At the turn of the sixteenth century, with the Italian Renaissance at its cultural high point, Italians rediscovered and reinvented an old art form–ancient Latin comedies, rewritten and updated in Italian. These plays–witty, ribald, tightly plotted, and characterized by clever reversals of gender roles and social stereotypes–quickly captured the imagination of Renaissance society. In this anthology Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero have assembled and translated five of the best and most representative plays from this period. Ranging from the early sixteenth-century Comedy of Calandro–the twisting and turning plot of which keeps the audience guessing up to the last scene–to the recently rediscovered and–due to its explicit sexual content–rarely performed–Venetian Comedy, these plays present the modern reader with a fresh and lively view of Italian Renaissance society. Also included is an introduction addressing the texts, their translation, and the social and cultural world of Renaissance comedy. Contents: The Comedy of Calandro, by Bernardo Dovizi de Bibbiena; The Mandrake Root, by Niccolo Machiavelli; Master of the Horse, by Pietro Aretino; The Deceived, by the Intronati; A Venetian Comedy by Anonymous.
Dramatically engaging and, even by twenty-first-century standards, variously outrageous, pornographic, and hilarious, these five Renaissance comedies are among the most readable and producible plays from any historical period. Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero have translated them into the graphic colloquial English they deserve. The gender-bending, cross-dressing cast of promiscuous characters are delightfully risque, but they also raise the serious issues of honesty and trust that only comedy can explore. –Edward Muir, Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University
The five plays chosen for this volume represent some of the finest, and most influential, works from the first wave of the classicizing revival of comic theater in 16th century Italy, which would then make itself felt throughout Europe: in the England of Shakespeare and the Spain of Lope. They stand among the extraordinary accomplishments of the ‘High Italian Renaissance,’ comparable to the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, the political and historical thought of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the courtly dialogue of Castiglione, the romance-epic of Ariosto, and so on. The combined skills of Giannetti and Ruggiero, a talented literary scholar and a leading cultural historian, have blended perfectly in producing lucid, appealing translations that both respect the artistry of the texts–especially their wickedly carnivalesque humor–and reveal their dual function of reproducing and travestying fundamental aspects of the ‘social world’ of early modern Italy. Readers will find the long introduction especially illuminating about the ways in which Machiavelli, Bibbiena, Aretino, and the others transform the classical models of Plautus and Terence as they superimpose upon them the political preoccupations, normative family relations, sexual practices, and gender and age roles of their own brilliant and traumatic epoch. –Albert Russell Ascoli, Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley