ABSTRACT
The issue of citizenship, when applied to theater people, could seem almost a question mal posee. Logistically speaking, the attempt to pinpoint the patria of a comicoamounts to a fool’s errand, since the archival record seldom yields information about actors before they launched their careers pretending to be other people. Writing plays predominantly in the Paduan dialect and from the perspective often of wise Paduan peasants helped Ruzante critique what he experienced as the stiflingly artificial and exclusionary hierarchies of elite Venetian society; but it was that very aura of elitism that Giovan Battista Andreini desperately needed. Counter-intuitively, Andreini never marked himself as belonging to the place where he had the most consistent patronage and even real estate, Mantua. In one respect it made good sense for Giovan Battista Andreini to insist upon being Florentine: he had been baptized in that city.
