How Italian Renaissance Regular (Five-Act) Comedy Reflected Its Society

A DISTORTING MIRROR? HOW ITALIAN RENAISSANCE REGULAR (FIVE-ACT) COMEDY REFLECTED ITS SOCIETY PAUL GEOFFREY PHILO Royal Holloway, University of London A thesis submitted for examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 1 ABSTRACT OF THESIS A DISTORTING MIRROR? HOW ITALIAN RENAISSANCE REGULAR (FIVE-ACT) COMEDY REFLECTED ITS SOCIETY This is an investigation into a specific genre of Italian theatre - erudite comedy of the first half of the sixteenth century. The investigation has been undertaken through the close study of the texts of five plays: La Calandra by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Il Negromante by Ludovico Ariosto, Il Marescalco by Pietro Aretino, Gli Straccioni by Annibal Caro, and L’Assiuolo by Giovanni Maria Cecchi. These cover a chronological spread, from the first play performed in 1513 to the last play written in 1549; and a geographical spread, both in terms of the origins of the playwrights and in the settings of the plays. The broad focus is on how this type of comedy provides an insight into how the society in which it was written and staged viewed typical members of bourgeois urban life, such as tutors, lawyers, well-to-do young males and servants, and incomers such as itinerant sorcerers and pedlars. (One of the plays, Il Marescalco, by virtue of its setting in a princely court, has a broader cast of characters, which includes an aristocrat.) The principal set of analyses concerns the interplay of characters as to how they gain ascendency over, or are dominated, by others through four discrete dimensions: authority, morality, intelligence and culture. In Chapters Two to Five inclusive these aspects are examined separately, whilst Chapter Six considers them together, either operating complementarily or in opposition. In addition, there is an evaluation of each play and certain characters within each play as to their degree of artifice or verisimilitude. The final chapter, Chapter Seven, draws together the various conclusions adduced in the previous chapters and places the thesis’s findings into the broader perspective of Italian political and cultural life of those times. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 5 The Critical Context 15 The Appeal of Commedia Erudita 36 Plays Selected for Investigation 45 Methodology 51 AUTHORITY DIMENSION Introduction 53 Servants 56 Young Noble Males 74 Young Noble Females 82 Male Heads of Household 88 Lone Figures 93 Conclusion 101 MORAL DIMENSION Introduction 108 Servants 111 Young Noble Males 126 Young Noble Females 133 Male Heads of Household 139 Lone Figures 143 Conclusion 152 INTELLIGENCE DIMENSION 3 Introduction 157 Servants 161 Young Noble Males 174 Young Noble Females 181 Male Heads of Household 185 Lone Figures 188 Conclusion 196 CULTURAL DIMENSION Introduction 200 Servants 206 Young Noble Males 226 Young Noble Females 234 Male Heads of Household 240 Lone Figures 242 Conclusion 252 HOW THESE DIMENSIONS VIE WITH ONE ANOTHER Introduction 256 La Calandra 257 Il Negromante 261 Il Marescalco 265 Gli Straccioni 269 L’Assiuolo 274 Themes Across the Five Plays 278 Symbolism Versus Verisimilitude 288 CONCLUSION 300 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 INTRODUCTION 4 In recent years Alain de Botton, philosopher, writer and broadcaster, has come to prominence through his book and parallel TV series Status Anxiety. In his introduction, he points to various anxieties - health, crime, physical attractiveness, the aging process, which he felt had had their fair share of media attention and public debate. A starting justification for his thesis was the assessment that anxiety about status, though widely experienced, was surprisingly under-discussed or at least under-examined, although he gauged that most people from time to time would worry about their place in the scheme of things, their worth in the eyes of fellow members of society. He defines status anxiety as: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.1 It is evident both from one’s own commonsense assumptions and from Alain de Botton’s more systematic approach that status anxiety is not just a modern-day phenomenon but has existed since the dawn of civilization. It is true, however, that status anxiety usually only comes to the fore when it is not submerged under greater, more urgent anxieties: those in response to war, famine or an epidemic of deadly disease. It is also evident that status anxiety is likely to be less prominent in societies with a rigid class or caste system, but more so in a less rigidly structured society. There is a well-known four-line verse that sums up the fixed social order of the Middle Ages, although it was composed during the Industrial Revolution (perhaps harking back to what was naively considered a golden age): The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.2 1 Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety (London: Penguin Books Limited, 2004), pp. 3-4 2 Verse from the nineteenth century church hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful, words and music by C.F. Alexander. 5 This is a simplification of the reality, since there have been notable, though rare, examples of a movement from peasant to merchant to aristocrat in three or four generations from the thirteenth century onwards in England, but it has a general validity. It is also worth noting that, when the social order is overly rigid and is seen by its lower classes to be too repressive, status anxiety not only surfaces but can develop from an individual sense of unease into a collective grievance and become the precursor to mass uprising.3 If status anxiety is assuaged through successful personal effort, preferment by others or merely through a lucky break, or is exacerbated through unsuccessful action, malign forces arrayed against oneself, or simply through misfortune, we can often turn to stories, real or fictional, to alleviate or sometimes, unwittingly, stoke that anxiety. If we read a story of the downfall of a crook, we may feel moral superiority; if we see someone the victim of an obvious confidence trick, we may feel intellectual superiority, or toward someone mispronouncing a word we may feel cultural superiority. Conversely, if we see our own faults too closely mirrored in another (in real life or in fiction) our own sense of security may be undermined. Evidently, the concept of status has little meaning if the individual is examined as a discrete entity in isolation, but only accrues meaning from the individual’s relationship to others. One particular form of fiction – theatre, which depicts the interaction of several characters over the course of two or three hours, provides a particularly suitable platform on which the ebb and flow of status can be given tangible form, enabling an audience member to tap into an immediate collective experience and gain a sense of how others view particular individuals or particular groups of individuals: how much worth or lack of worth, how much approval or condemnation these fictional stage characters should be accorded.4 3 If England experienced a dramatic clash between ruler and ruled in the shape of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, northern and central Italy saw more sporadic, smaller scale, clashes: ‘The reaction of contadini and rural community to the demands of landlords and cities did not always stop at petition and complaint. If there was no Jacquerie in the Italian countryside, violence and the threat of violence were certainly present and the level of disorder could become intense; [...] in Friuli in the early years of the sixteenth century attempts by members of the feudal nobility to insist on a vigorous interpretation of their lordship, together with the burdens placed on the region by the Venetian government, provoked a series of rural revolts.’ Denys Hay and John Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1380 – 1530 (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 61-62. 4 In any given performance, usually we do not know the verdicts reached by our fellow audience members until afterwards, either in informal discussion or, more formally, through a published review. Though in certain types of theatre such as pantomime, the recognition of a villain may come during a performance through a collective hiss from the audience. Conversely, a sustained display of physical or verbal dexterity by a character may elicit a spontaneous round of applause. 6 We like to see the hero come out on top; equally we like to see the person or persons opposing the hero come to a sticky end. We discern characters like us, or idealized versions of ourselves, characters alien or at least strange to us, characters we deem good, bad, smart or incompetent. If the stage fiction and its cast of characters are not too far removed from reality, it may provide a useful aid for judging the behaviour of their real- life equivalents.5 This thesis will be devoted to a study of commedia erudita (erudite comedy), a theatrical genre that was born in northern Italy in the first decade of the sixteenth century and saw its full flourishing during the following half century, before being supplanted as the dominant theatrical genre by commedia dell’arte towards the end of the century. (This is a simplified description since the waxing and waning of commedia erudita had considerable regional variation.) This genre of theatre featured typical figures from urban bourgeois life and, despite its comic exaggerations and set-pieces, is far less removed from reality than other contemporaneous theatre genres.

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