-subject, the ‘I,’ who addresses his ‘thou,’ and is invited to reciprocate with a written, or imagined, response.

By including responses, Costa’s love letters make explicit the reciprocal and

18 Ray, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections, 17. 19 Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 270–72, 318–22. – 145 – reversible roles of writer and reader that forms the dynamic of the epistolary genre: in responding to a letter the reader becomes a writer, and vice-versa.20

Albert Ascoli outlines this dynamic in Petrarch’s Familiares, addressed to classical auctores:

The flip-side of Petrarch’s elevation of himself as author with respect to the ancients is the relationship of contingency and interchange he apparently posits with his own readers, present and future. This, of course, is a natural effect of his affinity for the epistolary genre, which, as he defines it, and as its structure indicates, implies an open-ended exchange and de facto dialogue between two parties, as well as the alternation of roles of writer and reader among them. These texts, like Dante’s self- commentaries, posit two voices,…creating, at least superficially, an equality and interchangeability between “reader” and “writer.”21

The conventions of published epistolarity create at least two readers; the internal reader, or addressee of the letter, and an external reader. In epistolary fiction both internal and external readers influence the writer. Altman writes of epistolary fiction.

In no other genre do readers figure so prominently within the world of the narrative and in the generation of the text. …The epistolary form is unique in making the reader…almost as important an agent in the narrative as the writer. …[T]his reader is…a determinant of the letter’s message. Indeed at the very inception of the letter, [the reader] plays an instrumental generative role. 22

Altman found strategies in the eighteen-century epistolary novel that “blur the

20 Ibid., 88, 111. 21 Albert Ascoli, Favola Fui: Petrarch Writes His Readers (New York: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 12. 22 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, 88, 112n.1. – 146 – distinction between external and internal reader.” 23 As I will show, in Costa’s

Lettere amorose external and internal readership and authorship are blurred by the work’s didactic frame, located in the paratext. Ovidian allusions in the paratext establish a relationship between Costa’s book and Ovid’s didactic poetry and his epistolary fiction; both genres that make the activity of reading explicit by addressing someone.24 The letters of dedication and encomia position both internal and external readers as “pupils of love,” learning and practising the arts of erotic persuasion, with Costa as their teacher. The style of

Costa’s letters reflect Ovid’s precepts regarding the importance of letters in the art of seduction.

Costa’s Ovidian eroto-didactic authority

In her dedication of the Lettere amorose, Costa explicitly claims the Ovidian eroto-didactic authority alluded to in the closing capitolo of La chitarra through references to the Ars amatoria.25 Costa’s verse dedication describes an elegiac scene on the banks of the Arno, when, in a moment of grief at her misfortunes

(“Ah da me lunge è divisa/ L’aura vaga de’floridi contenti”) she comes across

Love writing letters, “Sparve ed Amor vid’io con note d’oro/Scriver lettre d’Amor su verde alloro,” and is inspired to emulate him:26

23 Ibid., 111. 24 Victoria Rimell, Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130, citing Alison Sharrock, Seduction and repetition in Ovid's Ars amatoria 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 6. The early modern reception of Ovid’s Heroides is discussed in Lorenzo Geri, "L’epistola eroica tra l’Italia e l’Europa (1590–1717)," Studi (e testi) italiani: Semestrale del Dipartimento di Studi Greco-Latini, Italiani, Scenico-Musicali 37 (2016). 25 Citation below page 151 and Chapter 3 page page 128. 26 For Costa and her sister Francesca’s relationship with dedicatee of the Lettere amorose Giovan Carlo de Medici see Teresa Megale, "Il principe e il – 147 –

Su’l lido istesso sotto i cari auspici De la speme vergai candide carte, Ov’ai Servi d’Amor poco felici Hor’insegnai del soffrir loro l’arte … E quante l’arti son varie in Amore, Tutte spiegai ne’ sospirosi fogli; … E carmi v’agiungea, ch’eran del core Messagi nati a distemprar gli scogli Degl’animi malvagi, ed indurati…27

In this passage Costa offers to share her experience and skill in the arts of love with suffering lovers, and to soften hardened hearts by including poetry.

Costa establishes herself here as the author of every fictional letter and every poem in the collection, in both male and female voices, and outlines an encyclopedic project of describing every type of love: “E quante l’arti son varie in Amore/Tutte spiegai ne sospirosi fogli.”

In addition to the references to teaching the “arts of love” in the verse dedication of the Lettere amorose, above, allusive references in the encomia link Costa’s authority to Ovid’s opening claim in his Ars amatoria to have been appointed the magister and praeceptor amoris, Cupid’s master and teacher, by

Venus.28 The anonymous authors of two encomia in Spanish and Portuguese in the paratext emphasise the transformative power of Costa’s teaching, her

“sweet doctrine,” on the world, and on the individual reader who arrives at her

“school of love”:

cantante," Medioevo e Rinascimento: annuario del diparitimento di studi sul Medioevo e il Rinascimento dell'Università di Firenze 6 (1992). 27 Costa, Lettere amorose, 7. 28 Ovid, Ars 1.7, 17. – 148 –

En copas de caracteres se beve. Con affecto gentil dulce dotrina Que hoy al Orbe ridime, de ruina Pues fuera, sin amar, su curso breve…29

The final quatrain of the anonymous Portuguese sonnet refers to Costa’s text as a ‘School of Love’:

Mas a Schola de Amor, pobre, e ignorante Se enriqeceo de modo em sua valia Quo que amante nao’ for, serà diamante.30

Costa and Alessandro Adimari both emphasise Costa’s role as messenger or ambassador of love, guided by Venus or Love. Just as Ovid threatened to use his experience of Love to turn Cupid’s arrows and flames against him, Adimari presents Costa wielding Cupid’s torch as a flaming pen, in her role as Love’s secretary or ambassador, writing official correspondence, avvisi:31

In queste Carte, ove una man di Neve Scrive le fiamme, e vi sigilla il core, Secretaria di Fé, Nunzia d’Amore Mirar la COSTA, et ammirar si deve: … Scriver meglio di poi nessun presuma. Perch’a si vaga Destra Amore ha dato

29 Costa, Lettere amorose, 12. ‘She drinks from the cup of characters/ With gentle affection, sweet doctrine/ Which redeems the world today from ruin,/ Exile (puesfuera), without love, on its brief journey. (Genesis 3.24 Echó, pues, fuera al hombre)’ 30 Ibid., 13. ‘But at the School of love, the poor and ignorant/ in order to enrich their worth,/ Even one who is not a lover, will become a diamond.’ Spanish and Portuguese translations made with the assistance of Professor John Griffiths. 31 Ovid, Ars 21–24, ‘He shakes his torch and wounds me with his darts;/but vain his force, and vainer are his arts. /The more he burns my soul, or wounds my sight,/The more he teaches to revenge the spite.’ See Adimari quotation above — “l’avviso amato.” – 149 –

Delle belle Ali sue, la miglior piuma.32

Adimari emphasises Costa’s authority for this task with a typical Marinist mixing of the sacred and profane, by following “Secretaria di Fé” with a feminine form of the title of papal ambassadors — “Nuncia.”

Just as Ovid claimed Venus as his “guard and guide,” Costa asks her readers to excuse her rough style, claiming to have been bound by Venus and Cupid:33

Sol della bella Dea l’aureo monile Cinge mia penna; onde il suo bel dimostro, E del suo figlio il più soave ardore Regge la mano, e somministra il Core…34

The dedication and the encomia of the Lettere amorose echo Ovidian allusions present in Costa’s apology for her amorous style in the final Capitolo of La chitarra:

Nell’arte di amar pena, e dolore, Tormento, Gelosia, Fortuna e Sorte solo si puon trattare senza rossore… …Cercai sotto altro nome altrui coprire, e in mille metamorfosi provai, che l’arte dell’amar non è gioire.35

Costa’s Ovidian allusive references in the paratext of the Lettere amorose also include poetic form.36 Costa creates an echo of Ovid’s works by writing each part of the paratext, the dedication, letter to the reader, and protesta in ottave, rather than prose, and by including poems after her letters. The most popular

32 Costa, Lettere amorose, 11. 33 Ovid, Ars 1.29–30. 34 Costa, Lettere amorose, 10. 35 Costa, La chitarra, 570. My italics. 36 Clarke and Coolahan emphasise the ways in which poetic form can create intertextual associations, "Gender, Reception, and Form,” 148. – 150 – vernacular translation of the Metamorphoses was in Ottave, while most of

Bruni’s Epistole eroiche were in terza rima.37

The ordinary, worldly, epistolary personae of the love letters also point to the realist style of the Ars, in which the letter is promoted as the first step in seduction, the vehicle of a carefully disguised eloquence.38

By letters, not by words, thy love begin; And ford the dangerous passage with thy pen; If to her heart thou aim'st to find the way, Extremely flatter and extremely pray.39 Learn eloquence, ye noble youth of Rome,— It will not only at the bar o'ercome: Sweet words the people and the senate move; But the chief end of eloquence is love. But in thy letter hide thy moving arts, Affect not to be thought a man of parts; None but vain fools to simple women preach: A learned letter oft has made a breach. In a familiar style your thoughts convey, And write such things as, present, you would say; Such words as from the heart may seem to move; 'Tis wit enough to make her think you love.40 She’s read your blandishments but won’t send back her note? Don’t fret. At least she read the words you wrote.

37 Outi Merisalo, "Translating the Classics into the Vernacular in Sixteenth- Century Italy," Renaissance Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 65; Lorenzo Geri, "Le Epistole Eroiche di Antonio Bruni tra Umoristi e Caliginosi," in Le virtuose adunanze: la cultura accademica tra XVI e XVIII secolo, ed. Clizia Gurreri and Ilaria Bianchi (Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2014), 86. 38 Ovid, Ars 1.437–86. 39 Ovid, Ars 1.437–40. This translation: Ovid, "Ars Amatoria, Book 1," in Ovid's Erotic Poems: "Amores" and "Ars amatoria" trans. ed. Len Krisak and Sarah Ruden (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 129. My italics. 40 Ovid, Ars 1.459–68. – 151 –

Whoever wants to read will write back in the end.41

Costa’s fictional letter writers practise Ovid’s advice, writing to each other in every-day language, and exercising a disguised rhetoric to move their correspondents, emotionally and physically into or out of a relationship.

Pupils of the arts of love

Adimari’s encomia and Costa’s dedication picture the external reader imagining him or her self as the recipient (the internal reader) of the letters, and as a pupil of amorous rhetoric: reading, learning and writing. Costa writes ”ai Servi d’Amor poco felici/Hor’insegnai del soffrir loro l’arte.”42 Adimari’s encomia praises

Costa’s writing skill and her book. The first quatrain is an exhortation to the reader: “In queste Carte....Mirar la Costa, e ammirar si deve.” He then discusses the reading and reception of the book, indicated by the deictic 'qui,' and alludes to the physical supports of the text (paper and ink), and the emotions that carry and move the message, dwelling on the force and efficacy of the author’s writing:

Qui Corriero è il Desio spedito, e lieve, Foglio il candido Sen, Tinta l'Ardore, Destrier la Voluntà, Sprone il Dolore.... Beltà la Sferza, il Tempo il Cammin breve.

In the first tercet Adimari imagines the external reader as a voyeur, silently enjoying, and learning from another’s private correspondence.

Legge ogni amante omai l’avviso amato E del foco, e del giel, che lo consuma.

41 Ovid, Ars 1.479–81. My italics. 42 Costa, Lettere amorose, 7. – 152 –

E negli affani altrui giovi al suo fato:43

Dialogue is explicit in Costa’s letters, and we read male and female epistolary voices persuading or dissuading the other in love, and in the process reciprocally and mutually forming each other as writing subjects.44 The fictional authors work to a particular end, each resisting or participating in the project of the other, adjusting their mood and argument through the position of, or against the words (reading for lies) of, the other.45

This is demonstrated in short-hand by the title of each exchange, and the salutations and valedictions at the beginning and end of every letter. In these rubrics each fictional author defines her emotional state and position relative to the scenario and the person she addresses.

For example, a male author initiates a letter exchange with the title

‘Amante di sdegno all’infedeltà della sua Donna,’ addressing the woman as

“Truffatrice crudel d’ogni mio bene,” and ends the letter with “Di te, che m’hai tradito,” signing “Quello, che al tuo mentir la fé già diede.”46

The woman denies any wrong-doing, responds by addressing the man as “Inumana cagion d’ogni mia pena,” and in valediction writes “Di te, che mai tradii. Quella, che se t’offese il morir brama.”47 The man responds with the address “Simulata spergiura del tuo Cuore,” and “Di te, da cui m’offendo,

Quello, ch’il tuo mentir tradito, esclama,” in the letter claiming to have seen and heard her with another man, irrefutable evidence of her infidelity.

43 Ibid., 11. 44 David Nowell Smith, On Voice in Poetry: the Work of Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. Nowell Smith writes that voice can be “figured as” subjectivity. 45 Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, 88. 46 Costa, Lettere amorose, 16–17. 47 Ibid., 18–19. – 153 –

In the final letter, the woman addressing the man as “Gioia del mio gioire” indicates that she now understands the incident to which he refers, but that the man he saw her with was not her lover, and urges him to meet her to hear her defence “della viva voce”:

non vero Amante è quello, che simili affeti non sente, né vero fuoco può chiamarsi quel fuoco, che libero dal paventoso ghiaccio in sonnacchiosa quiete sonnacchioso riposa…48

As for Ovid’s pupils, and the authors of the Heroides, the aim for many of

Costa’s fictional authors is not more letters, but a physical meeting.49 Several male personae propose the conventional idea of the letter as a viable substitute for the beloved, to mitigate the pain of separation: “È la penna gran mezana del riposo degli Amanti… poiché in quel punto fingendosi esser presente alla cosa amata, li pare di seco discorrere.” However, the female letter writer strongly protests — if the man prefers a letter to being with her in person, he cannot really love her:

Non ti bastava (ingrato) di tormentarmi vivendo da me lontano, che hai voluto ancor accrescermi il duolo con gli tuoi menzognieri, e simulati inchiostri?… dunque più t’è caro lo scrivermi, che lo star meco? … La penna non inostra il volto, ed ogni mentito affetto la penna ricopre, così doppo sì lungo digiuno della tua vista mi devo appagare d’un semplice foglio effigiato, e sparso di fraudolenti detti.50

“Ch’ io libera nacqui”: a manifesto of the Donna libera

Both structure and content of Costa’s Lettere amorose support the hypothesis

48 Ibid., 23–24. 49 Joseph Farrel, "Reading and Writing the Heroides," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 (1998): 312–13. 50 Costa, Lettere amorose, 41. Also see letter exchange at 65–69. – 154 – that the fictional male and female authors write to each other as equals. The symmetrical structure of the book that results from the dialogue between male and female subjects, and the eloquence of all the fictional authors in their expression of desire or antipathy, puts forward a wider argument for women’s participation in the Ovidian and libertine equation of eloquence and (erotic) power — “the chief end of eloquence is love.”51

The inclusion of a poem with every letter elevates all the writers to the status of poet. These correspondents show the highest respect for each other’s authorship through corresponding in the proposta/risposta form. This mirrors the practice of including poetic exchanges in published lyric collections. In the sixteenth century, Tullia D’Aragona’s published Rime (1547) was the first poetry collection to include separate sections of proposta/riposta poetry, and the author participated in both sides of the dialogue.52 Marino and Bruni both included full chapters of poetic exchanges, mainly with male poets, in their lyric collections.53 In Costa’s Lettere the ‘Amante contento alla sua Donna’ writes:

O’ dolci pene mie, cari martiri Felici doglie fortunati affanni Sono sol di penare e i miei desiri, Per poi nel tuo bel sen rifar miei danni. S’opponga pur fortuna, e fiera giri, Mi disastri la sorte, e tronchi gli anni, Che pur, nel tuo petto un sol momento

51 Ovid, Ars 1.462. 52 Julia L. Hairston, "'Di sangue illustre & pellegrino’: The Eclipse of the Body in the Lyric of Tullia d’Aragona," in The Body in Early Modern Italy, ed. Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 166. 53 Antonio Bruni, Le tre grazie rime del Bruni (Roma: Guglielmo Facciotti, 1630), 540–658; Giambattista Marino, La Lira, Rime I (Venice: Ciotti, 1614), 1614. – 155 –

Viver mi facci Amor moro contento.54

And the Donna responds:

‘Bellisima Cagione de’miei tormenti’: Se tu brami, mio ben, pene, e martiri, Io sol lieta mi rendo tra gli affanni, E sol sparger per te pianti, e sospiri Chieggio fino alla fin del fin degli anni. Sol di languir per te son miei desiri, Nè traggo dal languir penosi danni; Ma lieta dal penar prendo contento Purche nel tuo bel sen sia ‘l mio tormento.55

The ottave exchanged between this happy couple in Costa’s Lettere matches end rhymes, and Petrarchan oxymorons, and demonstrates an important form of sociability and mutual respect between the male and female fictional authors.56

The sheer number of different fictional female authors in the lettere, writing as persuasive pupils of love, makes a case for the equality of male and female authorship and desire. The concurrence of the authorial gender and the gender of the poetic voice also draws the idea of the equality of female rhetorical power and authorship closer to possibility. Most of Costa’s letter writers are anonymous. In all but a few cases they are identified only as donne and amanti, indistinguishable one from the other, making the letters with names or places all the more significant.

54 Costa, Lettere amorose, 114. 55 Ibid., 116. 56 Paul Schleuse, Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 44. Proposta and risposta exchanges were also common in musical performance and game playing, in gatherings such as academies and veglie. – 156 –

The appearance of the persona of the Bella donna reinforces the plausibility of female rhetorical power through the indeterminable relationship between that persona and Costa as author. These letters allude to the narrative of the Bella donna presented in La chitarra by using the same pastoral name,

Tirsi, for the lover, and mentioning both Rome and Florence. The “Donna lontana dal suo Amante” writes to be accepted back by her former lover, after a disastrous ending of an affair that took her to Florence. She assumes that the man has already heard of her misfortune, “delle mie antiviste miserie non m’affatigherò a darvi parte, poiche pur troppo vi devon esser note, essendo a tutto il mondo palese l’infelice mio stato.”57 The woman describes the affair as:

quei piaceri, che dispiaceri mi fanno, assicurandovi, che tutte quelle gioie, che Amore lungi da voi in altro petto mi diede, non ad altro sono servite, che ad aumentarmi i martiri, acrescermi gli affani, accelerarmi le pene, e sotto più penoso duolo farmi de vostri modi più dogliorosa, e lagrimosa Amante….58

The poem following the woman’s letter is the first mention of his identity as

“Tirsi,” the pastoral name given to the Roman beloved in La chitarra:

Partii Tirsi, partii, e’l molle piede Volsi à mio danno sù i fioriti campi; Ti dinegai l’Amor, mancai di fede, Sprezzai l’alto splendor de’tuoi bei lampi, Ti fei di doglia, e di tormento erede, Sdegnai la fiamma, onde convien, ch’avampi, E ribella a’tuoi Moti, a’tuoi desiri Fabra mi fei sù l’Arno a’miei martiri.59

57 Costa, Lettere amorose, 130. 58 Ibid., 131. 59 Ibid., 132. – 157 –

The man’s response is harsh, denouncing the woman’s infidelity and the duplicity in her request to return:

…oh perfida, come hai havvuto ardire di comparirmi avanti con il tuo mascherato foglio? come t’è dato il cuore di rinovarmi l’opre delle tue barbare azzione? come hai potuto somministrare alla penna i tuoi bugiardi pensieri? come, come tiranna di te medesima hai potuto formare gli osceni caratteri de’tuoi avvenimenti?60

His poem alters only one rhyme word of the woman’s poem:

Partisti ingrata, e traditrice il piede, Da me volgesti sù gli etruscii Campi, Per altri idolatrar, l’Amor, la fede, Cruda, negasti a’ miei dogliosi lampi: Per farmi d’ogni doglia al duolo erede Nel fuoco aredesti; onde convien ch’avampi, E ribella a’miei pianti, a’miei sospiri Sù l’arno rivolgesti i tuoi desiri.61

In her response, addressed to “Sola e fiera cagion della mia morte” the woman accuses him of cruelty that can lead only to her death:

Perfido disleale ecco, ch’il piede Da te rivolgo, e dagli Etruscii campi: Volgo priva di fe da te la fede, E all’onde de Sticie omai rivolgo i lampi; Restate iniquo di mia morte Erede, La morta fiamma il Cuor sia, che t’avvampi, E se non t’appagorno i miei martiri,

60 Ibid., 134–35. 61 Ibid., 136. – 158 –

Appaghi hor la mia Morte i tuoi desiri.62

The final letter in the exchange resolves the conflict and welcomes the woman’s return, after the male character has rehearsed the effects of her abandonment on him and explained his harsh reaction:

…qual Alma mai si forte haverebbe non forsennata potuto far petto a si impetuoso assalto? tu, che mia già fosti, ho d’altri sento? tu, che più di me stesso accuro, ad altri in cura? tu, ch’idolatrando adoro, in braccio ad’altro Amante? …onde ti prego, che deposto ogni memoria delli passati oltraggi ti contenti di ritornare con il tuo ritorno a me il godere; e permettendomi l’usate gioie nel tuo bel seno, lascia, ch’io solo solo di quelli mi vanti…63

The Bella donna’s rhetorical success sits alongside fifty-five other successful fictional female poets in the Lettere amorose, making the book the most extensive imagined collection of female writing in the period. Unlike the abandoned Heroides, Costa’s epistle writers succeed by receiving letters or eliciting responses from their male correspondents.

A more assertive version of the libertine persona of the Bella donna appears a few pages later in the Lettere amorose. The positioning of the Donna libera at the centre of the Lettere amorose is an example of what Paul Smith defines as “programmatic ordering:” a signal of the importance of this exchange to the whole collection.64 The centre of the Lettere amorose is also an equivocal point of the text, where the contemporary voices end, and the comic and grotesque scenarios begin. The Donna libera is thereby situated as close as possible to Costa’s imitation, and application, of the formal paradox of Adimari’s

62 Ibid., 138. 63 Ibid., 140–41. 64 Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering, 15, 195, 200. – 159 –

Tersicore in her grotesque lettere, considered in Chapter Three. Placing the

Donna libera at this point in the book indicates the power of her letters to question and corrode existing knowledge.65

The characteristics of the Donna libera are most fully explored in the exchange between the Amante and the Donna spergiura. These letters read as a manifesto of the Donna libera, and the heart of the message Costa is presenting in her Lettere amorose. In the first letter the male character expresses disapproval of the woman’s choice of a new lover, calling him “lindo” in a sarcastic tone, suggesting he is well beneath the quality of the men of previous relationships. The writer implies that the woman is pregnant, and connects a degree of inertia, and her cravings for new and unusual food and drink with her decision to choose this lover.66

Da davero bella disgustata, che a guisa di grossa Donna m’havete dinotato d’essere nella vostra indispositione di non ordinaria svogliatura, se bene anco in tal grado non di commune frutto viene ingordizia, od’ordinaria vivanda, ma di cibo inusitato, e nuovo solo si ha brama; talche in voi nè meno tale scusa si può ammettere, essendo il pasto, che vi sete eletta, ad’ogni più vil desiderio permesso.67

The lover claims that his criticism is for her own good and that she is not thinking of the damage to her name caused by her behaviour. The woman’s response is to point out the limitations of his power over her, and justifies her

65 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 7. 66 John Florio, Queen Anna's new world of words, or dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues, collected, and newly much augmented by John Florio… (London: printed by Melch. Bradwood, for Edw. Blount and William Barret), 221. “Grossa, grosse, big, fat. Also with child and big withall. Also course and lumpish.” 67 Costa, Lettere amorose, 195–96. – 160 – choices on the basis of exercising her own will. The letter is a manifesto of the

Donna libera setting out the motivations and consequences of her life choices:

Ringratio il Cielo, che voi meco non havete altro vincolo, che d’una semplice amistá; che certo se piú avanti s’estendesse la vostra autoritade, non più la mia libertà sarebbe dal mio volere esercitata…

…senza altra dichiaratione dicovi, ch’io libera nacqui, vissi, e in mia libertade viverommi fino, ch’haverò vita, ne per altro è da me esercitato l’abito di non congiunta Amante, che per potere a mia voglia appigliarmi a quello, che più mi piace, nè dovete voi terminare i miei pensieri…68

In the next letter, the man shifts his position while continuing to condemn her choices, motivated by his concern for her reputation. He indicates that he will respect and no longer challenge her position. He also makes clear her continuing desirability to him and his grief at her loss:

Se poi voi a vostra voglia volete operare con la volontade, io sono con il vostro volere; e sommergendo nell’intimo del Cuore della vostra cechità il rammarico, tacitamente mi lagnerò della perdita di voi…69

In the next section, I outline the Incogniti’s uses of female tropes, and their ambivalent flirtation with female authorship, exploring the contrasts between the female voices created by these male authors and the militant female libertine figure, the Donna libera.

68 Lettere amorose, 197–98. 69 Ibid., 200. – 161 –

Gender parity in eloquence and desire

In Chapter Two the production of La chitarra, Il violino and Lo stipo was linked to Florence, with support from the Roman Accademia degli Umoristi. Below I tentatively explore connections between the Lettere amorose and Venetian libertine circles, and the tradition of prose academic discourses, dialogues, novelle, and letters focused on love and gender, in the circles of the Accademia degli Incogniti.70 The dialogic form utilised by Costa points to Ovid’s double

Heroides and the early seventeenth-century published collections of Epistole eroiche by Marinist authors such as Antonio Bruni. Her everyday diction also reflects Ovidian advice on letter writing in the Ars, quoted above, and Incogniti models.

The Marinists expanded the range of letter writers of their Epistole heroiche to include characters of Romance poems, and recent historical figures, such as Armida to Rinaldo, and Catherine of Aragon to Henry VIII.71 However, again, Costa’s Lettere amorose stand apart from this model. Rather than presenting classical or vernacular literary characters, or theatrical types, they present male and female voices in verisimilar contemporary scenarios, pointing to a Venetian, Incognito, model for Costa’s Lettere amorose.

The Lettere amorose holds few clues to publication, stating “IN

VENETIA, Con Licenza de’Superiori 1639, on the title page.”72 In this period,

70 For a summary of the extensive publications of Incogniti authors, including Loredan, on questions of love see Favaro, "La retorica della schiettezza: Sulle Lettere amorose (1642) di Girolamo Brusoni," 22. 71 Lorenzo Geri, "L’epistola eroica tra l’Italia e l’Europa (1590–1717)," 55. There was also English experimentation with the Ovidian model, see Danielle Clarke, "Ovid's "Heroides", Drayton and the articulation of the feminine in the English Renaissance," Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008). Antonio Bruni, Epistole eroiche, ed. Gino Rizzo (Galatina: Congedo Ed., 1993), 30, 122. 72 Costa, Lettere amorose, i. – 162 –

Giovan Francesco Loredan, founder of the Accademia degli Incogniti, and biographer of Marino was exceptionally powerful in Venetian printing. 73 In addition to Loredan’s biography of Marino, Clizia Carminati has noted his support in the publication of other philo-Marinist works.74 Given this context, a

Venetian imprint of a clandestinely published book by a female author could alert the reader to links to the Incogniti.75 As mentioned in the introduction, La chitarra and the Lettere amorose share a portrait of Costa. The printers of the

Lettere have, however, played a visual joke in their reproduction of the La chitarra portrait, by making a significant substitution. The text encircling the La chitarra portrait “Factam Per Pictorem ABSQ. Corona Ad Efigiem Ex. Domine,

Margherite Coste” and the verse below “Cernere lavrigero quereris sine crine poetam: factum quod decima hec visa camena foret per Don Alfonso de Oviedo

Spinosa” have been removed in the Lettere. The verbal reference to the absence of Costa’s poet’s crown has been replaced with a laurel wreath, now encircling Costa’s portrait.76 A wreath also encircles an alternative portrait of

73 Carminati writes of Loredan’s “eccezionale potere nel mondo editoriale veneziano e la sua abilità nel coprire con la propria posizione politica e sociale compromissioni anche gravi con il mondo dell'editoria clandestina e con autori assai scomodi.” Clizia Carminati "Loredan, Giovan Francesco." In Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 65 (Rome: Il Treccani, 2005). 74 Ibid.; Bortot, "Introduzione," in "Il Marino viverà": edizione commentata della Vita del Cavalier Marino di Giovan Francesco Loredano (Venezia: Edizioni Ca' Foscari-Digital Publishing, 2015), 12–13. 75 “[Loredano] è un mediatore-impresario la cui creazione, gli Incogniti, più che una regolare accademia sembrerebbe un’associazione per la stampa e divulgazione del libro. Un istituto che esiste in primo luogo per pubblicare le opere dei propri iscritti ma anche (forse soprattutto) che intende impiegare la rete di accademici sparsi in tutta Italia per pubblicizzarle e diffonderle.” Maurizio Slawinski, "Gli affanni della letteratura nella corrispondenza di Guidubaldo Benamati ad Angelico Aprosio (1629–1652)," Aprosiana. Rivista annuale di studi barocchi 10 (2002): 28. cited in Simona Bortot, "Introduzione," 11. 76 "Behold the poet without laurel crown / For she is to be recognized as the tenth muse." trans. Amy Brosius, "‘Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto’: Virtuose of the Roman Conversazioni in the Mid-Seventeenth Century" (Doctoral, University of – 163 –

Costa in Lo stipo. (See Figures 2. and 3.)

Incogniti interest in Margherita Costa’s authorship can now be confirmed by a reference discovered in an Academic discourse published first in 1638, in

Loredan’s Bizzarie Academiche. Loredano places Costa after Corinna and

Sappho in a list of exemplary female authors:

Ammirabili ugualmente le donne nelle dottrine, nella prudenza, e nella guerra, a Ritrovarsi infinite le Teani, le Sofipatre, le Zenobie, le Aspasie, le Corinne, le Saffi, le Coste, le Marinelle, le Tarabotti, e mill’altre.77

Loredan’s praise of Costa, and the contemporary Venetian authors Lucrezia

Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti, is difficult to interpret, like most of the

Incogniti texts about women.78 Although this academic discourse, and others, are signalled as having a female audience, and praise female authors, Wendy

Heller indicates Incogniti attitudes are marked by ambivalence towards women.

She writes that “in the literary world created and sustained by the Incogniti, female virtue is relative, female self-expression through writing, singing, or fashion is suspect, bodies are unstable, and the lure of the erotic is ever present.”79 This ambivalence, and level of play, is evident in the title of the discourse in which Loredano praises his female contemporaries, and in his mode of address to his female audience. Loredan’s discourse was on the topic:

“Perche si paghino le Donne de’ congressi Amorosi.” He excuses himself for a

New York, 2009), 309. 77 Giovanni Francesco Loredano, Bizzarrie academiche di Gio. Francesco Loredano, nobile Veneto (Venetia: Sarzina, 1638), 51, 54. 78 Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 53. They contain “exaggerated rhetoric, filled with satire and double meanings, encoded for a knowing audience, in which… the serious and the comic are often difficult to differentiate.” 79 Ibid., 52. – 164 – negative comment about women in a short parenthesis to his female audience:

“La Donna (con pace de quelle, che m’ascoltano) è chiamata Porta del

Diavolo.” He then proceeds to support this statement by citing the classical authorities Tertullian and Boethias.80

Ferrante Pallavicino also refers to female readers, and presents contemporary academic interest in the lettera amorosa, in a preface to his collection of love letters and other writings.81 He writes that while the lettera amorosa is not traditionally written in a high style, and “deve esser intessuta solo d’affetti familiari, con l’orditura di concetti chiari de’quali possa esser capace l’intendimento d’una femina,” his male, and female, readers had higher expectations and capacities. His readers would be disappointed if he did not deliver a baroque poetic of surprise and wit.

Io ho scritto per compiacere lettori virtuosi i quali se non trovano qualche concetto, o sentimento spiritoso lontano dall’intelligenza comune, credono consumato il tempo in simile lettura. In somma, chi scrive per i letterati, non deve curarsi d’esser inteso dalle donne, o dagl’ignoranti. E poi non stimo le Dame, alle quale scrivo, d’intelletto così dimesso, che non possa sollevassi fuori dell’ordinario, nel penetrare i sentimenti d’un amante, il quale distilla gli spiriti più vivi del cuore, e dell’ingegno.82

80 Loredano, Bizzarrie academiche, 54. See also Ibid., 165, indicating the presence of a woman at another gathering of the academy, possibly Marinella herself. With thanks to Amy Sinclair for this reference. 81 Mario Felise, "Pallavicino, Ferrante," in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Treccani, 2014). Ferrante Pallavicino, Panegirici, Epitalami, Discorsi Accademici, Novelle, et Lettere amorose (Venetia: Turrini, 1649), 158. Pallavicino’s Corriero svaligiato (1641) is also an interesting model for a polyvocal letter collection, with letters in male and female voices. The narrative frame of the postman’s stolen bag, however, excludes responses to the letters. Il Corriero svaligiato: (con la) Lettera dalla prigionia, ed. Armando Marchi (Parma: Università di Parma: Istituto di filologia moderna, 1984). 82 Pallavicino, Panegirici, epitalami, discorsi accademici, novelle, et lettere – 165 –

All of Costa’s letters turn on an element of wit, or concetto, as the fictional authors attempt to persuade, or dissuade, each other in a variety of scenarios.

The implication of a female readership for Incogniti texts does not mitigate the stronger sense that they are an expression of libertine homosocial culture, in which women are discussed as fascinating and dangerous objects.83

As fictional letters with a contemporary, realistic, setting the Lettere amorose would appear most closely to follow the use of love letters within contemporary novelle amorose, such as the three-volume Cento novelle amorose (1635–51). This collection was proposed as a new Decameron, with choral authorship of forty-four members of the Accademia degli Incogniti.84 The modern editor of these novelle, Davide Conrieri, places such letters in the academic context outlined by Pallavicino as “prove di un'esemplare epistolografia galante e ingegnosa di gusto accademico.”85 Letters are frequently used in the novelle to reveal the emotional states of the lovers.86

For example, in the novella by Giovan Francesco Loredan, ‘L’Incendio’

(mentioned in Chapter Two) Lovanio falls in love with Deodora, wife of the libertine Gelasio, when he saved her from a house fire.87 Lovanio writes to

Deodora:

Signora

Le fiamme che adevano la vostra casa sono state destinate al tormento dell mia anima. Io voleva nasconderle, ma il fuoco amorose, 8–9. 83 Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 52. 84 Davide Conrieri, "Introduzione," in Novelle italiane, il Seicento e il Settecento (Milano: Garzanti, 1982), XXIV. 85 Ibid., XXI–II. 86 Ibid., XXI–XXII. 87 Giovanni Francesco Loredano, "L'Incendio," in ed. Davide Conrieri, Novelle italiane, il Seicento e il Settecento (Milano: Garzanti, 1982), 145–165. – 166 –

rinchiuso opera con maggior forza, e rende il soccorso fuori di tempo. …

Deodora replies. Lovanio

S’io non credessi suscitare i vostri disprezzi col dichiararmi così facilmente vinta da’ vostri prieghi, direi liberamente ch’io v’amo, e sono vostra. ... 88

A key feature of the Incogniti novelle noted by Davide Conrieri is an everyday violence native to, and mostly accepted by, characters. Extramarital love is the central theme of most of the novelle, and the female characters are, without exception, seen as extensions of male honour. The prevalent pattern identified by Conrieri is violated honour violently avenged:

Lo schema caratteristico di tanta parte della novellistica degli Incogniti: amore-onore offeso-risentimento-vendetta, al quale si legano i motivi della passione erotica, dello sdegno, dell'ira, della violenza.”89

Loredan’s ‘L’Incendio’ follows this pattern. When the husband Gelasio discovers he has been betrayed by his wife Deodora, he murders Lovanio to avenge his honour. Gelasio is murdered in reprisal by Deodora, who then commits suicide.

Deadora’s servant Aleria, who had been involved in the intrigue, also commits suicide in shame.90

The registers used by Costa in her Lettere amorose are consistent with use of letters in the Novelle. Costa’s Lettere amorose appear as novelle pared down to a few letters and poems, with the reader required to imagine the wider

88 Loredano, "L'Incendio," 147, 149. 89 Conrieri, "Introduzione," XXIII. 90 Loredano, "L'Incendio," 152–54. – 167 – narrative frame. However, despite Costa’s letters representing moments in extra-marital liaisons, there are very few traces of the system of honour and violent vendetta depicted and exploited for effect by the Incogniti authors. In the absence of a narrative frame, these letters carry no wider consequences in the lives depicted. The isolated nature of the exchanges also avoids any moralising or sadistic preoccupation with vendetta, creating an imaginative space that effaces the social opprobrium and dangerous consequences that are attached to the expression of desire by women in the novella.

The strengths of Costa’s female fictional authors, and the quality and outcomes of their communicative strategies, stand in stark contrast to the female characters in the Incogniti’s Novelle amorose. To explore this difference, in the following section I will place Costa’s female letter writers in dialogue with the representation of female rhetoric in the Retorica delle puttane by Incognito

Ferrante Pallavicino. Much Marinist and libertine clandestine production uses female tropes from classical and popular poetic imagery, ranging from the sensual to grotesque and pornographic, in texts that seek to define and defend personal and intellectual freedoms from the Church. The Retorica is one of the most dramatic examples of the critique of power relations between the church and the intellectual framed through misogynous use of female tropes and the female voice.

This satire targets the Jesuits by imitating the structure and key concepts of the main pedagogical rhetorical text of Jesuit educators, De arte retorica by

Cipriano Suarez, while also drawing on a long eroto-didactic and pornographic tradition.91 In this dialogue, a former prostitute and procuress trains a young

91 Laura Coci, "Introduzione," in La retorica delle puttane, Ferrante Pallavicino – 168 – woman in the arts and practical skills of lucrative prostitution: “Altro non è la retorica delle puttane che un’arte di moltiplicare artificiose parole e mendicati pretesti, con fine di persuadere e muovere li animi di quell’infelici ch’incappando nelle loro reti assistono alle sue vittorie.”92 The Retorica is equally about denouncing the hypocrisy of Jesuit rhetorical education and cultural power through association with prostitution, as it is about denigrating women. Both groups exercise the art of persuasion or seduction to recruit their members, and maintain their cultural and economic power within client and patron networks.93

Pallavicino’s narrative introduction describes the young female protagonist of the Retorica trapped by social conventions, like a number of

Costa’s letter writers. She cannot marry or be placed in a convent due to the poverty of her family, and suffers from boredom, hunger (by implication physical and sensual), and a wilful character. “Desiderava de saziare l’appetito meglio che di piacere ad uomini, né si curava di comparire lasciva e bizarra, mentre era quasi sempre affamata.”94 An elderly prostitute, turned procuress and teacher, offers to train the girl as the only possible way to express, and profit from, her desires: “In bellisimi termini palliati con decoro, le persuase di porsi nel mestiere della puttana, come che non eravi altro mezo termine in vigore di

(Milano: Fondazione Pietro Bembo 1992), XXX. The work of Spanish Jesuit Cipriano Suarez (1524–1583), the De arte rethorica libri tres, ex Aristotele, Cicerone et Quinctiliano praecipue deprompti was first published in 1562 and had over 207 editions up to the end of the eighteenth century. Ibid., XXXIII– XXXIV. 92 Ferrante Pallavicino, La retorica delle puttane ed. Laura Coci (Milano: Fondazione Pietro Bembo 1992), 17–18. 93 Coci, "Introduzione," XL, XXXIV. Letizia Panizza, "Ferrante Pallavicino's La retorica delle puttane (1642): Blasphemy, Heresy and Alleged Pornography," in Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism and Apocalypse in Italian Culture, ed. Fabrizio De Donno and Simon Gilson (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014). 94 Pallavicino, La retorica delle puttane, 11. – 169 – cui potesse participare i gusti del mondo.”95 The teacher promotes her own expertise in terms of a combination of sensual experience and abstract knowledge that stood as a libertine ideal, “Ne stupite, che sotto apparenze cosi mendiche io nasconda la virtù d’una tanta dottrina impressa in me non meno con buona theorica, che con infallibile prattica.”96

While Pallavicino’s female protagonists are presented as desperate, or avaricious, Costa’s fictional authors challenge gendered conventions of sexual transactions in both affective and economic gender relations, redefining gender positions and gendered rhetoric. One woman writes to a man of her love, taking the active role as the Amante in attempting to initiate the relationship. The

Donna amante acknowledges that this position is “ad onta del mio destino, senza riguardo del mio sesso, lacerando la fama della feminile honestà,” but asks whether the man will accept being her beloved.97

Such a proposal is not, however, taken seriously. At first the man fails to respond. A second letter reproves him for his failure. The woman chides the man precisely on the grounds of gender and decorum that she sought to transcend in her first letter, writing he was not behaving as a true cavaliere should. He replies to calm the woman’s furore, explaining that his philosophy of love prevents him from accepting her request, because he does not reciprocate her desire. “L’amare non è in nostro mano, nè l’elezione vien fatta da noi, ma è solo una semplice simpatìa, e corrispondenza di sangue, la quale Amore porge a chi più li piace.” He advises that she complain instead to Love and ask him to

95 Ibid., 13–14. This very common trope of female erotic education has classical antecedents including Lucian and Ovid, and sixteenth century models, especially Aretino’s dialogues Coci, "Introduzione," XLIII–LXXXVI. 96 Pallavicino, La retorica delle puttane, 16. 97 Costa, Lettere amorose, 30. – 170 – transform the man’s soul, heart and mind to a state of loving her, after which

“caro mi sarà il nodo dei vostri dolci legami.”98

In the exchange between a Donna rinchiusa and her lover, the woman insists on pressing her case for a relationship, despite her circumstances that are ambiguously presented as enclosure within a convent, or a family. “Ben m’è noto, e pur troppo conosco di malamente operare, mentre rinchiusa tra si fieri ceppi della mia libertade, liberamente eseguisco il talento de’miei disordinati desiri.” The prospective lover urges the woman to exercise her will to resist this passion: “fate conoscere al mondo la virilità del vostro ardire, con che vi prego dal Cielo il dovuto riguardo alla qualitade del vostro riguardevole stato.” In the third letter of the exchange the woman insists that she will not be dissuaded.

Finally in the fourth letter the man capitulates: “mi risolvo secondando il vostro volere di appigliarmi anch’io nel pelago de’vostri desiri, ed a quelli procurare con ogni mio maggior danno l’intiero godimento.”99

The anonymous fictional female authors in the Lettere amorose assert their desire or antipathy with little deference to gender or social hierarchies, rather, they use or challenge decorum according to their rhetorical advantage. This is seen, for example, in the responses of the Diva to the importunate Cavaliere

Amante, and the ‘Donna ad’Amante importuno.’ In the letter of the ‘Cavaliere

Amante alla sua Diva’ the man passionately declares his love, which struck when he saw the woman in public during carnevale. He requests to see the woman, to tell her “a viva voce” of his suffering.

Vi amo, anzi idolatro… e sono dalla vostra beltate, e dalli dolci modi sì legato, che non più vivo a me stesso, ma strasformato in

98 Ibid., 35–37. 99 Ibid., 172, 175, 178. – 171 –

voi; con voi vivo, in voi penso, e solo a voi m’aggiro….100

The ‘Risposta della Diva’ is scathing of the man’s attempt to approach her:

Il maltrattar Dama di mia qualitate mi da sdegno, che voi senza conoscimento alcuno della vostra nascita tutto in preda de’vostri sfrenati desideri ad altro non viviate, che a cibar li vostri incauti pensieri di fallaci, e disordinate speranze. Nacqui, vissi, e vivo tra honorate Matrone; ne vi fù chi di nostra casa abbagliasse un minimo lume dell’honorato nome de’miei Antenati….101

She suggests that he find a woman who is his social equal, or “amar quelle, che con inorpellata faccia sfacciatamente ad’ogni Amor s’appigliano.”102 She ends the letter defending her honour with the only threat of violence in any of the letters: “vivete per l’avvenire più accorto… nelle vostre azzioni, se non volete con altro, che con la penna esser effiagiato su gl’annali di quelli che scioccamente sperano.”103

Another exchange presents a scenario in which sexual power relations trump decorum when a cavaliere is dismissed by woman of lower social status who refuses his advances. The ‘Donna ad’Amante importuno’ writes to ask a man to stop his daily visits, and insists that she can choose who she sees:

Non comporta a il mio stato, ch’alle vostre frascherie mi appigli; e quando anco mia Stella apportasse l’opposito di esso, a vostre cure non mi darei,…essendo in mia mano il disporre quello, che piú mi move, della mia volontade.104

The man’s response reveals the assumptions of social status and power behind his behaviour.

100 Ibid., 56–57. 101 Ibid., 58. 102 Ibid., 59. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 157. – 172 –

Non mi pensai d’offendervi nel servirvi, ne cresi che si discara vi fosse la mia servitude, ma mi diedi ad intendere ch’a Dama della vostra nascita si desse a gloria, e non a vilipendio l’esser da Cavaliero mio pari amata.105

No expression of desire or level of didactic or rhetorical skill, however, accords the female voices in the Retorica delle puttane full subject status. The elderly teacher’s lessons are framed by an introduction, conclusion, and ‘confession of the author’ that makes it clear that prostitutes are ultimately objects to be despised. In his paratextual letters to the reader, Pallavicino presents the prostitute as serving a “mestiere utile” as the container for excess male semen that, according to naturalist philosophy, must be expelled.106

Io non iscorgo differenza dal procurare la sazietà della fame col cibo all’incontrare le soddisfazione di carnale desiderio, non meno naturale e necessario ne’suoi compiaccimenti; se il non mangiare o non bere genera la morte, anche semen retentum est venenum dice l’oracolo de’medici.107

While the wives and daughters in the novelle were chiefly seen as extensions of male honour, the prostitute is an extension of the male body, to be disposed of after use. After labelling the women “cacatoi e d'orinali esposti a beneficio commune,” Pallavicino continues:

…obligate dalla professione a posto di tale servitù, non meritano riscontro magiore di quello sia per l'accenato paralello sussiegato il posto. È indenga per certo la colocazion di verace affetto in una mercenaria soggezione, per cui s'astringe la donna al ricevere gl'umani escementi: tali posso chiamare il seme gittato in que'vasi, che senza ritegno alcuno sono inabili alla generazione e

105 Ibid., 158. 106 Pallavicino, La retorica delle puttane, 3, 120. 107 Ibid., 116. – 173 –

servono solamente quasi cloache al ricettare quelle immondizie che con sordida tramutazione ivi corromponsi.108

Costa’s female authors in the Lettere amorose present masculine and feminine language and gender roles as flexible or interchangable, upsetting gender expectations, with female subjects asserting their right to exercise their wills

(volontade) or express their desire as a man would. This applies both to affective and economic transactions between the male and female correspondents. Those authors who also appear to be courtesan figures assert their rights to use their bodies as they choose, as donne libere — the phrase noted in Storey’s study of prostitution in seventeenth-century Rome.109 One such character has many lovers, will not limit herself to one, and cannot be bought by a man she does not desire. The man accuses the woman of being unfaithful:

"Amante di sdegno alla sua Donna tacciandola d'ogni mancamento d'infedeltà."

Discortese Signora, anzi tiranna.

Se nelle cose d'Amore si fosse altretanto sagace, quanto inesperto, certo, ch'io con sì poco conoscimento del mio errore non si sare posto nelle vostre mani.110

He is corrected by the woman, who insists that she will not be limited to one man.

'Risposta della Donna in disprezzo del sudetto Amante'

Poco avveduto, e meno accorto Amante

[P]romessi d'amarvi, ma non mi dicharai d'amar voi solo… . …[M]i

108 Ibid., 129. My italics. 109 Storey, Carnal commerce, 121n.26, 226. 110 Costa, Lettere amorose, 107. – 174 –

date nome d'infida, disleale, ingrata, e indegna del vostro amore; poiche ingrata sarei, quando senza riguardo di me medesima, in povertà d'un solo Amante havete le mie bellezze soggiogate… . …[O]nde vi dico, che è povertà d'un Cuore il lasciarsi da un solo Amante amare, e ad un solo Amore volgere l'amore suo; mene rimango pero altera de'miei desiri, e nella Copia de'miei ardori poco, o nulla mi cale il rimaner priva della vostra fiamma.

Di voi, che d'uno assai nulla vi resta.

Quella, che senza voi resta fra mille.111

In another letter exchange, a woman dictates the values and terms of their relationship, rejecting gifts in order to assert her power to choose how she is treated. In the ‘Amante alle sua Donna creduta infedele,’ the man addresses the woman as ‘Mancatrice crudel de’ detti tuoi,’ complaining of her failure to meet him as agreed.

Sono stato tutta questa mattina attendovi nel luogo destinato, presopponendomi, che non ad’altre cure intenta, doveste affetuare la vostra promessa; ma alla fine mi sono chiarito, che altrettanto mi schernite, quanto io v’amo, o per dir meglio amai, non essendo cosi pusillanimo, che tra’vostri disprezzi voglia perseverare ad esercitare la mia riverenza… .112

The woman suggests in her response, addressed to ‘Suberbo esplorator degli error tuoi,’ that the lover had misunderstood who she was, the nature of their relationship, and that he had also done nothing to merit her fidelity or obedience to him.

Se più consideratamente riguardato avresti, quale Amante richiedevano le mie qualitadi, non con tanta efficacia vi sareste dato ad intendere, che solo volta ai vostri contenti…e solo a’vostri

111 Ibid., 109–11. 112 Ibid., 142. – 175 –

desiri facessi parte….Ditemi per gratia…quale dimostrazione fù quella, che verso di me faceste, che m’habbia ad essere imputato ad’ingratitudine il non prontamente obedirvi?113

The letter’s valediction reads “Di voi, di cui mai fui. Quella, che sol di sè visse, e vivrà.”114

The man admits in his response that her letter did not apprise him of any new information about her, and assumes that greed motivated her rejection of him. In a concrete demonstration of the “termini di splendidezza” for which he is known, he sends with the letter a golden vase: “se con tal esca potrò adescarvi ad amarmi.”115

Such an offer, rather than achieving the desired outcome, receives a response of outrage and hatred, as she insists her will cannot be bought.

…vi rimando l’aurato legame, che poco accorto applicaste al mio sciolto volere, e vi dico che non mai Donna di mia qualitade ricevè maggior ingiuria…

…con inusitata perfidia m’havrete tra mille ingiurie offesa, della quale vivo così bramosa di giusta vendetta, che ben tosto spero di farvi conoscere quanto sia differente il trattar fuor del vostro solito Dama del mio posto.116

In the Retorica delle puttane the prostitute’s objectification has the quality of inescapable circular reasoning: she is corrupted by what she is paid to contain, making her only function that of a container of corruption. No rhetorical skill can protect her from the violence that Pallavicino claims she deserves. The conclusion of the narrative has the young woman’s first client perpetrate anal

113 Ibid., 144–45. 114 Ibid., 145. 115 Ibid., 147–48. 116 Ibid., 150. – 176 – rape and cut the face of the elderly ruffiana, claiming the girl had not been a virgin as he had been led to believe.117

Costa’s Lettere amorose can be defined against contemporary Marinist and libertine production by what they do not represent. Where the Marinists re- wrote Ovid’s Heroides, Costa creates quotidian scenarios and epistolary personae more akin to the realism of the Ars amatoria, and the contemporary novella. Where the Incogniti’s Novelle amorose exploit violent vendetta for dramatic effect as the inevitable result of infidelity, Costa’s fictional female authors successfully negotiate and persuade. Where Pallavicino codified female rhetoric as the mendacity of prostitutes (and the Jesuit rhetorical tradition as a form of prostitution) in his Retorica delle puttane, Costa’s authors challenge gendered conventions of amorous rhetoric, and create new possibilities for gender relations.

Finally, within the Lettere, Costa promotes the type of the successful female libertine, hinting that the Bella donna, and particularly the Donna libera, might stand as the model for this type, underlined by Costa-as-author’s eroto- didactic authority, presented in the paratext. The Donna libera, and the eloquence of all the fictional authors in their expression of desire or antipathy, puts forward a positive argument for inclusion of women in the Ovidian and libertine equation of eloquence and (erotic) power. The book’s symmetrical structure, created by the dialogue between male and female subjects, embodies gender parity in both eloquence and desire.

The next chapter explores Costa’s engagement with the baroque grotesque, and returns to the paradox of female authorship. I consider the ways

117 Ibid., 103–04. – 177 – in which Costa’s authorship, La chitarra, and the lyric corpus are gendered through baroque grotesque metaphor. The paradox of female authorship is raised again in Ovidian echoes of metamorphosis and dismemberment found in

Costa’s reflections on her authorship in the dedication of her final published book, Gli amori della luna (1654). I also show how Costa’s skillful deployment of baroque grotesque themes and techniques mediate both contemporary court performance practice, and an earlier literary tradition of the beautiful woman and the dwarf.

– 178 –

Chapter Five — Stretching the Boundaries of the Baroque Grotesque

In this chapter I explore Costa’s engagement with the baroque grotesque, a living tradition of parody, critique, and entertainment. This chapter focuses on how Costa’s texts stretch the boundaries of baroque form, genre, and decorum through the use of the grotesque. I consider the gendering of grotesque textual forms in Horatian poetics, and the iteration of Horatian grotesque gendered tropes in Marino’s poetry. I show how gendered tropes of the grotesque inform Costa’s description of the experience and status of female authorship. These same tropes shape the structure of Costa’s La chitarra, which uses dispositio to represent the paradox of female authorship as a grotesque form.

I also consider the intersection of the grotesque in court entertainment with the poesia giocosa and romance traditions. The grotesque was a social and cultural currency celebrated in the human ‘menagerie’ of dwarfs, and individuals with other forms of deformity, within the Medici court of Ferdinando

II.1 Costa situates her Bella donna persona within grotesque court culture through intratextual connections between La chitarra and the Lettere amorose, and intertextual references to works connected to the Medici court.

In the concluding section of the chapter I explore Costa’s use of hyperbole, comedy, and parody to explore the full force of both the pornographic and anti-erotic potential of the baroque grotesque. The grotesque

Lettere amorose combine discourses of desire, disgust, and humour to expand the baroque grotesque to include male bodies.

1 Touba Ghadessi, "Lords and Monsters: Visible Emblems of Rule," I Tatti Studies 16, no. 1/2 (2013): 491-253. – 179 –

In Chapters Two and Three of this thesis I argued that the titles of

Costa’s books and the poetic voice of the Bella donna shaped Costa’s 1638–

1639 corpus as a simulacrum of Marino’s work and poetic persona. I argue here that La chitarra is central to the interpretation of the corpus. It is the key to understanding the status of Costa’s corpus as an ‘ambivalent copy’ of Marino, because the text is gendered female through its structure. The arrangement of the many, contrasting, parts of La chitarra shape interpretation, marking the text and Costa’s authorship as grotesque.2 Through the dispositio of many contrasting voices and genres, La chitarra embodies the gendered Horatian definition of grotesque literature, considered below. It is a female hybrid text.

The heterogeneity of the textual structure posits an ambivalent status for female authorship. It restates the paradox of Costa’s authorship that is defended through intertextual association with Adimari’sTersicore — the washing of

Costa’s reputation, and the synthesis of Dotta beltà — that I explore in Chapter

Two.

The opening passage of the Ars Poetica by Horace provides the

Renaissance definition of the grotesque. Latin editions of Horace’ Ars Poetica were printed from the late fifteenth century. The most important of these was

Cristoforo Landino’s edition and commentary published in 1461 for Lorenzo de’

Medici. Landino’s commentary initiated the study of classical poetics as a critical tool for contemporary poets, rather than being the object of study in themselves.3 Vernacular translations of the Ars poetica were printed from the

2 See Appendix A for scheme of sections described below. 3 Antonio Iurilli, "Il ‘corpus’ oraziano fra editoria e scuole umanistiche nei secoli XV de XVI." International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3, no. 2 (1996): 151- 52. – 180 – early sixteenth century as accessible manuals of stylistic norms.4 Translations continued to be published through the seventeenth century.5

Horace begins the Ars Poetica by outlining an ideal of literary decorum using the negative example of a contemporary style of painting:

If a painter should wish to unite a horse's neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight? Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man's dreams, are all vain and fictitious: so that neither head nor foot can correspond to any one form.6

In Horace’s formulation, the image of the risable, unacceptable grotesque form is gendered female, through the head and face of a beautiful woman. His reference to grotesque art and writing being “like a sick man’s dreams” is connected to the Platonic idea of furor poeticus or ‘the Muses’ madness. He contrasts this, in the treatise, with the stoic ideal of artistic creativity being

“subject to reason, decorum and natural laws.”7 Decorum within Horace’s Ars poetica defines both the correct relationship between the parts and the whole of a composition, and the observation of genre conventions. Both of these forms of decorum are violated by the hybrid book he imagines. While the violation of

4 The first of these was a verse translation by Ludovico Dolce, dedicated to Aretino. Luciana Borsetto, "La Poetica d’Horatio tradotta," in Orazio e la letteratura Italiana: contributi alla storia della fortuna del poeta Latino. Atti del convegno svoltosi a Licenza 1993, ed. Mario Scotti (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1994), 222-24. 5 Borsetto, "La Poetica d’Horatio tradotta," 258-65. 6 Horace, Ars Poetica, 1–9. 7 Shun-Liang Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 28. – 181 – decorum for strategic effect was recognised as a rhetorical technique by

Aristotle, it became an “aesthetic principle” in Longinus’ On the sublime, the reception of which shaped innovation in baroque poetics.8

The hybrid paintings to which the passage in Horace refers were called

‘grottesche,’ after the underground ‘grotte’ of Nero’s Domus Aurea excavated in

Rome, in the fifteenth century. In his study Rethinking the Concept of the

Grotesque (2010), Shun-Liang Chao returns to the same paintings used as examples by Horace to develop his definition of the grotesque. Chao holds that the grotesque has consistent formal qualities in visual and literary culture from the antique period through to the twentieth century.

[I]n the decorative images of the Domus Aurea…the lower half of a human transforms into tendrils, as does the body of a winged lion; also, in the Horatian hybrid, a woman’s lower half transforms into a fish tail, and her arms into feathery limbs. In other words, the grotesque is, first and foremost, physically in-between or trans- formational. To be precise, the grotesque (con)fusion or conglomeration of heterogenous body parts breeds, in Dacos’s terms, a ‘perpetuelle metamorphose’ (’perpetual metamorphosis’) of one form into another or, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed.’ …The grotesque body, so to say, is ‘the epitome of incompleteness,’ and thus… makes itself a source of the sublime, one that entertains the imagination with a sort of terrible uncertainty. The pattern of ‘both-and,’ and the physically in-between, brings us to another feature of the grotesque which arises from the paradoxical confusion of the fantastic and the verisimilar:

8 Robert Hariman, "Decorum," in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 206. Eugenio Refini, "Longinus and the Poetic Imagination,” 37. – 182 –

intellectual uncertainty.9 As I introduced in Chapter One of this thesis, Marino’s poetry is a model for the early modern grotesque in Chao’s study.10 Marino crowds his religious and lyric texts with grotesque bodily metaphors and appeals to sensual experience. This use of visual and sensual metaphors were common to baroque poetry and

“visual piety” in the tradition of the Spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.11

Jesuit poetics, rhetoric, and the poetics of meraviglia in literary theory, were all shaped by the diffusion of Longinus treatise On the Sublime from the late sixteenth century.12

Marino uses a hybrid image of the siren, similar to the female figure described above by Horace, in ‘La musica,’ one part of his Sacred Orations or

Dicerie sacre (1614).13 As seen in the poetry of Isabetta Coreglia, Adimari’s

Tersicore, and encomia for Costa in La chitarra, the siren was a key image for the female musician in the early modern period, with both positive and negative connotations. Sirens could be identified as neo-platonic “celestial” sirens or their antithesis, the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, whose voices overpower the will and reason of their victims, leading to their death.14 Marino’s Dicerie sacre presents a negative trope of the female singer to stand for Satan’s voice, and the

9 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 9-10. 10 Ibid., 78–79. 11 Ibid., 72, cites Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 29–55. 12 Refini, "Longinus and the Poetic Imagination,” 37. Refini cites Marc Fumaroli, L'Age de l'éloquence: rhétorique et “res literaria,” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique, (Genève: Droz, 1980), 33-51. 13 Marino, Dicerie sacre, 169-279. 14 Elena Laura Calogero, "'Sweet Alluring harmony,'” 65-66. Costa, La chitarra, ix, x, xii, xiv. Included in four of eleven ecomia, by Adimari, Barbazza, Spinosa and Incerto. – 183 – destructive power of sensuality, as the antithesis of the song of repentence sung by the “mouths” of Christ’s wounds:

Lessi che Mercurio, già dalla vanità delle genti creduto iddio de’ furti e delle menzogne, col suono della sampogna sua, addormentando Argo, l’uccise. Ma molto è più sagace la fraude del nostro infernale avversario, che per uccidere l’anima e rapirle la grazia viene ad invaghirla con diletti insidiosi e fallaci, onde s’ella cautamente non vigila, ammorzati tutti i lumi della ragione, resta del suo ingannatore misera preda. Deh, non possono in noi tanto le lusinghe di queste false et allettatrici sirene, che hanno solo la faccia di donna, ma nell’estremo finiscono in pesce, mostrano solo di dolcezza una piacevole apparenza, ma sono nostre ‘micidiali e nemiche. Sirene infami e perverse, non cantatrici ma incantatrici.

…Che tre fussero le Sirene del mare, Partenope, Ligia e Leucosia, è favola troppo nota. E che tre sieno le sirene dell’inferno, mondo , carne e diavolo, è verità troppo più chiara. …Imitiamo adunque l’accortezza d’Ulisse, che per non udire le sirene, incerandosi l’orrechie, si feca all’albero della nave legare. Insegnici la cristiana prudenza di chiuder l’adito ai vezzi loro, e mentre si solca questo infido Egeo delle sensualità mondane, andiancene ad abracciare e stringere quel benedetto tronco di croce. Quivi, o che melodia più sonora riconforterà gli animi nostri!

E che altro sono quelle sante piaghe, se non tante canore bocche le quali a tutte l’ore n’invitano e chiamano a penitenza? Ma specialmente dalle labra di quel fianco aperto che parole si sentono uscire da fare altrui traboccare di tenerezza?15 Marino associates the female singer with sensuality, and represents her in a hybrid form again in his Adone, Canto 7. La lusinga appears in the garden of

15 Marino, Dicerie sacre, 237–38. My italics. – 184 – hearing, music and taste, with the face of a young beautiful woman, the body of a bird, and claws of a harpy:

Un fiore, un fiore apre la buccia e figlia, ed è suo parto un biondo crin disciolto, e dopo’l crin con due serene ciglia ecco una fronte e con la fronte un volto. Al principio però non ben somiglia il mezzo e’l fin, ma differente è molto. Vedesi ala beltà, che quindi spunta, forma di stranio augello esser congiunta. Tosto che’n luce a poco a poco uscio quel fantastico mostro al’improviso, non sorse in piè, ma del suo fior natio restò tra l’erbe e tra le foglie assiso. Occhio ha ridente, atto benigno e pio, ha feminile e giovenile il viso. Veston le spalle e’l sen penne stellate, fregian le gambe e i piè scaglie dorate.

Serpentina la coda al ventre ha chiusa, lunata e qual d’arpia l’unghia pungente. Cela un amo tra’ fiori, onde delusa tira l’incauta e semplicetta gente. Tien di nettare e mel la lingua infusa, che persuade altrui soavemente. Così la bella fera i sensi alletta, fera gentil, che la Lusinga è detta.

La Lusinga è costei. Lunge fuggite, o di falso piacer folli seguaci! Non ha sfinge o sirena o più mentite parolette e sembianze o più sagaci! Copron perfide insidie, aspre ferite, – 185 –

abbracciamenti adulatori e baci. Vipera e scorpion, con arti infide baciando morde ed abbracciando uccide.16

Such images as Marino’s hybrid female figures, the ‘mast/crucifix/body of Christ’ and the ‘singing/speaking wound’ seen in the quotation from Musica above, are examples of the baroque grotesque metaphor. The power of these metaphors rests in setting two images side by side, one of which is bodily, that cannot be reconciled.17 Chao explains that the “normal, or symbolic, operation of metaphor” is to “lead the attention away from the literal (concrete discordance) towards the figurative (conceptual similitude).” The grotesque body, as a metaphorical construction, “tampers with this process.” Instead it makes the literal dissimilarity visible, giving “rise to a powerful effect of the biologically horrible and the logically absurd.”18

The metaphor that defined the poetics of the grotesque from their

Horation origins was gendered female. This ambivalent gendered metaphor was used to define female performance in both Marino’s religious writing and poetry. The continuity of this tradition, and the Marinist context of Costa’s lyric corpus, raises the following questions: How do Costa’s authorship, texts and corpus participate in this gendering of the grotesque? Does this ambivalence make the female authorship of this Diva, Muse and Siren grotesque in and of itself — a logical impossibility and monstrous? Can female authorship in this period be more than an unstable sign, a hybrid, or unachieved metamorphosis?

16 Marino, Adone, ed. Marzio Pieri, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 7.82–85, 396– 97. For analysis of this canto in relation to Incogniti thought see Mauro Calcagno, "Signifying nothing: on the aesthetics of pure voice in early Venetian opera," The Journal of Musicology, no. 4 (2003). 17 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 56. 18 Ibid. – 186 –

Baroque grotesque female authorship

Costa’s own reflections on the difficulties of her authorship, which I consider below, raise these questions, and she uses images of metamorphosis and monstrosity that participate in the “in-between” of the grotesque, described by

Chao. The effect of this “paradoxical confusion of the fantastic and the verisimilar” is “intellectual uncertainty.”19 In the paratext of her final published work, Gli amori della luna (1654), Costa fashions a narrative of her whole writing career that connects voice, gender and the problems of female authorship. In this narrative Costa foregrounds the two interconnected themes of her authorship: her engagement with Marinist/Ovidian poetics (explored in the last two chapters) and her deft use of the baroque grotesque, explored in this chapter.

Costa’s skill and renown as a singer made her authorship possible: the same patrons and networks financed and facilitated the publication of her books. She recalls her success in singing in her capitolo of self-defence that closes La chitarra, in an invocation to a muse: “Però tu Musa, che sempre

Vittoria/mi desti nel cantar, ti prego adesso,/che mi presti il cervello, e la memoria;/E non guardare al feminineo sesso,/ma guidata nel fonte d’Elicona,/lasciami entrar nel fiume di permesso.”20 However, sixteen years later, in the letter of dedication of her final work Costa describes the coupling of her voice and pen as an abortive failure, an incomplete metamorphosis, that had rendered her monstrous. The Muse had not regarded her plea to ignore her gender and, in consequence, her permission (permesso) to access Permesso,

19 Chao, Rethinking the concept of the grotesque,10. 20 Costa, La chitarra, 567. My italics. – 187 – the spring of Helicon associated with poetic inspiration and success, had been denied. Instead she had drowned in misfortune:

[T]ra studiose fatiche e sù l’Arno e su’l Tebro, esercitai in vece dell’Ago, la Penna, e animata dal gran Padroncinio dell’Altezza Serenissima di Ferdinando Secondo Gran Duca di Toscana, trà rozzi inchiostri, ho dato alle Stampe quattordici Volumi; sotto questo Cielo fatta Eupupa à miei danni, quasi somersa tra quest’acque, in vece di stabilirmi nell’Età quel nome, che nella gioventù tra gl’applausi di sì grand’Alme acquistai; dispennata la penna, amutita la lingua, altro suono non hanno saputo formare, che dolorose strida à i miei infortunij.21

In this letter prefacing her short opera libretto, Gli amori della Luna, Costa describes her failure as an author as the loss of her voice, in the form of her pen and her tongue, in contrast to the fame that her singing voice had brought her in her youth. Costa’s compressed history of her singing and authorship closely link gender and voice. Her patrons are informed of the conditions that led to the publication of her fourteen books: support of a powerful patron, her renown as a singer, “gl’applausi di sì grand’Alme,” her studious labours, her distinctive style

(rozezza), her speed of composition. Costa claims that gender motivated the envy of her detractors, the debilitating criticism and false praise of these “invidi rostri.”

[L]’ignoranza chiama nel nostro sesso mostruoso le Lettere, ed’io, che dopo tanti sudori, per lungo spatio non ho potuto disferentiata dall’altre vantare il mio Lauro; ed a quel dono, che il Cielo mi ha dato, ho visto da invidi rostri, oscurata la luce, se non oppressa,

21 Margherita Costa, Gli amori della luna della signora Maria Margherita Costa (Venezia: Giuliani, 1654), A3v–A3r. The ‘upupa’ appears in the chorus of birds, Adone 7.21.8 – 188 –

disanimata, o sin qui sotto silentio anottata me stessa.22

The images in Costa’s letter recall the story of Ovid’s Philomela, Procne, Itys, and Tereus.23 Costa represents her failure as metamorphosis and mutilation, beginning with the loss of language, transformation into a Hoopoe bird who can only lament with harsh sounds, and being torn apart by the beaks of her envious detractors to finally arrive at a self-imposed silence and darkness, experienced as death.24 In Ovid’s story of the ill-fated couple, Tereus, King of

Thrace and Procne, daughter of the King of Athens, the sisters Philomela and

Procne were silenced by the violence of Tereus’ rape and mutilation of

Philomela.25 Itys was dismembered by his mother Procne, in revenge, and

Tereus was transformed into a Hoopoe bird, while Philomela and Procne became a nightingale and a swallow.

However, Costa’s narrative also recalls the persistent attempts of Ovid’s female characters to write their own stories. Philomela weaves a textile, and

Procne weaves fictions, disguising herself as a follower of Bacchus to rescue her sister, and inventing a rite to convince Tereus to consume his son, in order to avenge her sister.26 Costa continues to write in order to tell of her suffering and condemn her accusers. She makes the violent, gendered dynamic of the reception of her poetry a key motivation for her persistence. Costa affirms her talent, proving through writing, gaining patronage, and printing her books that her detractors are wrong:

22 Costa, Gli amori della, A4r. 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.438–674. 24 Socrates mentions the Hoopoe (Pheado 85a) as a bird thought to sing in lamentation, in the course of discussing the swansong. 25 Philomela was silenced by having her tongue cut out and Procne with rage when she learned her sister’s story. Ovid, Met. 6.555–57, 583–85. 26 Ovid, Met. 6. 573–78, 587–600, 647–649. – 189 –

Mi è stato forza sotto Cielo stranier esercitar l’ingegno a diffesa di lingua nemica; onde avolta tra ritorte d’invidi rostri malamente ho potuto nel termine di quindeci giorni dare alla luce questo picciolo Parto del mio rozzo stile.27

In the eyes of her envious and ignorant critics, Costa’s authorship transgresses gender norms. Instead of sewing as a woman should, writing makes her (and all female authors) monstrous: “l’ignoranza chiama nel nostro sesso mostruoso le

Lettere.”28 The voice that she had gained in the production of her fourteen books (la penna, la lingua), with the support of her patrons, had been taken away from her in the works’ reception, showing that an author’s voice is only powerful — audible, legible, visible — to the degree to which it is accepted and affirmed by its readers/audience. The implication is that the same conditions that define male authorship render a female author both prey and monstrous.

And yet, in the act of casting herself as victim and monster, Costa displays her mastery of the tropes of Ovidian poetics and of the baroque grotesque. These two themes are present from the opening pages of La chitarra, and run through her corpus of poetry and love letters.

Jessica Goethals has noted that Costa repeated the theme of failure, exile, and new beginnings in her dedication to each new patron.29 However,

Costa’s allusive use of visceral and violent Ovidian images in her 1654 dedication, combined with the simplified, hind-sighted narrative, results in a much more serious public denunciation. This j’accuse distills the author’s suffering and her strengths. Costa describes her authorship as a failure through

27 Costa, Gli amori della luna, A4r. 28 Ibid., A5r. 29 Jessica Goethals, “The Bizarre Muse: the Literary Persona of Margherita Costa,” Early Modern Women 12, no. 1 (2017): 61. – 190 – the description of her metamorphosis from human language to animal sounds, her exclusion from the male realms of speech and writing, the judgements and actions that sought to render her monstrous and silent. And at the same moment, she demonstrates her mastery of the baroque grotesque. Her acts of writing and publishing perform female authorship, while describing its impossibility, creating a paradox.

The discomforting ambivalence of images of female monstrosity in the writing of Marino and Costa is the residue of the insoluble problem of the female gender in creative practice and reception, filtered through a baroque aesthetic.

Chao’s explanation of the early modern groteque cites E.R. Curtius, who wrote that “[t]he ‘pursuit of the marvellous’ is ‘the common denominator for all aesthetic tendencies opposed to Classicism.’”30 For Chao “the pursuit of the marvellous… manifests itself one way or another in the cult of fantasia, the power to amalgamate dissonant items into improbable or unfamiliar metaphors/image.”31 In effect, Costa is describing the status of the female author as an Horatian grotesque — because her gender and authorship are are viewed as irreconcilable. In the following section I propose that Costa’s La chitarra also shares the form of the Horatian grotesque.

Costa’s La chitarra as grotesque hybrid text

In the analysis that follows I consider the arrangement of La chitarra as an example of baroque dispositio, or textual ordering. The work sets side by side

30 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 19n54. cites Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 273, 82. 31 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 18–19. – 191 – contrasting poetic voices, styles, and forms to present Costa and La chitarra as marvellous hybrids. These include neoclassical, bernesque, Petrarchan, lyric, and theatrical, forms. This juxtaposition of contrasting forms, registers and voices, position La chitarra and by extension Costa’s poetic corpus, as exemplum of the grotesque. A corpus by a female author — a body of texts gendered female — can only be hybrid (destructive of decorum) because it centres on the unstable or paradoxical category of female authorship. In this way Costa’s female authorship becomes an ideal means to create disruptive baroque lyric, epistolary and grotesque forms.

In addition to baroque metaphor, larger-scale forms of discordia concors

— the use of contrast and contradiction to create meaning — can expand critical understanding of the baroque poetics of the marvellous.32 Paolo Cherchi emphasises dispositio as an important technique used by Marino to evoke meraviglia, that is to astonish and delight the reader.33 Cherchi writes that “for

Marino, words in their materiality are the content of a poem…, and its form is its concept. …The Adone is a work which transforms itself through its repetitions and symmetries; and its disposition creates a message of relativity.”34 As a technique for presenting many possibilities or perspectives dispositio avoids privileging one ‘truth,’ perhaps thereby undermining the very idea of truth. This can be seen in the quotation above from La musica.35

La chitarra is a text in which all the parts do not speak to each other,

32 Ibid., 7. Also cited in Chapter One. 33 Paolo Cherchi, "Marino and the Meraviglia," 69. 34 Cherchi, "Chapter 16: The Seicento, Lyric Poetry," in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Lino Pertile and Peter Brand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 307. 35 The most recent editor of the Dicerie sacre insists that despite four decades of study, they remain an enigma. Ardissino, "Introduzione," 9–10. – 192 – where styles and genres and contradictory images are set side by side, in dissonant chaos, and do not fit the purported genre of the text. Formal, stylistic and structural features of the book ensure disorientation as the main effect of reading. While the genre designated in the title canzoniere amoroso forms the body of the text running from pages 80 to 544, prefacing and concluding paratexts create a chaotic mixture of voices, forms and styles that contradict and comment on this genre. Furthermore, as I will show, the flow of the canzoniere narrative is broken by its division in four sections, ottave, sonetti, idilli and canzonette, that further reinforces the incoherence of the text.

Comic and serious styles alternate in the paratext and wider structure of

La chitarra, and the contrasting style of each section can be read as highlighting or undermining the message of the proceeding and following sections. In this way the dispositio of styles and poetic forms that disorients or dazzles the reader becomes a meta-critical tool commenting on form and gendered authorship. A descriptive table of the contents (see Appendix A) outlines the structure of the text, and the juxtaposition of the contrasting poetic styles and traditions of the sections.

Costa’s hybrid paratext

A frontispiece containing a formal portrait of the author follows the title page of

La chitarra.36 The three-quarter portrait at the centre of the image shows Costa seated gazing directly at the viewer, her hands resting on a large book. She is

36 ‘Cernere lavrigero quereris sine crine poetam: factum quod decima hec visa camena foret.’ This portrait by artist Stefano Della Bella is analysed in Amy Brosius, "'Il suon, lo sguardo, il canto": Functions of portraits of mid- seventeenth-century virtuose in Rome," Italian Studies 63, no. 1 (2008). and reproduced in Goethals, "The Bizarre Muse," 62. – 193 – dressed with a high collar, and latest noble hairstyle, emphasising the decorum of a virtuosa onesta, rather than that of a cortigiana.37 The portrait’s oval frame is encircled by a Latin inscription identifying Costa with Sappho the ‘tenth muse’ without a laurel wreath, surrounded by scrolls, acanthus leaves, an open book in the centre top. The margins of the image introduce another set of associations to Costa as a performer or courtesan. They are filled with a variety of musical instruments in the lower parts of the image, and an open score at the centre top, framed by elaborate embroidered drapery that could indicate a stage, or a bed.38

Costa’s letter of dedication following the portrait contradicts the image of

Costa as noble and onesta, introducing grotesque images, and a comic tone.

She places the book under the sign of hybridity, describing the work as a monstrous birth — simultaneously object and monster. The letter invokes both performers and performance practice in the court of Ferdinando II, as Costa casts her book as both the musical instrument of its title, and a dwarf: “un sconcio, e biasimevole Mostro…un storpio, e mal formato Nano.” She resolves to offer the book/monstrous birth into the protection of Ferdinando II “essendo che nelle Corti di Gran Prencipi sono anco ammessi, e per scherzozi e faceti.”39

As a musical instrument, it participates similarly in a ‘low culture,’ but one that

Costa identifies as welcome at Ferdinando’s court:

Ho voluto anco intitulare questo mostruoso Parto del mio rozzo ingegno, la Chitarra; poiche…se bene è istromento vile, viene

37 Brosius, "Functions of portraits of virtuose," 29. 38 FIGURE 1 Costa portrait, Ibid., 29–30. 39 Costa, "Sereniss. Gran Duca," in La chitarra, i–ii. For the historicity of Costa’s dedication see Teresa Megale, "La commedia decifrata. Metamorfosi e rispecchiamenti in «Li Buffoni» di Margherita Costa," Il Castello di Elsinore. Quadrimestrale di teatro 1, no. 2 (1988): 65–66. – 194 –

quasi da tutti esercitato; e perche sò, che V.A. non sdegnerà tal volta frà il numeroso concento di variati istrumenti servirsi ancho di essa…40

The aulic register immediately returns in the prefacing allographic encomia for

Costa that have been discussed in more detail in Chapter Two. These display a network of the Roman and Florentine authors offering a conventional presentation and defence of Costa’s authorship through neo-classical ideals such as wisdom, harmony, and classical exemplars of female speech or authorship.41 The first two encomia also describe and justify the author’s move from Rome to Florence, in such a way that Florence stands for authorship, in the authoritative literary language (Tuscan) and form (the canzoniere). Pompeo

Colonna, comparing Costa to the Theban poet Corinna, writes that Costa’s move from Rome to Florence had renewed the poetic glory of Petrarch’s birthplace transforming Florence into a new Thebes: “L'oro del crin di nobil

Lauro cinto,/ Dell'Amante di Laura il pregio estinto,/Vegga hor l'Etruria, a si gran gloria ascesa/Sia nova Tebe hor la Città di Fiori,/Tù novella Corinna alla tenzone/ T'apparecchia a cantar più dolci amori.”42

The references to Corinna and Pindar also point to Costa’s Florentine connection with Alessandro Adimari, the author of the second encomia, and translator of Pindar’s odes.43 Costa describes Tuscan and Petrarchism as the epitome of poetic style in her letter to the reader, and disavows any ambition to compete with her illustrious and learned Florentine readers:

40 Costa, "Sereniss. Gran Duca," in La chitarra, ii. 41 Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell'Arte, 75, 88, 93. 42 Costa, La chitarra, viii. 43 Alessandro Adimari and Horace, Ode di Pindaro ... tradotte in parafrasi ed in rima Toscana da A. Adimari ... Con osservazioni e confronti d'alcuni luoghi immitati ... da Orazio Flacco (Pisa: Tangli, 1631). – 195 –

So che mi sarà ascritto a’ temerarietà il voler cantar sù l’Arno, mentre io nacqui sul Tebro. Ma perche ho l’animo spogliato d’ogni presunzione, e del tutto lontano di voler pareggiare il virtuoso, e lodevol modo ch’ivi si tiene nel comporre; mi sono ardito di dare alla luce questo picciolo Volume; sperando, che dove fiorisce ogni virtù, e dove regna così ricco numero d’elevati Spiriti, habbino de essere le mie rime, se non gradite, almeno compatite.44

After signalling La chitarra as a canzoniere, a Tuscan, Petrarchan form, the letter to the reader and allographic encomia are followed by two poems that belong to a Florentine anti-classical counter-tradition: a capitolo and sonnet in a

‘Bernesque’ style, combining comic and satirical elements, as I described in

Chapter One.

As I briefly discussed in Chapter Two, Costa’s ‘Capitolo scherzoso

Scusandosi l’Autora’ also ties her book to a contemporary use of poesia giocosa, the Marinist Murtoleide, fischiate del Cavalier Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola.45 This work incorperated several sets of satirical sonnets, and other miscellaneous comic and mildly pornographic texts.46 The capitolo from the collection, ‘La chitarra,’ that Costa cites is not only comic, but also contains sexual allusions that may be shared by the title of Costa’s book. In keeping with paratextual elements of these texts as important sites of meaning, the title of La chitarra is both a gendered equivocation and an allusive reference

44 Costa, "Ai lettori," in La chitarra, iii. 45 Costa, La chitarra, 1–5, 6. 46 Giambattista Marino et al., La murtoleide fischiate del Cavaliere Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola. Aggontovi le Strigliate a Tomaso Stigliani, e L’Innamoramento di pupolo de la pupola, et altre curiosita piacevoli (Norinbergh: Per Joseph Stamphier, 1649). La murtoleide appeared in multiple clandestine editions between 1626 and 1649, see Sonia Schilardi, ed. La murtoleide del Marino: satira di un poeta “goffo” (Lecce: Argo, 2007), 100–101. – 196 – with many valances.47 I showed in Chapter Two that, when considered in relation to the titles of Costa’s books as echoes of Marino’s corpus, La chitarra stands as the Lira. However, in the equivocal burlesque, and popular register

“suonar la chitarrina” refers to sexual intercourse, while a “chitarrone” is a

“poetastro” — an author of inferior poetry.48 In Magagnati’s capitolo that Costa cites in her own capitolo and bernesque sonnet, the guitar of the poem’s title is a metaphor for the passive sexual body.49

Desiderosa di darci caparra Del bestialaccio umor della mia Musa Le hò fatto dar di piglio a la Chitarra, Stromento c’hoggi più che gli altri si usa Per haver molto più proportione De la viuola, o della Cornamusa. Stromento fatto con gran discrettione Poi c’hà fisionomia si gioviale Che piace a tutte quante le persone.50

The letter of dedication, capitolo, and dedicatory sonnet that open Costa’s La chitarra imitate the tone and some vocabulary of the first three terzine above, sustaining both an equivocal and comic-burlesque register.51 For example,

47 Genette, Paratexts, 2. 48 Valter Boggione and Giovanni Cassalegno, Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano (Milan: TEA, 1999), 405.; Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, vol. III (Torino: UTET,1973). 92–93 49 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106. The term for the passive sexual partner was gendered female, regardless of sex, i.e. “la bardassa.” 50 Marino, La murtoleide, 324. 51 Niccola Villani, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano [pseud.] sopra la poesia giocosa de' Greci, de' Latini, e de' Toscani, con alcune poesie piacevoli (Venetia: G P Pinella, 1634), 72. Writing of poesia giocosa Villani indicates “o pudiche esser possono, o lascive. …Ben ve ne hanno alcune, che lascive sono in sostanza, e pudiche sembrano in apparenza.” See Chapter One, page 5-6 for longer citation. – 197 –

Costa borrows from Magagnati’s capitolo the idea of the guitar as a “common” instrument (cited in the letter of dedication above) and the reference in her sonnet to the book as a down-payment, or deposit, “Però prendi sì picciola caparra/dal buon’animo mio, nè mi sia tolto/di gradirlo, ò sia Nano, ò sia

Chitarra.”52

The importance of the capitolo as Costa’s entry into Florentine literary culture is signalled strongly by her use of this exordium of her canzoniere to put forward a manifesto of her poetics, and introduce another grotesque element — her muse. Costa’s muse takes the form of an uncontrollable hybrid creature called Simona. It is described as both a hairy beast and a bird who predicts the weather, a strolaga or loon.

La mia musa e svegliata, e già ripiglia il Plettro ruginoso, e la zampogna, e non la posso ritener in briglia: … Grida, s’abbachia, stride, è maladice, e priega, ch’io li lasci dire il vero, e varie cose in testa mi predice; Ed io, ch’uscir non vuoglio dal sentiero, tiro la briglia, e li dò bastonate, e stimo la sua furia quanto un zero; …. La Musa mia, che si chiama Simona, non Figlia di Minerva, nè di Giove, ma guardiana è del bosco d’Elicona: Ella è Strolaga; e dice quando piove… …

52 Costa, La chitarra, 6. – 198 –

Nella faccia e pelosa come Belva.53

Jessica Goethals indicates that La chitarra’s introductory capitolo was Costa’s most anthologised poem in the following centuries.54 Costa’s shrieking muse is clearly more harpy than siren.55 This parody of the negative female trope of the siren, seen in the quotations above from Marino’s La musica and Adone, finds a later echo in Costa’s dedication to Gli amori della luna, in the shrill call of the

Hoopee bird. This muse does not sing, it can only curse, bark and shriek:

“s’abbachia, stride, è maladice.”56

Costa’s portrayal of her muse as a wild animal that cannot be tamed amplifies the “bestialaccio umore” of the muse appearing in Magagnati’s capitolo, and connects Costa’s poem to a wider tradition of satire and poesia giocosa.57 Describing the muse or the author as an animal, specifically a snarling dog, is a trope of the ancient satirist that marks the capitolo, and frames the canzoniere that follows, as potentially critical as well as comedic.58

Several other references in Costa’s poem point specifically to Persius’ prologue

(one would assume cited as commonplaces): that of the author as a social and poetic outsider writing without style, and the suggestion that the paper on which the poetry is written will be re-used in the preparation of food:

Però, se i versi miei ben riguardate,

53 Ibid., 1, 2, 3. 54 Goethals, “The Bizarre Muse,” 67. Goethals analyses an allographic manuscript of a comic conversion narrative by Costa that reuses portions of the opening and closing capitoli of La chitarra, including the description of her grotesque muse. Ibid., 67–69. 55 I acknowledge the comment of my reveiwer noting the close association between the two images in the classical tradition. 56 Ibid., 2. 57 Costa, La chitarra, 1–3. Marino, La murtoleide, 324. cited above. 58 R.Clinton Simms, "Persius prologue and early modern English satire," Translation and Literature 22 (2013): 42n.50. – 199 –

non vi parranno dattili, o spondei, ma scartacci da cuocer le frittate Siano anco zoppi, ch’io figlia de i Dei non sono, nè di stil tanto perfetto, …A’ me basta puoter star sola in letto a paragone col mio biondo Apollo, .. E se non ho poetico pennello mi basta, che non siano le mie rime di stile stirachiato un paralello.59

In the opening of the capitolo Costa engages critically with several Cinque and

Seicento satirical and comic texts about women, when her muse demands to be allowed to speak the truth about the female characters:

…Vourebbe dir mal fin della Togna, della Mea, della Nanna, e della Cice, e grattarli la schiena senza rogna. Grida, s’abbacchia, stride, e maledice, e priega, ch’io li lasci dire il vero, e varie cose in testa mi predice.60

These names may refer to Togna, found in the comic poetry of Giulio Cesare

Croce, and Nanna, the prostitute in Aretino’s Ragionamenti.61 However, the poet decides that licensing her muse for such truth saying would not be in their shared interests: “Ed io, ch’uscir non vuoglio da sentiero,/ tiro la briglia, e li dò bastonate.” Despite her attempts at taming this beast, the muse dictates the terms of Costa’s poetry:

Già tengo dalla musa una ricetta,

59 Costa, La chitarra, 5. 60 Ibid., 1. 61 Togna is also a character in Aretino’s play, La cortigiana. The trope of the satirist’s struggle to tell the truth is proposed here not with a classical reference but with references to Dante’s prophetic mission (Par. 17.127–29) – 200 –

di non mutar un verso, che risuona, nè toglier’allo stil nà paroletta. … Le mie versi son schietti, è mal vestiti, richi d’errori, è povero di merto, di rozzo stile, e puoco repuliti.62

Silvia Longhi has noted the close relationship between the burlesque and the satirical capitolo in the sixteenth century, and Costa’s ‘Capitolo scherzoso’ appears to participate in the contamination or intersection of the two genres.63

Longhi states that the difference between the satirical and burlesque capitolo is one of quantity rather than quality, and Costa’s poem weighs more on the side of the joyful chaos of poesia giocosa. The contrasts and tensions between muse and author within the capitolo are all features of the burlesque capitolo: irrational (animal) and human (rational) qualities; action (writing equating to riding/taming the muse) and inaction: “A me basta puoter star sola in letto/a paragone col mio biondo Apollo,/senza lima di rosso, o di belletto.” 64 Longhi explains that within the capitolo giocoso the “oscillazione dallo zero al più infinito: dalla sfrenatezza alla pigrezza, che sono al di là di una contradizione apparente, i due stati possibili di un medesimo modo di esistere.”65

The larger tension created by this poem, however, is between the anti- erotic poesia giocosa of the opening capitolo and the canzoniere amoroso that follows. Longhi comments that “la poesia satirica si autodefinisce, come la

62 Costa, La chitarra, 5. 63 Silvia Longhi, Lusus, il capitolo burlesco nel Cinquecento, (Padova: Antenore, 1983), 228–30. 64 Costa, La chitarra, 1. 65 Ibid., 235. – 201 – burlesca, per oppositione a… la poesia lirica di contenuto amoroso.”66

In Chapters Three and Four I discussed the Ovidian allusions in Costa’s second capitolo that ends La chitarra. The two capitoli, placed as the exordio and conclusio (or head and tail) of the book, both titled defences of the author and her text, are in contrasting styles. The first is a Bernesque capitolo setting forth a comic/satirical poetics, emphasising the contemporary Tuscan-ness of the book. The last is an epistolary capitolo defending Costa’s amorous poetry as theatrics, or simulation, claiming the authority of the earlier Ovidian tradition.

The lyric sequence of La chitarra, the canzoniere amoroso, is wedged between two extreme statements of poetics that each contradict the other, and point to a different literary tradition. In addition, each capitolo references a contrasting portion of the Marinist corpus — the satirical/burlesque clandestine production of the Murtoleide, the Lettere Facete, and Marino’s Ovidian lyric corpus.

In the next section I will explain how apposite it is that the canzoniere amoroso, which works as a parody of the Petrarcan canzoniere, rests within two versions of Costa’s authorial voice; the unprecedented female voiced bernesque capitolo, and the saucy Ovidian exculpation. Both contradict the image of Costa’s authorship and neo-classical decorum presented in the portrait, and many of the encomia.

La chitarra as canzoniere-amoroso-giocoso

The canzoniere, containing the narrative of the Bella donna persona, is a structure-within-a-structure — another example within La chitarra of the use of dispositio to critique the tradition being cited. As a prosopopoeia of the male

66 Ibid., 230. – 202 – libertine lyric persona, the Bella donna parodies the Petrarchan lyric voice, and the structure of La chitarra canzoniere creates narrative circularity that parodies the trajectory of the Petrarchan narrative. This parody functions by disturbing and undermining the expectations elicited by the reference to the authoritative text, creating comic incongruity.67

While Petrarch’s Canzoniere was considered the model of the single author poetry collection, authors of lyric sequences from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries adapted or changed the form in various ways: the title, themes, representing several women rather than one, and the length of the collections.68 From the fifteenth century the impulse of some editors was to classify and arrange the poems of the Canzoniere chronologically and thematically around the life and death of Laura. This served to emphasise the narrative, to reduce the collection to a romance in poetry, and to conform with the structure of Dante’s Vita nuova.69

In the seventeenth century, then, the use of the term canzoniere created an expectation that the poetry would describe a love narrative of a single poetic persona, however the form existed in many variations.70 Marino’s Lira (1614) was the most influential canzoniere of the seventeenth century, and displays many of the structural changes of the later sixteenth century seen in printed editions of Tasso and Guarini, such as the addition of titles for each poem.71

67 Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern, 30–32. 68 Massimo Danzi, "Petrarca e la forma "canzoniere" fra quattro e cinquecento," in Lezioni sul testo: modelli di analisi letteraria per la scuola, ed. Emilio Manzotti (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 1992), 104–15. Guglielmo Gorni, "V. Il Canzoniere," in Metrica e analisi letteraria (Bologna: 1993), 115. 69 Gorni, "V. Il Canzoniere," 116–17, 119. 70 Teodolinda Barolini and Wayne Storey, eds., Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 27–29. 71 Martini, "Le nuove forme di canzoniere," 202–206. – 203 –

The division of the poems by verse form and theme, another late Cinquecento innovation, had different effects across the three volumes of the Lira, and masked narrative possibilities: part of Marino’s playful poetics described as “un gioco di rimpiattino nel micro e macrostruttura”o “fra le parti e il tutto.”72

While Marino’s three volumes display the baroque explosion of possible topics of the lyric, love is a central theme in the Lira with the focus not on one beloved, but on many women.73 The clearest statement of the lyric subject’s promiscuity is Marino’s ‘Amore incostante,’ a rewriting of Ovid’s catalogue poem, in which the protagonist is assaulted by desire for every type of woman, and claims the powers of Proteus meet this challenge, cited above in Chapter

Two.74

Like the Lira, La chitarra canzoniere is arranged by verse form, ottave, sonetti, idilli and canzonette, with titles introducing the speaker and theme of each poem. However, unlike Marino’s Lira, the poems shape a loose narrative, describing the Bella donna, the (libertine) lyric subject, moving between several

‘beloveds.’ As I described in Chapter Two the central love affair narrated by the poems is that of the poet as “Bella donna” with “Tirsi.” Bella donna rejects Tirsi after he is unfaithful. She seeks other lovers, and finally settles down to domestic life in Florence with one man, renouncing the world in favour of family, the spindle and needle, as seen in the quotation below. The trajectory of the

Petrarchan canzoniere narrative is from earthly love, through a turning point

(metanoia), to spiritual love. This is read through a progression of these themes in the poetry and a temporal progression from “then” to “now.” Costa’s narrative

72 Ibid., 204. 73 Danzi, "Petrarca e la forma "canzoniere" fra quattro e cinquecento," 104. 74 Marino, La Lira: 1614, 495. See page 97–98. – 204 – has the requisite temporal feature of the canzoniere form, combined with an additional geographic element: ‘then, with Tirsi, in Rome’ and ‘now, with unnamed man, and her children, in Florence.’

However, the Petrarchan narrative is simultaneously fulfilled by Costa’s poems and disrupted by the four part structure of the book. Narrative elements of time and place point back to the model of the Rime sparse, as received in the

Seicento. La chitarra repeats this narrative in each of the four sections, making the story circular rather than linear. The spiritual goal of the narrative is also modified: the Bella donna’s journey is from worldly passions (including musical and poetic performance) to a position resembling faithful wife and mother.

The Bella donna’s renunciation is repeated, in the new verse form, at the end of each section. These four poems addressed “Alle donne,” iterate Costa’s message of warning to female readers to learn of the difficulties of love from her negative example, while she exhorts them to return to women's real work — sewing and spinning. The following three stanze of the much longer poem

"Bella donna si duole della sua vita passata, e si gode della sua vita presente" illustrate the end point of this journey:

Ho cangiato pensier, stato, e costumi, non più vive il mio Cor fra crudi affanni a più lodevol vita ho volto i lumi, o volto il piè da i miei cotanti danni; più non sia, che penando io mi consumi nè più segua il mio mal fra tanti inganni, che scacciato da me l’empio desire, in vita ho volto io mio crudo morire. … Lasciamo dunque tutti ogn’altro stile, e se volgiamo ai nostri affari il Core; – 205 –

lasciamo di trattar spirto virile, che solo è di esser Donna il nostro honore; ogn’arte, ogni virtù prendiamo avile, e dispensiam con l’ago i giorni, e l’hore: sì, sì, lasciamo omai (Donne) ogn’altro uso che l’arte nostra è sol la rocca, e’l fuso

In quanto a me son ferma, e risoluta lasciar la penna, abondonare il canto, romper’ il suono, e con la lingua muta ponere ogni virtute omai da canto: poich’ogni cosa in Donne è mal tenuta, e biasmo apporta in loro ogni lor vanto; ond’io, che d’homo, e Donna hebbi ‘l trattare, ho l’arte mia sarà sol di filare.75

The irony of the proposed conversion is emphasised through the canzoniere structure, with the author obviously not taking her own advice, as the story begins again in a new verse form.

The last contrasting section of La chitarra to be considered follows

Costa’s canzoniere amoroso, and precedes the final capitolo. The three part

Tenzone, ‘I Caramoggi,’ gestures to a cluster of literary and performance traditions linked to the Medici court, and also has wider allusive references to the Orlando Furioso, and the Morgante maggiore. This text has strong intratextual associations with the references to monstrous births and dwarfs in the letter of dedication, and will be analysed in the next part of this chapter on grotesque performance and living burlesque traditions.

It is fitting that the siren should be both an image of female performance,

75 Costa, La chitarra, 387, 392, 395–97. – 206 – and the decorum splintering effects of hybrid textuality. Costa’s ability to perform many voices, all of them entertaining, makes La chitarra a hybrid text, an example of the baroque grotesque, gendered female. The effects of disorientation and dissonance achieved through dispositio works against any hierarchy of genres, proposing a multiplicity of possibilities that comment on each other.

Performing grotesque gender and genres

In the next part of this chapter I consider Costa’s performance of authorship through the grotesque bodies in the dedicatory letter of La chitarra, the capitoli,

Caramoggi texts, and the Lettere amorose that bring together a tradition of the grotesque in court performance. Costa’s texts present the baroque grotesque as a social and cultural currency, that was celebrated in the human ‘menagerie’ of dwarfs, and individuals with other forms of deformity, within the Medici court of Ferdinando II, and in texts connected to the court.76 Costa’s participation in this court culture and her experience as a performer is a rare perspective that shapes both her choice of themes, and her approach as an author. Costa’s detailed observations of the social performance of gender and desire in a court context can be seen in her dedications that encode the social relationship between patron and author through literary conventions.77

Costa’s skill in writing gendered performance can be seen in the interactions of the Bella donna and the other letter writers in the comic and

76 Díaz and Goethals, “Editors’ Introduction," in The Buffoons: a Ridiculous Comedy: A Bilingual Edition, 40. 77 Marco Paoli, La dedica: storia di una strategia editoriale (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 2009), 88–89. – 207 – grotesque Lettere amorose, through descriptions of behaviours and actions that have the body at the centre.78 Costa’s comic writing brings together several themes I have explored in the previous chapters. These include grotesque, and equivocal images, the idea of equality of female and male desire explored in

Chapter Four, and the fluidity of gender roles seen in Costa’s contemporary voiced Lettere amorose and her rewriting of male authored poetry analysed in

Chapter Three. In the Caramoggi texts and the Lettere amorose, Costa unites court practice and romance traditions of dwarfs, found in the Orlando furioso, to critique the representation of women in these traditions.

As I discussed above, Costa uses the image of the dwarf at court as a metaphor for her book in the La chitarra dedication to Ferdinando II: “un sconcio, e biasimevole Mostro…un storpio, e mal formato Nano.”79 This metaphor alludes to an historical reality of the Medici, and other courts in the period, that Costa exploited in her 1641 comedy Li buffoni. Diaz and Goethals’ recent critical edition of Li buffoni builds on the earlier research of Teresa

Megale.80 Megale’s study revealed the comedy to be a parody of the Medici court of Ferdinando II, and identified Costa’s characters as living members of the court who provided comic entertainment.81 These performers, who included dwarfs, had a wide range of physical and intellectual disabilities that Costa exploited as character traits for humour in the comedy.82

78 The physical routines or lazzi of the commedia dell’arte tradition are a central comic technique in Costa’s Buffoni. Díaz and Goethals, “Editors’ Introduction," 47. 79 Costa, La chitarra, v. 80 Díaz and Goethals, “Editors’ Introduction," 53. 81 Megale, "La commedia decifrata. Metamorfosi e rispecchiamenti in «Li Buffoni» di Margherita Costa." 82 Díaz and Goethals, " Editors’ Introduction," 39–43. – 208 –

Both the opening letter of dedication and encomia and the final

Caramoggi texts frame La chitarra with references to dwarfs. In his prefacing encomia to La chitarra, Alessandro Adimari makes reference to Pygmies and giants to praise Costa’s intelligence: “Quel, che vedi, o Lettor, senno, e sembiante/Raccolto in queste carte, è breve salma/Anzi un Pigmeo del suo saver Gigante.” Costa’s comic Lettere amorose also include letters between the

Bella donna and dwarfs that share a further set of intertexts from Ariosto’s

Orlando furioso (1516) and may recall Pulci’s Morgante maggiore.83

For the Medici, and many contemporary rulers, dwarfs were important as court entertainers, and to economies of display, collection and exchange.84

Pulci had written the Morgante maggiore at the request of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a patron and author, and a powerful figure in Florence during the fifteenth century, when the Florentine republic was dominated by her husband Piero de’

Medici, and then her son Lorenzo de’ Medici.85 This gave the Morgante particular significance for the Medici.86 There is evidence of a series of dwarfs named Morgante at the Medici court, playing on the ironic effect of naming a dwarf after a giant.87 In 1549 Cosimo de’ Medici had at least nine dwarfs in his court, the most celebrated of whom was Braccio di Bartolo, known as Morgante, whose image was captured and collected in a number of artworks, including paintings by Bronzino, and sculptures — one of which sat on the terrace above

83 Costa, La chitarra, ix. 84 Touba Ghadessi, "Lords and Monsters: Visible Emblems of Rule," I Tatti Studies 16, no. 1/2 (2013): 502. 85 For an overview and extensive bibliography see Gerry Milligan, "Lucrezia Tornabuoni," Oxford bibliographies online. Renaissance and Reformation (2011). 86 Alessio Decaria, "Luigi Pulci," in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Treccani, 2016). 87 Ghadessi, "Lords and Monsters: Visible Emblems of Rule," 504–505. – 209 – the Loggia dei Lanzi, and others in the Boboli Gardens.88 The tradition of dwarfs in the court was continued by Cosimo II, and it was in the Medici court in 1616 that Jacques Callot created the caricatures of the Varie Figure Gobbi.89 Another dwarf called Morgante, from the court of Archduchess Maria Maddalena, appears in the correspondence of Cosimo II in 1621, having been loaned to, and returned by, the Duchess of Mantua, Caterina de’ Medici-Gonzaga.90

Appearing as the third group of letters in the comic section of the Lettere amorose, an exchange consisting of four letters describes a relationship initiated by the Bella Donna and reciprocated by a dwarf. The correspondence plays on the disparity of size between the lovers, and the Bella donna seeks to convince him of her desire and protection. She reassures the dwarf that he could hide beneath her skirts should they be surprised together, and presents their relationship with an equivocal set of images, evoking shared musical performance.

Non vedi mio scherzo amoroso, che quando anche la fortuna portasse, che scoperte le mie fiamme, d’altri fossimo all’improviso assaliti, sì picciolo luogo mi chiede il tuo leggiadretto corpo per sua sicurezza…sotto le proprie falde tacito t’asconderei.

…Ti prego, che fatto ardito dall’ardente mia brama ti compiacci d’esporti tra le mie gioie al non evidente pericolo… permettemi usigniolo mio bello ch’alla soave canna della tua picciola voce inesti il gran flato de’miei sospiri? ammettimi dalle vaghe piume il rassettato volo nel mio capace seno? concedimi che nel tuo poco moto il moto de’miei gran moti fortunata mi goda.91

88 Ibid. 89 Jacques Callot, Varie figure gobbi di Iacopo Callot fatto in Firenza anno 1616. [21 engravings.] (Nance1622). 90 Ghadessi, "Lords and Monsters: Visible Emblems of Rule," 501–503. 91 Margherita Costa, Lettere amorose, 201–202. – 210 –

Costa’s descriptions of singing and dancing in this passage use equivocal terms to produce nonsense images, while also recalling the context of court entertainment shared by the personae of both the dwarf and the Bella donna.92

In his response the Nano plays on the antithesis of large and small, writes of his fear of not being able to meet her expectations and of being mocked by her entourage, but finally offers the Bella donna all that he is, be that ever so little.

Larghissima Signora de’tuoi doni.

Conosco d’esser soverchio pusillanimo, e di far grandissimo torto alla vostra grandezza con la mia picciola prosuntione, ma, bello specchio degli occhi miei, il mio picciolo seno é di gran tema ricetto…che temo, bel cipresso delo mio poco terreno, di render la vostra voluntade troppo capace della mia incapacitade, e di rimanere (da voi scorto) deriso. Pure non sempre l’apparenza dice il vero, ne lo proverbi sono tutti per verosimili approvati…onde

…se tal mi volete, tal mi vi dono, se cosi mi bramate, cosi mi vi cedo, se del mio talento vivete anziosa; non solo di esso vi porgo ogni possibil dominio, ma m’espongo ad’esporre ogni mia forza a’ vostri contenti; della quale tanto ricco, quanto povero dell’opera, a voi cedo impero.93

The Bella donna’s response employs both hyperbole and more equivocal comic

92 Megale, "La commedia decifrata. Metamorfosi e rispecchiamenti in «Li Buffoni» di Margherita Costa."; Boggione and Cassalegno, Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano. Words for male genitalia: 2.4.2 Usignolo, 2.1.2 canna; Female: 3.3.6.1b seno. Note also a possible allusion to singing and dancing from Dante Par 12.3–6 “e nel suo giro tutta non si volse/ prima ch'un'altra di cerchio la chiuse,/ e moto a moto e canto a canto colse;” An English translation of one letter in this exchange is found in Lisa Kaborycha, A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 179–80. 93 Costa, Lettere amorose, 203–204. – 211 – writing than the first letter:

Picciolo tronco ove m’attengo lieta.

O, fortunato doglienze, bene spese fatiche, ben coltivati pensieri, ben annidati desiri, ed in fine ben collocati affetti.

…Deh mia vita, che non prima seppi ch’il godimento d’Amore in te so s’annidassi?…nè mai più lieta mi vidi, che nel tuo piciolo seno… mentre a te appigliandomi, si rinova in me il fortunato avvenimento della accorta Regina di Longobardi, o savia ed avveduta Signora, ben scioperato, e indescreto fù quello, che di tua vaga elezzione ti diede biasimevole fama. Attenda, chi più vuole, ad apperendersi a queste antenne di sdrusciti vascelli, ch’io su’l mio picciolo, e securo Battello più contenta m’ingolfo a’miei viaggi.94

The nautical double entendre, and a reference to speech or singing in the Bella donna’s first letter, are echoed in the final response from the dwarf:

Spatioso stipo de’miei pochi arnesi

Si’ che è vero, mio risplendente Sole, che sotto lo splendor de’tuoi gran rai risplender veggio la mia picciola Stella? Sì mio ampio ricetto, che nella copiosa fonte delle tue amorose dolcezze si concede l’approdo del mio picciolo vaso. Godo, mia bella, godo, e tanto più godisco, quanto tu del mio gioir t’appaghi, e di quello con le tue pietose voci mi dai libero possesso.95

The passage in the Bella donna’s letter referring to “il fortunato avvenimento della accorta Regina di Longobardi” presents a crucial literary locus for a liaison between a normatively beautiful and privileged woman and a dwarf. This is the story of the infidelity of the wife of Astolfo, King of Lombardy in Canto Twenty-

94 Ibid., 206–207. 95 Ibid., 208–209. – 212 –

Eight of the Orlando Furioso. Recounted by an unreliable narrator, the inn- keeper Turpino, this novella describes the quest for the truth about women’s capacity for desire and infidelity. Both the male protagonists of the novella regard themselves as exempla of male beauty: Iocundo, a Roman nobleman, and Astolfo. The men set out on their quest after they had been profoundly shocked at discovering their wives’ infidelity, with a servant and a dwarf, respectively.96

While the only reference to the Queen of Lombardy in the Lettere amorose is in the Bella donna’s prose letter, the scenario appears in the second last stanza of all three of the Caramoggi texts in La chitarra, along with the references to the Morgante. These texts record, or more likely transform and expand, a series of theatrical events that occurred in Florence in 1629. They take the form of three prose epistles followed by a poem of ten ottave, “spoken” by a different collective identity: Caramogi (dwarfs), Begl’imbusti (vain noblemen), and Donne. In the first two texts, the male characters aim to convince all, especially women, of their desirability as lovers, and the women present their own opinions. As the titles of the letters and poems below indicate, the second letter and poem responds to the first, and the women respond to both letters:

- I Caramoggi, overo gl'Amanti abbozzati Ai Signori Begl'imbusti. Del

Signor Andrea Salvadori

- Gl'Ammanti Abbozzati, a Begl'Imbusti

96 Annalisa Izzo, "Misoginia e filoginia nel Orlando Furioso," Chroniques Italiennes Series Web 22, no. 1 (2012): 19, 21, 23. This brilliant analysis of the canto, on which I base my argument, also places it in the context of the Ferrara court.

– 213 –

- Risposta. I Begl'Imbusti a gli Sig. Amanti Abbozzati. Dell'Autora

- I Begl'Imbusti ai Caramogi

- Dichiarazione Delle Donne A gli Begl'Imbusti, e Caramoggi. Dell'Autora.

- Le donne alli Caramogi, e ai Begl'Imbusti.97

Authorship of the first of these three prose letters is attributed to Andrea

Salvadori, court poet to the Medici, who had died in 1635, and a text with a similar title appears in the first volume of Andrea Salvadori’s posthumously published poems.98 An anonymous libretto bearing a title similar to Costa’s second Caramoggi text was published in the year of the performances:

Risposta de'Begli Imbusti a'Caramogi Palio e mascherata Fatta in Firenze il di

28 Agosto 1629. In Firenze Per Pietro Cecconcelli, 1629.99

The only direct quotation from the published 1629 text in Costa’s equivalent Risposta is an aphorism around which the arguments turn in all three of her Caramoggi epistles: “Bello e quello che piace.”100 Costa’s Risposta re- presents the general themes of the 1629 pamphlet, albeit in a more comic and less formal register. The three letters and poems in La chitarra share the same tone and register, and rhyme scheme, often repeating rhyme words in the same

97 Costa, La chitarra, 546-563. 98 ‘Caramogi. Palio e mascherata faceta fatta in Firenze il di 6 agosto 1629.’ Andrea Salvadori, Le poesie del Sig. Andrea Saluadori fra le quali contengonsi unite insieme tutte quelle, che furono divisamente impresse in diuerse stampe vivente l'autore, e l'altre non più divulgate. Parte Prima. (Roma: Per Michele Ercole, 1668). Salvadori had written the text for the opera that Costa possibly appeared in, the Flora, performed for the marriage of Margherita de’ Medici and Odoardo Farnese in 1628. Kelley Harness, "'La Flora' and the end of female rule in Tuscany," Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 3 (1998): 438. 99 Angelo Solerti, Musica, ballo e drammatica alla corte medica dal 1600 al 1637: notizie tratte da un diario con appendice di testi inediti e rari (New York: B. Blom, 1968), 195n.3. It is interesting to note that Solerti, citing no evidence, tentatively attributes this second text to Alessandro Adimari. 100 Costa, La chitarra, 553. – 214 – position across the ten ottave, possibly indicating that even the first work, attributed to Salvadori, was a rewriting by Costa.

In the light of the scenario played out in canto twenty-eight of the Orlando furioso, the three groups presented in the Caramoggi texts correspond to the three subject positions in the novella — the dwarf, the vain noblemen, and the queen. Costa writes these three dramatic and poetic monologues in conversation with one of the central problems of the Furioso that unfolds in

Canto twenty-eight. That is the problem of choice and equality of desire for women.101 Costa presents arguments about women’s desire from the view points of these protagonists, with the final word going to the women in their

Dichiarazione. The references to the Furioso and the Morgante appear in the same stanze. First the Caramoggi write of the wise choice of the queen:

O saggia la Regina de Lombardi Di cui già scrisse il Ferrarese Omero; Che punta’l Cor da gl’amorosi dardi Al suo Nano gentil volse il pensiero; I grandi non son sempre Mandricardi, Nè sempre la presenza dice il vero E spesso in un Pimmeo Cor di Gigante E Marguette tal’or vince Morgante.102

The Begl’imbusti reply that while the queen made a mistake in choosing the dwarf, at least she did not choose the villain from the Orlando furioso,

Mandricardo:

Cediam che la Regina de’Lombardi

101 Izzo, "Misoginia e filoginia nel Orlando Furioso," 24. For further studies of the representation of gender relations in the Orlando Furioso see Chapters Two and Three in Deanna Shemek, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 102 Costa, La chitarra, 551. – 215 –

ad’intender si dia bianco per nero; e che punta nel Cor dai stral Codardi a si brutto homaccin volse il pensiero; poiche scieglier non seppe i Mandricardi quella dolce Signora, e’l ben più vero, sperando in’un Pigmeo Cor di Gigante, a Margutte si diè, tolse a Murgante.103

The Donne contradict both groups of men and Ariosto, deny that the Lombard queen had ever loved the dwarf, and propose to choose neither the dwarfs nor the Belg’imbusti, but a villain like Mandricardo, or the hero of the Gerusaleme

Liberata, Tancredi:

Della saggia Reggina dei Lombardi noi non crediamo quel, che disse Omero, che non puo nobil Donna a si codardi fantocci da mazzuol volger pensiero: piaceno a noi i Tancredi, e i Mandricardi (non i belli in piazza in portamento altero) ne i quai proviamo ogn’hor Cor di Gigante, voi sembrate Margutte, e lor Morgante.104

A slightly different set of perspectives on the novella are offered by the

Bella donna and the dwarf in their exchange in the Lettere amorose, where the

Bella donna affirms the Queen’s choice, and condemns the narrator of the story for his negative judgement: “o savia ed avveduta Signora, ben scioperato, e indescreto fù quello, che di tua vaga elezzione ti diede biasimevole fama.”105

Reading La chitarra and the Lettere amorose texts through their engagement with the novella of Canto Twenty-Eight of the Furioso, Costa

103 Costa, La chitarra, 558. 104 105 Costa, Lettere amorose, 207. – 216 – argues for women’s equality of desire from both a negative and a positive perspective. The Dichiarazione supports women not to choose any man who insists on his desirability, and the Lettere amorose supports them to desire the other who might appear undesirable to anyone else, the dwarf.

Stretching baroque grotesque gender

In my initial introduction of Alessandro Adimari’s collection of fifty paradoxical sonnets on female imperfections, the Tersicore, in Chapter Three, I showed how Costa’s commitment to the grotesque significantly modified Adimari’s moderate baroque themes in the direction of poesia giocosa and the obscene.

In the earlier part of this chapter I discussed Costa’s hybrid muse as the gathering of the grotesque into the earlier Bernesque tradition. In the final part of this chapter I will show how Costa’s other grotesque epistolary voices combine desire, revulsion, and the obscene to construct an anti-erotic parody of love theory that pushes every boundary of female authorship, and the baroque grotesque.

The principle basis for love between couples in contemporary theories of love were parity and complementarity. Mario Equicola, summarising the neoplatonic position writes:

Platonici dicono esser necessaria cognitione, e convenientia de Idea, Genio, e’ stella a principio d'amore: Idea intendemo forma, secondo Tulio: questa non è altro che similitudine. …Base in questo luogo che la similitudine de forma, aspetto, membri, lineamenti, puo causare beni volentia, perche da tal proportione qualche attione del l'animo si comprende, e se non in ogni atto, in alcuno ci trovamo simili.106

106 Mario Equicola, Libro de natura de amore di Mario Equicola (Venetia: – 217 –

Equicola also presents the idea of complementarity, from Aristophanes’ account of love in Plato's Symposium in which the original human beings were male, female and androgynous with two heads and four legs. They were split in two, and thereafter desired to be reunited: "E adunque ciascuno di noi mezzo, e ciascuno c’era il suo resto, cio è quella stirpe donde fu separato.” From this follows male and female homosexuality, and heterosexuality.107

Costa’s fictional authors frequently present the ideals of parity and complementarity (or a parody of them) using a range of rhetorical techniques including hyperbole, to persuade their lovers in the Lettere amorose. The humour of Costa’s grotesque letters derives from the effect of incongruity between lyric decorum, in which only idealised bodies appear, and the voices of characters who would normally be excluded from the literature of love.108

Ritter writes that hyperbole “dramatically holds the real and ideal in irresolvable tension, and reveals the impossible distance between the ineptitude and the infinite multiplicity of language to describe that which is indescribable."109 The grotesque of burlesque literature has been theorised by

Stampato ... per Lorenzo Lorio da Portes, 1525), 125. See Stephen Kolsky, "Mario Equicola's Libro de natura de amore (1525): a new interpretation," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, no. 3 (2010), placing Equicola’s tract in a sceptical philosophical tradition. Two editions of the Libro de natura di amore were published in Venice in the Seicento: 1607, 1626. Equicola stands for ‘love’, in Marino’s comic love letters ‘L’innamoramento di pupulo della pupula’. The pupolo writes “S’Amore sarà Equicola, Giustino, e Giustiniano, so che non mancherete di Donarmi dopo tante tempeste un Suetonio Tranquillo, e se ciò farete io vi prometto di esser non solo Bentivoglio, ma il Tacito.” Marino, La murtoleide (Norinbergh,1649), 3-4. 107 Plato, Symposium 189c–193c Equicola, Libro de natura de amore di Mario Equicola, 120. 108 For an overview of these tracts see Giorgio Masi, "La lirica e i trattati d'amore" in Storia della letteratura italiana, IV. Il primo Cinquecento (Rome: Salerno, 1996), 602-603. 109 Joshua Ritter, " Recovering Hyperbole: Re-Imagining the Limits of Rhetoric – 218 –

Geoffrey Harpham as an embodied hyperbole, serving the function of expanding one’s imagination, “the grotesque serves a positive function of transformation, which errantly transitions from one understanding of reality to another.”110 The rhetorical function of hyperbole is for affect to replace reason, and for the audience to loose itself in the emotive language presented.111

Costa’s most virtuosic deployment of hyperbole and grotesque metaphor is seen in a particularly striking exchange of love letters between two personae each defined by disease: the “Amante malfranciosato a Donna Rognosa.” In this exchange, Costa matches one of the figures from Adimari’s Tersicore, the

Bella Rognosa, (woman with scabies), to a lover with syphilis.112 The stomach turning possibilities of this match are enthusiastically explored in Costa’s letters, as each fictional author lovingly describes the physical symptoms of the other.

The theme of syphilis had a long history in poesia giocosa, usually focused either on blaming female prostitutes and mercenaries, for the transmission of the disease, or on the symptoms experienced by the male sufferers.113 Marino’s

Ritratto burlesco of a soldier in the Galleria points to the futility of dying of

for an Age of Excess," Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 4 (2012): 407; Recovering Hyperbole: Re-Imagining the Limits of Rhetoric for an Age of Excess, diss. (Communication Dissertations, Georgia State University, 2010), 90n135. 110 Recovering Hyperbole, 32. 111 Ibid., 107. Ritter cites Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, "Rhetorical Theology: Charity Seeking Charity," in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000), 91, and Peter W. Shoemaker, Powerful Connections: the Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 87. 112 See also poem “Astrologo offeso da Morbo gallico” in Margherita Costa, Lo stipo, 218–22. 113 Domenico Zanrè, "French Diseases and Italian Responses: Representations of the mal francese in the Literature of Cinquecento Tuscany," in Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 195–98. – 219 – syphilis after surviving a violent life.

‘Bravo’ Squartai, sbranai, smembrai (sì bravo io fui) Svenai, spolpai, svernai, sventrai, scannai, Dal mal Francese al fin morto restai. Dite, chi fù più bravo di noi dui?114

Adimari’s sonnet for the Bella Rognosa had reflected on the colours and shapes of her self inflicted wounds, comparing the scratches and scars on her skin to pearls, coral, rubies, flowers, the markings of a tiger, and constellations.

Che se tigre d'amor sembri alla pelle (Manto condegno al crudo tuo rigore) Sembri anco un vago ciel cinto di stelle.

In the letter from Amante malfranciosato, the metaphysical meanings inferred from of the woman’s skin in Adimari’s sonnet are replaced with the physical: his lover’s skin is compared to a ruled page, and scars and wounds are kissed and touched.

Securo segno d’Amorose piaghe

So che a voi medesima, marginosa mia bella, apporterà non poca ammiratione la mia illecita brama, e che di poco accorto mi darete nome, mentre nel fesso vaso delle vostre cicatrici con tanta vehemenza appoggiar chiedo le sitibonde labbia; ma, mio reciso oggetto, vestendovi de’miei panni considerate, che Amore è sol figurato cieco, perche degli error suoi non discerna gli errori, né si ammette a cuor di vero Amante, che nell’oggetto amato, benche gran parte disamabile regni, di essa minima parte disamabile disami; anzi ingolfato nel pelago delle sue gioie ogni amaro gli è dolce, ogni brutto gli è bello, ogni rotto gli è intierno, ed ogni male per suo bene approva. Il che in voi approvando attenderò a fruire

114 Giambattista Marino, La galeria (Venezia: Ciotti, 1635 (1620)), 253. – 220 –

nel vostro lacerato seno il mio intiero godimento; e di esso novamente bramoso con ogni efficacia vi prego.

Di voi, ch’in piaghe mi piagaste il cuore, Quello, che più di voi trafitto giace.115

Equivocal terms in the semantic fields of battle and wounds open and the close letter: the salutation refers to the woman’s “amorose piaghe,” and he asks first to kiss her scars, “il fesso vaso delle vostre cicatrici con tanta vehemenza appoggiar chiedo le sitibonde labbia.” An equivocal vocabulary here gives the

Ovidian theme of the War on/of Love a sexually explicit reading. The topos of the War on/of Love appears here as a grotesque metaphor, that is, tending away from the figurative to the literal, with sex acts as a battle, and the vagina as a wound. The Amante’s valediction states that the woman wounds his heart with her wounds “in piaghe mi piagaste il cuore, che più di voi trafitto giace.”116

A confluence of similar terms appears in Marino’s 1608 marriage poem for Francesco Gonzaga and Margherita of Savoy,“Il Letto,” first published in his

Epitalami in 1616.117 The description of the moment of consummation appears near the end of the poem.

Cosi vinto, l'invitto, mentre trafigge e 'mpiaga, cade e sovra la piaga resta in battaglia il piagator trafitto.118

“Seno,” a common euphemism for both vagina and womb, qualified by lacerato in the final phrase of Costa’s letter, is also drawn into the same semantic

115 Margherita Costa, Lettere amorose, 240–41. 116 Ibid., 240–41. 117 Boggione and Cassalegno, Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano, 116. 118 Giambattista Marino, Gli epitalami (Venice: Gio.Pietro Brigonci, 1664), 108. – 221 – field.119 Both words describing the woman’s scars, “fesso” and “vaso” also appear as terms for female genitalia in the pornographic tradition.120 Costa’s use of an erotic vocabulary and imagery, also found in one of Marino’s earliest censored poems, further supports the hypothesis of Costa’s writing as a vehicle for the diffusion of forbidden images or texts.121

These letters use equivocal words, and imagery of wounds and illness, to set revulsion alongside desire, creating the disconcerting effects of the grotesque:

As a metaphor, the grotesque body, whilst demanding interpretations, makes visible the superficial or literal level of dissimilarity and thereby gives rise to a powerful effect of the biologically horrible and the logically absurd.122

This contradiction, the much sought after “concetto, o sentimento spiritoso,” by

Pallavicino quoted above in Chapter Four, is produced in part through the conventions of epistolarity — by the two levels of reading in the text corresponding to the two levels of readers.123 The fictional authors, who are also the internal readers, read and love on a naive or literal plane, while the external readers are entertained by the double entendres, and the horror evoked by the contradiction presented.

119 Boggione and Cassalegno, Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano, 474. 120 Boggione and Cassalegno, Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano, 415, 389, 474–75. The equivocal term ‘fessa’ is central to Costa’s comedy Li Buffoni. The Princess Marmotta comes from the city of Fessa (Fez), described as a paradise for women. See Díaz and Goethals, “Editors’ Introduction," 58. 121 Clizia Carminati, Giovan Battista Marino tra inquisizione e censura (Roma: Ed. Antenore, 2008), 275. 122 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 57. 123 Ferrante Pallavicino, Panegirici, epitalami, discorsi accademici, novelle, et lettere amorose, 8–9. Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: approaches to a form, 88. – 222 –

The Donna Rognosa’s response to the Amante Malfranciosato indicates her reading of the lover’s letter is as superficial as the lines on the page, or her skin. In a parody of the theory of the complementarity of lovers, quoted above from Equicola, she writes that their illnesses — hers external and his internal — complement each other and perfectly harmonise:

Verace nido di amorosi frutti, …Io da focoso Amore soprastata in varie pari del corpo riconosco l’offese, e voi in ogni parte di esso da gallica ferita rimanete reciso. Io con le proprie mani offendendomi la sanguinosa offesa, di quella lacrimosamente mi lagno, e voi colpito da interato duolo dolorosamente esclamate l’offese di contagioso umore; ed all’opposito mio con non recise carni le lacerate midolla in ingommati globi nell’ossa distillate. Vivemo però più d’ogni altro lieti, havendoci nostra fortuna sì bene accoppiati; e nel languor dell’uno il rammarico dell’altro di comune accodendo, godiamo sotto tale Stella conforme desire. Di voi, ch’Amor recise. Quella, che al vostro duolo il suo consola.124

Costa’s emphasis on the man’s internal pain — deep in his marrow — describes the symptoms syphilis sufferers experienced in their bones and muscles. The loss of soft tissue such as the nose and genitals, as a result of pustulent wounds and ulcers, is also described by Costa: “in ogni parte di esso da gallica ferita rimanete reciso.”125 Each point in the woman’s letter carries an opposite meaning. She describes syphilis as the fruit of love, when it is a sexually contracted disease, likely to be fatal. She speaks of her healing

124 Costa, Lettere amorose, 243. 125 Zanrè, "French Diseases and Italian Responses: Representations of the mal francese in the Literature of Cinquecento Tuscany." 195–98. – 223 – through their sexual union, when such a match would lead to her own suffering and death. The vocabulary of sex acts as a battle, already present in Marino’s

Epitalami, is framed in Costa’s letters by the dark irony of popular love theory presented in the voice of a person dying of a sexually transmitted disease. The bodily and the literal images in this baroque grotesque metaphor impinge upon, to the point of effacing, the figurative ‘death’ of sexual union, to substitute a literal for a figurative death. In the same way that death does not discriminate, there is no gender hierarchy in the dark humour of Costa’s grotesque letters.

Even as her love letters advocate for the equality of male and female authorship, Costa’s La chitarra and hybrid poetic corpus embody the gendered grotesque. At the poetic, aesthetic and ethical levels in both Horace (Ars poetica) and Marino (Dicerie sacre, La musica) impossible contradiction and discord is gendered female. Everything beneath a beautiful face is a conglomeration of monstrous elements. In the poetics of Horace, and the religious poetry of Marino, the grotesque is mapped onto the female body. In male authored Marinist poetry and libertine dialogue female sexuality, and bodies, are associated with open wounds, (Marino) or sewers (Pallavicino). In

Costa’s letter of dedication to Gli amori della luna also describes the female author being assigned a monstrous status, and suffering metamorphosis and mutilation.

Costa, however, is also a master of metamorphosis, flexibly reshaping and mixing genre and gender conventions. In her grotesque Lettere amorose,

Costa reinforces the parity of male and female voices. She also affirms the performativity and flexibility of gender roles she established in the first half of the Lettere amorose. She does this through representing male and female

– 224 – grotesque bodies in relation with one another. Costa challenges the courtly love tradition by using grotesque imagery to describe male and female bodies, through male and female voices. Costa’s use of equivocal images and word choices from erotic, burlesque and pornographic traditions takes grotesque hyperbole to an extreme, but with attention to gendered voices and subject positions. Costa can be read as successfully deploying Shun Lian Chao’s definition of the grotesque as a “poetics of contradiction, one that propels the semiotic deluge of ‘nonsense effects’ to tear open the symbolic structure and bring about/back the experience of the real,” where that symbolic structure is male-centred poetic convention.126

126 Chao, Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque, 17–18. – 225 –

Chapter Six — Conclusion

‘A Madonna’ SIMULACRO divino, unica stampa Di bellezza immortal, pompa di Cielo, Etna d'Amor, che dal tuo vivo gelo Scoti faville, ond'ogni core avampa.

Chiara face d'honor, lucida lampa, Ch'oscuri il Faro a Mensi, il Sole a Delo, Anima pura in christallino velo, In cui d'alte virtù schiera s'accampa.

Opra maggior del gran pennel di Dio, Lavoro di Natura il più perfetto, Meraviglia del mondo, Idolo mio.

Belta, neve al candor, foco al'effetto, Pace de gli occhi e guerra del desio,

Dammi a cantar, com'a languir suggetto.1

Marino begins his Lira III with a poem that demonstrates the corrosive effects of the simulacrum on the model.2 In Deleuze’s reading of Plato, outlined in

Chapter One, the simulacrum only shares the form or appearance of the model, without sharing its substance. A perfect copy also sets up a paradox: the possibility of being confused with, or supplanting, the original threatens the idea of an original.3

In early modern usage, the term simulacrum implied a copy of a deity or

1 Giovanni Battista Marino, La Lira: 1614, 406. 2 ‘A Madonna’ is the first poem of the ‘Amori’ after the exordium of the 1614 collection. 3 Smith, "The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism," 99-100, 114. – 226 – sacred thing.4 In the poem ‘A Madonna’ quoted above, Marino invokes an earthly muse for poetic inspiration. The first lines confirm the echoes of praise for the Virgin Mary: “SIMULACRO divino, unica stampa/Di bellezza immortal.”

The lines that follow are a seemingly indiscriminate list of Petrarchist attributes of the beloved, tropes and oxymorons, and references to Marian purity and perfection.

By association with this sacrilegious idol — the desired female object mapped on the Virgin Mary — each trope and oxymoron listed in Marino’s poem, fifteen in all, is successively destroyed. Marino moves here between figures not to build, but to destroy meaning, in a sort of anti-metalepsis.5 The perfect copy, both sacred and profane muse, vapourises the ideal female lyric object. This simulacrum also destroys any possibility that the lyric subject,

“languishing in subjection” to his idol, will transcend the body.6

In this thesis I have interpreted Costa’s corpus as a literary simulacrum.

The conceptual mapping of Costa onto Marino is not an obvious or transparent reading, it proceeds by steps — an example itself of metalepsis. Costa’s authorship and her lyric corpus are formed by shifts between the rhetorical figures and tropes of prosopopoeia, imitatio, simulatio, dispositio, that relate to

4 Oxford English Dictionary, "simulacrum, n." (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 5 Brian Cummings, "Metalepsis: The Boundaries of Metaphor," in Renaissance figures of speech, ed. Sylvia Anderson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 219. “A process of transition, doubling, or ellipsis in figuration, of replacing a figure with another figure, and of missing out the figure in between in order to create a figure that stretches the sense or which fetches things from far off.” 6 Salvarani, “Note,” in La Lira: 1614, 693. Salvarani writes the poem is “una sequela nominale di appellativi ed epiteti senza alcuno sbalzo sintettico. … La terzina conclusiva…neutralizza in poche mosse l’interso arsenale del petrachismo manieristico.” – 227 – each other by paradox or allusion, not by logical steps.

Costa defines her authorship through her prosopopoeia of the Marinist

Bella donna trope, and the libertine poetic subject. The 1638–1639 works carry names that echo, in diminutive and “low” forms, the titles of Marino’s corpus.

Her corpus also shares the simulacrum’s qualities of multiplicity, internal difference, and competing voices that destroy the imperative of non- contradiction.7 With the heterogenous La chitarra standing as the key to the corpus, these books come together, in an unharmonious disunity, to create a beautiful monstrosity — a baroque grotesque female corpus.

Within this improbable textual body, anything is possible. Beautiful women copulate with dwarves. Courtesans refuse the advances of Cavalieri.

Nymphs triumph over seducers. Margherita Costa and her Marinist supporters make a female Marinist author from a courtesan virtuosa. Costa then cites

Marino’s censored poetry against Marino, undetected by the Inquisition.

The relationship between the simulacrum and the model also raises the question of Costa’s lyric corpus as a paradox. Costa’s Marinist mask, the first among many masks or personae in the corpus, is an enabling and authorising technique for the paradox of female authorship, female voice, and female performance, defended by Adimari and by Costa herself. In baroque culture, female participation was contested, debated, praised, condemned — in short, even as producers, women remained the object of male discourse.8 Colie explains that paradox always involves a criticism of convention, that it marks “a regular edge to progressive thinking, a point at which ‘object’ turns into

7 Smith, "The Concept of the Simulacrum,” 99. 8 Rosalind Kerr, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia Dell'arte Stage, 2015. Kerr interprets the Diva as a fetish. – 228 –

‘subject.’”9

The 1638–1639 lyric corpus produces the authorship of an unconventional female performer, drawing attention to the “limitation it questions and denies.”10 The devices of parody (doubleness) and paradox

(making the impossible manifest) are replicated throughout the corpus in

Costa’s production of hundreds of female, male, comic and grotesque speaking and writing subjects in her Lettere amorose. As I have shown through intertextual analysis, Costa’s parodic incorporation and manipulation of marinist poetry signals a critical stance towards the representations of female tropes and gender relations represented there.

Margherita Costa — baroque female authorship

I have analysed Costa’s writing alongside, and as engaging with, her male contemporaries, to avoid a false separatism. Costa’s early writing is deeply implicated in questions raised and debated by libertine and heterodox authors.

These turned on questions of gender, knowledge and sexual expression — gendered embodied life. These debates aimed to entertain and scandalise.

They were also a means of investigating human experience and knowledge, as broadly as possible, at personal risk. Costa’s lyric production contributed to libertine resistance to Church hegemony by presenting Marinist and libertine themes, deploying a variety of gendered poetic voices across prefaces, poetry and love letters, and by allusively referencing a significant corpus of Marino’s poems that had been censored in the preceding decades.

9 Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 6-7. 10 Ibid., 12. – 229 –

Costa’s corpus and authorship can be seen as instrumental in a primo-

Seicento campaign to maintain the cultural prestige of Marino and Marinist poetry. Costa engages with Marinist poetic conventions to open up the question of use and abuse of female tropes and bodies in male poetic and political discourses. Costa’s lyric poetry and love letters push the ideological challenge of Marinist production to its farthest extreme through the creation and publication of a female libertine subject co-extensive with female authorship. As a female author writing in the voice of previously male-authored female tropes, she holds the (male) lyric imagination, and libertine philosophy, to account. The female voice ceases to be a fantasy or a hypothesis, to become a possibility.

Costa’s connections to libertine culture made her authorship possible in a period that was generally inimical to female authorship.11 This is supported by textual evidence showing such authorising strategies as a close association between her role as a singer to position herself as a poet, used by Costa in the poetic persona of the Bella donna and by the authors of encomia prefacing her books. Attention to the other ‘voices’ of the corpus, the variety of poetic styles and registers, also shows Costa’s flexibility in moving between poetic traditions in line with the interests of her patrons at the Medici court and her literary interlocutors. The collaborative and reciprocal exchange between Costa and

Marinist authors is seen in the clandestine production of her lyric corpus.

Intertextual analysis in this study has revealed Costa as an interpreter of

Marino’s poetry and the poetry of her Marinist peers, including censored poetry that might have been circulating in manuscript collections. Textual analysis has demonstrated some of the rhetorical strategies through which Costa parodied

11 See Chapter One page one notes two and three. – 230 – and criticised these male authored works.

My study offers a nuanced understanding of baroque literature and culture by showing how Marinist culture might have been experienced, or imagined, by a woman writing from within this culture. Costa’s overwhelmingly positive presentation of female sexuality and the utopian manifesto of the

Donna libera in the Lettere amorose offers a rare female perspective on the gender bias of Seicento libertine philosophies. This perspective differs from female authors contemporary to Costa, who did not write about sex or sexuality, due to their social positions and decorum as wives, widows, or nuns.

An innovation of this study has been to apply gender as a term of macro- textual analysis. This has revealed some of the ways in which gender and language were inextricable for baroque authors as they strove to stretch and challenge literary conventions.

Future directions

The methodology I have established through this research is a tool to better understand the relationship between language and gender in early modern literature. It clarifies the difference in the rhetorical effects that can be achieved depending on (the perceived) gender of the author, relative to a first person voice in a text. This methodology might be applied and tested on other female voiced texts written by early modern male and female authors. One outcome of further research in this area would be a more nuanced understanding of the rhetorical strategies that female authors employed in order to enter intellectual and creative discourses in the early modern period. It is important to discover more ways in which literary production is shaped by gender, both for male and

– 231 – female authorship.

In the background of this research have been larger questions about the female voice, and the gendering of language, knowledge and the epistemological subject in the Western philosophical tradition. The

‘interventions’ (she does not propose theories) of Luce Irigaray, including the idea that woman and the female voice are excluded terms in Western philosophy, are compelling given the slow historical pace of achieving gender parity. Early modern poetry may appear a difficult area of literature to investigate these questions. However, as the analysis of Costa and Marino’s poetry has shown in this thesis, poetry provides an abundant range of possible meanings through allusion. Gendered power relations are the central theme of lyric poetry. Embodied gender and gendered knowledge were live questions for early modern poets. They also drew on rich living traditions of vernacular poetry, and on classical poetry, to create imaginative worlds, or reflect their own worlds in new ways.

– 232 –

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Costa Portraits

Figure 1. Frontispiece, La chitarra.

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Figure 2. Frontispiece Lettere amorose.

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Figure 3. Frontispiece Lo stipo.

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Appendix A. La chitarra Schematic Table.

Section/Page number Title/Contents of section Title Page (i) LA CHITARRA Della Signora MARGHERITA COSTA ROMANA Canzoniere amoroso DEDICATA Al SERENISS. FERDINANDO II Gran Duca di Toscana. IN FRANCFORT Per Daniel Wastch. 1638. Con licenza de’Superiori. Portrait (iii) A seated Costa gazes directly at the viewer. An oval frame is encircled by a Latin inscription, “Cernere lavrigero quereris sine crine poetam: factum quod decima hec visa camena foret.” surrounded by scrolls, acanthus leaves, an open book in the centre top. The margins are filled with elaborate embroidered drapery, a variety of musical instruments and an open score.

Dedicatory letter (v–vi) A Comic/parodic dedicatory letter to Ferdinando II de’ Medici, dated 15 April 1638. Ai lettori (vii) Letter to the readers following common modesty tropes of female authorship: sperando, che dove fiorisce ogni virtù...habbino da essere le mie rime, se non gradite, almeno compatite; e come parto di Donna, che vive povera d'ogni studio, protette dalla loro ingenuità. Allographic encomia (viii–xv) Eleven poems, mainly neoclassical imagery, praising Costa’s singing, poetry and beauty. Il Principe di Gallicano (Pompeo Colonna); Alessandro Adimari, Andrea Barbazza, Berardino Biscia, Don Alfonso de Oviedo Spinosa, Ottavio Tronsarelli. Second title page (xvi) “Rime amorose Della Signora Margherita Costa,” compartite In Ottave, Sonetti, Idilj, e Canzonette.” First Capitolo, 1–5 Capitolo Scherzoso - Scuandosi l’Autora

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Comic dedicatory Sonnet, “Dono delle sue rime al Sereniss. Ferdinando Secondo G.Duca di Toscana.” 6 A second dedication to Ferdinando II, in a bernesque/burlesque style of comic poetry, like the preceeding Capitolo, Encomia/Occasional Ottave forFirst encomia dated to 1634 - panegyric for the Marriage of Ferdinando II de named recipients, 7–79 Medici and Vittoria della Rovere; further encomia for members of the Medici household; encomia for Roman patrons, dated from as early as 1627. Most encomia for named patrons are in the voice of the Bella donna: “Bella donna al Signor Prencipe di Conca ucciso dal suo Proprio Cavallo” — displaying the lyric subject speaking outside the narrative - extradiegetically. 77 Ottave, 80–395 Bella donna poems of the narrative sequence (the diagesis) - poetic voice and subject introduced in the title of each poem, eg. “Bella donna di sdegno al suo Amante mentre spreggiata da Lui Ella si'invaghisce di altro Amore.” Third title page, 399, “SONETTI DELL’AUTORA A DIVERSI.” Of the 92 sonnets all in the voice of Bella 401–494 donna, 6 addressed to named recipients on particular events: “Bella donna nell'accasamento del Sig. Don Andrea Laudati e la Sig Donna Diana Garrafa”, 84 in narrative sequence. Fourth title page, 495; “IDILI AMOROSI DELL’AUTORA A DIVERSI” 497–518 10 Idylls, no named recipients. Fifth title page, 519 “CANZONETTE AMOROSE DELL’AUTORA” 521–544 26 Canzonette Tenzone/theatrical work in I CARAMOGGI, three parts, each with Overo gl’Amanti abbozzati. address and response, Ai Signori Begl’imbusti 546– 565 Del Signor In three sections, each ANDREA SALVADORI with a prose introduction and an ottava, each in a GL’AMANTI different voice, the Dwarfs, ABBOZZATI the Dandies, and the A BEGL’IMBUSTI Women, an argument about which type of man is RISPOSTA. most lovable. I BEGLI’IMBUSTI A gli Sig. Amanti Abbozzati DELL’AUTORA.

I BEGL’IMBUSTI AI CARAMOGI

Dichiarazione

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DELLE DONNE A gli BEGL’IMBUSTI, E CARAMOGGI. DELL’AUTTORA Closing capitolo, 567–573 ‘Capitolo scherzoso dell'Auttora per quegli, che potessino tacciare le sue rime di troppo vestite d'Amorosi affetti, o vero in altro’ Indices of poetry Four indexes, divided by verse type, in alphabetical order by first line. 575– 582 583 Corrections 584 A sonnet from the printer dedicating his work (the printed book) to the author Quindi per inalzar l'opre tue belle,/Ond'una eterma fama al Ciel sen'vole,/ Vorrei, che i piombi mie fossero Stelle,/Carta l'istesso Ciel, Torcolo il Sole

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Appendix B. List of Authors named in Costa’s texts.

La chitarra: Alessandro Adimari (1579–1649); Don Alfonso de Orviedo Spinosa; Pompeo Colonna, Principe di Gallicano, Rome/Aquilla (c 1600– c1660); Andrea Barbazza, Bologna, (1581–1656); Bernadino Biscia, Ottavio Tronsarelli (d.1646), librettist; Andrea Salvadori (1591–1634) Medici court composer; Antonio Bruni (1593–1635) (stolen poem by).

Il violino: Alessandro Adimari, Ferdinando Saracinelli (1587–c1640) Bali di Volterra, Medici superintendent of performances, poet, librettist.

Lettere amorose: Alessandro Adimari, Don Alfonso de Orviedo Spinosa, Franceso Roncone.

Lo stipo: Ivan Silvestro Gomez, Miguel de Silveira (1580–1639) Portuguese, Spain/Naples, (Marrano), Ottavio Tronsarelli, Don Alphonso de Oviedo Spinosa, Alessandro Adimari, Paganino Gaudentio (1595–1649), teacher of Latin and Greek, Studio di Pisa; Don Giovanni De Erasso, Spanish ambassador to Tuscan State, dedicatee of Costa’s first book, Viaggio in Alamagna. Benedetto Guerrini, (1596–1657), Segretario di camera of Ferdinando II de’ Medici from 1632.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Robarts, Julie Louise

Title: Challenging male authored poetry: Margherita Costa’s Marinist lyrics (1638–1639)

Date: 2019

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/225146

File Description: Complete thesis

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