Stage representations had to bear a strong resemblance to reality in order to get around the audience’s instinctive reluctance to be drawn into the fictional world of the stage and in order to establish theater as a viable cultural force. Invoking the poetics of verisimilitude, dramatists argued against the slavish imitation of long-dead traditions and insisted that plays represent current, living customs. Dolce offered a simple but suggestive insight into this principle of poetics when, in the prologue to his Medea (1558), he described the play as a ‘‘new tragedy’’ because it had been ‘‘dressed in new clothes.’’ The novelties included language, length, spatial settings, courtly ambiance, religion, dramaturgical techniques, and stagecraft.
Most Renaissance dramas are nearly twice as long as a typical Greek or Roman tragedy. Dolce’s Medea, for example, has approximately 2,350 lines, more than double the 1,000 lines of its Senecan prototype; Anguillara’s Edippo (1565) is 3,180 lines long, or twice as long as its source, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; and Groto’s Adriana (1578), perhaps the longest of all Italian Renaissance tragedies, is about 4,420 lines. This unusual length was culturally warranted. Greek tragedy was one of several entertainments offered at the City Dionysia (see Seidensticker, chapter 3 in this volume), but Renaissance dramatic representations were unique sociopolitical events. In some instances, the sponsors demanded that a play be long enough to provide a full day’s entertainment. When Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara commissioned Didone from Giraldi, he requested that it be at least six hours long (Giraldi 1543, 485). The length of the representation included intermezzi or self-contained spectacles meant to provide a light distraction from the seriousness of the staged drama. With time allowed for honored guests to arrive and take their seats according to protocol, the whole event could conceivably last into the wee hours of the morning. Filippo Pigafetta, who attended the 1585 performance of Giustiniani’s Edippo, noted that the representation lasted over twelve hours. Spectators began arriving at four in the afternoon; the performance started at one-thirty and was over at little after five o’clock in the morning (Pigafetta 1585, 55-56). Giacomo Dolfin, another eyewitness, reported that the representation began with the sound of trumpets, the roll of drums, and the rumbling of artillery rounds, and it was so gratifying that it was worth the wait (Dolfin 1585, 34).
Faced with the sponsor’s demands, playwrights tended to stretch the length of their texts by elaborating selected scenes, spinning subplots, adding characters with speaking parts, and appending other dramatic features, such as long, argumentative epilogues. Their task was facilitated by the prevailing humanist predilection for rhetoric. Italian tragedy’s preference for telling over showing would have found little favor with a popular audience such as that of Renaissance England, but it had a receptive public in the well-educated guests who normally attended the performances.
The emphasis on rhetoric encouraged long-drawn-out elaborations of the original text. Luigi Alamanni’s Antigone (1533), for example, though a faithful translation of Sophocles’ play, is about three hundred lines longer than the original and features innovations that call attention to the translator’s culture. This intent is especially evident in Alamanni’s treatment of the chorus. In the Greek version, soon after Tiresias predicts ruin for Thebes, the chorus sings that the whole city is in the grip of disease and begs Dionysus to ‘‘come with cleansing step over Parnassus’ slope’’ (1140-44). In the Italian translation, this prayer gives way to a secular protest against the capriciousness of powerful and ‘‘fallacious’’ Fortuna, which the chorus characterizes in typically Renaissance terms as fragil, senza fede/instabil, varia, e leve/lubrica et inconstante [fragile, untrustworthy, unstable, shifting, and volatile, slippery and inconstant] (p. 197). The protest is rendered in lyrical Petrarchan style, reflecting both the taste of the times and the author’s determination to display his poetic virtuosity.
In adaptations, too, lengthy scenes contrast sharply with the relative brevity and simplicity of the original version. The description of the capture scene in Rucellai’s Oreste (1520-25), for example, is much longer and more elaborate than in its source, Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians. In the Greek original, a messenger recounts in about eighty lines how Taurian herdsmen captured Orestes and his boyhood friend Pylades (260-339); in the Italian version the same episode is 129 lines long (1.429-558). The expansion details the epic resistance put up by the protagonists whose gesta (deeds) are reminiscent of Ariosto’s chivalric heroes. The messenger reports that the two friends retreated like lions facing their hunters, and fought with the ferocity of tigers protecting their cubs. He also likens them to stinging hornets fighting against a cloud of bees or an army of ground ants. The narrative abounds in rhetorical devices, especially hyperbole, a figure of speech typical of chiv-alric literature. Thus, the youths throw the boat on the water as easily as if it were a hive of bees; on Pilade’s shield lands a forest of enemy arrows; a thousand lances and swords fall on Oreste; Oreste’s breathing becomes so heavy that it turns into black, thick vapor. Unfortunately, this epic scene, while extolling the young men’s superhuman strength, is largely inconsequential to the development of the plot, since both men are ultimately overpowered and taken prisoner, just as in Euripides.
World History
