ABSTRACT
Angelo Beolco began his decade-long stage career in Venice, at a brilliant festa at Ca' Foscari in 1520, with a paradox. Angelo Beolco — seems symptomatic of Beolco's creative straddling of the actor-author interface and of his predilection for apparent opposites. It has become a commonplace of Ruzante studies to emphasize that Beolco's focus was primarily on performance over authorship. Andrews's comment about Beolco 'formulating performance texts which were only partly verbal' is particularly apt. The effectiveness of Beolco's texts as theatre does not, in itself, mean that they are anything less than fully worked up and consummately written. A seemingly telling indication that Beolco was uninterested in fate of his material as texts is his failure to get any of his plays into print in his lifetime. Beolco requested in December 1533, and obtained from the Venetian Senate, copyright protection for two of his late five-act comedies, La Piovana and La Vaccaria, he apparently never exercised the publishing option.
