Woman as Truth in a Renaissance Comedy

Abstract

Bruno's comedy, the Candelaio is a complex text which manages to fluctuate in and out of focus all too easily to let it slip by as merely a comedy of disguise. As such, the characters would appear to undergo no psychological process, as mere victims of either frivolous or damaging inganni, trapped in a momentary distortion of reality. However, through a shift in perspective, the woman characters provide one key with which to unlock the complexity of Bruno's characters, in terms of social perception and identity crisis, where even the very notion of reality or is problematized and identi ty construction revealed. Through a process which may be characterized as subversive anamorphism, I propose that woman in this text functions as a focusing lens, through which we may perceive truth, which is duplicity, multiplicity and mutation. The women expose the delusive identity construction of the male protagonists, and send the notion of public and private identity into crisis, while linguistic subversion through the demystification of petrarchian language and love code (Bonifacio), the internal corrosion of contemporary approximate science (Bartolomeo), and the deformation of pedantic Latin (Manfurio) extend social criticism. Anamorphism, or a shift in perspective occurs in the gaps between the individual's perception of himself and what Stephen Greenblatt has called his self -fashioningl, the reception of his creation in his society, and in the consequences of the harmony or discord his self-fashioning creates. More often than not, the conflation of several fashioned selves creates discord, as the truth the presence of artifice is that underlying blur which threatens to reveal actual chaos or madness. This threat of revelation is where I believe a consideration of the woman characters is crucial. It seems that their function in the Candelaio is