ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tragic genre with respect to the textual traces of friendship: its terminology, its connections to gender, and, ultimately, its manifestation into various forms of female virtue and female bonding. In Renzo Cremante’s anthology of Italian Renaissance tragedy, Giangiorgio Trissino’s Sofonisba is labeled as “the first tragedy explicitly modeled on the classics". In sum, friendship can only exist, Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio explains, among good and virtuous men, men who are similar in character and praiseworthy for their lives and customs. Giraldi's Eufimia, another ‘tragedia a lieto fine’, provides further testimony of the discursive presence of female friendship in dramatic practice. On the ideals of friendship and virtue Giraldi becomes more flexible and more inclusive in his theatrical experiments, thereby adding a nuance to the masculine paradigm of the novelle and the Dialoghi that furnish, the ideological template for the whole collection.
