RUSTIC LANGUAGE IN A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENTINE COMEDY:LA BIAGIA DA DECOMANO

Abstract

At some time in the 1520s Bartolomeo Castelli, a publisher of popular texts in Florence, commissioned the printing of a work called LA BIAGIA DA DECOMANO. The anonymous author must have intended this title to recall the two key texts of the letteratura nenciale of the previous century: above all Luigi Pulci's La Beca da Dicomano, but also the poem to which Pulci was responding, La Nencia da Barberino. As we shall see, both these texts had some influence on La Biagia. Unlike them, however, Castelli's publication was not a poem in which a peasant declared his love for a village lass, but a comedy depicting the preparation and celebration of a peasant wedding. The themes of this subtype of rustic literature, known as mogliazzi in Tuscany and mariazi in the Veneto, where they were particularly popular, included negotiations over the dowry which were carried out by a marriage-broker acting on behalf of the groom and the bride's father, rivalries between two or even three lovers, the wedding ceremony itself, the ensuing festivities, and quarrels between husband and wife. The longest and most complex such play is Ruzante's inventive Betía, which also belongs to the 1520s. La Biagia, clumsily written at times and awkwardly structured, cannot be considered as more than a mediocre example of this genre. But the play deserves consideration for its linguistic features and, more generally, for its place in the tradition of Tuscan rustic literature.