Abstract
The fear that man, subjected to practices considered emasculating, could “regress” to the female state was culturally central in the early modern definition of the man-woman polarity. In this context, effeminacy was used as a stigma against practices to be banned or controlled and was among the main accusations raised by the religious controversy against the emerging professional theatre. Through the close reading of some librettos produced in Venice between 1641 and 1668, the essay aims to show how the authors appropriated some tòpoi of the antitheatrical controversy, building an artistic acrobatics in which love was seen as a “disease” capable of removing the hero’s virility and was observed within a practice (theatre, and especially opera) which was itself considered effeminate and emasculating. The essay revolves around a progressive intensification of ambiguities, transvestitisms and allusions, showing how the librettists of Venetian opera also attempted an investigation of gender codes at the textual level and pushed themselves to the limit beyond which the mechanism of censorship inevitably triggered.
Highlights
Spetta ai fedeli Lenia e Zotico realizzare la parodica istituzione, nella quale Eliogabalo interviene infine come primus inter pares, indossando abiti da donna: «Ecomi d’huomo trasformato in femina / In Toro, in Cigno, in oro / Giove si tramutò: mi cangio anch’io / né son da meno del Tonante Dio»
Il che non significa però che i librettisti non riuscissero a trovare strade –certo ambigue e sottili– per sfuggire alla retorica rigida delle distinzioni di genere: se è vero che i “lieti fini” (gli eroi che rinsaviscono, ritrovando in un modo o nell’altro la propria virilità) mostrano un teatro che viene a patti con la morale e se ne fa in certo modo rassicurante portavoce, è vero anche che, nel corso dei diversi intrecci, l’effeminatezza era di fatto rappresentata e quindi autorizzata dalla pratica scenica (oltre che dalla conturbante presenza fisica e musicale del cantante che, su registro femminile, incarnava l’androgino protagonista)
Summary
Se i teatranti difendevano il teatro come ineliminabile aspetto della varietà del mondo stabilita dal “Sommo Facitore”, così Besso difende Giasone in quanto uomo che acconsente al suo destino di amante e non di guerriero.
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