Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy - From Machiavelli to Goldoni

"Cope has defined a counter-generic genre that sharpens and refines our understanding of the distinctive Italian contribution to the history of theater. His analysis is shrewd, and his careful close readings of a large number of plays make this fascinating theater of complicity available to readers with little or no Italian. Beyond that, he provokes endless reflection on theater itself as a metaphor of the knowable, and of the ways in which that metaphor was transformed between the early humanistic revivals of Plautus and Terence, and the rise of Gozzi."--Walter Stephens, Dartmouth College

List of contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Il Padano to Il Veneto 17

Siena: Piccolomini's Dialogo and the Rozzi Rusticali 49

Florence 75

Il Manco male: Maggi's Meneghino in Milan 117

Goldoni 139

Afterword on Secrecy and Literary Genres 185

Notes 191

Index 217

About the author

Jackson I. Cope

Summary

Modern vernacular comedy took shape in early sixteenth-century Italy with the many plays adapted from and modeled on Plautine New Comedy. This work demonstrates how Italian dramatists reacted to the wide success of this genre with a counterparadigm, a comedy that exploits secrecy as form. It examines this major development in Italian theater.

Product details

• Authors: Cope, Jackson I Cope, Jackson I. Cope
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.05.1996
• EAN: 9780822317609
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-1760-9
• No. of pages: 232
• Series: Society; 7; Society; 7
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Italienisch, Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker