Salvatore Di Maria. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance.

Lewisberg and London: Bucknell University Press, 2002. 11 pls. + 272 pp. $46.50. ISBN: 0-8387-5490-2.

Whereas considerable critical attention has been focused recently on sixteenth-century Italian comedy, little advance has been made in the scholarship relating to Renaissance tragedy since Marvin T. Herrick's Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance and Joseph S. Kennard's The Italian Theatre were published in the 1960s. Moreover, previous scholarship has been very limited in its scope. In an annotation to his discussion, in chapter 8, of three dramatic interpretations of the Dido myth, Di Maria could well be referring to Renaissance tragedy as a whole when he states: "To my knowledge, no scholar has yet examined these tragedies [by Pazzi, Giraldi, and Dolce] from the theatrical point of view. Critical attention has focused mostly on their literariness, plot structure, source material, themes, characters, and tragic conflicts" (254, n. 14).

In order to redress this situation, Di Maria first investigates (pt. 1) the function of Cinquecento theater both as a reflection of aspects of contemporary culture and as a decisive factor in the making of social history since, as he shows, it was a forum for debating such cultural issues as the political nature of kingship and the questione della donna. He then seeks (pt. 2) to determine the literary and dramaturgical innovations that contributed toward the revival of tragedy in the Italian Renaissance.

The idea informing the five chapters that constitute part 1 of this volume is that Renaissance tragedians, while frequently adapting the works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, did so in such a way that their dramas had contemporary relevance. In the tyrant king's downfall, for instance, audiences recognized the rejection of Machiavelli's amoralism and an emerging political philosophy more consonant with the prevailing values of the Counter Reformation. In the conflicting perspectives of the role of the female heroine, the audience was implicitly invited to participate in a debate over the relative status of women. Settings and costumes were modernized, mythological characters were portrayed as barons and knights, religious belief was expressed in Christian, rather than pagan, terms so as to maximize verisimilitude and thus audience involvement as well. The importance that Di Maria places on the spectators of these tragedies as mediators/interpreters between the fictional world of the stage and the sociopolitical reality from which they come is consistent with his aim to broaden the study of tragedy so as to include its theatrical features, its non-verbal and semiotic aspects no less than its literary text.

The process of adapting tragedies so that they could be staged successfully was slow. Although tragedies had been written since the beginning of the sixteenth century, Di Maria points out that Giraldi Cinthio's Orbecche was the first tragedy to be represented on stage (1541). Performance gave rise to significant innovations in the genre, which Di Maria discusses in the second part of his study. He identifies the use of perspective as the first and, arguably, the most important contribution to the staging of tragedy as it allowed for a new conception of dramatic space, which could include any location within earshot of the spectators. The stage itself thus became a decoding center for all dramatic events, especially those taking place on "stages" outside the viewing area. As a corollary to this discussion, Di Maria convincingly reconstructs the stage setting of Aretino's Orazia from verbal indications given by the characters.

Not only did this expansion of dramatic space heighten significantly the verisimilitude of the performance, but it also enabled the direct staging of violence, which conflicted with the Horatian notion of decorum, to be replaced with the verbal reporting of it. In chapter 7, "Representing the Unrepresentable: The Hic et Nunc of Tragedy," Di Maria again uses Orazia and Orbecche to illustrate this device. The spectators "visualize" what is happening close to them: they hear both the victim's dying words and an eyewitness' description of the deed, followed by its perpetrator's admission of guilt.

Di Maria's scholarship in this study is exemplary. Besides his familiarity with both the Italian and French theater of the times, he makes profitable and extensive use both of correspondence to and by the playwrights discussed and of contemporary treatises on theater. The sometimes Italianate nature of his English translations of quotations and occasional typographical errors in no way detract from the considerable merits of this study, which admirably fulfils its stated purpose of reevaluating Italian Renaissance tragedy.

NICOLE PRUNSTER

La Trobe University