Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy by Alexandra Coller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy by Alexandra Coller Caterina Mongiat Farina WOMEN, RHETORIC, AND DRAMA IN EARLY MODERN ITALY, by Alexandra Coller. New York: Routledge, 2017. 282 pp. $155.00 cloth; $54.95 ebook. Imagine a place where women own property and support themselves independently, speak and move freely, and can be with a person of their choice. Margherita Costa did just that with the fictional realm of Fessa in her comedy Li buffoni (1641; The Buffoons, 2018). This is only one of the masterpieces discussed in Alexandra Coller’s revisionist canon of Italian drama delineated with philological rigor and critical ingenuity in Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy. As Coller explains in the introduction, her book challenges the notion of tragicomedy as the only original genre of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian drama to argue that early modern comedy, tragedy, and pastoral tragicomedy share a claim to originality for the following reasons: their quantitative and qualitative shift in depicting female characters, their common predilection for Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1351) in addition to the more obvious classical sources, and their rhetorical choices in signaling cultural and literary shifts in gender representations, which opened new creative possibilities for both male and female playwrights (pp. 1–2). The book is divided in two parts. In the first part (chapters 1–2), Coller focuses on women characters in comedies and tragedies written by men and, in the second part (chapters 3–5), on pastorals written by women. Yet the chapters in part one are felicitously complicated by codas discussing the first extant comedy authored by a woman and the first extant tragedy authored by a woman, respectively. In the first chapter, Coller identifies Ruzante’s L’Anconitana (The Woman from Ancona, 1994), for which she follows Linda Carroll’s dating of 1517–1518, as an early example in fiction of women crossdressing as men for reasons other than love. Coller unveils the ways in which the protagonist Isotta (crossdressed as Gismondo) uses her virtù (skill) in “feminine” arts like fashion together with her rhetorical prowess in speech to fend for herself and teach other women how to achieve grace: “Ruzante is putting forward a female figure who can instruct and dispute” (p. 30). In Coller’s reconstructed canon, which includes among other comedies Alessandro Piccolomini’s Alessandro (1544), Niccolò Secchi’s Gl’inganni (1547; Deceits), Luca Contile’s Cesarea Gonzaga (1550), and Giambattista Della Porta’s Cintia (1601), Ruzante’s women characters establish the originality and preeminence of his comedy. Costa’s Li buffoni joins this canon by exploring the traditionally male genre of comedy. Coller’s fascinating hypothesis is that Costa’s protagonist Marmotta, a noblewoman that leads the utopian realm of Fessa, might have been inspired by Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere [End Page 446] and her female-centered court of Poggio Imperiale, where fiction and history converge regarding the emancipation of women. Differing conceptions of virtù, understood in chapter two as the more traditional “moral virtue” rather than “skill,” and friendship emerge from the juxtaposition of Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s and Ludovico Dolce’s tragedies with Valeria Miani’s Celinda (1611) (p. 77). Collectively, the heroines Selene and Eufimia (Cinzio), Marianna and Medea (Dolce), Celinda (Miani), and their female friends argue through eloquent words and deeds that friendship (including friendship between husband and wife) rests on equality and loyalty and that men often fail at one or both of these principles. Coller, here as throughout the book, excels at integrating the complex and necessary synopses of the plays into her rhetorical and critical analysis. The extended coda on Miani’s Celinda gives Coller the opportunity to explore in detail Boccaccio’s influence on certain episodes of the protagonist’s love affair. Part two begins with an eye-opening comparison of satyr scenes in the male canon (Tasso and Battista Guarini are here joined by Agostino Beccari, Luigi Groto, Giovan Maria Avanzi, and Cesare Cremonini among others) with a diverse collection of women-authored pastorals including Isabella Andreini’s Mirtilla (1588), Maddalena Campiglia’s Flori (1588), Barbara Torelli Benedetti’s Partenia (1586), Leonora Bernardi’s Tragicomedia pastorale (Pastoral tragicomedy) written in...