In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Italian theater consisted mainly of farcical representations and religious dramatizations of Bible stories and lives of saints. In the fifteenth century Italian humanists launched the Latin comedy on the example of Plautus and Terence, and a few wrote modest tragedies in Latin following Seneca’s model. Though comedy flourished by adapting and imitating the Roman playwrights, tragedy received its impetus from the discovery of the great tragedians of ancient Greece, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In a brief sketch of tragedy’s long journey appended to his Ifigenia (1560), the prolific playwright Lodovico Dolce writes that Lady Tragedy, after her glorious days in Greece, refused to live in Rome and moved to Florence where she was received with great enthusiasm and honored by accomplished dramatists such as Trissino, Alamanni, Rucellai, Aretino, Giraldi, Speroni, and, of course, himself.
The noble genre, as tragedy was called, made its way into modern civilization between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, mainly through the efforts of dedicated Italian scholars. Italian fascination with the classics was already running high in the quattrocento, when manuscript hunters were scouring libraries throughout Europe looking for ancient texts. Greek texts were very difficult to find, given almost two millennia of neglect and obscurity, and difficult also to have translated, as there were very few Greek scholars living in Italy at the time. But the challenge had its rewards, and humanists ventured throughout Greece and its islands in search of ancient texts. The Sicilian Giovanni Aurispa was in Greece in 1413 and again in 1421, purchasing manuscripts of Sophocles and Euripides and other ancient works. When he returned to Italy, he brought with him a library of 238 Greek manuscripts (Garin 1995, 32).
It was not enough merely to own an ancient text. Scholars were eager to learn and discuss its contents, especially in cases where the works were known only through short selections or anecdotes. Theoretical tracts, such as Aristotle’s Poetics, were generally translated and circulated within the academic community. Works aimed at a wider audience, such as tragedies, tended to be discussed or read aloud in courtly settings. At first, tragedies were appreciated mainly as literary texts. As men of letters
Learned about the formal aspects of the genre, they discovered that the notion of tragedy handed down to them through the Middle Ages was not consistent with Aristotle’s definition or with the practice of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Roman Seneca.
In the Middle Ages, scholars had known of Greek and Roman tragedy mostly through excerpts and vague references. They thought of tragedy as a poem dealing with bloody deeds, often instigated by women, such as Helen of Troy or Cleopatra. Early in the fourth century, Donatus conceived of tragedy as a literary composition dealing with noble characters and great horrors, with a sorrowful conclusion. In the sixth century Isidore of Seville considered it a mournful poem dealing with the bloody crimes of wicked rulers (Kelly 1993, 31, 76-77 passim). In the thirteenth century Dante, expanding this view to include Lucan’s understanding of the genre as involving ‘‘mastery of grand style,’’ concluded that tragedy consisted of a serious subject treated in sublime style and having a horrible conclusion. He expressed this view of tragedy in the Divine Comedy, where Vergil refers to his Aeneid as ‘‘my high tragedy [written] in lofty verses’’ (Inferno 20.113; cf. 26.82).1 Significantly, in this evolving notion of the genre there was no mention of tragedy as a theatrical representation other than incidental references to its being recited or mimed in public.
It was not long before Italian dramatists tried their hands at composing their own tragedies. At the outset these tragedies were intended for a reading audience and were viewed primarily as occasions for verbal rhetoric. In 1524, Alessandro Pazzi de’ Medici was still referring to his tragedies as poems to be lecte et recitate (read and recited; Pazzi 1524, 141). Trissino’s Sofonisba (1515) was reprinted six times and translated into French before it was performed for the first time in 1562; and Rucellai’s Rosmunda (around 1515), though reprinted at least five times in the course of the century, was never performed. Yet the growing interest in tragedy, even as mere reading text, not only fueled the ongoing search for Greek tragedies, but also led to a flurry of translations and reworkings appropriately called volgarizza-menti. Renaissance playwrights were inspired to draw on the values and aesthetic principles of the past to give dramatic expression to their own culture, thus revitalizing classical tragedy.
The process was facilitated by the diffusion of Aristotle’s Poetics, which, together with Horace’s Ars poetica, provided guidance and formal authority. The notion of the three unities, in particular, imposed coherence on the newly discovered genre. Differences of opinion about various elements of tragedy led to lively debates ranging from whether it was better to follow the example of the Greeks or the Romans to whether plots should be based on historical or fictional events. There were also questions about the form: what type of verse was suitable to tragedy, how long should a representation last, how many characters might there be in a scene. The question of how a play should be divided was never resolved; some playwrights followed the Senecan model with its division into acts and scenes, while others, such as Trissino, Rucellai, Pazzi, and Martelli, remained faithful to the episodic Greek tradition and accordingly became known as the Grecians (Herrick 1965, 43-71). With regard to other issues of theatrical poetics, playwrights enjoyed plenty of freedom, since they could appeal to the authority of Horace whenever they departed from Aristotelian precepts, and vice versa.
If the debates failed to reach general consensus on several important issues, they succeeded in generating wide interest in the genre and in promoting the notion that tragedy belonged not in the ‘‘closet’’ as a poem to be read (see Barish 1994), but on the stage. The honor of restoring tragedy to the stage belongs to Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, perhaps the most important theater theorist and playwright of the sixteenth century. Following the great success of Giraldi’s Orbecche (1541), stage performances became more and more frequent as artists and patrons sought to quench an increasing thirst for dramatic representations set in ancient times. The first theater, the Teatro Olimpico di Vicenza (plate 27.1), was inaugurated in 1585. But even before that, patrons wishing to exploit the political advantage of being associated with a glorious tradition commissioned plays and sponsored performances that were put on either at court or in private residences before large but select groups of spectators. When Lodovico Dolce’s Marianna was performed in Ferrara in 1565, the author wrote to a friend that the large audience actually hindered the first performance, and the play was performed more successfully a second time (Dolce 1565, 745). For the 1568 performance of Gabriele Bombace’s Alidoro in honor of Queen Barbara of Austria, so many nobles traveled to Reggio Emilia that, in order to accommodate the visitors, local gentry were not allowed to attend opening night (Ariani 1977, 985).
Despite this popularity, tragedies were never represented as frequently as comedies, partly because the high style of tragedy and the gravity of its subject matter appealed only to the educated few. A more pragmatic consideration, however, was the prohibitive cost associated with stage productions. Unlike comedy, tragedy required the construction of majestic sets and the use of elaborate costumes for its royal characters and their large retinues. It was not unusual for Renaissance performances to feature casts of more than eighty characters and supernumeraries, all sumptuously dressed with fine cloth embroidered in gold and other precious metals.
Performances of tragedy became the occasion for ostentatious displays of political authority. Spectators came from miles around and the noisy streets were thronged with people and carriages. The ubiquitous presence of armed honor guards in colorful uniforms contributed to the cheerful mood of pomp and pageantry and served as a reminder of the sponsor’s power.2 In most cases, the ruling prince attended the performance in full regalia. Surrounded by nobles and dignitaries ranged according to rank and influence, the prince vied with the performers for the public’s attention and approval.
Although the rhetoric of power expressed itself in pageantry and spilled into the auditorium through seating arrangements, the stage spectacle itself remained largely an artistic representation of a fictional world. One must resist the temptation to assume that playwrights, by virtue of their education, were de facto members of the nobility or bourgeoisie and tended, therefore, to promote the preservation of the sociopolitical system in which they had a vested interest. In fact, not all playwrights were nobles: Aretino, for instance, was the son of a shoemaker, Lodovico Dolce made a living as a teacher and a printer, and the self-taught Luigi Groto found sporadic employment as a tutor and as a spokesman for various causes. It is difficult to see what interest these playwrights could have in promoting a system that essentially excluded them. Admittedly, the search for patronage was a driving force behind the artists’ work, but it was the urge to surpass their rivals that inspired them to their greatest achievements. They aimed to go beyond the mere imitation of the classics and to
Plate 27.1 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza. Interior view. Photograph © AUnari/Art Resource, NY.
Bring on stage a world that drew meaningful parallels to their own, even as it retained its ancient allure. Not surprisingly, they gave their plays such names as Antigone, Edippo, Hecuba, Ifigenia, Medea, Oreste, Didone, Orazia, Sofonisba, and Tullia. Though audiences cherished the prestige of the Greek and Roman traditions, it was the plays’ formal and thematic innovations as well as their novel stagecraft that helped to narrow the gap between the fiction of the stage and the real world of the auditorium.
In order to close this gap and make their works appealing, playwrights knew that their theater had to address current sociopolitical issues as well as meet prevailing aesthetic expectations. A political topic of obvious relevance to the times that dominates many a Renaissance tragedy is the notion of kingship that Machiavellian theory had brought to the forefront of political discourse. The ideology informing the role of most stage rulers clearly mirrored the ongoing debate on royal prerogatives and princely virtues. The rulers tended to dismiss their counselors’ advice to govern with justice and magnanimity - an attitude that dramatized Machiavelli’s rejection of humanist notions of princeship as too idealistic and incompatible with current real-politik. However, the violent deaths of those same rulers pointed to a rejection of Machiavellian amoralism and the emergence of a political philosophy based on the moral and religious values of Counter-Reformation Italy. On the social plane, the plays challenge the traditionally misogynist view of womanhood - an issue with profound cultural implications. The issue is highlighted by the conflicting perspectives that articulate the tragic role of the stage queen or princess. On the one hand, she is characterized as subservient, of limited intellect, and prone to emotionalism. On the other hand, she is portrayed as an intelligent and strong individual demanding the right to live with human dignity. In most dramas, the debate ended with the heroine’s tragic demise; however, the composure and resolve with which victims such as Dido and Sofonisba faced death elevated them to the dignity of their male counterparts.
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