ABSTRACT
Renaissance lite ran theorists, highly influenced by Aristotle's Poetics, and consistently propounded a utilitarian aim for comedy, a genre that could instruct readers and spectators as it also pleased them. Dramatic traces of real-life economic hardship, which overlay the age-youth binary, push these two apparent comedies towards the domain of tragicomedy, or even anticomedy. One of Piccolomini's types, the comic senex, demonstrates some telltale, infinitely repeatable characteristics across geographic and temporal boundaries, such as between Cinquecento Italy and Elizabethan England. In the case of L'Anconitana, Ruzante, born in the Paduan countryside and a lifelong witness to the ravages of war and poverty that Venetian policy had wrought in the territories of the Republic. According to one statistical study, the elderly composed about 10 percent of the early modern English population, a considerably lesser figure than in Britain today.
