ABSTRACT
All dramatic genres and sub-genres, developing throughout the pre- and post-Counter Reformation period – commedia dell’arte, commedia grave, and pastoral drama – are dependent on the commedia erudita, whose established, regular composition of seminal theatregrams is also visible in the reduced three-act format of improvised theatre. Louise George Clubb charts chronologically the various stages of this artistic phenomenon through the social, historical, and religious events which marked the private and public life of Renaissance Italy. Constructed on the ingredients and types of the urban middle-class characters from Roman New Comedy – senex and adulescens amans, servus correns, servus scaltrus, meretrix, matrona, miles gloriosus, parasitus, leno, etc. – and moved by love, hunger, and avarice, the commedia erudita engaged in the “domestic struggle of youth with age, in plots woven by clever servants towards the victory of young lovers over mercenary parents or foolish elderly rivals”. Interestingly, the chapter examines the transformations undergone in the period’s theatrical practice by the most recurrent theatregrams – misplaced love, sexual disguise, cross-dressing, mistaken identities, presumed death, bed-trick, etc. – in the wake of the new spirit and taste arising from the Council of Trent.
