1 Scala’s full title is Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, overo la ricreatione comica, boscareccia, e tragica: divisa in cinquanta giornate (Venice: Battista Pulciani, 1611). All my citations are from Ferruccio Marotti’s 1976 edition entitled Il teatro delle favole rappresentative by Flaminio Scala.
2 Other terms were commedia Italiana or commedia degli zanni, and commedia delle maschere. The first documented use of the term commedia dell’arte (professional comedy) seems to have been Carlo Goldoni’s, in 1750. See Richard Andrews, “Molière, commedia dell’arte, and the Question of Influence in Early Modern European Theatre,” 445. I use the term commedia dell’arte throughout because it is best known, the professional players worked not only from scenarios but also from scripts, and they were, accordingly, not always improvising. Unfortunately, the term commedia dell’arte, even though commedia can mean “play” as well as “comedy,” may also be misleading because, while most commedia dell’arte scenarios were comic, the players also worked in other genres, as Scala’s collection makes clear (see appendix).
3 Louise George Clubb, “Italian Renaissance Theatre,” 128–9.
4 Henry Salerno, Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte: Flaminio Scala’s Il Teatro Delle Favole Rappresentative was printed by New York University in 1967 and subsequently by Limelight in 1989, 1992, and 1996. Sadly, for Salerno’s undeniably considerable labour in translating all of Scala’s scenarios, Kenneth McKee wrote a foreword stating the then common view that the scenarios are “not worth saving” and are of “no artistic value,” xvi, xvii.
5 Richard Andrews, “How – and Why – Does One Print Scenarios? Flaminio Scala, 1611,” 36.
6 Richard Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, xviii.
7 Ibid. For Andrews’ argument, see especially vii, xxxv.
8 Richard Andrews, “Writing as Re-arranging.” Courtesy of the author.
9 Flaminio Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, cx.
10 Tim Fitzpatrick, The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes in the Commedia dell’Arte, 104.
11 Quirino Galli, Gli scenari di Flaminio Scala, 122. The analytic vocabulary of the two men differs. Fitzpatrick’s analysis is in terms of schemas, subschemas (both diachronic and synchronic), categories, and words. Galli’s is in terms of words, fragments, episodes, plot intrigue, and variants. One moves from the larger units to the smaller; the other, from the smaller to the larger.
12 See for instance, Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, “Commedia dell’Arte”, 111, and Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, vii.
13 Fitzpatrick, Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes, 104. Galli, Gli scenari di Flaminio Scala, 122.
14 Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, xiv.
15 Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte, 181–96.
16 Flaminio Scala, “L’autore a’ cortesi lettori,” and Francesco Andreini, “Cortesi lettori,” in Il teatro delle favole rappresentative by Flaminio Scala, ii, xiii. Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte, 13.
17 Corsini, ii. 43; Corsini i. II; Correr, no. 21 in K.M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, vol. 2, at 582, 601, and 607.
18 Mark Edmundson, “Against Readings,” 62–3.
19 Roberto Tessari, La commedia dell’arte nel Seicento: “Industria” e “Arte giocosa” della civiltà barocca, 116.
20 Ruzante, Teatro: Prima edizione completa, xxvii. Richard Helgerson, in keeping with this idea, remarks that, unlike the later drama he considers, the commedia dell’arte presented “the nonaristocratic home as a scene of extravagant folly meant to provoke mirth.” He posits a clear-cut distinction between public and private in the material he examines. Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, 3.
21 Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, 106.
22 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,” 15, 28, and passim. Laura Giannetti has provided a spirited and persuasive re-evaluation of the commedia erudita based on Ruggiero’s extensive studies of sex and marriage in early modern Italy (Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss).
23 John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, 16.
24 Ibid.
25 Flaminio Scala, second prologue to Il finto marito, cxvii. Both Fitzpatrick and Galli claim, but do not show, that within their “conventionalized fictional world” the Scala scenarios deal with everyday concerns. Fitzpatrick, Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes, 349; Galli, Gli scenari di Flaminio Scala, 135.
26 In Siro Ferrone, Comici dell’arte: Corrispondenze, 451–587.
27 Flaminio Scala, Il finto marito, in Commedi dei comici dell’arte, ed. Laura Falavolti.
28 Andreini, “Cortesi lettori,” vol. 1, 12.
29 Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, cxv. Emphasizing this same point more than three hundred years later, a guide for would-be playwrights emphasizes that “a professional playwright spends more time on the scenario either on paper or in his head, than upon the actual writing of the dialogue.” Marian Gallaway, Constructing a Play, 313.
30 Bernardino Telesio (1509–80), for instance, one of the founders of the empirical movement, “insisted that observation alone, not reason or authority, was the path to true knowledge.” William Eamon, “The Scientific Renaissance,” 420.
31 Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, cx–cxiv.
32 Janet Levarie Smarr, Italian Renaissance Tales, xxxiii.
33 The Ingram Bywater translation of Aristotle’s Poetics reads as follows: “Now the action (that which was done) is represented in the play by the Fable or Plot. The Fable, in our present sense of the term, is simply this, the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story.” Aristotle, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, 16.
34 “The Prologue is normally the part where the plot is narrated.” Flaminio Scala, second prologue to Il finto marito, cxviii.
35 Andrews, “How – and Why – Does One Print Scenarios?” 38.
36 For this debate see Ferruccio Marotti, “Il teatro delle favole rappresentative: Un progetto utopico.”
37 I borrow the term that Henry Kamen uses for non-aristocratic elites. He uses it because it does not carry the baggage of the term bourgeoisie, although, as he admits, the term is not ideal; there is no lower elite. Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society, 97.
38 I use the terms as seems appropriate in the particular context. The word youths, as we shall see, is often and suitably used in the early modern period for those whom we would now consider to be young men. At the time, there was considerable ambiguity in positing the length of adolescence. Some designations continued it until age thirty. See Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It, 331n4. For Richard C. Trexler’s extensive use of the word youths to mean “giovani,” see his Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 388–9, and the whole of his chapter 13. See also Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Civic Morality,” 23–4.
39 Scala added other characters, probably as actor availability, character doubling, and finances allowed and as the story required. From time to time some actor whose character was not in the scenario might have taken another role in it. In Day 36, Scala explicitly tells us that the role of Graziano may be played by the actor who ordinarily plays Pantalone.
40 Ferdinano Taviani, “Positions du masque dans la Commedia dell’Arte,” 126.
41 M.A. Katritzky shows masked upper-class women as well. Their masks seem to denote their class rather than their character. M.A. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, 202–4.
42 John Jeffries Martin, “The Myth of Renaissance Individualism,” 215.
43 Guazzo, La civil conversazione, 177.
44 Jay Tribby, review of Stefano Guazzo e la civil conversazione.
45 The revelatory term theatregram was introduced by Louise George Clubb (“Theatregrams,” 15–33). See my chapter 4 section on imitation and invention.
46 As a shorthand, I often refer to a scenario only by its Day. A list of scenario titles in both Italian and English can be found in the appendix to this work.
47 Francesco Andreini, “Cortesi lettori,” 12.
48 Up to his death in 1983 Ludovico Zorzi sought, with the aid of students, to transcribe all the extant scenarios. This work remains incomplete and unpublished.
49 The edition of fifty-one in Italian from 1996 is Gli scenari Correr: La commedia dell’arte a Venezia, ed. Carmelo Alberti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1996). La Commedia dell’Arte, edited and introduced by Cesare Molinari (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1999), includes a selection of scenarios from Scala, Correr, and Magliabecchiana manuscript collections. Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck provided The Commedia dell’Arte in Naples: A Bilingual Edition of the 176 Casamarciano Scenarios = La commedia dell’arte a Napoli: Edizione bilingue dei 176 scenari Casamariano, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001). Annamaria Testaverde edited I canovacci della commedia dell’arte (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2007), which includes selections of scenarios by Scala, by Basilio Locatelli, and from a number of anonymous collections in various libraries. Prior to these, in 1880, Adolfo Bartoli published the twenty-two scenarios from the Magliabecchiana manuscript (Scenari inediti della Commedia dell’Arte contributo alla storia del teatro popolare italiano Scenari inediti (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1880). During most of the twentieth century only isolated scenari were printed here and there. In 1934 Kathleen Lea provided a limited sample of scenarios in English in Italian Popular Comedy, vol. 2.
1 The English theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) explained that one is “a person in respect of another”: a “husband, father, mother, daughter, wife, lord, subject.” William Perkins, The Work of William Perkins, 382.
2 Middle elites in cities were variously referred to as cittadini in Venice, popolo or ceto civile in Naples, popolo grosso (people of substance) in Genoa, and more generally as “those of the middling sort” (quelli dell sorte mediocre). By and large these groups included those who enjoyed an independent income, those who worked in the courts of law, and merchants, and craftsmen who were especially esteemed such as goldsmiths, printers, physicians, and architects. Domenico Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 69.
3 Scala, first prologue, Il finto marito, cxi.
4 Aelius Donatus, “On Comedy and Tragedy,” 79.
5 Domenico Bruni, “Prologue to Lo Speccio,” 414. Bruni wrote prologues, including this one, to plays he never wrote.
6 Debora Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder,” 22. It is significant in this context that Renaissance mirrors were not flat but convex.
7 Scala, second prologue to Il finto marito, cxvii.
8 See Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art, 77–8. Doran observes that this was more strictly the case with Italian plays than with Elizabethan ones.
9 Alessandro Piccolomini, “Annotationi nel libro della poetica d’Aristotle” (Venice, 1575), in Italian Comedy in the Renaissance by Marvin T. Herrick, 108.
10 John M. Najemy, “Giannozzo and His Elders,” 57.
11 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,” 28.
12 Dale Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence, 367.
13 Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 16, 367. Trexler suggests further that the patriarchs of Florence hired foreign mercenaries to do their fighting, not because of cost-effectiveness but because they feared that an army of local “youths” would turn arms inward against the regime (390).
14 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 129.
15 Ian Frederick Moulton, “The Illicit Worlds of the Renaissance,” 503.
16 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 165.
17 In 1589 Nicolo Gozze cautioned in his Governo della famiglia that, for reasons of modesty and honour, fathers should admonish and instruct their children and train their wives in the home, not in public outside the home: “This is one of the reasons for which houses have been built” (“Introduction: Approaching the Italian Renaissance Interior” by Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, Flora Dennis, and Ann Matchette, 623).
18 Proverb quoted in Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence, 13.
19 Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, 107.
20 Niccolò Machiavelli, “How a State is Ruined Because of Women,” chap. 26.
21 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,” 13.
22 Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (Ricordi), series C, 68, 106. Guicciardini was also a statesman and a diplomat.
23 Guido Ruggiero, “Witchcraft and Magic,” 479.
24 John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 439. See also Jackson I. Cope, Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy from Machiavelli to Goldoni, 5: “What we, the viewers, agree to silence is our awareness that events at the ‘end’ are not closed back in a great circle that creates a renewed social harmony but open onto vistas of disruption and deception that belie the ludic ritualized release and restoration that have been the historic seedbed and pattern of New Comedy. The effect is a play more cynical than carnivalesque.”
25 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, chap. 5.
26 Ibid., 23.
27 See, for instance, Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice; Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice; and Eric R. Dursteler, Renegade Women.
28 Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 438.
29 Brian Richardson, “‘Amore maritale’: Advice on Love and Marriage in the Second Half of the Cinquecento,” 194.
30 William P. Roberts, “Christian Marriage,” 210.
31 See Daniela Hacke, “‘Non lo volevo per marito in modo alcuno’,” 208. Hacke cites Volker Hunecke, Der venezianische Adel am Ende der Republik, 1646–1797: Demographie, Familie, Haushalt (Tübingen, Germany: M. Niemeyer, 1995), 141.
32 Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice, 160.
33 Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, 102.
34 Paul F. Grendler, Books and Schools in the Italian Renaissance, 199–200.
35 Claudione, the tutor in Day 34, is a wholly undeveloped character with but a single brief appearance.
36 Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 124, citing Erasmus, Ciceronianus, 1528.
37 Paul F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 148.
38 Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, vol. 2, 275; vol. 1, 107.
39 Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society, 107. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, “Training and Professionalization,” 170-2.
40 Kamen, Early Modern European Society, 99.
41 Alberto Tenenti, “The Merchant and the Banker,” 156.
42 Bernardino de Siena (1380–1444), Paula Findlen, “Understanding the Italian Renaissance,” in The Italian Renaissance, 8.
43 Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 586.
44 Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, 106, and Florence, 91.
45 Tenenti, “The Merchant and the Banker,” 160.
46 Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750, 191. Tenenti, “The Merchant and the Banker,” 170.
47 Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 438. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800, 213. Joanne M. Ferraro, “Family and Clan in the Renaissance World,” 174.
48 Tenenti, “The Merchant and the Banker,” 165.
49 Paul F. Grendler “Form and Function in Italian Renaissance Popular Books,” 453.
50 Ferrone, “La nevrosi postale,” 37–43. The considerable fear of the letters being delayed, lost, or stolen expressed in this correspondence is reflected in the scenarios.
51 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence (I libri della famiglia), 160. Alberti’s treatise on the family was written between 1433 and 1440 and disseminated in manuscript form but was not published until 1843. Although it was written one hundred and fifty years before Scala wrote, the views of Alberti in the passages I cite are consistent with those expressed by Italian humanists at the end of the sixteenth century but are more incisive. I therefore use it often.
52 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 171.
53 Ibid., 118. Croce is being facetious, but Camporesi cites him extensively as a true expression of a style of life that many people had to observe from stark necessity. See also the unsourced quote provided by D.V. and F.W. Kent:
Always complain about your tax: how you didn’t deserve half as much, how you are burdened with debt, how you have enormous expenses, obligations from your father’s bequests, that you have lost money in trading, that your crops are poor, that you will have to buy grain and wine and wood and other necessities. However, don’t let these complaints be so outrageous as to make a fool of you: tell a lie which is near to the truth so that you will be believed and not be seen to be a liar.
Such complaints were regarded as moral behaviour: self-protection. D.V. and F.W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, 54.
54 Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420–1540, 239.
55 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality, 23.
56 Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 438.
57 Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women, 136.
58 Marsilio Ficino’s 1455 “Epistola ad fratres vulgaris,” in Supplementum ficinianum, ed. P.O. Kristeller, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1937), vol. 2, 122, quoted in F.W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, 47.
59 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 41.
60 Ibid.
61 Torquato Tasso, Tasso’s Dialogues, 61.
62 In Palmieri’s division of life into six parts, adolescence was followed by the stage of virility, and old age began at fifty-six. Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile trattato di Matteo Palmieri, 28, first published as Libro della via civile (Florence: Giunti, 1529), and in three subsequent sixteenth-century editions in 1534, 1535, and 1536.
63 Moulton, “The Illicit Worlds of the Renaissance,” 497. Up to the age of eighteen or twenty, males could assume the passive role in anal intercourse. After that, “manly” norms required the male to be the sodomizer. What mattered was that the behaviour was age appropriate. John Jeffries Martin, introduction to Michael Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 140.
64 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,” 23.
65 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 160.
66 Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 142.
67 In response, Pantalone wants to know who, then, is corrupting his son. It seems not to be conceivable to him that his son is responsible for his own behaviour. Adovardo Alberti, in Leon Battista Alberti’s, The Family in Renaissance Florence, comments on such obtuseness: “For some reason that I don’t know, however, something like excessive love veils and blinds the father’s eyes. He rarely sees the faults of his children until they have already grown obvious and serious” (80). The fear of sons being corrupted by the company they keep is several times expressed in Alberti. Lorenzo Alberti says, “Sometimes they are inspired to evil and wholly ruined by the bad conversation and customs around them” (36).
68 Christopher Carlsmith, A Renaissance Education, 290.
69 Lorenzo Alberti in Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 36.
70 Doran, Endeavors of Art, 22.
71 Ibid., 236.
72 Torquato Tasso, Tasso’s Dialogues, 83.
73 Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” 141. See also Jean E. Howard, “Cross-Dressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” 25.
74 Margaret L. King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 223. Women in convents presented no issues for the patriarchy nor, then, for comedy. There are poorly documented cases of lay spinsters, women under the supervision of brothers or other relatives. These suggest that such women were often no more than unpaid servants or nurses and badly treated at that. Federica Ambrosini, “Toward a Social History of Women in Venice,” 424–5.
75 In Florence the law required that a woman needed a guardian in order to take part in legal transactions. This mundualdus could be any designated male. For a married woman the husband served in that role. Kuehn, Law, Family and Women, 204.
76 Elissa B. Weaver, “Gender,”190.
77 King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 223.
78 Diana E. Henderson, “The Theatre and Domestic Culture,” 181. “Nature and human reason taught mankind the necessity of having a spouse, both to increase and continue generations and to nourish and preserve those already born,” says Lionardo in Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 111.
79 Ludovico Dolce, Dialogo della institution delle donne, in “The Lady and the Laurel” by Anne Christine Junkerman, 49.
80 Paula Findlen, “Introduction to Part IV,” in The Italian Renaissance, 169.
81 Dilwyn Knox, “Civility, Courtesy, and Women in the Italian Renaissance,” 6. Ludovico Dolce analogized an unmarried girl’s body to a ship floating in a sea of many dangers, all the orifices of which have to be closed so that these dangers cannot penetrate into the inner parts.” Lodovico Dolci, Dialogo della istitutione delle donne (Venice: Giolito, 1560), fol. 9v., in Bonnie Gordon, “The Courtesan’s Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” 188.
82 Marta Ajmar, “Exemplary Women in Renaissance Italy,” 246.
83 Gabriella Zarri, “Christian Good Manners,” 88.
84 Lena Cowen Orlin, “Three Ways to Be Invisible in the Renaissance,” 185. Handiwork kept the woman occupied, out of public view with head lowered, appropriately modelling and proving her self-abnegation. See also King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 237.
85 King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 223.
86 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 207.
87 Paolo Caggio, “Iconomica del Signor Paolo Caggio, gentil’huomo di Palermo,” in Bell, How to Do It, 346n1.
88 Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 102.
89 Ibid., 88.
90 Grendler, “Form and Function,” 453.
91 Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century, and Their influence on the Literatures of Europe, 249.
92 Fra Sabba Castiglione, 1554, in Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 88.
93 Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice, 164, 187.
94 Alessandro Piccolomini, “Alessandro,” 306.
95 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, 108–9.
96 Ibid., 111. Owing to inferior care and sometimes outright neglect, the infant mortality rate for girls who were farmed out to wet nurses was higher than that of boys with in-house wet nurses. Rudolph M. Bell disputes this view, inferring from advice books of the period that “girls as well as boys were cherished” and that “abandonment or indifference were not frequent.” Bell, How to Do It, 145.
97 Stanley Chojnacki, “‘The Most Serious Duty,’” 181.
98 Christopher F. Black, Early Modern Italy, 113.
99 Ann Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, 190, 205.
100 Sharon T. Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour in Italian Renaissance Cities,” 43.
101 Chojnacki, “‘The Most Serious Duty,’” 182.
102 Tanya Pollard sees the relationship between the considerable interest in drugs of various kinds in early modern theatre as expression of the rising concern about “the rapidly changing and controversy-ridden world of early modern pharmacy” together with a comparable concern about the power of theatre, which was frequently analogized to drugs. Pollard observes that opium, brought from the New World, was increasingly used to induce sleep, particularly for plague victims, but that its use called attention to the too-fine line between drug-induced sleep and death. Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England, 4, 18, 66–7.
103 Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmus on Women, 17.
104 Grendler, Books and Schools in the Italian Renaissance, 11. The most popular story was Orlando furioso. From the first edition in 1516 to the end of the century, by Grendler’s count, there were perhaps as many as 183 printings.
105 E.R. Chamberlin, The World of the Italian Renaissance, 192.
106 Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour in Italian Renaissance Cities,” 44.
107 King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 214.
108 Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 10.
109 Days 30 and 36 each call for a baby in arms. No other young children appear in the Scala scenarios.
110 See, for instance, “Widows, Legal Rights, and the Mercantile Economy of Early Modern Milan,” by Jeanette M. Fregulia, 233–8.
111 King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 215.
112 Kamen, Early Modern European Society, 20, table 1.1.
113 Christine Meek, “Women Between the Law and Social Reality,” 184.
114 Ibid.
115 King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 213.
116 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 69.
117 Over age forty, a woman became virtually unmarriageable. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual, 119.
118 Caroline Castiglione, “Mothers and Children,” 382.
119 Widows with no prospects for marriage were sent to convents. Otherwise, their independence, like that of an unmarried daughter, would have posed a threat to the family. Najemy, “Giannozzo and His Elders,” 55.
120 See, for instance, Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice, 154.
121 Castiglione, “Mothers and Children,” 386.
122 If the male offspring did not survive, his patrimony went to the paternal agnates – uncles and grandfathers – who, accordingly, may not always have acted in the best interests of the offspring. Giulia Calvi, “Widows, the State, and the Guardianship of Children in Early Modern Tuscany,” 213.
123 Exemplified in the engraving from the Recueil Fossard provided by Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, 320. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, dates these engravings from the 1580s, 108.
124 Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture,” 149.
125 Ferraro, “Family and Clan in the Renaissance World,” 179.
126 Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour,” 44.
127 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 159.
128 Robert C. Davis, “The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance,” 22. They were also subject to everyday street violence. Davis reports that washerwomen typically had to do the laundry at wells located in the middle of public spaces, where they were frequently caught in the midst of youths fighting one another. They risked serious injury and even death. To prevent this, cities like Perugia built enclosed wash-houses from which teasing and provocative youths and men stopping to water their horses were banned. Ibid., 30.
129 Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture,” 149.
130 Trevor Dean, “Fathers and Daughters,” 95.
131 Ibid., 89. In real life, he may also have chosen the husband.
132 Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, vol. 1, 56. Verona Eisenach reports that because of the almost certain disabilities that a concubine would suffer if she were simply abandoned once the relationship had ended, the men who kept them often helped them to marry, providing a dowry, a husband, and a proper celebration, thus allowing them to re-enter respectable society. Eisenach speculates that this arrangement may have been the chief attraction of concubinage for many women. Verona Emlyn Eisenach, Husbands, Wives, and Concubines, 134, 153.
133 Sandra Cavallo and Simona Cerutti, “Female Honor and the Social Control of Reproduction in Piedmont between 1600 and 1800,” 78.
134 Dean, “Fathers and Daughters,” 95
135 Scala, Il teatro dell favole rappresentative, vol. 1, 53. Adultery was a crime prosecuted primarily against women, and the punishments could be severe. Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 209.
136 Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century, 146.
137 Ibid., 146, 251.
138 Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, 48.
139 Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, 303.
140 Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 325.
141 Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance, 162.
142 Rosalind Kerr, “IsabellIa Andreini (Comica Gelosa 1562–1604),” 71–92.
143 Andrews’s assertion that the fathers in the scenarios “opposed the desired matches [of the lovers] either for selfish reasons (avarice, or wanting one of the young women for themselves), or else out of an automatic hostility to any marriage proposal which they had not initiated. In some of Scala’s scenarios no reason is given why a father forbids a betrothal: it is a knee-jerk authoritarian reaction which does not demand explanation.” This is true as far as it goes but minimizes the significance of marriage relative to the preservation of the patriarchy in the society. Richard Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, xxxiii.
144 Ruggiero, “Witchcraft and Magic,” 479.
145 Bembo, Gli Asolani. By 1600, Gli Asolani (1497–1504), one of the most influential books of the Renaissance, had appeared in at least twenty-two Italian editions.
146 This scenario is a tour de force for the actress playing Isabella, who goes mad following Orazio’s betrayal. It also allows Orazio an emotional conflict, not so fully developed in other scenarios. If it is hard for contemporary readers to accept the usual happy marriage after Isabella’s murders and Orazio’s vacillation between two women, we have to take into account that the murders took place only in the antefact and before Isabella was a Christian; they serve as part of the motivation for Isabella’s madness, and we are to appreciate her devotion to and suffering for Orazio. For his part, Orazio is a victim of Love.
147 Paula Findlen, “Introduction to Part III,” in The Italian Renaissance, 95.
148 Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century, 146, 35, and 145. For a debate on the role of jealousy in love see Sperone Speroni, “Dialogue on Love,” revised version of 1575; I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press for calling this dialogue to my attention.
149 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 35, 420.
150 Domenico Pietropaolo, “The Theatre,” 17.
151 Battista in Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 96.
152 Often for a tip. See Giovanni Maria Cécchi, The Horned Owl (L’assiuolo), 77.
153 Guazzo, La civil conversazione, 237.
154 Hacke, Women, Sex, and Marriage, 189.
155 Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, 62.
156 Richard Andrews finds the presence of Capitano here mere padding “in scenes which have no connection with the main plot,” added because the story of Cataldo, the pedant, “is not sufficient to fill a whole three acts.” Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 190. In my reading, Isabella’s behaviour gives her character depth and adds suspense. Her behaviour is neither inconsistent nor one-dimensionally “virtuous” as Andrews claims (in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 191). At the end of the second act when the tutor kisses Isabella and she goes into the house happy, the prior scene with the Capitano leaves the audience wondering whether she will be unfaithful with the more ready-to-hand tutor. Isabella’s sexual frustration is displaced onto Pedrolino, who seeks revenge for the beating she gives him, which, like Isabella’s frustration, in the end is also displaced satisfactorily onto the pedant.
157 Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, 195.
158 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (Il cortegiano), 138.
159 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 95.
160 Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, 6.
161 Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 41.
162 Ibid., 282.
163 Findlen, “Introduction to Part III,” in The Italian Renaissance, 95.
164 Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, 6, 9, 13.
165 Ibid., 218.
166 Ibid., 13.
167 Giovanni Morelli, Ricordi, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1956), 226, in Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, 157.
168 In Day 3 the friend simply gives up the one love interest for another. In Day 30 Flavio does not forgive, but his love interest turns out to be his own sister.
169 Doran, Endeavors of Art, 22, 235–6.
170 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 306–7.
171 Black, Early Modern Italy, 97.
172 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 107–8.
173 Ibid., 110, 116.
174 Ibid., 167.
175 Tasso, Tasso’s Dialogues, 101, 105.
176 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 31.
177 Ibid., 32.
178 Ibid., 16.
179 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 295. Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 31.
180 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 218.
181 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 13, 12.
182 F.W. Kent, “’Be Rather Loved Than Feared’: Class Relations in Quattrocento Florence,” 48.
183 They could also be removed from the will. Apparently, promises of inclusion in the will and threats of removal from it played a role in discipline. Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 207.
184 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy, 151.
185 According to Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 1, 254.
186 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 8, 40.
187 Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol 1, 253–4, translated by Crane, Italian Social Customs, 295. Guazzo’s work was very popular, having been translated into Latin, French, and English and reprinted as late as 1738. The book first appeared In English as The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, books 1–3 translated by George Pettie, 1581, and book 4 translated by Barth Young, 1586, with an introduction by Edward Sullivan. London: Constable and Co, 1925.
188 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 24.
189 F.W. Kent, “Be Rather Loved Than Feared,” 48.
190 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 222.
191 Ibid., 216, 222.
192 Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy, 222.
193 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 222; emphasis Romano’s.
194 Ibid., 223.
195 Ibid.
196 Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 78.
197 Ibid., 207.
198 Karl Appuhn, “Tools for the Development of the European Economy,” 261.
199 Ibid.
200 Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 133. This number does not take into account the high mortality rate of the poor, many of them crowded into disease-infested quarters. Appuhn, “Tools for the Development of the European Economy,” 261.
201 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 226.
202 Ibid., 220.
203 Ibid., 153.
204 Ibid., 226.
205 James R. Farr, “Honor, Law, and Custom in Renaissance Europe,” 134.
206 The black-faced mask of Arlecchino seems to be a reference to his peasant background. The term nigredo was used to describe the peasant and serf, as well as the devil. If the peasant was a good for nothing, he was referred to as a “black leccatore [sponging] rustic.” His brow was low, his nose flat. He was subhuman, monstrous; “an unheard-of filthy blackness afflicted” him all over. Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, 36.
207 Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, series B, 106, 39.
208 Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 9.
209 Richard Andrews, “Shakespeare and Italian Comedy,” 138.
210 Robert Henke, “Representations of Poverty in the Commedia dell’Arte,” 235.
211 Peter Burke, “The Historical Geography of the Renaissance,” 92.
212 De Vries, European Urbanization, 213. Burke “The Historical Geography,” 92.
213 Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters, 18.
214 Robert C. Davis, “The Renaissance Goes Up in Smoke,” 400.
215 Ibid.
216 Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 97.
217 Stefonao Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, 72.
218 Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 98.
219 Ibid., 182.
220 Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 23–4.
221 Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 97. For my discussion of slavery by Christians see my chapters 8, “Day 36, Isabella [the] Astrologer.”
222 Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 144.
223 Tommaso Astarita reports that Christians in Muslim lands who converted to Islam, as many did, could ascend to prominent positions in the Muslim world. Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 98. There is also record of those who pretended to convert. See Eric R. Dursteler, Renegade Women, 17, 115, 118.
224 Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 1. See also Thomas James Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700.
225 Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters, 18.
226 Niccolò Machievelli, History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy.
227 Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 92.
228 Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 32. The book was first published in Florence in 1561 and subsequently in 1562 and 1599. Lodovico Alamanni, 1516, ascribed “the present state and shame of serfdom of Italy” to the “habit of using mercenary soldiers,” in Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 130.
229 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532, chap. 1.
230 Between 1532, the date of its first publication, and 1611, the date of Scala’s collection, Machiavelli’s The Prince had been printed twenty times. Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters, 208.
231 Recent scholars have argued that the disunified Italian states were no match for a national army in any case.
232 Coluccio Salutati in Mallet, Mercenaries and Their Masters, 208.
233 Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 12. See also Machiavelli, Discourses, book 1, chap. 43.
234 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War (Arte della Guerra, 1521), 189.
235 Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 52.
236 Geoffrey Trease, The Condottieri, 18.
237 Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters, 3.
238 Michael D. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” 232.
239 Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 52.
240 Thomas F. Arnold, “Violence and Warfare in the Renaissance World,” 461.
241 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 58.
242 Davis, “The Renaissance Goes Up in Smoke,” 399.
243 At one time the condottieri used the configuration of the three-soldier mounted lancia (that is a head or a capo-lancia, a groom, and a boy). Arlecchino, when accompanying the Capitano, seems to play the role of that groom.
244 Michael Mallett, “The Condottiere,” 41.
245 Henke, “Representations of Poverty,” 229–46.
246 Black, Early Modern Italy, 25.
247 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 455–6.
248 Black, Early Modern Italy, 25.
249 Thomas F. Van Laan sees middle-elite characters, who are frequently shown dressing down, as in the process of losing themselves to find themselves. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare, 105. David Bevington, influenced by Victor Turner, aligns this process with ritual initiation (David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence, 4 and passim). Recently Peter Hyland has argued that the prevalence of disguise on the early modern stage reflects broader current questions about the stability of the self, particularly provoked by the rise of the upwardly mobile classes (Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage, 30, 141). In Scala the middle elites dress down. I can think of two instances in Scala in which a servant dresses up: In Day 9 Isabella’s nurse disguises herself as a gentleman, husband to Isabella, to help her mistress prevent an unwanted marriage while she awaits her true love; and in Day 26 Pedrolino momentarily costumes himself as a Levantine merchant in order to help his master.
250 Scala was certainly familiar with the term lazzi: the Stranger, adversary to the Player in the first prologue of Il finto marito, uses it (p. cviv).
251 Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, 120. Camporesi also observes that in real life “tricks, expedients and techniques … belong to the repertoire of the art of hunger, [the] great inventor of swindling subtleties” (ibid, 116–17).
252 Ray Porter, preface to Bread of Dreams by Piero Camporesi, 14–15.
253 Robert Garapon, La Fantaisie verbale et le comique dans le théâtre français du Moyen Âge à la fin du XVIIe siècle, 87; in Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 81.
254 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 456.
255 Black, Early Modern Italy, 105.
1 Andrews, “Shakespeare and Italian Comedy,” 127.
2 Ibid. See also Richard Andrews, “Anti-feminism in Commedia Erudita,” 17.
3 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland, vol. 1, 70.
4 Donald Beecher, Renaissance Comedy, vol. 1, 12.
5 Domenico Pietropaolo, “The Stage in the Text,” 38.
6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, 75.
7 Samuel Beckett deliberately turned the convention of the street setting on its head where, on a road in Waiting for Godot, “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful” (Estragon, act 1).
8 Maggie Günsberg, Gender and the Italian Stage, 46.
9 For this argument see Pietropaolo, “The Stage in the Text,” 38.
10 Likewise, Ludovico Ariosto in his prologue to Il Negromante (1509) explains that the same set that he used for Ferrara in his La Lena, namely the fixed stage set of the ducal theatre in Ferrara, now represents Cremona (215).
11 Francesco Andreini, “Cortesi Lettori,” 13.
12 Corsini manuscript illustrations, in Vita Pandolfi, La commedia dell’arte, vol 5, reproduced in an unnumbered twenty-six-page supplement between pages 256 and 257; and, much smaller, in Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, 543–9.
13 Stefano Mengarelli, “New Developments in Commedia Research,” 214.
14 Similarly an ink-and-wash representation, “?French School c. 1575–1600. A scene from the commedia dell’arte,” in Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, 592, fig. 305, shows a man playing a mandolin partially behind the front building. For other figures within the set, but not behind the front buildings, see the engraving by Jacques Callot, “Scapino takes centre stage,” 1618–20, in Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, 590, fig. 301; also the woodcut shown as “C. Gonzaga, Gli inganni,” in Peter Brand, “Disguise in Renaissance Comedy,” 68. For a figure in a doorway on the perspectival street see 34v in “Curzio Gonzaga, Gli inganni, 1592,” reproduced in Louise George Clubb, “Pictures for the Reader,” 271. Clubb also attributes the work to Curzio Gonzaga. At the present time the play, in accordance with its prologue, is seen as the collective work of the Academy of the Intronati of Siena to which Gonzaga belonged. For a figure knocking on the door in the perspectival street, see the anonymous illustration for act 3, scene 3, in Orazio Vecchi, L’amfiparnaso, 1597, no page number.
15 Scala, Day 19, act 3, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, 203.
16 Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (Basel, 1576), 535, in Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 49.
17 Pietro Aretino, La cortigiana, 53. In La calandra the argument tells us that “the city that you see here before you is Rome. That city, once so large, spacious, and great that with all its triumphs it encompassed many cities, countries, and rivers, now has become so small that, as you see, it can be easily contained in your city” (4).
18 Vecchi, L’amfiparnaso, no page number.
19 This point is made by Salvatore Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, 138.
20 Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, “Commedia dellArte,” 112.
21 Burke, Culture and Society, 252.
22 For population figures see Edward Muir and Ronald F.E. Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence,” 82, and Burke, The Italian Renaissance, 226.
23 De Vries, European Urbanization, 181.
24 Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places,” 82.
25 Kamen, Early Modern European Society, 20, table 1.1.
26 From Marsilio Ficino’s “Epistola ad fratres vulgaris,” 1455, in F.W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, 47.
27 Eisenach observes that the nuclear family isolated women from the control, influences, and oversight of the extended kinship group (Husbands, Wives, and Concubines, 85).
28 E.R. Chamberlin, Everyday Life in Renaissance Times, 80–2.
29 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 33.
30 Günsberg, Gender and the Italian Stage, 21.
31 Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, La calandra (The Comedy of Calandro).
32 Chamberlin, Everyday Life in Renaissance Times, 83; Chamberlin, The World of the Italian Renaissance, 201–2.
33 Andrea de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity, cv.
34 Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 147.
35 Michael Talbot, “Ore Italiane,” 58–9.
36 Sabba Castiglione, Ricordi overo ammaestramenti, in Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 95.
37 Robbery and murder, including revenge killings, were endemic in Italy at the time. Davis, “The Renaissance Goes Up in Smoke,” 399.
38 Talbot, “OreItaliane,” 58.
39 Ibid., 57.
40 Ghosts appear “all too often in Scala’s … scenarios.” Richard Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 287, also 309. Jeremy Lopez comments that “there is something theatrically exuberant about making live bodies seem extravagantly dead, and also about representing ghosts with indisputably corporeal actors.” Jeremy Lopez, “Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage,” 195.
41 Martin, “The Myth of Renaissance Individualism,” 38.
42 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 94.
43 David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 107, 120.
44 Tim Fitzpatrick sees a convention of unmotivated exits in Scala’s scenarios, which he interprets as “more or less natural returns to ‘home base’ [offstage].” Fitzpatrick, The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes, 111. In my reading, most of the exits are, in fact, motivated; entrances, however, often serve only plot convenience; the piazza is “home base.”
45 F.W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, 241–2.
46 D.V. Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence, 6.
47 Ibid.
48 Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places,” 88, 90.
49 D.V. Kent and F.W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, 2. Peter Burke reiterates the analogy: The city was “a stage,” upon which was played out, in public view, many activities, which today are conducted behind the privacy of walls. Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 119.
50 Adam Kendon in de Jorio, Gesture in Naples, cii.
51 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 102.
52 James S. Ackerman and Myra Nan Rosenfeld, “Social Stratification in Renaissance Urban Planning,” 46. See also Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places,” 88.
53 Moulton, “The Illicit Words of the Renaissance,” 494.
54 Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation, 78.
55 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 207.
56 Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 10.
57 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 167.
58 Davis, “The Geography of Gender,” 22.
59 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 109.
60 Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 9.
61 The Italian fascination with the beguiling allusion extends literally to facades in which simulated marble, cleverly disguised concrete, and a cunning assortment of ashlar (thin stone slabs applied to resemble weighty blocks) feign the real thing.
62 Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 10.
63 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 47.
64 Alexander Cowan, “Cities, Towns, and New Forms of Culture,” 107.
65 Dursteler, Renegade Women, 17.
66 Paolo Sarpi, letter to Jacques Gillot, 1609, in Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, 59.
67 Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, 6.
68 Ibid., 59, 5.
69 Le Banquet ou apres-dinée du comte d’Arète (Paris: Guillaume Bichon, 1594), 4, in Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, xiv.
70 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 266.
71 Linda Woodbridge, “Renaissance Bogeymen,” 453.
72 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 149.
73 Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 255. Muir cites the dialogue on honour of Annibale Romei. See also Farr, “Honor, Law, and Custom,” 127.
74 D.V. Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust, 136.
75 Agostino Ventura, Misc. Gregolin, 1572, in Ugo Tucci, “The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century,” 368.
76 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex,” 12.
77 Elizabeth S. Cohen, “Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome,” 617.
78 Weaver, “Gender,” 190.
79 Farr, “Honor, Law, and Custom,” 128.
80 Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, 193.
81 Jeffrey Masten, “Playwrighting,” 359.
82 Gregory Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550–1800, 28.
83 Davis, “The Geography of Gender,” 23.
84 Ibid., 17.
85 The effort to keep the family’s wealth intact meant that many men never married. Scala’s comedies do not include these men, except perhaps in the case of the Capitano. Nor does he represent unmarried women in convents, the number of whom increased with dowry inflation.
86 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex,” 23.
87 Guido Ruggiero, “Witchcraft and Magic,” 478.
88 Strocchia, “Gender and Rites of Honour,” 53–4.
89 Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 108, 99.
90 Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 60.
91 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 195.
92 Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 96-7. Also Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour,” 54.
93 Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour,” 57–8.
94 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 200.
95 Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour,” 53.
96 Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” 235.
97 Arnold, “Violence and Warfare,” 466.
98 Gregory Hanlon, “Violence and Its Control in the Late Renaissance,” 140.
99 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 456.
100 Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 29.
101 Arnold, “Violence and Warfare,” 463.
102 Hanlon, “Violence and Its Control,” 140.
103 V.G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 117.
104 Arnold, “Violence and Warfare,” 461.
105 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 422.
106 Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 256.
107 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 422.
108 Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 118.
109 Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 255. For the intimate relationship between honour, violence, and concepts of manliness in our own society see James Gilligan, Violence, passim.
110 Hanlon, “Violence and Its Control,” 140.
111 Edward Muir, “The Double Binds of Manly Revenge in Renaissance Italy,” 71.
112 Arnold, “Violence and Warfare,” 465.
113 Donald Weinstein, “Fighting or flyting? Verbal Dueling in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Italy,” 212.
114 Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 28.
115 Thomas Kuehn, “Inheritance and Identity in Early Renaissance Florence,” 138–9.
116 Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, series C, 60, 74.
117 Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 118.
118 Arnold, “Violence and Warfare,” 465.
119 Burke, The Historical Anthropology, 11. For a very vivid and amusing account of the theatrical nature of quarrels in the streets of Naples, two hundred years after Scala wrote, see de Jorio, Gesture in Naples, ciii.
120 Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, 256.
121 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 141.
122 Twenty-fifth session, Council of Trent, 1563, chap. 19. On the effect of duelling manuals see Weinstein, “Fighting or flyting?,” 215.
123 Scala’s Day 6, The Jealous Old Man, and Day 37, The Hunt, both portray hunters. Hunting was a violent activity that was central to the early modern period; the killing of other living things was regarded as a pleasurable activity. Thomas Arnold argues that among the upper classes “familiarity and the sensation of inflicting physical hurt on another living thing was first won and most often reinforced by the experience of the hunt.” Arnold, “Violence and Warfare,” 465.
124 Jane Tylus, “Women at the Windows,” 325.
125 Ibid., 331.
126 Louise George Clubb, “Italian Stories on Stage,” 42.
127 Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe, 8, 99. Other motivations listed by Dekker and van de Pol are migration and following, remaining with, or escaping a husband or family. These are not utilized in Scala.
128 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 117–18. Giannetti notes that in Italy the male characters who cross-dressed as female could appear in the Italian drama as they could not in the English drama, largely because the males who cross-dressed were invariably youths who had not renounced male privileges or superiority, for the simple but telling reason that society did not see them as having either as yet.
129 Howard, “Cross-Dressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle,” 25.
130 Laura Giannetti Ruggiero, “When Male Characters Pass as Women,” 757.
131 M.A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine, and Theatre, 1500–1750, 243.
132 Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, Ilsegreto della commedia dell’arte, 416.
133 Howard, “Cross-Dressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle,” 41.
134 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 15.
135 For this debate see Brand, “Disguise in Renaissance comedy,” 84. Brand is also very good on the social effects of transsexual disguise, 86.
1 Flaminio Scala’s letter to readers that prefaces his scenario collection, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, 10.
2 Leon Battista Alberti, Leon Battista Alberti on Painting, 75.
3 Andrews, in Flaminio Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, vii.
4 Ireneo Sanesi maintained that the commedia dell’arte is a “popular adaptation or travesty of the learned comedy” (La commedia, vol. 1, 515).
5 Flaminio Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, cx, cxiii.
6 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy, 1.
7 Hayden White, for instance, argues that “narrativity … is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is to identify with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine,” and that the “demand for closure … is a demand … for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (The Content of the Form, 14, 21). We know that the Renaissance mirror showed events in moral terms. See the introduction to my chapter 2.
8 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 237.
9 Quintilian in Greene, The Light in Troy, 54.
10 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 23.
11 Greene, The Light in Troy, 31.
12 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 14–15.
13 Ibid., 93, 195, 14.
14 Ibid., 113, 21–2.
15 Ibid., 240.
16 Seneca’s letter to Lucilius in Greene, The Light in Troy, 73–4.
17 Greene, The Light in Troy, 39.
18 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 272–3.
19 Francesco Petrarch, Le familiari, 33.19, in Francesco Petrarch, Letters from Petrarch, 199. Letters are identified by volume and number according to Petrarch’s original division.
20 Petrarch, Le familiari, 23.19, in Greene, The Light in Troy, 98.
21 Petrarch, Le familiari, 1, 8, in Greene, The Light in Troy, 99.
22 Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, in Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, cx.
23 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 272.
24 Louise George Clubb, “Looking Back on Shakespeare and Italian Theatre,” 4.
25 She was writing about Shakespeare, after all.
26 The late Ludovico Zorzi’s effort, following Vladimir Propp, to ambitiously count the number of what Propp called “narratemes” that were employed in all of commedia dell’arte, while highly enlightening, similarly suggests reshuffling. Ludovico Zorzi, “Intorno alla Commedia dell’ Arte,” 70.
27 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chap 11.
28 Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, 29.
29 Ibid., 31.
30 Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 3. Perloff cites a TLS review by Edgell Rickword of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” when the poem first appeared in 1923: “One’s ‘magic-lantern show’ [a term, Perloff observes, that was no doubt derived from Proust] should not consist of ‘slides made by others.’ A poem as a ‘set of notes,’ most of them ‘borrowed’ from other texts: such ‘mere notation’ can only be ‘the result of an indolence of the imagination.’” Edgell Rickword, TLS, 20 September 1923, 49.
31 Charles Bernstein, “Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, and Implausibly Deniable Links,” Poetry, February 2009, in Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 1.
32 Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, in Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, cxiii; Andreini, “Cortesi lettori,” in II teatro delle favole rappresentative, 13.
33 Quintillian, Institutio Oratatoria, x. vii. 7, in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 109.
34 Scala, first prologue to Il finto marito, cxiii.
35 Richard Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, xii–xiii.
36 Giovanni Battista Andreini, at the end of his play, Le due comedie in comedia, 1623.
37 Testaverde reads Francesco Andreini’s praise thus. Annamaria Testaverde, “Introduzione,” I canovacci della Commedia Dell’ Arte, xxv.
38 Barbara Mowat observes that a number of plays by Shakespeare (like some plays by Marlowe) can be considered as dramatizations of particular literary works and that others (like some plays by Jonson, Greene, and Marlowe) instead weave together language, characters, and incidents from a variety of works. “Even in the case of William Shakespeare, then, the matter presented on the early modern stage had absorbed and transmuted many a printed quarto and folio page.” Barbara A. Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture,” 223–4.
39 Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “Improvisation in the Commedia dell’Arte in Its Golden Age,” 225–50.
40 Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, 134.
41 Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature, 46.
42 Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, 258.
43 Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (Basel, 1576), 29, in Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 49.
44 Testaverde discusses the “obsession with doubles” in commedia dell’arte, particularly as it shows itself in puns and in the characters, especially twins. She usefully analyses scenarios in terms of “redoubling and the trick of disguise” (“Introduzione,” I canovacci della Commedia Dell’ Arte, xlvii–liii).
45 I am paraphrasing Longinus’s (?) description of the effect of Demostenes’s hyperbata, in On the Sublime in Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, 298–9.
46 Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, 149.
47 Aristotle, Poetics, xv, 6; Horace, Ars poetica, II, 191–2. Madeleine Doran has observed that, while Renaissance critics universally condemned the deus ex machina, their emphasis on the clever denouement put a premium on surprise. All that was required was that its improbability be skillfully concealed. Doran, Endeavors of Art, 324.
48 The scenario is set in Venice where impoverished peasants from the region around Bergamo came to work. Indeed, in Day 10 Burattino and Pedrolino discover that they are from the same village near Bergamo and thus probably both spoke with a Bergamasque dialect. In Day 28 Burattino and Pedrolino are again from the same area as are Arlecchino and Pedrolino in Day 31. So in each of these scenarios the two characters are likely to have spoken with the same dialect.
49 Andrews helpfully delineates Scala’s frequent use of “the bad disguise trick,” one in which a character is persuaded to disguise himself in a way that will result in his harm or ridicule. We might usefully extend Andrews’s idea to Spavento in Scala’s Day 37, where he is persuaded to go about without his sword and is then mocked and beaten; to Burattino in Day 27, who is advised to stay mute and as a result is repeatedly beaten; and to Malvolio in Twelfth Night, who woos in cross-garters. Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 190.
50 Lopez, Theatrical Convention, 70.
51 Ibid., 182.
52 Roberto Tessari, La commedia dell’arte nel Seicento, 125.
53 See the views of Castelvetro and Robortello in Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 49.
54 William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 4.
55 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 166.
56 In act 2 of Day 14, Fabrizio, actually a woman in disguise, confesses herself to be overcome by the power of Love and, in so doing, refers the audience back to the opening scene and calls upon them to reinterpret it.
57 In revenge for the beating, Pedrolino had previously tried to pimp Isabella as his “wife” to the Capitino and, in claiming that he weeps for his wife, he may be fantasizing a most unfortunate end for Isabella, who has mistreated him.
58 The second of these lazzi also serves to allow time to pass while Isabella goes to gather a crowd for the humiliation of the pedant.
59 Terence, unlike the earlier Plautus, and favoured by early modern playwrights, discouraged direct address to the audience as unrealistic, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/587857/Terence (accessed 25 January 2014). There is only very limited direct evidence in Scala’s scenarios of the audience’s being acknowledged, but we cannot know the extent of such acknowledgment in performance. Pantalone bows to the audience here at the end of act 1 in Day 26, and at the end of act 2, Day 37, the Capitano bows to the people (presumably to the audience, there being no one else on stage) and says “May it do you good, Gentlemen.” Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, vol. 2, 381.
60 Doran, Endeavors of Art, 235–6.
61 Joel Altman makes the point that those who studied Terence’s plays viewed each as “a running controversy waged by characters whose ruminations, inquiries, laments, and rejoicings were imaged responses to the need for proof required to win the argument.” Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, 143.
62 The entertainment value of the scenario itself argues against the negative views of theatrical performance put forth in the scenario.
63 Alessandro Striggio, La caccia, liner notes with compact disc entitled Banchieri, Il Festino del Giovedi Grasso; Striggio, La caccia, Concerto Italiano directed by Rinaldo Allessandrini.
64 Lucia Marchi, “Chasing Voices, Hunting Love,” 13–31. I am grateful to Marchi for calling attention to this essay, and the pen-and-ink drawing I include here, and for lending me a copy of the compact disc of Striggio’s La caccia.
65 Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 222.
66 Lucia Marchi, personal communication, 24 June 2013.
67 Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response, 4.
68 J.L. Styan, Drama, Stage, and Audience, 218. Jeremy Lopez has suggested that the opulent texture of the drama provided “a surfeit of stimulus and complexity … akin … to sexual excitement” (Theatrical Convention and Audience Response, 118).
69 Cicero, De oratore, 142.
70 Quintilian, preface to the seventh book of Instituto oratoria, in Herrick, Comic Theory, 96.
71 Giovanni Battista Guarini, prologue to The Dropsical Lady (L’idropica), 1583, in Herrick, Italian Comedy, 158. This idea was also shared by Della Porta, Giraldi, Castelvetro, and Beni. See Doran, Endeavors of Art, 278.
72 Desiderius Erasmus, 1512, Copia, 24: 302.
73 Janet Levarie Smarr, Italian Renaissance Tales, xxxiii.
74 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, part 4, 439.
75 Henke, “Representations of Poverty,” 242.
76 The speaker is Bibbiena, known for his love of practical jokes. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 188.
77 Perhaps we need to keep in mind that poor dental care, fisticuffs, and dentistry itself meant that many people were missing teeth. However, infection was one of the top five killers, and tooth pulling, as unsanitary as it was, could result in death. Rotten teeth must have made bad breath, a subject of Scala’s Day 12 and Day 20.
78 Donald A. Beecher, “Intriguers and Tricksters,” 62.
79 Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, vol. 2, 332.
80 Quintilian, De Institutio Oratoria, 6.1.2 in Herrick, Comic Theory in the Renaissance, 31.
81 The last ten of the fifty scenarios go even further afield, not only into tragedy, pastoral, and what Scala calls “heroic” and “royal,” or “mixed,” but to a work extending over three days. See the appendix.
82 Taviani, “Positions du masque dans la Commedia dell’Arte,” 126, 121. M.A. Katritzky observes that masked or veiled female characters are, in fact, represented in the iconography of the commedia dell’arte (The Art of Commedia, 202–3). These masks seem to denote membership in the upper class rather than character.
83 In Day 20 Pedrolino and in Day 16 Laura do not seem self-consistent but merely functionaries of the plot.
1 Henke, Performance and Literature, 120.
2 Bembo, Gli Asolani, 126.
1 See, for instance, Ferruccio Marotti, ed., Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, lvi–lviii; Roberto Tessari, La commedia dell’arte nel Seicento, 127–9; Cesari Molinari, “‘Le favole rappresentative’ di Flaminio Scala,” 134–5.
2 Isabella Andreini, in Masks and Marionettes, by Joseph Spencer Kennard, 52. See also Isabella Andreini, “Biasimo di I vecchi innamorati,” in La Commedia dell’Arte, 977. Madonna Oretta, in Giovanni Maria Cécchi’s, The Horned Owl (L’assiuolo), IV, 3, provides a similar malmaritata (complaint about bad marriage):
How many pleasures we are deprived of, and under what cruel tyranny we must live our lives. When men have to take a wife, they nearly always take whoever they please. We, on the contrary, must take whoever is given us. Sometimes, and I for one can vouch for it, poor me, we must take one who, to say nothing of his age which would make him our father rather than our husband, is so rough and inhuman … I find myself married to Messer Ambrogio, who could be my grandfather! He’s rich yes. But this doesn’t mean I eat any better! Besides having a husband who’s old, there’s the problem of having one who’s jealous, wrongly jealous. And there’s no one who’s more jealous than him. So, because of his jealousy I’m deprived of pleasure outside the house, and because of his age, of pleasure inside the house. (47)
Notable feminist writers of the period, Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) and Moderata Fonte (1555–92), denounced both arranged marriages and forced monacization. Ferraro, “Family Clan,” 182.
3 A theorbo is a long-necked lute, virtually indistinguishable from the chitterone that Scala references later.
4 In the list of characters for Days 26, 28, and 29, Scala specifies policemen who speak, and for Day 30, servants who speak, thus suggesting a difference in pay scale and the possibility of employing non-speaking extras on occasion for small roles.
5 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 102.
6 Antonio Venuti’s preface to De agricoltura opusculum (Venice: Orso, 1546), 3rd ed., in Tucci, “The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth century,” 350.
7 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 193. Amanda Lillie makes clear how widespread and long-lived has been the idea of the idyllic life at a villa (“The Humanist Villa Revisited,” 193–4).
8 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 251.
9 The theme of the young girl unhappily married to an older husband with whom she has little rapport and a young, unmarried male eager for a sexual affair appears in many novelle.
10 David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 181–8. I am grateful to musicologist Martha Feldman for this reference.
11 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 118.
12 Michael Rocke provides a quotation from Matteo Palmieri, Vita civile, 1433 (published in 1529), that could easily serve as a set speech at this point for Pantalone. Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture,” 141.
13 Jean Baptiste Molière, The School for Wives (L’école des femmes), 140.
14 Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture,” 155.
15 David R. Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, 18.
16 The Medici palace actually had toilets with drain pipes. Marta Ajmar- Wollheim and Flora Dennis, ed., At Home in Renaissance Italy, 36. These seem unlikely in this scenario.
17 Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces (Intercenales), 141.
18 Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy, 38.
19 Andrea Perrucci, A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation, 70.
20 Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, 141. In the course of the sixteenth century not only did firearms decimate the wildlife, but game habitat was turned into gardens and pasture. Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, 111, 124.
21 The dance steps provided by Fabritio Caroso, Il ballarino, 1581, can be found at http://jducoeur.org/HBallarino/Book2/Ballo%20del%20Piantone.html The music from Caroso can be heard at http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/del/music/caroso_il_piantone_susan.mid The site also provides the sheet music.
22 Perrucci, A Treatise on Acting, 70.
23 In Giovanni Maria Cécchi’s play L’assiuolo (The Horned Owl) the old husband, locked outside in the garden, dutifully makes the call of an owl while the young lovers within enjoy the pleasure of their lovemaking, which is enhanced by the trick on the old man.
24 Men could be similarly punished but sometimes had the option of paying a fine. Moulton, “The Illicit Worlds,” 492. See also Cohen, Love and Death, 198: “Adultery was punishable by death in some law codes; in Ferrara the guilty woman was to be burned alive, but not the man. In practice the courts often took a much more lenient view, as in sixteenth-century Venice, though the honour of offended aristocratic families might encourage the murder of both male and female offenders, with little consequence for the murdering cuckold or his supporters.” See also Eva Cantarella, “Homicides of Honor,” 229–44. Michael Rocke reports that punishment could also include forfeiture of the woman’s dowry to her husband and children (“Gender and Sexual Culture,” 158). The dowry was often her sole means of subsistence in widowhood, as well as a mark of her honour.
25 Comedies of adultery were not in the majority, but some of them are well known: Ariosto’s La lena, Machiavelli’s La mandragola, and Cécchi’s L’assiuolo. In Scala’s Day 39, there is scant reassurance that the wives, with their young lovers, will not continue to be blissfully unfaithful to their foolish old husbands.
26 Alessandro Piccolomini, La Raffaella ovvero Dialogo della bella creanza delle donne, ed. Giancarlo Alfano (Rome: Salerno, 2001), 108, in Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 193.
27 Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex,” 13, 15.
28 The comedy of old men and their inappropriate sexual passion for young girls is taken up by playwright Andrea Calmo, 1510–71, who himself specialized in the role of a mature Venetian merchant who loses his dignity to “senile passion and gross stupidity.” It is also taken up by Gigio Giancarli, La cingana, 1550, and by Adriano Banchieri, La pazzia senile (The Madness of Old Age), 1598. See Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, 147, and Ferraro, Marriage Wars, 63.
29 John Walter Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto. vol. 1, 75. I am grateful to musicologist Robert L. Kendrick for this reference.
30 Ibid., 75, 121, 129.
31 Francesco Rasi, Virtuoso Italian Vocal Music: Monteverdi, Carissima, Caccini, Frescobaldi, performed by Catherine Bott. Liner notes with compact disc. I am grateful to musicologist Lucia Marchi for having explained the Roman style to me and for having lent me this compact disc.
32 Hill, Roman Monody, vol. 1, 236.
33 At this point the scenario is reminiscent of The Decameron, III, 6.
34 Richard Andrews notes that English dramatists, unlike Italian ones, used the bed trick only to get men in bed with their “rightful” mates, not for adultery (“Shakespeare and Italian Comedy,” 140).
35 In Bibbiena’s La calandra, 1513, Calandro, who foolishly believes that the young Santilla is in love with him and seeks his favours, is placed by a servant in a darkened room with an ugly prostitute instead. The maid in the fourth story on the eighth day in The Decameron is also very ugly. Perhaps Pasquella is ugly too or perhaps she was played by a man.
36 The form of The Decameron and of other collections of fables and the frequency of writing set in dialogue form reflect the extent to which writing was regarded as speech written, whereas today we think of performance as writing spoken.
37 Ferruccio Marotti in Scala, Il teatro, delle favole rappresentative, viii.
38 Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage, 147.
39 “According to canon law, a marriage that could never be consummated was not valid” (Ferraro, Marriage Wars, 10). In Cécchi’s L’assiuolo, act 5, scene 6, in which the adultery is similarly celebrated, one of the characters observes, “Old men are like a gardener’s dog: it never eats the lettuce nor lets anyone else eat it” (70).
40 Daniela Lombardi, “Intervention by Church and State in Marriage Disputes in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Florence,” 143–5.
41 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, 97.
42 Cohen, Love and Death, 147.
43 Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare, 223.
44 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 33.
1 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 125.
2 Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, passim.
3 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 87.
4 Spavento (meaning “fear”) is the captain Francesco Andreini, Scala’s friend, made famous in performing with the Gelosi. There is no evidence that Scala wrote for the Gelosi. Rather he seems to have used this name in his printed versions of the scenarios to honour his friend and to capitalize on his reputation in that role.
5 Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex,” 18.
6 In a source play, Girolamo Bargagli’s La pellegrina, ca 1567, two women in similar situations hide their clandestine marriages; one woman is pregnant and pretending to be mad, and the other is cross-dressed as a man. But in 1563 the Council of Trent proclaimed that clandestine marriage was invalid. Scala played it safe.
7 In La pellegrina, Lespida’s nurse fears that if the father realizes she is pregnant, he will disown her (act 1, scene 2).
8 The renowned Isabella Andreini, for instance, who bore seven children and died in childbirth with her eighth, must often have been performing pregnant. We do not know for whom the role was written. Pantalone’s daughter is most often Isabella, not Flaminia.
9 “Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, delirium is a common name to all.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1, 273.
10 Paolo Valesio, “The Language of Madness in the Renaissance,” 217.
11 Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century, 49.
12 Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects, 50. In Scala’s only examples of mad speech, in his scenario The Madness of Isabella, there is no underlying psychology. Louise George Clubb suggests that mad Isabella’s reference to “Isola” (that is, Isabel or, in English, Elizabeth) in “‘a clister for Isola of England who couldn’t piss’ is probably an echo of Catholic anti-Tudor calumny referring to various physical abnormalities attributed by rumor to the Virgin Queen.” Thus, the possibility for political commentary, at least safe political commentary, is suggested. Louise George Clubb, “The State of the Arte in the Andreini’s Time,” 270.
13 Valesio, “The Language of Madness,” 203; Duncan Salkeld, Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 67, 76.
14 Pierto Aretino, La cortigiana, 70, act 1, scene 7.
15 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1, 389, 394.
16 In a mad speech written by Isabella Andreini, the character responds to phantasms. Isabella Andreini, Fragmenti di alcune scritture, 58–60.
17 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 572, 592.
18 Valesio, “The Language of Madness,” 203; Salkeld, Madness and Drama, 109. Conversely, sumptuary law forbade people from dressing above their station.
19 M.A. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, 546, fig. 43.
20 Robert Henke, “The Italian Mountebank and the Commedia dell’Arte,” 4.
21 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 543. Hale has observed that by the late fifteenth century doctors were expected to be able to discriminate between twenty varieties of colour and density in urine. See also William I. White, “A New Look at the Role of Urinalysis in the History of Diagnostic Medicine,” 122.
22 White, ibid.
23 It was believed that the urine of a pregnant woman, after several days, developed a pearly film on top. In 1928 it was proven that hormones in the urine of pregnant women stimulate bacterial growth that results in such a film. Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity, 75.
24 White,” A New Look at the Role of Urinalysis,” 122.
25 Ibid., 123.
26 Neely, Distracted Subjects, 6.
27 Don Gregorio Paniagua Rodriguez (conductor), Tarentule-Tarentelle, The Atrium Musical de Madrid, compact disc with liner notes.
28 Maps from the period show no Porta della Cavena. The old site of Porta Capena borders the current district of Ripa. Grande Dizionario Garzanti gives the first definition of caneva as a shop that sells wine and other foodstuffs (regional use); and the second, as the warehouse for storage of wheat and other provisions (archaic). I am grateful to Margherita Pieracci Harwell for her help in this matter.
29 Romano, Household and Statecraft, 159.
30 Burke, Culture and Society, 238.
31 Crane, Italian Social Customs, 146.
32 Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 24.
33 In Day 29 Scala uses Arlecchino’s fall from a ladder to end act 1. M.A. Katritzky notes that ladders were popular professional stage props figuring in scenarios not only by Scala but by Diancolelli and others. A French courtier at Fontainebleau recorded in his diary in 1608 that the commedia dell’arte actor Cola “climbed straight up a ladder that was not leaning against anything, and then fell its full length doing somersaults without getting a scratch.” In M.A. Katritzky, Healing, Performance, and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians, 169.
34 Chamberlin, Everyday Life, 121.
35 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 98–9.
36 Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 129.
37 Michael D. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” 235.
38 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 188.
39 Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 78.
40 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 82.
41 Neely, Distracted Subjects, 73; Jerome J. Bylebyl, “The School of Padua,” 350.
42 Ronald Sawyer, “Patients, Healers, and Disease in the Southeast Midlands, England, 1597–1634,” 207–11.
43 Instances like this have fuelled the debate about whether Scala wrote for readers or for actors.
44 We do not know the doctor’s diagnosis. Black hellebore, a supposed cure for dropsy, also caused vertigo, emesis, and catharsis among other things. In The Madness of Isabella, Scala introduces it as a cure for madness. Women’s mental disturbances, it was widely believed, were frequently caused by a failure to menstruate, too much blood in the uterus: Neely, Distracted Subjects, 94 and passim. For this there were “menstrual regulators.” These same drugs, available in every apothecary shop, were effective abortifacients, even for late-term pregnancies, although, because they were strictly forbidden by the Church, they were not openly referred to as such. John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs, 124, 147–8. I do not know their side effects.
45 Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, 21, 317. The eighteenth-century Dutch artist, G.-J. Xavery, in illustrations for The Marvellous Malady of Harlequin represents Harlequin vomiting and then, in another image, defecating. Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, between p. 56 and p. 57.
46 Robert Henke, “Towards Reconstructing the Audiences of the Commedia dell’Arte,” 213.
47 Cohen, Honor and Gender,” 601.
48 David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 16–17, 129–30.
49 Douglas Biow, “Food,” 503, 511.
50 Peter Burke, “Worldviews,” 184. Peter Burke defines magic as “the attempt to produce material changes in the world as the result of performing certain rituals and writing or uttering certain verbal formulas (‘spells,’ ‘charms’ or incantations) requesting or demanding that these changes take place” (ibid.).
51 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 203.
52 Black, Early Modern Italy, 201.
53 Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, “The Sorcerer in Italian Renaissance Comedy,” 75.
54 Neely, Distracted Subjects, 124. See also Pollard, Drugs and Theater, 18.
55 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 262.
56 The Recueil Fossard woodcut, from the mid-1580s, shows very explicit sex play between Harlequin and Francisquina, in Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, 320.
57 “The handshaking ritual among merchant elite … took place between the relatives of the betrothed couple and represented only the first step of a complex series of negotiations, which involved the bride-to-be only in the final stages.” Lombardi, “Intervention by Church and State,” 145.
58 D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, 17.
59 Guido Ruggiero, “Witchcraft and Magic,” 481.
60 In alchemy, Mercury is the medium of conjunction or the reconciliation of opposites. He is also the protector of thieves.
61 Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 17. The spiritual and material world continued to seem very close. Guido Ruggiero, “Witchcraft and Magic,” 477. Scala uses essentially the same disguise trick several times: in Day 20 the youths enter their love’s houses as notaries, in Day 37 as doctors.
62 Kurt Seligman, The History of Magic, 303.
63 Peter Whitfield, Astrology, 139, 140, 164.
64 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 18.
65 Ibid. Walker observes that part of the reason for the Church’s objection to magic was that it imitated the trappings of the mass: “The church has her own magic; there is no room for any other.” Ibid.
1 Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 148–9.
2 See, for instance, Pietropaolo, “The Theatre,” 17.
3 Antoni Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe, 63–4.
4 Ibid., 64.
5 King, “The Woman of the Renaissance,” 22. Lynne Lawner estimates that throughout the sixteenth century prostitutes and courtesans in Rome constituted about 10 per cent of the population. Lynne Lawner, Loves of the Courtesans, 6. See also Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe, 247, and Moulton, “The Illicit Worlds of the Renaissance,” 496.
6 Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 42.
7 “Anyone who works as an innkeeper, as you do, must fill the clients’ beds as well as their bellies.” Girolamo Bargagli, The Female Pilgrim (La pellegrina), act 2, scene 3.
8 Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 64.
9 Piccolomini, “Alessandro,” (act 1, scene 5), 314. Scala, Il finto marito, 328–9.
10 Christopher Black estimates that about one-third of households had at least one servant, so it is not surprising that even the Capitano, whose means were modest, had one. Christopher F. Black, Early Modern Italy, 97.
11 Strocchia, “Gender and Rites of Honour,” 54.
12 The windows would not have had glass.
13 Erasmus, Erasmus on Women, 17.
14 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 150.
15 Unlike Virginia Scott in The Commedia dell’Arte in Paris, 1644–1697, 124, I do not find any regular alternation of scene types in Scala.
16 Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero note that “this description of a young woman madly in love uses the language of contemporary love spells.” Accademia intornati di Siena, Gl’ingannati, act 2, scene 2, line 228.
17 Laura Giannetti Ruggiero, “When Male Characters Pass as Women,” 743–60.
18 In one of Pietro Aretino’s dialogues, 1534, an experienced prostitute advises her daughter that to warm up a sluggish customer she should put on his clothes: “’No sooner does the gentleman see you transformed from a woman into a man than he will leap on you as hunger does on a hot loaf.’” Aretino, Ragionamenti, 206, in Cathy Santore, “Julia Lombardo, ‘Somtuosa Meretrize,’” 57–8.
19 David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 177.
20 Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy, 111. No men would have been present. Women were not sent to schools that provided training in Latin. When they were schooled at all, they were taught in convents or at home. For upper-middle-class girls the convent route was not unusual. See also Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy, 61, 88; Diana Robin, “Humanism and Feminism in Laura Cereta’s Public Letters,” 369; and Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 88.
21 M.A. Katritzky, “Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery,” 136.
22 Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 250.
23 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, chap. 5.
24 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, 97.
25 Howard, “Cross-Dressing,” 25.
26 The father in Gl’ingannati despairs:
Is this the honor she pays me? Oh, how unlucky I am! I’ve worked so hard to overcome my evil fortune, and for this? To see my patrimony without heirs; to see my house ruined; to see my daughter a whore; to become the subject of common gossip; to be unable to show my face in public; to be pointed out by children in the streets; to be held up as a warning by the old; … to be made an example of in tales; and to be made the subject of the gossip of every woman in this city? Maybe these women aren’t gossips, eh? Maybe they don’t like to malign others, eh? But I imagine it doesn’t really matter, because everyone knows everything already. Actually, I’m certain, for if even one woman knows it, in three hours the whole town knows it. I’m a disgraced father, a miserable and sad old man who has lived too long! What can I do? What should I think?
(Accademia degli Intornati di Siena, Gl’ingannati, act 3, scene 3, lines 248–9).
27 Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 150.
28 Ibid., 149.
29 Accademia degli Intornati di Siena, Gl’ingannati, act 4, scene 5, lines 266–7.
30 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 142–52.
31 Maggie Günsberg, “Gender Deceptions,” 343. By the statute of the Holy Roman Empire enacted in 1532, the sentence for sexual acts between women was death by burning. See Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts, 7, 13. In practice, because there could be no penetration, the possibility of sexual activity between women was often not taken seriously.
32 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 57.
33 M.A. Katritzky observes iconography in which the inamorata wears breeches under her dress. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, 202.
34 Di Maria makes this same point relative to written tragedy, in The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, 102.
35 Vergilio Verucci, Li diversi linguaggi, 205.
36 Richard Andrews, “Theatre,” 294.
1 Translated by James E. Hirsh, in The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes, 203. Torquato Tasso, in the first canto of his highly influential epic poem Gerusalemme liberta (1581), pronounced, in a modification of Horace, that poetry is like a medicine offered to sick children, in a glass with an appealingly sweetened rim but that can effect its curative powers. It both delights and teaches. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, vol. 1, canto 1, verse 3, page 4. Similarly, commedia grave was seen as having redemptive powers.
2 Andrews, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 213.
3 Richard Andrews, “Rhetoric and Drama,” 153–68.
4 Peter Mazur, personal communication, 16 January 2010.
5 Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 182.
6 Ibid., 183.
7 Davis, Christian Slaves, 206n10.
8 Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 98.
9 Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Sciences, vol. 6, 157.
10 Ugo Baldini, “The Roman Inquisition’s Condemnation of Astrology,” 95. Subsequently, in 1633, the bull Inscrutabilis of Urban VIII unmistakably branded all astrology as heresy. Whitfield, Astrology, 163.
11 Giambattista Della Porta, Teatro, ed. Raffaele Sirri (Naples: Scientifiche Italiane, 1978), 1, 315, in Robert W. Leslie, “Sforza Oddi and the Commedia Grave,” 531.
12 On fortune see Whitfield, Astrology, 156. On love, see Guido Ruggiero, “Witchcraft and Magic,” 479. “Reason is more powerful than Fortune,” and “Fortune has in her hand only the man who submits to her.” Alberti in The Family in Renaissance Florence, 30, 28. The interplay between fortune and reason was a common motif.
13 Andrews’s translation, in Scala, The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, 204–14.
14 Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 66. The author observes that even today “orientation” has positive connotations, whereas “disorientation” does not. Ibid., 70.
15 Jordan Lancaster, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, 92.
16 My illustration is a painting from 1470. I have chosen it for its clarity. Numerous subsequent plans and views of Naples from the bay were “published on paper or painted on walls (like the geographic gallery in the Vatican palace) that would have been seen by all educated men.” Personal communication, art historian Martha Pollak, 28 July 2013. Such a map of Naples, Neapolis, is by Sebastian Münster, Cosmographei CCLXX (Basel: H. Petri, 1550).
17 Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 183.
18 George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy, 86.
19 Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 15.
20 Lancaster, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, 92. The town Ragusa in Italy is landlocked.
21 Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 86.
22 Andrews, “Rhetoric and Drama,” passim.
23 Dianne Yvonne Ghirardo, “The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara,” 424.
24 Ibid., 405.
25 For a modern “edition” of this catalogue see Rita Casagrande di Villaviera, Le cortigiane veneziane del Cinquecento. See also Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, passim. I am grateful to one of the anonymous referees of my manuscript for this reference. Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It, 333n12, asserts that the purpose of such catalogues was satirical – like Arlecchino’s.
26 Lancaster, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, 107.
27 Traveller and writer Thomas Coryat estimated that there were twenty thousand courtesans in Venice but that “many are esteemed so loose, that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow,” Coryats Crudities, 1611, in Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, 161.
28 Moulton, “The Illicit Worlds of the Renaissance,” 493.
29 Black, Early Modern Italy, 196. “The care of prisoners was largely left to their own families and to religious organizations.” Historian Peter Mazur, personal communication, 16 January 2010.
30 Davis, “The Renaissance Goes Up in Smoke,” 99.
31 Lancaster, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, 107. Hacke, Women, Sex, and Marriage, 20.
32 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 84.
33 Louise George Clubb, Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy, 1516, with Robert Black and Giovanni Pollastra, 169.
34 Leslie, “Sforza Oddi and the Commedia Grave,” 529.
35 Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 144.
36 Cavallo and Cerutti, “Female Honor,” 77.
37 There would have been no reason for Orazio, when he was seen as a Turk who had committed no crime, to have been arrested. After his escape from jail, explained in the argument, he disguised himself successfully to keep from being jailed again. His re-arrest in this scene constitutes a crisis for Isabella and of the scenario.
38 Hacke, Women, Sex, and Marriage, 18, 187.
39 An etching by Jacques Callot for a series on the siege of La Rochelle, The Inhabitants of La Rochelle Asking Pardon of the King Louis XIII, shows the king seated out of doors at the side of an open area. Jacques Callot, Callot’s Etchings, print 227.
40 Were this captain the governor of the prison and the same man as the guard who had arranged for Orazio’s escape, as he is in Andrews’s translation , it is hard to imagine the Regent being on cordial terms with him. More likely, the prison guard who arranged for Orazio’s escape from prison would have suffered very serious consequences. It is also hard to imagine why the governor of the prison would be much interested in pulling rank on the Regent to secure the return of Aguizzino and Amett to prison or that Amett in prison served as a slave under Aguizzino.
41 Sforza Oddi, second prologue to Prigione d’amore in Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, 62.
42 Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 101, 114.