Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy from Machiavelli to Goldioni.

Jackson I. Cope. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. x + 221pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8223-1760-6.

The study of Italian theatre tends to localize rather than generalize. Jackson Cope has defied this trend in past works, including The Theatre and the Dream (1973) and Dramaturgy of the Daemonic (1984). His new work on "secret sharers" continues to look at the whole while at the same time focussing on a subgenre of Italian comedy that he finds throughout the peninsula and adduces as evidence of a far greater cross-fertilisation than is commonly acknowledged.

Moving beyond Duckworth and Frye's work on the "argument" on comic plot, and past Toschi, Segal and Slater's discussions of the popular and festive element in comedy, Cope finds in Italian comedy another plot paradigm which he labels "anti-Plautine" or "Anti-New Comedy." The principal elements of the New Comedy formula are present: lovers, obstacle, harmonious reconciliation. But in the plays that Cope discusses, the "happy ending" is a misleading surface. In the denouement, the audience shares with one or more of the characters in the play knowledge of a secret that is kept from the play's society at large. The audience is thus required to witness two endings in a single action: one, the harmonious closure of New Comedy, the other, a disharmonious non-resolution that enforces the audience's collusion in secrecy to such an extent that the collusion is a formal ingredient of the comedy.

Having presented the nub of his argument in the introduction, Cope proceeds to give it substance in detailed readings of a range of plays. He begins with a reading of a goliardic comedy in Latin, Ugolino Pisani's Philogenia, in which the title character is seduced, betrayed, exploited by friends of the seducer, and married off to a doltish peasant with the connivance of a corrupt friar and two whores. Honor and the girl's availability are preserved in the "happy ending"; the betrayal of Philogenia's ingenuous trust is known to all but herself.

Analyses of Galeotto del Carretto's Li sei contenti, the anonymous La venexiana, and Ruzante's La Betia show the operation of the paradigm in the Veneto. For Siena, Cope chooses rather questionably Alessandro Piccolomini's Dialogo della bella creanza (which develops the theme of secrecy while not being a comedy), and the rustic farces of the Rozzi. For Florence, Cecchi's L'assiuolo, Grazzini's Il frate, and Machiavelli's Mandragola (the order is significant) carry his point admirably.

Not sharing Cope's enthusiasm for the Milanese dramatist Carlo Maria Maggi, I will pass to the concluding chapter which provides a careful reading of Goldoni's mid-career works, Il frappatore, La bottega del caffe, and the masterpiece Villeggiatura trilogy. The lieto fine of this trilogy, which is not (he points out) to be confused with a happy ending, is that three of the four women enter marriages that are extraordinarily problematic, since they are entered with closely guarded secrets. This final chapter, which proves to have been the driving force of the book, also opens up new possibilities, particularly for a reading of the novels and theatre of Luigi Pirandello.

Gendered questions are generally absent from Cope's analysis. He does not ask why men write about women cheerfully accepting compromise and secrecy, and about the men who deceive them and themselves. Ultimately, the value of this book lies in the considered reading and contextualisation of the plays and their relationship with their audiences. It is difficult for English-speaking audiences, accustomed to seeing sixteenth-century theatre on stage, to imagine how little attention pre-seventeenth-century texts (that is, before Goldoni) are given in the Italian theatre. Cope's contextualisation and analysis will contribute to their reassessment.

NERIDA NEWBIGIN University of Sydney