ABSTRACT
As we have seen in Chapter 2, six games are proposed and rejected before the game of forming a perfect courtier is chosen. One of the rejected games, suggested by Cesare Gonzaga (1.8), is premised on the view that in everyone there are traces, or seeds, or sparks (the metaphor varies) of folly (pazzia) relating to some particular preoccupation. Like Ariani’s study of pazzia and cognate terms in the Courtier, the present chapter also takes this speech by Cesare as its point of reference. But Ariani’s reading is substantially different from the one developed here, since it is based on a semantic analysis of terms as they are used throughout the Courtier, and their linguistic context, but pays little attention to the question of which character is speaking at any particular moment and in what dramatic context their speech occurs. Our own approach, however, foregrounds these considerations.
