RICERCA ITALIANA     

HUMANISTIC THEATRE. STUDIES AND EDITIONS

Università degli Studi di Genova

Abstract

If during Middle Ages there was a scanty production of secular latin plays, with the achievement of humanistic culture, latin drama recovers the tradition of classical theatre (and this already with Albertino Mussato and his Ecerinis, and with Petrarca, author of a lost comedy). Until the first half of XV century most playwrights come from a goliardic milieu, and a larger number of texts linked to the historical and intellectual background of cities like Pavia, Padua and Bologna have been produced. All these cities were the site of prestigious universities which acted as a force of attraction for Italian and foreign students, who represented a pillar of town life, capable of transferring – especially during the course of mid-fifteenth century – to the literary plane life experiences or fantasies often impregnated with sarcasm and irony. Playwrights don’t omit to interpret and to transfer on the scene the reality of everyday life, often made up of dissipation, routs, adventures and mockeries, parallel to an efficient production of novellas inspired by the Decameron. It is not by chance that there are many points of contact with contemporary novellas, as inexhaustible a source of exempla and types as Plautus’s and Terence’s comedies. At the same time, the linguistic factor has great importance: Latin absorbs vernacular expressions which also explain the internationalisation owing to the presence, in the universities towns, of foreign students, bringers of their own language >>>

Principal Investigator

Stefano Pittaluga Università degli Studi di GENOVA

Research Objectives

The chief and most important aim of the project is to prepare critical editions of a substantial amount of latin humanistic theatrical texts, which will form the first group of an inclusive edition of the whole “corpus” of theatrical humanistic texts (about fifty), composed from the beginning of XIV to the end of XV century. These editions will be based on scientific philological criteria, and will include positive critical apparatus, translations in Italian and large historical, literary, linguistic and philological introductions. Every edition will include authors' names, manuscripts and quotations indexes. Another important aim of the Project is to publish essays on linguistic peculiarities of these texts (and of other “comic” humanistic texts), in order to verify the use of classical, mediaeval, vernacular patterns.
A third important aim is that of recovering theatrical texts either unknown or overlooked till now because they have been transmitted as anonymous or without title or lacking the right name of their author. All this will be made possible through a systematic census of the documents emerging from a careful research of the required documents to be performed in Italian and foreign libraries. The first stage will be a census of texts. The census will be based on a scientific methodology already experimented in similar studies in the transmission of texts during the middle ages and Humanism. At the beginning general repertories, such as Iter Italicum >>>

First Results

We hope that the results of the research will correspond to the objectives of the Programme. Therefore the results have to consist in the realization of these lines of research: 1) census of manuscripts and of bibliographical data; 2) preparation of critical editions; 3) philological, historical, literary, linguistic, theatrical essays and studies.
In regard to the first line is indispensable to gather two large dossiers: 1) the first will concern latin comic language in XV century and his relation both with the language of Palliata and vernacular (with attention turned to Italian novel); 2) the second will concern a census of manuscripts and of ancient editions related to humanistic theatrical texts, and also a bibliographical data collection in order to prepare critical editions and essays.
The second line of the research consists in preparing the following critical editions (and this is the main aim of this research): Anonym, Commedia elettorale; Anonym, Andrieta; Anonym, Phylon; Mercurino Ranzo, De falso hypocrita; Hermann Knuyt Van Slyterhoven, Scornetta; Tito Livio Frulovisi, Peregrinatio; Tito Livio Frulovisi Eugenius; Anonym, Dolos; Anonym, Commedia sine nomine; Girolamo Molini, Leucasia; Carlo Verardi, Historia Baetica; Marcellino Verardi, Fernandus servatus. These editions will be based on scientific philological criteria, and will include positive critical apparatus, translations in Italian and large historical, literary, linguistic and philological >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

After the first researches of D'Ancona, Creizenach and Beutler, the students’ attention to humanistic theatre, particularly to comedies, was called by a historian of theatre, Vito Pandolfi, and by a philologist, Alessandro Perosa in the sixty years of the last century. The researches of these two students, based on different cultural visions, induced Antonio Stäuble to publish a global essay on the humanistic comedy: La commedia umanistica del Quattrocento (1968). It is an important study - today obsolete – that systematically deals with many central themes about this genre: analyse of the texts’ contents, problems in the structure and in the linguistic and lexical form, characterization of the persons, relations to classical models, possible representations, historical milieu and its reconstruction, pedagogical and polemical aims, manuscript tradition and diffusion of these texts. The essay of Stäuble aroused new interest for humanistic theatre by the students of the XV century Latin and of the Renaissance theatre.
When Stäuble wrote, only very few of the fifty texts of the corpus were edited and it was possible to read them in not sure editions or in the Perosa’s Italian translation. So the Swiss student had only to read manuscripts and few XVI century editions and he made mistakes of attribution and valuation.
In the last forty years the attention to humanistic theatre and to comic texts of the XV century has risen together with scientific production >>>