Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance by Laura Giannetti, Guido Ruggiero
2006; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2006.0191
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
Resumo554 Reviews satire. Though bright and inventive it is resolutely discreet and high-minded' (p. I38). These are the kinds of statement we ask our students to avoid. Considering primary sources, some of the unpublished material which is referred to remains marginal to the main narrative and is quoted without clear reference to its present location, at least in the appendix, where the numbering of texts is sometimes confused with that of the stanzas. The book deals mainly with the figure of the 'ugly woman', usually in the form of the vituperatio vetulae pursued by numerous vernacular authors. For all its thoroughness, Ido not find thework wholly satisfactory because it seems to be poised between a rhetorical-stylistic analysis of a number of poems dealing with ugly women, and an aesthetic, mildly feminist analysis of the same theme. The book could be a real page-turner, but it isnot, mainly because of the author's unwillingness to take sides more clearly, rather than just mention some auctoritas or other. A male fantasy to bite 'around' (this, incidentally, isnot explicit inBettella's translation, which in other places is good and quite literal) the big breasts of the woman, expressed in a capitolo by Firenzuola, is censured, inwhat seems an exaggerated manner, as 'a male urge to abuse the female body' (p. Io6), supported, not wholly appropriately inmy view, by a serious study byMelanie Klein. One would like to seemore independence of judgement, and more originality; the theme of the old hag is, after all, rather a repetitive one, even if it is varied by the 'dark lady', especially in the seventeenth century. I have not found any mistakes in the book, apart from a slip inwhich Niccol6 de' Rossi is said to have been born 'in the late twelfth century' (p. 3I), which should of course read 'thirteenth' or Duecento. Occasionally the translations of Italian texts could be more forceful, e.g. (p. 22) the beginning of Rustico's sonnet 'Dovunque vai, con teco porti il cesso', and later the reference to le selle should be something like 'cess-pit' rather than amodern, more deodorized, 'toilet'; similarly, on page 6i troia is rendered by 'bitch'. Overall this is a useful attempt at investigating some important themes inmedieval and Renaissance, or early modern, misogyny. The bibliography is quite thorough, although I would add at least Ian Maclean's The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I980) and Josip B. Percan's 'Femina dulce malum': la donna nella letteratura medievale latina (secoli X-XIV) (Rome: Kappa, 2003). BALLIOLCOLLEGE, OXFORD DIEGO ZANCANI Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance. Trans. and ed. by LAURA GIANNETTI and GUIDO RUGGIERO. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. xlii+323 pp. ?44.50 (pbk L'5). ISBN o-8oI8-7257-x (pbk o-8oi8 7258-8). The five comedies introduced and translated in this volume are, with the titles of the English translations, Bibbiena's La Calandr(i)a [The Comedy of Calandro], Machi avelli's La Mandragola [The Mandrake Root], Aretino's IIMarescalco [The Master of theHorse], Gl'Ingannati [the Deceived] by the Academy of the Intronati of Siena, and the anonymous La Veniexiana [The Venetian Comedy]. It is interesting to spe culate on the reasons for the authors' choice of these particular five plays. The most obvious advantage of their selection is chronological and generic coherence. All five were written and performed in a roughly twenty-year period, I5 I3-c. 1536, which saw the introduction and affirmation of the first vernacular tradition of scripted comedy in Europe since Roman times. The five-act commedia erudita or regolare, modelled initially on late Quattrocento revivals of Plautus and Terence, was pioneered by Ari osto at the Este court in Ferrara. It quickly spread to the other courts of northern MLR, IOI.2, 2006 555 and central Italy and beyond them towider strata of society, creating a new classic template for European theatre imbued with explicit and implicit Renaissance values. The five plays of the present collection present the reader with significant and re presentative exemplars of this typology, spanning some of itsmajor production and performance centres: Florence, Siena, Urbino, Mantua, and Venice. In addition...
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