Charlotte Pressler

Department of English

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, NY, 14260

(716) 886-4463





    Passing from Play to Play: The Novella as Mediator Between

              Italian and English Renaissance Drama



     This is an exploratory paper on a topic about which I continue to
have more questions

than answers. It began, for me, with a consideration of two contrasting
approaches to

comparative Renaissance drama, both of which I find very useful. The
newer of the two is

sometimes called "new structuralism"; the other is the more familiar
discipline of theater history.

While "new structuralism" calls attention to similarities in the stock
plots and characters of

Italian and English Renaissance drama, theater historians point to the
divergence in their

theatrical practices. A link between the two forms of drama is easy to
sense but hard to elucidate.

I will suggest here that the genre of prose fiction known as the novella
was the mediator that not

only transmitted Italian dramas to England, but transformed them into
the kinds of material that

the very different practices of the English public stages would find
"good to use."



     "New structuralist" approaches to Renaissance drama focus on the
stock characters and

plot elements common to both Italian and English drama. Among them are
the familiar scenes

and characters of New Comedy: the bawdy nurse, the clever manservant,
the parasite, the miser,

the impotent old man and the superannuated virgin (and so on). Stock
characters and plot

elements are used by Renaissance playwrights to generate "new" plays as
recombinant versions

of old. New structuralists, however, tend not to say very much about the
means through which

the English stages might have become acquainted with Italian plays and
methods of working (as

opposed to the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, sources for both
Italian and English

plays). Such evidence as there is for direct contacts between Italian
and English theaters prior to

1600 is sparse and fragmentary.

     However, some sort of contact must have occurred. In Italy, the
rediscovery of Plautus'

comedies by humanist scholars of the early fifteenth century had led to
what has been called a

movement for an "experimental" theater in the sixteenth. Gentleman
amateurs of the theater

grouped together in "academies" or societies, whose aim was to
reinterpret the norms of classical

theater in plays responding to the social and political situations of
their own times: this was the

commedia erudita of the Italian Cinquecento. One such play, Gl'Ingannati
("The Deceived"), a

reworking of Plautus' Menaechmi which makes the look-alike twins brother
and sister, has long

been recognized as a source of Twelfth Night. Attempts to trace the
precise relationship between

the two plays, however, have produced instead a proliferating and
tangled web of resemblances

among plays and tales in what has come to be called the "Ingannati
family."

     Furthermore, though the similarities between Twelfth Night and
Gl'Ingannati are

apparent, so are the differences. Gl'Ingannati has a contemporary
setting, the realistically

rendered city of Modena, familiar to its audience. Twelfth Night is set
in "Illyria," a generalized

place on the Adriatic coast, remote from its English audience's
experiences. The time of Twelfth

Night is non-specific and its topical references are few. The time of
Gl'Ingannati is contemporary

with its production, and the play is deeply topical, for it is one
character's attempt to repair the

damage his family had suffered during the Sack of Rome that sets the
plot in motion.

     All but one of the principal characters of Gl'Ingannati are
hard-headed members of the

merchant classes; they and their servants enact the "realistic
depictions of contemporary urban

Italian life" that Robert Henke has found typical of early Cinquecento
Italian comedy (19).

Twelfth Night's characters, on the other hand, are almost entirely drawn
from the nobility and

gentry, and moreover a gentry of a leisured and rather fantastical sort.

     In what psychoanalytic criticism might read as the most significant
change, the vecchi of

Gl'Ingannati, the fathers with comically inappropriate marriage plans
whose consent is required

for the comic resolution, do not appear as characters in Twelfth Night.
Yet the old family

servants, male and female, whose supporting roles as helpers, mediators,
tricksters, and bawdy

critics of the pretensions of the upper classes are crucial in Plautine
comedy, are also missing

from Twelfth Night.

     In sum, the young lovers of Gl'Ingannati seek, with the help of
their servants, to

reintegrate themselves into, and in the process repair, the damaged
social order, realistically

rendered, of contemporary Italy; to this, their fathers, as the social
order's representatives, must

give their consent. The young lovers of Twelfth Night are on their own,
in an indeterminate place

and time where "authority" is personated by the pompous steward Malvolio
and the older

generation by the drunken, swaggering Sir Toby Belch. Without parents,
servants, nurses or

tutors, they must start fresh and improvise the order they wish to
achieve.

     As a recent article by Jack D'Amico has observed, these are
differences grounded in the

staging practices characteristic of Italian and English theater. For
D'Amico, there is an "essential

continuity between the theatrical representation of the place where the
action unfolds and the felt

quality of that place" (265). The fixed set characteristic of the
Italian theater, a realistically

rendered cityscape against which the comedy is performed, offers an
"idealized image of the city

as structure" (267). Ultimately a place of rational control, the city is
"perturbed but not

dissolved" by the "fluid, metamorphosizing power of erotic love" (267).
The "harmonious

blending of structures employed in the prospettiva of Italian comedy,"
D'Amico writes,

"provides a visual frame for the action of a comedy as it moves
temporally to its happy ending"

(266), while "the disguises and shifting identities ... complicate but
never transcend the city as

the measure of human life" (282).

     On the other hand, the "marvelous fluidity" (278) of the
unlocalized English stage set

mirrors the fluidity of desire in Twelfth Night, its "ability to create
strange experiences" (283)

which "reward those who have been willing to give up a fixed image of
the self and to follow

those elusive echoes which lead toward some as yet unseen perspective"
(281). The power of

language in Shakespearean comedy, D'Amico writes, is the power to
"project images, to create

fluid perspectives that dissolve obstructions and reshape the urban
world of comedy" in the space

opened up by the unlocalized, indeterminate English stage (266).

     Despite their similarities, then, Gl'Ingannati and Twelfth Night
inhabit fundamentally

different theatrical worlds, realized in fundamentally different plays.
Both strive to effect the

reintegration of their characters into their worlds, but the English
characters must, and the Italian

characters may not, reshape the worlds into which they will reintegrate
themselves. Each comedy

is conditioned by, and differentiated through, the staging practices of
the theaters in which it was

performed.

     These differences between the theatrical practices of Italian and
English theater

companies would have made direct interchange between the two very
difficult in practice. A

comedy designed for the "world" of the fixed Italian stage is not easy
to adapt to the shifting

perspectives and fluid projections of the unlocalized English stage. It
has to forego the fixed

cityscape of the Italian theater, the frame which asserts the ultimate
control of reason; but in

doing so it abandons the Italian comedic telos: reintegration into the
visible frame of the city, the

measure of human life. More: on an unlocalized stage, the city is there
if and only if a character

says that it is, and it is only what a character has said that it is.
Now characters who strive with

all their might to integrate themselves into a structure which they
believe to be fixed, durable,

and visible to all, but which in fact exists only in their own verbal
projections, may be fit subjects

for comic ridicule, but they will not be comic heroes.

     Thus, though Italian and English Renaissance comedies may have had
a common

repertoire of plot and character elements, these elements are
consistently and significantly

transformed in their passage from Italian to English stages; Twelfth
Night is a representative

example here. "New structuralists" call attention to the plot and
character elements shared by

Italian and English Renaissance comedies; theater historians make it
clear that considerable

divergences in theatrical practices existed, and moreover would have
hampered interchange

between the two theaters.

     Genetic criticism has long established, however, that the proximate
source of Twelfth

Night is not a play, but Barnabe Riche's novella Of Apolonius and Silla.
Like other English

dramatists of the time, Shakespeare often used a novella rather than a
play, as his starting point.

In the rest of this paper, I will sketch in the generic/genetic history
of the Ingannati novellas,

hoping to show that the successive transformations of the tale mediated
its passage from

commedia erudita to Shakespearean comedy.

     The earliest known collection of Italian novelle, the Novellino, is
already marked by the

variety in subject matter, the didactic purpose, and the flexible
ethical attitude which are usually

considered to characterize the genre as a whole. In these tales, Fortune
rules much of human life,

but intelligent men and women know how to adjust their own plans to
variable circumstances.

Maintaining the appearance of family honor is all-important to the
protagonists; but their real

goal is to satisfy as much as possible of their own desires while
keeping their own and others'

reputations intact. As in the commedia erudita, the characters' desires
inhabit but do not rupture

the over-arching, conventional civic order which frames these early
tales.

     The sixteenth-century collections of Matteo Bandello (Novelle,
1554) and Giraldi Cinthio

(Hecatommithi, 1565) mark a change in the conventions of the genre. In
these narratives, the

focus is no longer on the clever tricks and stratagems by which
characters achieve their goals.

Instead, the tales are concerned principally with the accidents to which
human affairs are

subjected. Bandello and Giraldi Cinthio offer a disconnected succession
of random happenings

against a background of political and economic disorders, preferring to
write about extreme

situations, and valuing the "marvellous," whatever its ethical kind.
They stress the pathos of their

protagonists' situations, subjected to their own and others' violent
passions and the equally

violent forces of war. Such tales offer survival tools for those caught
in the collapsing world of

early sixteenth-century Italy; as Robin Kirkpatrick has written, they
"mirror a cultural situation in

which there is no stable viewpoint" (235).

     The sixteenth-century Italian novella thus extends the genre's
characteristic relativism to

the social order itself. The order of their world, if it has an order,
is mysterious and providential,

not intelligible and rational; for the order of reason is ruptured by
actions which reason cannot

comprehend. As Francesco Bondini had written in one of the few
contemporary theorizations of

the novella, his 1574 Lezioni sopra il comporre delle novelle:

                    [M]uch more amazing [than the wonders of the natural
world] is the human

          intellect especially in its moments of perversity: love can
lead us to destroy the

          object of love, as Deianara destroyed Hercules; in Oedipus we
can see a trust in

          reason lead to its own overthrow; amazingly, it is as if in
the human intellect there

          were a living force that destroyed the rationality of that
intellect and the

          arguments that rationality might employ so as not to fall into
such error [qtd. in

          Kirkpatrick 232].

     Matteo Bandello, who converted the Ingannati plot into one of his
Novelle (II:36), sets

most of his action against the familiar backdrop of the commedia; his
characters pop in and out

of each other's houses in a way that asks the reader to imagine a fixed
Serlian prospettiva

standing behind the narrative. The rational order presupposed by the
main action of the tale,

however, is problematized by Bandello's long introduction, which follows
a meditation on the

excessive force of love with a lamentation over the outrages perpetrated
at the Sack of Rome.

     Love in Gl'Ingannati had not been given an excessive character.
There, love was a means

by which the social order might be repaired, and, as such, subordinated
to it. The lovers'

stratagems ended by restoring the fortunes of their families, which had
been disrupted and

damaged by the Sack of Rome. Love in Bandello, however, has become a
power capable of

subordinating even cosmic reason to its ends. Love, he writes, makes
lovers do marvellous and

excessive things (cose... meravigliose e strabocchevoli; 252);
incredible deeds become at once

credible if we are told that they were done by lovers. As the Greek
fables tell us, even the gods

themselves behave madly and shamefully when in love. When juxtaposed
with his account of the

"incests, sacrileges, rapes, and murders" perpetrated at the Sack of
Rome by the "enemies of the

faith of Christ," the German and Spanish soldiers he calls "worse than
Turks," love becomes by

implication the one power excessive enough to be contraposed to such
outrageous impieties. The

stratagems of the lovers in Bandello, then, no longer inhabit the fixed,
rational order of the

Ingannati city; Bandello writes as if this order has been destroyed for
good by the Sack of Rome,

allowing love (and violence) to range without limit over the ruins of
the city. In Bandello's tale,

framed by the ruined order of reason and the limitlessness of love, the
movement toward the

fluid perspectives of a Twelfth Night has begun.

     English versions of Italian novellas begin to appear in the 1560s.
These were not

translations, but adaptations of the Italian tales, and their writers,
perhaps in an attempt at self-

legitimation, tried to associate them with the pedagogical, humanist
genre of the exemplum.

Thus

William Painter, in his preface to the Palace of Pleasure, tells his
readers that he is about to set

before them notable examples of virtue and vice, so that they may
imitate the actions of the

virtuous characters in the tales and abhor and shun the actions of the
vicious. But the characters

in English novellas not only were exempla; they also presented
themselves through exempla, in

elaborately worked-up set speeches offering their responses to plot
situations and deliberations

on courses of action, which the narrator presented to the readers as
models of verbal expression.

     To further their didactic purposes, novella writers enriched their
material with "copious"

ornamentation. In Renaissance rhetorical theory, skillful ornamentation
added "vividness" to an

exemplum, and the more vivid the exemplum, the greater an impression it
would make on the

reader's memory and the better it would serve its didactic function --
or so the theory went. In

practice, "vividness" in the presentation of vice was as likely to sweep
the reader away with

wonder (and even admiration), to the detriment of any moral the exemplum
was intended to

suggest, not to mention the reader's own morals. Between the rhetorical
value of "vividness" and

the didactic goals of the moralized text, there was a profound and
difficult gap. English novella

writers responded to their critics (who included Roger Ascham and
Stephen Gosson) by

defensively padding their tales with thick layers of moralization,
supplied by a strong narrator

and imposed ad hoc. The result was a style Robin Kirkpatrick has justly
called both "extreme and

uncertain" (250).

     I want to turn now to one of the more important rhetorical
techniques used by novella

writers to moralize their tales: the strategic deployment in the
narrative of adages or "sentences."

This "sub-literary small form,"  as Rosalie Colie once called it, has
been the subject of an

extensive theoretical literature, beginning with Aristotle's Rhetoric
and extended in the

Renaissance by Giraldo Cinthio and Minturno.

     Though the "sentence" is a "small form," its uses are multiple. At
the beginning of a

novella, the "sentence" functions as a prologue, announcing the topos
that will be handled in the

narrative to come. Within the narrative, the sentence, as Geoffrey
Bennington has written, can be

found "in the form of maxims, aphorisms, and generalizing assertions,
...  sentences which lay

down the law" (xi; ital. in original). Renaissance literary theorists,
who, like Bennington, based

their analyses on Aristotle, offered similar theorizations of the
"sentence." (I find it interesting,

parenthetically, that a good bit of contemporary criticism was
anticipated in the Renaissance.) As

Minturno wrote in his 1564 L'arte poetica, the sentence is "something
which is uttered as

appertaining universally to life and morals" (299). Giraldi Cinthio, in
his 1554 Discorso intorno

al comporre dei romanzi, comments that "as soon as sentences are reduced
to the particular, they

lose the name and fall short of being sentences" [151]. Sentences,
however, are also used,

according to Minturno, to present "characters and habits ... the
disposition and tendency of the

mind, and the qualities and appetite of the man who speaks" (299).

     To summarize: a sentence, in Renaissance practice, may present
either a consensus

opinion, one which is presumed to be shared by both the writer and the
readers; or it may be used

for "characterization," in which case neither the writer nor the readers
need accept -- indeed, may

vigorously reject -- the character's version of consensus morality.
However, as Minturno is

careful to point out, sentences in a "poetic" work ought always to be
introduced by particular

characters: "Remember," he writes, "you are not a teacher of manners nor
of learning, but one

who is narrating; you should introduce them in the action and the words
of someone else" (300).

     Three forms of sententious authority, then, compete in Renaissance
theorizations: that of

the culturally-sanctioned topos, the theme handled in a particular tale;
that of the universalizing

proposition of consensus morality, usually enunciated by the narrator in
a novella; and that of the

claim (always to be examined closely) of any particular character to act
or speak in line with

consensus morality. It is the last of these three that is perhaps most
important. For the action of a

novella frequently pauses so that characters may give, explicate, and
defend in set speeches the

maxims which establish "plausibility structures" for own actions. These
speeches avail

themselves of "the fact that a given narrative proposition can be
subsumed under different and

contradictory sententious propositions" (Bennington 121); characters
choose and build upon just

those "sentences" which allow favorable constructions of their actions,
producing speeches the

reader might be expected to judge as partial or specious.  However,
since the rhetorical ideal of

"vividness" applied to the characters' speeches as well as to the
narrator's descriptions of their

actions, the characters' specious self-justifications could be so
vividly rendered as to overwhelm

and disarm the reader's critical judgment, rendering the speech
ineffective as an exemplum.

     To prevent this, the narrator of an English novella frequently
intruded into the narrative,

hoping to correct the overwhelming impression his characters' "false"
rhetoric might be making

on his readers. Attempting to moralize each successive, presentationally
vivid incident in the

narrative, he is pulled in multiple and inconsistent directions. His own
rhetoric, which should

ground the tale in a firm moral consensus, becomes haphazard and
situational. In sum, it begins

to resemble the rhetoric of his characters. The presumption of a
consensus between narrator and

audience becomes severely undermined, and with it the narrator's own
claim to moral authority.

More and more, the narrator of a novella becomes merely one more
idiosycratic rhetorician

deploying "sentences which have lost the name of sentences." The result
is an ever more

destabilized, ungrounded narrative.

     Thus in Barnabe Riche's Of Apolonius and Silla, as Yvonne Rodax
once commented

(190), the characters are neither controlled by the narrator nor in full
control of their narrative

destinies, and their attempts to understand and moralize their own
positions are undercut by a

ironizing narrator who refuses to accept their set speeches at face
value. In Twelfth Night, that

improvisational, situational nature of the characters' understandings is
still more marked;

moreover, the ironizing narrative voice has survived the transition from
narrative to play, having

been assumed by Feste the Fool. It may be noticed, in this context, that
most of the

characteristics which differentiate Twelfth Night from Gl'Ingannati also
distinguish Riche's

novella Of Apolonius and Silla from Bandello's.

     Riche's tale, like Twelfth Night, takes place at an indeterminate
time and in a generalized

exotic setting: the eastern regions of Cyprus and Constantinople at a
time then some 150 years in

the past. The journalistic concern displayed by Bandello, who is careful
to give the source for

each story he tells, and to locate each within a particularized
historical setting, gives way to an

indeterminacy which perhaps reflects the English narrative's status as
(relatively timeless)

exemplum, rather than, as in the Italian tale, an account of events
within a particular social

context.

     The merchant and servant characters of Gl'Ingannati persist in
Bandello's novella, though

the role of the vecchi is given less prominence, the number of servants
has been reduced, and the

raucous and often bawdy action of the subplots involving servant
characters has been dropped.

Riche's characters, on the other hand, are, like Shakespeare's, somewhat
exoticized aristocrats.

Silla, who corresponds to Gl'Ingannati's Lelia, Bandello's Nicuola, and
Twelfth Night's Viola, is

the daughter of the governor of Cyprus, "an ancient duke" (182). Catella
in Bandello, like

Isabella in Gl'Ingannati, is the unmarried daughter of one of the
merchant vecchi, but Julina in

Riche is "a noble dame, a widow, whose husband ... was one of the
noblest men that were in the

parts of Greece" (187), and the head of an independent household, as
Olivia in Twelfth Night

will

be.

     Julina's newly independent status, however, lessens the role of the
other vecchio,

Lelia/Nicuola/Silla's father, to that of a mere accessory. Riche's
novella, then, seems to be

preparing the way for the absent fathers of Twelfth Night. One might ask
why the vecchi start to

disappear from the English versions of the Ingannati-plot. The answer
might be that they are no

longer the privileged utterers of "sentences" in the narrative.
Renaissance literary theory

considered it the task of old men to enunciate the consensus morality
that, however mocked, is

the verbal analogue of the fixed cityscape, the order of conventional
reason framing an Italian

comedy. The characters of English novellas, however, have begun to
negotiate the plausibility-

structures of the narrative among themselves; the authoritative narrator
is being reduced to one

more participant, and often an anxious one, in this play of rhetorical
justifications, and the

resulting destabilization of authority might be rendering the function
of grave old men obsolete.

     Though the motivations of Riche's characters tend to be as
situational as those of their

Italian analogues, his women characters present themselves through
moralized reflections which

take seriously the conventional views of love, chastity, and women's
honor, offering elaborate

examinations of their emotions and motives. Riche's Julina, while more
governed by her desires

than Silla, and so answering in some respects to the comic theatergram
of the appetitive young

widow, has an exquisite sense of honor and shame missing from her
Italian analogues Isabella

and Catella. While they are blanks, who seem to exist principally as the
free-floating female

sexual desire through which the families of the two merchant fathers
will eventually be joined,

she is torn by desires she struggles to understand from others'
perspectives as well as her own.

     Well able to act in her own behalf, as indeed her Italian
counterparts had been, she is also

able to offer "sentences" which construct plausibility-structures for
her own and others' actions.

Julina has become able to rhetorically set forth and defend, perhaps
even imaginatively project,

the order in which she believes her own desires and actions to be
situated. Her Italian

counterparts merely express their half-articulate desires, which are
legitimated not by their own

but by others' speech, by their fathers' consent to their marriages, set
against and upheld by the

rational order of the city.

     Finally, Riche's narrative voice is distinguished by its ironic and
distanced tone, as in the

following address to his women readers:

                    Gentlewomen, according to my promise, I will here
for brevity's sake omit to

          make repetition of the long and dolorous discourse recorded by
Silla for this

          sudden departure of her Apolonius, knowing you to be as
tender-hearted as Silla

          herself, whereby you may the better conjecture the fury of her
fever [183].

He has, as it were, given up the attempt to control his characters with
his superior moralizations,

and contents himself with aloof, occasionally mocking asides to the
reader.     In Twelfth

Night, the situationally ironized "sentences" of the novella become
quibbles tossed so rapidly

from one character's mouth to another's that the authority which the
enunciation of the sentence

should confer on its enunciator begins to circulate at dizzying speed.
In a play which makes Sir

Toby Belch the chief enunciator of maxims and sentences, both kinds of
authority are at risk.

This is the man who can take a maxim from William Lily's Latin grammar:
Diliculo surgere

saluberrimum est ("It is most healthful to rise early"), and turn it
into a jesting affirmation of the

moral worthiness of drunkards:

                    Approach, Sir Andrew. Not to be abed after midnight
is to be up betimes; and

          "Deliculo surgere," thou know'st. (2:3:1-3).

But as Feste observes: "A sentence is but a chev'ril glove to a good
wit. How quickly the wrong

side may be turned outward!" (3.1.11-13).

     The characters of Twelfth Night do not by their use of "sentences"
attempt to align their

particular actions with a universalizing, consensus morality. Rather,
they use the maxims and

quibbles they toss out as starting points for the improvisation of their
particular, irreducible

"singularities," none of which sum up to a "common place." If
Gl'Ingannati represents free-

floating physical desire finding its place within the rational order of
the city, Twelfth Night

encourages language to float free, to elaborate the paradoxes of desire
in the indeterminate space

of an improvisatory social order in which personal identity is
confounded in twinship, no desire

has a constant object or place, and Viola's cry "Prove true,
imagination, O prove true" [3.4387]

may be the only sentence commanding universal assent.

     As I have argued here, however, the mediating genre of the novella,
in transmitting the

conventions of Italian commedia erudita to English audiences, also
relativized the fixed

structures of order and reason which framed Italian comedy. The English
novella, by

problematizing the rhetorical structures that constructed its narrative
authority, opened up its

narrations, if not entirely willingly, to the de-universalized,
individuated perspectives explored

by the English stage. When such a novella was turned into a play,
whatever remaining authority a

narrator might have provided would be dropped, along with the narrator.
If the de-universalized

perspectives of the English novella were then to be played out on the
shifting, unlocalized

English stage, something very much like Twelfth Night might be the
result.

                           Works Cited



Accademia degli Intronati di Siena. La Commedia degli Ingannati (1538).
Edizione critica con

introduzione e note di Florindo Cerreta.

          Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1953. Tr. as The Deceived by Bruce
Penman. In Five Italian

Renaissance Comedies. Ed. Bruce Penman.

     London (et.al.): Penguin Books, 1978.

Bandello, Matteo. Novelle (1554). A cura di Gioachino Brognoligo. 3
vols. Bari: Gius. Laterza

& Figli, 1931.

Bennington, Geoffrey. Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law
in

Eighteenth-Century French