Leone de'Sommi and the Performing Arts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts Madeleine Schechter Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts. Edited by Ahuva Belkin. Assaph Book Series vol. 1. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1997; pp. xviii + 245. $12.00 paper. Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts is the first anthology dedicated to Leone de’ Sommi (1527–1592), a playwright, theatre director, and poet who lived and created at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, at the time a flourishing cultural and artistic center. Despite his artistic achievements and innovative ideas, de’ Sommi remained outside the focus of scholarly interest for many centuries, with perhaps the felicitous exception of his theoretical discussions on theatre, the Dialogues, which have enjoyed several critical editions. The first English translation was by Allardyce Nicoll, who established de’ Sommi’s authorship of this work. Later on, it was analyzed by Ferruccio Marotti, who published the complete Italian edition. In the last decade, a new French translation edited and published by A. Strihan in the Revue d’histoire du théâtre has enhanced the growing academic recognition of this document’s humanistic erudition and artistic sensitivity. It is widely acknowledged that de’ Sommi’s life and artistic activity aimed at a synthesis between Jewish culture and religion and Italian Renaissance humanistic and artistic ideals. However, it is the blend of his skills as a playwright, theatre theorist, and theatre director that makes de’ Sommi especially relevant to modern developments in theatre research. He was what we would now consider an interdisciplinary artist, endowed with a modern artistic awareness of theatre’s importance as a performative art. In order to appreciate how innovative such a preoccupation was, it should be remembered that the theatrical performance was almost completely neglected by Renaissance learned circles and entirely forbidden by Jewish religion. This anthology highlights de’ Sommi’s approach to theatre as physical place, not merely as a rhetorical locus. The book articulates two key concerns: de’ Sommi’s performance-oriented conception of theatre and the place of this activity in the context of his time, offering valuable access to the artistic world and forms of Renaissance artistic expression contemporary to de’ Sommi. Its critical essays are preceded by a prologue by Shlomo Simonsohn, which presents the life of the Jewish community of Mantua within its contemporary Christian environment. He observes that the Jews of Mantua, confined to a ghetto during the time of Leone de’ Sommi, lived under “atrocious” circumstances: “These conditions, the result of anti-Jewish policies adopted by the Church in the Middle Ages, were perfected in Italy to a degree hitherto unheard of anywhere else” (23). The epilogue by Dunbar H. Ogden further expresses the need for historic and critical context in evaluating “the de’ Sommi moment contribution then and now” (238). Ogden, writing from a more postmodern perspective, advances an intriguing analogy between de’ Sommi’s court spectacles and the Tel Aviv conference, with regard to the shifting historical strategies in the theatricalization of cultural power. Ahuva Belkin introduces the body of the anthology with a comprehensive historiographical essay offering a general account of de’ Sommi’s life and work and a framework for the specialized topics which follow. The book is divided into three sections: the relationship between theatre, music, and dance; textual and pre-scenic aspects; and a portrait of de’ Sommi as a theatre director. [End Page 546] In the first section, Don Harrán discusses the common aspirations of Hebrew dramatists and musicians working in different media. Iain A. Fenlon considers the potential contributions of Guarini and de’ Sommi to the development of baroque dance spectacle, focusing on the pre-history of this entertainment in Italian culture. Enrico Fubini enquires whether there is “such a thing as Jewish polyphony” (67) in considering possible musical interchanges between Christian and Jewish culture. A. William Smith lists various aspects of the gestural “international language” (94) that widely permeated the Renaissance culture. Most of the articles in the second section deal with the scenic potential of his plays and their staging, with the exception of Cristina dal Molin’s account of the recovery of some unedited manuscripts at the National Library of Turin. Hanna Scolnicov’s “Staging...