Two Renaissance Views of Carthage: Trissino’s Sofonisba and Castellini’s Asdrubale

Abstract

The Sofonisba of Trissino, which belongs to the beginning of the sixteenth century, is generally named as the first regular tragedy. This literary curiosity I cannot boast of having read, but from other sources I know the author to be a spiritless pedant. Those even of the learned, who are most zealous for the imitation of the ancients, pronounce it a dull labored work, without a breath of true poetical spirit; we may, therefore, without further examination, safely appeal to their judgement upon it.l Since August Schlegel wrote those words in 1809 a long series of critics have been content to accept his estimate of Sofonisba, without his candor, however, in acknowledging their ignorance of the work itself. There has been some degree of revaluation done by modern Italian editors, and I should like here to re-examine the tragedy and Trissino's purpose in writing it, and to compare it with another Carthaginian tragedy written forty-five years later, the Asdrubale of Jacopo Castellini. When Giangiorgio Trissino began to compose Sofonisba in 1514, he was twenty-six. 2 A nobleman of Vicenza, wealthy, educated by some of the leading humanists of the day, an enthusiast for Greek literature, he was forced in 1509 to leave his native city when it was captured by Venice from the Emperor, whose party he had supported. For eight years he lived in Ferrara, Mantua, and Rome; he met most of the leading figures of the era, and became the friend and correspondent of Lucrezia Borgia and her sister-in-law, Isabella d'Este, married to Duke Francesco Gonzaga. Sofonisba was written at least in part in Rome, and was dedicated to the Medici Pope, Leo X. It was