Description
Book SynopsisModern 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.
Trade Review“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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
