Ariosto’s Astute Arrogance: The Construction of the Comic City in La Lena

Contributor(s): Daragh O’Connell

This essay interrogates Ludovico Ariosto’s theatrical poetics by charting his developing sense of the theatrical space and his embrace of the contemporary. From an initial appropriation of Roman stage models to a more nuanced appreciation of the comic possibilities afforded through a modernizing...

Érasme, l’Arétin et Boccace dans l’invention du discours comique-burlesque d’Annibal Caro

Contributor(s): Ambra Moroncini

This article considers Annibal Caro’s religious sentiments during the years of his most intense comic and paradoxical production: the pre-Tridentine period from 1536 to 1543, a time of tense expectation in Rome for significant Church reform. Although Caro’s religious beliefs never raised...

The Reception of Fernando de Roja’s Celestina in Italy: A Polyphonic Discourse

Contributor(s): Enrica Maria Ferrara

La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas was published in Spain for the first time in 1499 as a comedy, and as a tragicomedy in 1502. The first Italian translation of the play was published in Rome in 1506 and gave birth to a parallel and complementary textual tradition on which the reception and...

Bodily Passions: Physiognomy and Drama in Giovan Battista Della Porta

Contributor(s): Eugenio Refini

This article explores the intersections of physiognomic knowledge and drama in the works of Neapolitan naturalist and playwright Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1616). It first looks at references to theatre—classical drama in particular—in Della Porta’s writings on physiognomy, thus showing...

Self-Portraits of a Truthful Liar: Satire, Truth-Telling, and Courtliness in Ludovico Ariosto’s Satire and Orlando Furioso

Contributor(s): Paola Ugolini

Composed during the most difficult years of Ludovico Ariosto’s relationship with the Este court, the Satire are known for presenting a picture of their author as a simple, quiet-loving man, and also as a man who can speak only the truth. However, the self-portrait offered by the Satire of the...

“E poi in Roma ognuno è Aretino”: Pasquino, Aretino, and the Concealed Self

Contributor(s): Marco Faini

This article explores Pietro Aretino’s pasquinade production as a crucial phase in the construction of his public and literary persona that is characterized by a peculiar effacement of the author’s voice. The article then focuses on issues of anonymity and authorship in the fifteenth and...

“Il ridervi de la goffezza del dire”: Niccolò Franco et la satire napolitaine du pétrarquisme

Contributor(s): Roland Béhar

This essay explores the Neapolitan background of Niccolò Franco and argues that although the main purpose of his Il Petrarchista (Venice, 1539) was certainly a kind of Erasmian and Aretinian satire of the Petrarchist mode which grounded Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525), still not...

Burlesque Connotations in the Pictorial Language in Bronzino’s Poetry

Contributor(s): Carla Chiummo

Agnolo di Cosimo, better known as Bronzino, was not only one of the most celebrated painters at the court of Cosimo I in Florence; he was also a dazzling poet, as Vasari reminds us in his Vite. Bronzino was the author of a Petrarchan canzoniere, as well as of burlesque poems. In his sonetti...

The Question of Esoteric Writing in Machiavelli’s Works

Contributor(s): Rasoul Namazi

The question addressed by this article is whether esotericism or secret teachings exist in Machiavelli’s writings. This question has been a major point of contention between the commentators of Machiavelli, with many denying the existence of esoteric teaching in the Machiavellian corpus. This...

“Of rose and pomegarnet the redolent pryncesse”: Fashioning Princess Mary in 1525

Contributor(s): Stephen Hamrick

While a more accurate appraisal of Mary Tudor’s life and reign is underway, historians of literature continue either to ignore or to misinterpret surviving representations of Princess Mary. To begin correcting this failure, the article analyzes a complex 1525 verse portrait of Mary, setting that...

“No chronicle records his fellow”: Reading Perkin Warbeck in the Early Seventeenth Century

Contributor(s): Igor Djordjevic

This article argues that John Ford’s play Perkin Warbeck should be read in the context of “new” Jacobean readings of the historiography of Henry VII’s reign. After tracing the origins and dissemination of Warbeck’s scaffold confession of imposture, and exposing the sixteenth-century chroniclers’...

Thomas Browne and the Silent Text

Contributor(s): Jessica Wolfe

Throughout his writings, the physician and essayist Thomas Browne (1605–82) grapples with the problem of how and whether to interpret the silence of texts. His innovative solutions to the problem of “negative authority,” the term used in early modern theological debates over the significance, or...

Ecclesiastical Chronotaxes of the Renaissance

Contributor(s): Damiano Acciarino

During the sixteenth century, confessional disputes between Catholics and Protestants became the “battlefield” for determining and shaping the reformed Christian religion. Antiquarian erudition played a key role in this process, acting in accordance with the diverse cultural systems in place,...

Translating Dramatic Texts in Sixteenth-Century England and France: Introduction / Traduire le texte dramatique au seizième siècle en Angleterre et en France : Introduction

Contributor(s): Anne G. Graham, Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby

Robert Radcliffe’s Translation of Joannes Ravisius Textor’s Dialogi (1530) and the Henrician Reformation

Contributor(s): Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby

Joannes Ravisius Textor’s Dialogi aliquot festivissimi (1530) exerted considerable influence in England in the 1530s. The English Textor movement was spurred primarily by the dialogues’ effectiveness in advancing and popularizing specific religious changes promoted by the government as part of...

Toning Down Abraham: Arthur Golding’s 1577 Translation, A Tragedie of Abraham’s Sacrifice

Contributor(s): Anne G. Graham

Arthur Golding was a prolific Elizabethan translator, most famous for his rendering of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In 1577, he translated Théodore de Bèze’s 1550 tragedy, Abraham sacrifiant. While the Huguenot’s play has been widely studied, Golding’s translation has received almost no scholarly...

“Comme espics dans les plaines”: Patterns of Translation of Robert Garnier’s Epic Similes in Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia (1594)

Contributor(s): Marie-Alice Belle

Although celebrated in its time as a worthy contribution to the poetic experiments of the late Elizabethan age, Thomas Kyd’s 1594 Cornelia, translated from Robert Garnier’s Cornélie (1574), has long been held by modern criticism as a minor work in the playwright’s career. Previous attempts to...

Towards a Typology of Cross-Channel Dramatic Borrowings: The View from the White Cliffs

Contributor(s): Richard Hillman

Scholarship on the diverse ways in which early modern English playwrights “translated” French textual material, dramatic and otherwise, has by now accumulated enough specific instances to justify an overview of methods and results. There are few outright translations of French plays, but the...

Les vies françaises de l’Arcadia : du roman de Sir Philip Sidney à ses adaptations dramatiques en France

Contributor(s): Alban Déléris

Dans les années 1580, Sir Philip Sidney s’attelle à l’écriture de son oeuvre majeure, l’Arcadia, vaste roman pastoral dont la composition inachevée s’étale sur plusieurs années, et la publication posthume. Sa diffusion à l’étranger, et notamment en France, est rapide et l’Arcadia fait en effet...

La farse d’Amphitrion (Anvers, 1504), première traduction française d’une comédie plautinienne

Contributor(s): Mathieu Ferrand

La farse d’Amphitrion paraît à Anvers en 1504, dans un recueil de vers anonymes. Il s’agit de la première traduction française d’une comédie plautinienne. L’analyse du texte et du paratexte permet d’abord de reconstituer le portrait intellectuel de l’auteur — un poète de la cour de Bourgogne — et...