ABSTRACT

In the climax of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Ulisse, disguised as the old beggar, succeeds where the three suitors had failed before him: he strings his own bow. In the climax of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Ulisse, disguised as the old beggar, succeeds where the three suitors had failed before him: he strings his own bow. The suitors Pisandro, Antinoo, and Anfinimo cry out in astonishment while Minerva, ever Ulisse’s helper, descends in a machine. The focus on performance has afforded the collection a capacious interpretive tool, which is able to address both the complex interplay of orality and written composition and circulation as well as the impure readings the reception of the Homeric poems demand. The hero with many shapes, whose powerful mind allows protean adaptation to the circumstances, is the figure of variation and change, and possibly the most fitting case study for the stability of what people call a literary character.