book review: Olga Zorzi Pugliese. Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del Cortegiano): A Classic in the Making. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Castiglione, "The Book Of The Courtier": Training the Ideal Renaissance Courtier (A Précis)
Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 text, The Book of the Courtier, inform renaissance men—and women—how to behave in medieval European courts. The aim of the text is to teach the customs and manners of an ideal courtier. In this précis, I first offer a summary of the text and a detailed synopsis of key concepts, before ending with a brief evaluation and synthesis of the text with the work of Christine de Pizan and Madeleine de Scudery.
Making and breaking the rules: Castiglione's Cortegiano
Renaissance Studies, 1997
I, i. 40 (references are to book, chapter, and page). All translations are from B. Castiglione, The Book 4 t h Courtier, trans. G . Bull (Harmondsworth, 1976). Occasional modifications have been made to the translations to improve clarity.
Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies, 2018
of Goldoni's famously complex female characters in terms of gender discourse (pp. xli-xliv) and the conscious awareness of theatricality pervading Goldoni's Venetian society (pp. li-lvi) provide helpful food for thought to better understand the plays that follow. The afterword, by Italian literary scholar Cesare de Michelis, offers an absorbing analysis of Goldoni's contributions to modernity in terms of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which latter event the playwright experienced first-hand in Paris as his death approached. Where this attractive new edition of the five plays comes up short is in its lack of consistency among the translations. The first play, translated in 1968 by Frederick H Davies (with minimal formal corrections by the editors), reads very much like a play of that era, and a British one at that. It is replete with Britannic lexical foibles such as "my dear chap," the "fortnight," and "good gracious, yes!" (pp. 18, 20, 36). The second translation appeared 30 years later, penned by American translator Jeremy Parzen. It is refreshingly more neutral in tone, although the decision to translate the Venetian zecchino coin into its English equivalent "sequin" is a poor one given the much more common use of the word in the arts (sums in lire instead are left in the original). The last three translations first appeared in 1992, and are the work of Anthony Oldcorn, the renowned medieval and Renaissance scholar (and, incidentally, this reviewer's personal guide through Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio during a bygone semester abroad). While the first two translators leave most titles unchanged ("Signore," "Signora," and "Signorina"), Oldcorn often opts to use the stiff "madam" when "signora" is not followed by a name (e.g. "I am a gentleman, madam" (p. 275), orig. "Son galantuomo, signora"). The disparity between the styles of translation makes it seem as if there are multiple Goldonis writing, this despite the fact that all the plays premiered within a 12-year span of one another. Similarly, the plays could have used clearer contextualization. While the editors have added sparse (and certainly insightful) notes elucidating unfamiliar references and the like to the first two plays, they have only copied and pasted Oldcorn's original notes in the final three. Had the editors taken a firmer hand in this regard, either by providing a concise introduction for each play, or by adding more (and more consistent) supplementary notes, the volume would have had greater overall coherence. Despite these few flaws, the collection is a worthy addition to the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library, furthering the collection's laudable mission of presenting neglected works and eras of Italian literature to an Anglophone readership.
The book is divided into four main chapters, each of which explores different and very specific dramatic conventions and theatrical cultures. Through these case studies Van Pelt strives to illustrate how "certain plays and topoi were used throughout Europe, and that they found themselves reevaluated or reinvented, at times repressed or attacked, so that alternative forms arose that replaced, or existed alongside, their predecessors" (4). The first chapter discusses religious plays and pageants from late medieval Italy, France, and the Low Countries that depicted the desecration of a consecrated Host. The second centers on the figure of Mary Magdalene as represented not only in lesser-known works from the Czech Republic, Germany, and Cyprus but also in plays written by blockbuster dramatists, such as Baroque Spain's Lope de Vega. The third focuses on two different archer-hero characters, England's Robin Hood and Switzerland's Wilhelm Tell, presented as exemplars of elite appropriation of popular and subversive figures across early Renaissance Europe. Finally, the fourth chapter explores a series of civic street performances that took place in 1607 in Wells, England, by examining them in their wider European social and cultural contexts. Clearly the breadth of this book's scope and subject matter is remarkable, especially when considering its length (144 pages). It is much to Van Pelt's credit that she manages to bind these wide-ranging chapters closely together and make them read as a monographic study. Such cohesion rests on the selection of performances that share an underlying element of strategic thinking: as she explains, all the plays discussed in the book "stage a cross-over between the world of the play and the world outside the play" (126), and in doing so attempt to exercise some form of leverage in real life through the medium of performance. Also connecting these chapters is the author's pervasive commitment to transnational reading, abetted by her dexterity and fluency in various languages and cultures. Accompanying its readers across an impressive range of geographic, temporal, or linguistic boundaries, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe guides them toward a better understanding of the common ground on which the theatrical cultures of medieval and early modern Europe were built.