ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Renaissance comedy problematized the performances of gender that humanist discourse prescribed. It examines Il commodo, a play by Antonio Landi. The chapter examines the ideal performances of womanhood and the women roles that were expected to play in the prescriptive discourse of humanism before considering the various performances of motherhood and the construction of patriarchal masculinity in Antonio Landi's Il commodo. The humanist authors did not so much describe what they observed of married life in their own society or the women they encountered. The discourse of humanism presented ideal women not merely as mothers, but as breast-feeding mothers. Yet, although according to patriarchal ideology, for practical as well as ideological reasons, ideal womanhood required the harmonious coexistence of wifehood and motherhood, the virtuous performance of motherhood could prove to be an obstacle to the performance of wifehood.
