“The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi.”

The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto'sI suppositi

Sergio Costola

Mediaevalia, Volume 33, 2012, pp. 195-228 (Article)

Published by State University of New York PressDOI: 10.1353/mdi.2012.0003

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Mediaevalia, Vol. 33, 2012

THE POLITICS OF A THEATRICAL EVENT

THE 1509 PERFORMANCE OF ARIOSTO’S I SUPPOSITI

Sergio Costola

Ludovico Ariosto is traditionally considered the founder of new vernacular comedy, but this title has in some ways been detrimental to a full understanding of Ariosto’s plays.1 In general, sixteenth-century Italian comedy has enjoyed few critical accolades from the seventeenth century down to our own, and is often faulted for being “formulaic, immoral, socially pointless, stereotypical, and repetitive.”2 Although Ariosto’s comedies are rich in interpretative possibilities, studies generally have not taken into account the plays’ proper context, which links Ariosto’s work to a theatrical practice rather than only to literary genres and traditions.3 These plays were not primarily conceived of as literature, and their principal destina-tion was not the printed text. In fact, Ariosto’s La cassaria and I sup-positi were published in Florence, without the author’s approval, only after they had been performed.4 Since the nature of these plays was not strictly literary, they require consideration as elements of a more complex and composite event. Graham Holderness has claimed that drama has too often been treated—in literary and cultural analysis—as written text; he argues for the need to reconfigure critical analysis with a different conception of Renaissance drama, as theater: “as dra-matic materials that were devised specifically for performance . . . as ‘texts’ that have a performance history often separable from their history as written texts,” and “as cultural products that are designed for mobilization in theatrical rather than literary-critical ways.”5

If this is so, how can one do justice to texts that were designed for mobilization in theatrical ways? How is it possible that texts or events that were relevant for their coeval audiences have become “socially pointless” when historians understand them as a series of writings? To put it another way, how can one recover those synchronic fac-tors that once made these texts so relevant?6 As Thomas Postlewait

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196 The Politics of a Theatrical Event

has recently pointed out, theater studies today too often fail to give adequate consideration to the ways in which political factors, values, and forces are at work in the theater.7 In the study of theater and drama, he argues, the idea of the political has been too simply defined and dealt with in two ways:

We can investigate the political topics, themes, issues, viewpoints, and agendas that get expressed in plays, productions, theatre groups, and artistic movements. Or, by shifting the focus, we can describe the political conditions within the historical matrix that shape dramatic literature, the theatrical arts, performance events, and cultural practices . . . In the first case, we usually locate the politics in the dramatic text . . . or the theatrical event . . . In the second case, we situate the politics within the shaping environment or culture which the work or event supposedly reflects, embodies, expresses, realizes, fulfills, resists, or subverts.8

Both cases set up a familiar polarity between text (or event) versus context: one defines the relationship as an opposition, and the other implies some kind of correspondence through mimesis or represen-tation. Thus, an artist of the Renaissance such as Ariosto, usually operating in and writing for a court, is seen either as a “royal apolo-gist” or a “crypto-subversive” critic.9

So, again, how can one do justice to these plays critically? How can one move beyond the basic polarity between event and context? In order to illustrate the ways in which courtly theatrical performances are related to structures of power and resistance, it will be useful to explore them by taking into consideration a specific event. The event I consider here is the performance of Ludovico Ariosto’s I suppositi that took place in the Ducal Palace of the Este court during the 1509 carnival celebrations. Following Thomas Postlewait’s suggestion that “the idea of location [of politics] needs to be multiple,”10 I will investigate four possible critical perspectives for this theatrical event.

First, I will investigate the frame. The word theater, during the early modern period, designated two simultaneous and distinct actions, seeing and being seen; thus, any critical understanding of the “visions” of this notion of theater must first articulate the struc-ture of the frame, and not simply focus on the content of these visions. In the first part of this essay I will offer a brief overview of the


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social and economic organization of the Renaissance festival at the time of Ariosto.

Second, I will examine the frame within the frame, that is, the architecture of the theater itself and its interplay between the text devised by Ariosto and current historical events. As commonly noted, the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries are characterized, in Italian theater architecture, by the ascendance of Vitruvian planning and perspective scenery over the medieval theater structures and tradi-tions. One consequence of this shift was that the audience arrange-ment tended increasingly to reinforce status differences between men and women. The theater apparatus tended to regulate the man/woman relationship according to a subject/object dichotomy: women were there only to be “looked upon,” with the patriarchal gaze confirming their existence and limiting their potential for mobility. Ariosto, however, reflected and called attention to contem-porary historical events in such a way as to emphasize the provisional nature of power, making contingent and fluid what was held to be permanent and fixed. Instead of presenting a self-sufficient micro-cosm based upon idealizing myths that would support the duke’s claim to power, Ariosto’s theatrical machine offered the possibility to explore the instability of a court in which male and female coteries vied for power.

Third, I will consider the performance from the perspective of Ariosto and the querelle des femmes. Here, I offer an attempt to inves-tigate the author’s intention, motives, and aims; as we shall see, Ariosto portrays woman as a sexually desiring subject. He suggests that through a pact between two women that crosses age and class boundaries, the impositions of the wedding market can be over-come; he reverses stereotypes related to women’s bodies; and he uses the father’s house as the site of woman’s oppression. These are all elements that can hardly soothe a society forcefully engaged in naturalizing gender boundaries and legislating class rigidity.

Finally, I will examine cross-dressing and female masquerade. I shift the focus to the reception, rather than the production, of the artwork, investigating how different audience members could simul-taneously entertain different views of the same scene. Ariosto, far from being an encomiastic court apologist, instead toyed with images of hegemonic idealism, writing and staging plays that are marked by the absence of a strong father figure, and thus of authority. Ariosto’s distance from court ideology was partially linked to his interrogation



of gender roles and patriarchal authority. However, in this last part of the essay, my intention is not to reflect on how politics can be located in the individual features of an artist and his work, but rather to reflect on the historical audience and the individual features of that audience’s perception at the moment the first performance of Ariosto’s I suppositi took place in Ferrara in 1509.

The Frame

According to Cruciani, “Renaissance theatre, in its cultured dimension, found its widest and most significant shaping unity in the festival.”11 In order to understand Renaissance theater iuxta propria principia we need to recognize the theoretical and ideolog-ical value of the festival, which functioned as a structuring unity that afforded a privileged place to certain forms of spectacle. The festival constituted the “frame” by which the spectator could leave the time and space of the everyday life in order to occupy an ideal dimension. This “frame” includes differing elements of perform-ance—the wooden theater, the decoration, the food, the scenog-raphy, the dances, the songs and the singers, the musicians—yet, they were organized according to a teleological project and pur-pose focused on the perspective scene, the duke’s vision, and the ideal city. This teleological project—in particular, the perspective scene, with its imposed unity of vision—tended to unify natural and artificial space, thus transforming the theater into an ideal city in which all the contradictions of the real city were recom-posed into the unifying vision of the court.

Theater and (ideal) city were thus offered as the two terms of an equation based on a complex series of metonymies. The Ducal Palace was identified with the city because both palace and the city were thought of as places for the celebration of an ideal time and space. In turn, the Great Hall was identified with the Duke’s Palace, because, as Leon Battista Alberti writes, the hall is “the bosom of the house” and must have the same relationship with the palace that the main square has with the city.12 The chain of metonymies City-Ducal Palace, Ducal Palace-Great Hall, and then again Great Hall-City, is also a reflection of the fundamental belief that architectural form is a projection of the harmony of the celestial macrocosm.


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André Chastel calls the space of the court festival lieu solennel—solemn or formal place—whether that means the courtyard or, more frequently, the main hall of the courtly palace.13 The festival becomes a moment in which it is possible to witness a compact exhibition of various kinds of spectacle that generally could be encountered only in isolated and dispersed fora. During the court festival, these differ-ent forms and techniques—poetry, oratory, costume, painting, archi-tecture, scenery, music, dance, choreography—become subsumed in a unitary sense of signification.

The court tendency to employ a space perfectly unified and codi-fied for the theatrical performances was primarily motivated by the desire to endow the perspective space with the quality of the natural space. The theater had to function as instrumentum regni, as a place apt to represent an ideal program, which was propelled by the pleasure originating from the magnificence of a perfectly organized spectacle. Elin Diamond has written persuasively on this point:

In the Western theater (Gr. theatron or “seeing place”), pleasure is never far from the market and its mysti-fications. The spectator sees what is not there—an illusion, a sign of an absent original—and fails to see what is there—a constructed series of images so pol-ished and coherent that the ideological and human labor of their making is hidden from view.14

The visual perspective system in the Italian Renaissance was based on the point of view of a frontal observer, which determines both the horizon line and the vanishing point (the latter had been targeted by Brunelleschi). This system, transferred into the theater, defini-tively separates the space designated for the scene from the one for the spectator. The place in the audience coinciding with the ideal observer—the only place from which all the lines converge toward the vanishing point—is reserved for the main authority figure. The far-ther a spectator sits from the ideal position, the more imperfect his/her view will be. The system thus establishes a social hierarchy within the audience.15 However, as Postlewait notes, we should always distin-guish between “the desired political agendas of the court and its politi-cal ability to impose those agendas.”16 In fact, how can one be so sure that the context is the only shaping condition for a theatrical event? How did the theatrical space and text devised by Ariosto interact with the main frame of the Renaissance festival?



The Frame within the Frame

If it is true, as Henri Lefebvre argues, that “(social) space is a (social) product,”17 then no space is free of social implications, including structures of gender and class. How does the architecture of the theater embody the belief system by highlighting certain persons or functions while overshadowing others? Who attended the first per-formance of Ariosto’s I suppositi and what was the arrangement of the spectators on the grandstands?

One of the most important elements for the functioning of the theater apparatus in Ferrara was the arrangement of the audience and the social, psychological, and ideological consequences this positioning entailed. We are left with two very important documents in this regard: a letter addressed by a humanist, named Pencaro, to the Marchioness of Mantua Isabella d’Este, and a letter written by Isabella herself. According to Isabella d’Este, women sat on the cen-tral grandstand, segregated from the men:

The thirteen tiers of the grandstands are built on the side of the hall facing the piazza, with two partitions dividing the women from the men: the women sit in the middle while the men on the two sides.18

The seating in the auditorium was not simply arranged by gender but also, as Pencaro’s letter seems to suggest, by class:

At eight o’clock, the Duke and, successively, the court, the nobility, and the plebeians entered the Great Hall, followed after a while by the women, with various and such attire that they all seemed to be from the nobility, and maybe they even believed it. Indeed, my Lady, the attire of the women in this town is very sumptuous . . . . When they arrived, the Great Hall was already full of people, and so they sat on those grandstands which were reserved for them.19

The result of this seating plan was an extremely complicated “dia-logue” of looks and gazes as exemplified in Figure 2.20

Thus, the duke had a central position, overseeing the performance in front of the stage. Behind the duke sat the women. In addition to watching the performance, they could also watch the duke watch-ing the performance. Although court etiquette discouraged them


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from gazing directly on the men, they could in fact watch the men watching the performance; they could watch the men watching the duke watching the performance; or they could watch the men watching the women or the men watching one another, thus yield-ing a variety of combinations. The men sat on the two sides of the

Figure 1.

Figure 2.



auditorium. Thus, the ordering by gender and class added to the variations of the various spectators’ gaze.

It is my contention that this complexity of gazes contradicts the traditional goal of one point perspective, which was to establish a social hierarchy within the audience by placing the main authority as the ideal observer and by subjecting perception to a rigidly con-trolled system. This complexity, instead, reflects the constant fluc-tuation in power among the different coteries that was typical of the Este court during these years. This kind of theater apparatus has been usually interpreted as regulating man/woman relation-ships according to a subject/object dichotomy: women were there only to be “looked upon,” with the male gaze confirming their exist-ence. If read this way, this arrangement, while apparently confer-ring on women a central position—a position that could be read as an indication of their superiority in relation to men—at the same time signaled and established the roles of the Eternal Feminine and the Perfect Courtier.21 Maggie Günsberg has argued that the system of gender-differentiated spectatorship works in conjunction with fetishism in cross-dressing “to deny a femininity outside of its patri-archally circumscribing equation with a sexuality/reproductivity in the service of the dominant order.”22 This kind of argument, on the one hand, makes quite clear how power consolidates its position, and on the other, it seems to offer no room for voicing those resist-ances that arise when we also consider other aspects of spectator-ship. Politics, in fact, can also be located in the ways a particular theatrical event resonates with current events. Carl Schmitt, in his Hamlet oder Hekuba, argues that sometimes the tragic element inher-ent to a play cannot be explained only by referring to the play itself, but must be considered as a nucleus of contemporary historical events. Schmitt claims that within the autonomy of the drama and its characters there irrupts (Einbruch) a human and political problem derived from contemporary events that transcends the play and its internal logic.23 The political problematic that irrupts in the sequence of 1509 performances was constituted by the international interfer-ence in Italian affairs, and by the abrupt political reversals that saw Ferrara passing repeatedly in and out of alliance with France, Rome, and Venice. The absence of strong father figures within Ariosto’s text echoes the general historical crisis afflicting the entire Italian peninsula and Ferrara in particular. The bleak future of Ferrara was thus placed on the stage before an audience participating in the


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reenactment of a drama in which the figure of the king as head of the state finds its metonym, in familial terms, in the figure of the father as head of the family. Within a political and social order char-acterized by the metaphor of the “body politic,” the absence of a strong father figure in the familial domain could only be perceived by the audience as the disappearance of a strong head of state in the social and political spheres.24 Neither Seneca’s Hippolytus—a piece performed during the same carnival and in the same theater—nor Ariosto’s I suppositi offer father figures who are balanced or in con-trol. On the contrary, in both plays the absence of authority is high-lighted, rendering problematic, I would argue, any interpretation of Ariosto’s play as an encomiastic and mythologized history.

The frictions with other Italian city-states that led to the war in 1509 were coupled with tense relationships between the most impor-tant members of the Este family. Two events are worth mentioning in this regard. In 1506, there was an attempted coup by the military cadets led by Giulio d’Este and Ferrante d’Este against their own family.25 It has been conjectured that the impetus for this coup was an event that took place the previous year when Cardinal Ippolito and Don Giulio competed for Angela Borgia, one of the women of Lucrezia’s entourage.26 The events that followed are but an example of the inherent violence of the Este family.

There was also the immediacy of another startling event that occurred a few months earlier. On 6 June 1508, at the corner of Savonarola and Praisolo Avenue, the Ferrarese citizens could see, laying on the ground, the corpse of the famous poet Ercole Strozzi, with his throat ripped open, and his body furrowed by twenty-two wounds.27 Contemporary writers supposed that the poet harbored feelings of deep love for Lucrezia Borgia and that the verses he had devoted to the duchess were the cause of the duke’s jealousy and his subsequent order to kill the poet. A disturbing historical event, thus, could have flashed behind the plays’ theatrical masks.

Ariosto’s staging of I suppositi in 1509 with its companion Seneca’s Hippolytus, must be understood in this historical context. The audi-ence in the hall could learn from these plays that authority was not fixed, that class boundaries could be crossed, and that patriarchy was in crisis. The seating arrangement for the audience becomes part of a theatrical machine that manipulates the gaze and creates both ambiguities and complexities of perception. Specifically, the viewing places of the duke, the women, and the men with the variations in



perception and hierarchy that they suggest, reflect the very real tur-moil within the court as two male and two female coteries vied for power. It is even possible to say that Ariosto exploited the arrange-ment of the spectators in the hall in order to play one of his tricks at the duke’s expense. The prologue, besides providing a metaphor for the relationship of the play to its audience, “one suggesting a per-formance not of truth but of deception,” also suggested to the audi-ence, as David Posner has noted, with its reference to sodomy and the omnipresence of supposizioni throughout the play, that it “ought to watch its back.”28 The duke’s privilege during court performances was not conferred through an abstract—and hidden—lesson, but revealed through concrete embodiment. The duke sat on the best seat in the house: a platform directly in front of the stage and with his back turned to the entire audience. While this arrangement was supposed to teach its audience that the duke’s political and natural body formed an indivisible unity that was index of a social order, the governing metaphor of Ariosto’s play shifted the emphasis from the political to the natural body, transforming the duke’s position from one of power into one of weakness.

If concerns about gender and class found expression in an archi-tecture that objectified women (women were there only as the object of the male gaze) and denied men their potential for social mobility (they sat according to a hierarchical order), then the opening scene of I suppositi together with the main supposizione within the play, with its switch between servant and master, pointed to images of female changeability, social mobility, and the possibility for transformation in relation to the self.

Ariosto’s I suppositi and the querelle des femmes

Although my main concern regarding I suppositi rests with its the-atrical apparatus, rather than its narrative and symbolic content, it would be nonetheless helpful to offer the plot of the play: A young man from Sicily, Erostrato, has come to study in Ferrara. However, after falling in love with Polinesta, he decides to exchange identities with his servant Dulippo, and applies for work in the young lad’s household. When the rich and old lawyer Cleandro asks Polinesta’s father for her hand and offers a large dowry, Erostrato convinces Dulippo (believed to be Erostrato) to come up with a higher dowry


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and asks a merchant from Siena to play the part of Filogono, his own father. Unfortunately, the real Filogono arrives unexpectedly in Ferrara and comes face to face with his impostor and with Dulippo, who is pretending to be his son. Consequently, he decides to hire Cleandro and bring the two impostors to justice. However, in the final part of the play, the lawyer recognizes Dulippo as his lost son and the recognition saves Erostrato, who is eventually allowed to marry Polinesta.

The first scene of I suppositi, thus, invited the women in the audi-ence to watch a play about the foolish adventures of a group of men competing for the same woman, which at the same time supports women’s right to choose their own lovers. I am not arguing for the need to consider Ariosto as a feminist ante litteram. Ariosto’s intent was not so much to capture or to construct truth but rather to explore the ways in which a text—both in its performed and literary modes—resists the imposition of preexisting models, and instead points to the conventionality of both gender and class constructions. With the dramatization of material familiar to the audience, Ariosto was able to highlight the spectators’ critical perceptions both as process and a construction. Women in the audience were free to compare the characters’ masks29 to masks that were closer and proper to them-selves; thus, theater was transformed into a machine capable of pro-posing unofficial histories and unofficial historians.30

The first scene begins with a dialogue between the only two female characters present in the play, Polinesta and her nurse. The discussion concerns Polinesta’s relationship with Erostrato and the plan that the two lovers devise to subvert the coercion of the wedding market and to elude the proposition of Cleandro, a rich old man:

NURSE: There’s no one about Polinesta, so you can come outside, where we are less restricted and can be certain that we won’t be overheard. Inside the house I think even the beds, chests and doors have ears.

POLI: And jugs have lugs and pots can spot.NURSE: You making fun of me but I can tell you it

would be a good sight better if you were more careful than you are. I’ve told you a thousand times if I’ve told you once that



you must take care not to be seen with Dulippo.

POLI: Why don’t you like me talking with him as I do with other people?31

As one of the most debated topics in Renaissance Italy, the querelle des femmes gave birth to a vast literature on the subject of womanhood.32 Ariosto participated in the discussion with his Orlando Furioso—and also, I would argue, with his plays.33 Deanna Shemek claims that Ariosto complicates gender opposition appealing to a more complex reality than one simply based on binary oppositions.34 Thus, Ariosto, moving beyond the usual treatment of women, uses the querelle as a means of critiquing rigid ways of thinking and to reflect upon soci-ety’s morality and politics.

Antonio de Luca has observed that Polinesta’s love for Erostrato is presented from the beginning as the “habitus of a serene and con-vinced passion . . . able to express itself scenically not as pretext for the plot but, although in a rather simple linearity, with full auton-omy.”35 Polinesta’s autonomous passion marks her value as a woman independent from the market to which her father would like to con-fine her. As Constance Jordan notes,

A bride, especially a woman who had the capacity to convey property, was typically objectified as an item in a continuous exchange between men that, in pot-latch fashion, took place over generations to the mutual benefit of the participants.36

Polinesta is thus able to escape this web of exchange by means of sub-terfuge, and thus reclaims her agency by employing fictions (fizione).

The two women’s first act of agency is related to the theatrical arrangement of space, as I have previously discussed. In order to freely discuss their plans they first need to leave the house of Polinesta’s father—one of the wooden houses constructed on the stage. The house functions as a metaphor for the relationship between father and daughter as well as that of husband and wife. Robert Davis has shown how, in Renaissance Italy, urban space became progressively gendered; public spaces were coded as male and private spaces as female. The “isolation and enclosure of women played a crucial role in promoting . . . patrilineal interests.”37 In addition, male rituals of


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display and aggression in city streets and piazzas made public spaces unsafe for women.38 For these reasons, women—and, we should specify, elite women—went out less frequently and, when they did, they were forced by the complexity and volume of their attire to be attended by a large number of female servants. Polinesta and her nurse venture into the (male) public space of the street. In the house, in fact, as the nurse complains, they “are restricted” and “the beds, chests and doors have ears.”

The characters are depicted in a similar way to the most impor-tant woman in the audience. The same year that the first perform-ance of Ariosto’s I suppositi took place, Lucrezia, the duke’s wife, in order to prove her chastity at court, had the courtier Pietro Giorgio da Lampugnano sleep in her antechamber as a guard.39 Many docu-ments insist on Lucrezia’s isolation during the period following Ercole Strozzi’s death: she refused to receive people in her rooms and showed no desire to hold court. Scholars and biographers tend to explain Lucrezia’s behavior as the result of a severe depression. However, if we consider women as performers and agents in history, instead of simply as victims of the patriarchal system, it is possible to reread Lucrezia’s isolation as a series of performances apt to project the private domestic space to which she was “restricted” into the public sphere.40

Lucrezia’s refusal to leave her rooms could represent a rebellion against dominant codes that served to regulate the ways and times a duchess was to appear in public. When she finally did leave her room and appear publicly it was in a most peculiar way. Lucrezia ordered a field tent to be erected in the cathedral in which she and her court of women could attend mass without being seen. I believe that this act demonstrates a consciousness on Lucrezia’s part of how the organization of social space tended to “objectify” women. Lucrezia’s awareness of the ways in which self-representation could be coded was paralleled by bodily practices that tended to challenge contemporary moral standards. Lucrezia’s understanding of the fact that “the beds, chests and doors” of her rooms had “eyes and ears,” enables her to control the performance of her daily ritual bathing. Rachel Erlanger has noted that, “in a world where perfume did the work of soap and water, Lucrezia’s insistence upon her daily bath seemed shocking and almost immoral.”41 This impression is ampli-fied by the details that were made known to the courts of Mantua and Ferrara through the indiscretions of “El Prete,” Isabella d’Este’s



good watchdog, whose unpublished letters on this subject have been summarized by Maria Bellonci:

With a festive air Lucrezia would prepare powders and braziers and golden nets and Moorish shirts and a great receptacle of warm, aromatic water, and then, when alone with her favourite, would take off her own brocades and undress her girl-in-waiting and together they could get into the bath which the little maid, Lucia, kept supplied with hot water. The two young women would play and laugh . . . . Later . . . they would stretch out on cushions and burn sweet-scented incense and braziers.42

To return to Ariosto’s play, it is significant that when venturing “out,” Polinesta and her nurse do not acknowledge the presence of the audience: “no one is about,” says the nurse. The (male) gaze in this case, although still fundamental for the fiction, becomes none-theless neutralized in its normative dimension. Patricia Simons notes that during the Renaissance, “to be a woman in the world was/is to be the object of the male gaze: to ‘appear in public’ is to ‘be looked upon’ . . . . The gaze, then a metaphor for worldliness and virility, made of Renaissance woman an object of public discourse, exposed to scrutiny and framed by the parameters of propriety, display, and ‘impression management.’”43

As seen earlier, Meggie Günsberg has written on the position of female spectators of comedies who “occupied the dual position of coming to enjoy the spectacle of the entertainment (the play, the intermezzi, the dancing) and of providing it.”44 As various descriptions of Renaissance carnivals confirm, theatrical representations became the place par excellence in which women were converted into a com-modity, an object to be looked upon, desired, and potentially bought. Pencaro’s letter (quoted previously) regarding the 1499 carnival is an invaluable source regarding woman’s dual position. The entrance to the hall was ordered according to both sex and social rank. The duke entered first and then the male courtiers, followed by the male nobil-ity, and eventually the male plebeians. Then it was the women’s turn, and they were dressed in such a way that they all appeared to belong to the nobility. As the object of the male gaze that they appeared to invite by means of their attire and seating position, the women in the hall


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seemed to authorize men’s desire and surrender to their authority. As I have stated, men were not positioned at the center, but instead occu-pied the space situated at the two extremes of the cavea. By looking from their place at the rest of the room, the women directed the men to acquire a central position, offering them the place of honor and recognition of the male role desiring subjects. For this reason, spec-tatorial pleasure in theater theory has been characterized as fetish-ism. It is possible, however, to find historical examples—and I believe Renaissance Ferrara is one of them—suggesting the possibility for woman’s agency, rather than objectification. Ferrara offers an exam-ple in which societal expectations clashed with individual behaviors.

Polinesta’s and her nurse’s gesture of leaving the house can be read as an action similar to a Brechtian gestus, which Elin Diamond explains as “an act that undermines the imaginary relations of classi-cal mimesis in order to make visible the contradictory links between textual politics, authorial position, and theater apparatus.”45 Polinesta and her nurse exit the house and enter, simultaneously, the (male) space of the street and the (male) space of the festival. The gestic phrase here is “no one is about.” The two female charac-ters preemptively offer themselves as objects of attention by exiting the house, while simultaneously disavowing the same look that they solicit. The male gaze they mention in relation to the house—that is, their familial situation—is the same one that goes unrecognized in the audience. Polinesta and her nurse emphasize the act of seeing rather than being seen and, by appropriating the gaze, pose a threat to the entire system of representation.46

The second act of agency is related to time. The two women are not only the first characters to appear on stage, but they are also the initial movers of the story:

NURSE: Isn’t it enough that through my help you and Dulippo spend the night together, even though I arranged this rather unwillingly. How I wish you were inclined toward a more respectable love . . . . Instead you’ve chosen as a lover one of your father’s servants from whom you can expect nothing but disgrace.

POLI: Who was the cause of it all but you, Nurse? It was you who didn’t cease to



endear him to me . . . . Who brought him into my bed the first night, if not you? (TP, I, 1, 54)

Polinesta does not represent the cautious woman who remains indoors leaving to her father the business of her marriage. Instead, she becomes her own patriarch, eschewing her objectification in the wedding market and proposing herself as sexually desiring subject. Polinesta’s virtues are not the ones usually assigned to the ideal woman, in terms typical of the querelle or treatises on domestic government.47 She is not the chaste woman who is able to defeat desire, and her employment of pretense and reason is certainly not listed in treatises as appertaining to virtu-ous women. In order to accentuate the difference between the donna onesta—the chaste and exemplary women who populated the Italian Renaissance paintings and poems of the period—and the meretrice—the indecent and incontinent wild woman embodied in the extreme figure of the prostitute—and also because of patrilineal anxiety, chas-tity became the central component of woman’s honor. All of Lucrezia Borgia’s portraits after her marriage with Alfonso d’Este emphasize her marital fidelity and chastity.48 The loss of chastity would have had serious social and political consequences. Although the law prescribed punish-ments for both men and women, female adulterers were prosecuted and punished publicly, as happened in Ferrara at various times. “Public shaming,” according to Judith Brown, “may have been seen as a preven-tive measure for women in the audience who may have been contem-plating similar transgression.”49 Ariosto presents a female character not as a passive victim of the patriarchal system, but instead as a woman able to assert her agency by fulfilling her sexual desires.50 Polinesta inhabits the interstice created by the impossible ideal of the donna onesta and the meretrice.51

There are other factors that might bring us to consider Ariosto’s play as a critique rather than a confirmation of societal stereotypes regarding class and gender. Antonio de Luca claims that in this scene, Polinesta and her nurse are united by means of an open and calm relationship in which a strong sense of complicity holds sway.52 As Valeria Finucci shows, “nowhere in the Furioso does Ariosto offer a positive image of older womanhood”;53 on the other hand, Ariosto characterizes the aged female in positive terms in I suppositi.

The contrast between young and old was already prevalent since the late fourteenth century within both visual and literary culture.54


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In particular, physical characterization of old women as ugly stood for a reflection of their moral outlook. Ariosto decides not to exploit the tradition of the old woman, nor the related contrast between beautiful young woman and ugly old “hag.” Instead, the playwright decides to focus on male ugliness—Cleandro—with a characteriza-tion in which the old and ugly male body stands for a wicked morality.

Through Polinesta’s complicity with her nurse, and also through the nurse’s agency in the story—she is, after all, “the cause of it all,” as Polinesta says—Ariosto is able to underscore his linked critique of matters of gender and class. For both women, moral value (selfless love) takes precedence over material value (monetary concerns). In the rest of the play the distinction between moral and material value pervades the realm of history, and this was Ariosto’s critique of his patrons.55

Cross-Dressing and Female Masquerade

Scene Two begins with the entrance of two new characters: Cleandro, a doctor of law who is trying to marry Polinesta by offering her father a very palatable dowry, and Pasifilo, a parasite “friendlier now to one, now to the other, depending upon which prepares a better meal,” as he describes himself:56

CLE: Weren’t some people just here in front of that door, Pasifilo?

PAS: Yes, my most learned Cleandro, didn’t you see your Polinesta?

CLE: Was it my Polinesta? By God, I didn’t recognize her!

PAS: I’m not surprised; the air is dense today, somewhat foggy, and I recognize her more by her clothes than by her face. (TP I, 2, 56)

Pasifilo recognizes Polinesta from her clothes rather than from her face. For Cleandro and Pasifilo, Polinesta is commodified by her clothing and, as a result, becomes again an object of the marriage market: she is an invisible “reality” whose “I”—the face—becomes completely irrelevant. Since a woman’s attire was in part a sign of either the father’s or the husband’s rank,57 Cleandro and Pasifilo



transform Polinesta into an object on display in a framed “mirror,” which, like many women’s portraits of the time, reflects both “man’s worldly wealth and her ideal dowry, rather than her ‘true’ or ‘real’ nature.”58

Within the context of 1509, the beginning of this scene is open to at least three kinds of readings: First, that Ariosto intends to make fun of the fact that the actors playing Polinesta and her nurse are men. In this case there is the key question of whether cross-dressing is reinforcing or rejecting traditional definitions regarding gender and sexuality. Second, that the scene refers to societal norms regarding sumptuary laws in Ferrara, thus focusing attention on the meanings of both feminine and masculine masquerade. And, last, that the audi-ence is directed toward the issue of homoeroticism, which had been already introduced by the author in the prologue.59

Let us consider the first of these issues: cross-dressing, which has notable implications for the definition of gender and sexuality. Does the use of cross-dressing in performance strengthen societal stereotypes of gender and sexuality, or does it allow the displacement of dominant norms? Günsberg has argued that this question cannot be answered definitively if the analysis takes into consideration only the written text. In fact, the issue, she claims, “can only be adequately addressed by examining cross-dressing as a dramatic device interacting with a complex set of other factors. In addition to the dramatic texts them-selves, we need to consider the context within which performance takes place.”60 As has been previously discussed, Ariosto’s I suppositi was staged during the 1509 Carnival together with other plays. In addition, each play was accompanied by elaborated intermezzi with dance and music, which featured women on stage. These intermezzi attracted the attention of the chroniclers, and possibly also the spectators, more than the plays themselves did.

The power of cross-dressing can be best understood with refer-ence to the context in which the play was immersed, as well as other factors related to the definition of gender. Judith Butler considers gender as “performative,” or a “doing,” that cannot be understood “outside a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repeti-tion of norms.”61 She further claims that it is not “a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed,” but the subject itself is “per-formatively constituted” by doings, which include the ones signifying a particular gender.62 This iterability implies that performance is not a singular “act” or event,


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but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.63

The possibility of subversion, far from being “a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed,” lies in the inevasible slip-page arising from the repetition and citation of social performance.64

Thus, cross-dressing cannot be considered subversive in itself. In fact, it could be used to support either idealization or denatu-ralization of gender stereotypes. However, Butler argues that since “hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations,”65 cross-dressing can be disruptive to the extent that it opens an interstice through which an exploration of gender boundaries is made possible, revealing how the hegem-onic discourse on gender is itself produced and based on an imita-tive structure.

Ariosto’s lines—in the aforementioned passage, where Pasifilo recognizes Polinesta from her clothes rather than from her face—play on the supposed naturalness and originality of the notion of woman. Cleandro and Pasifilo, showing themselves blinded by the “foggy” day, fail to make any distinction between Polinesta and the representation of her status—her clothes—creating a slippage between the fixity of boundaries and alternative ways of enacting gender. The title suppositi 66 refers to male/male sexual relations insofar as the actor interpreting a female character points to the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and, thus, contests its pretense of naturalness and originality. Cross-dressing here is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior original gender, but is rather a performative act, forcing the specta-tors to draw back and forth between the clothes, which embodied and forged a specific sexual identity, and contradictory fantasies of the “body beneath.”67

The passage that opens Act I, Scene Two, can also be interpreted as a reference to societal norms regarding Ferrarese sumptuary laws. Among the reasons these laws were in force was the perceived need to regulate class behavior. Most of the laws were addressed to women, because of their relationship to patriarchal valuation.68 Sumptuary



laws covered all possible aspects of women’s clothing, addressing issues regarding materials to be used, their size, color, and shape, the kind of jewels and other ornaments to be worn.69 Giuseppina Muzzarelli identifies the court as the primary place for the ostenta-tion of rich attire:

The court constituted a vast scene on which various characters moved following rules which were well known and only valid for those who walked on that stage: it was, in few words, a world apart, in which clothes acquired a primary role.70

The reason for this ostentation was multiple. It impressed guests from other courts and countries, the richness of clothes attesting to the court’s power and wealth. It also served as a means of reinforcing spe-cific identities within the court, furnishing each role or function with a “uniform” that carried symbols that marked its sources of power. Finally, the aggregate function of these performances participated in and constituted a system of etiquette that ruled the entire court.71

Pencaro, in the letter mentioned above, also wrote that women entered the theater “with various and such attire that they all seemed to be from the nobility, and maybe they even believed it.”72 I would argue that the presence of women who pretended to be from the nobility but were not, points not only to middle-class women but to the so-called courtesans and mistresses. The presence of the courte-sans and mistresses places the carnival within the context of an economic system that commodified women. The marriage market and the mistress market run parallel.73 However, Pencaro refers both to “a doing” and to “a thing done.” If on the one hand, by stating that these women “seemed noble,” he was referring to “a thing done,” that is, to a preexisting set of norms defining a particular social category. On the other hand, by pointing out the fact that they themselves also believed to be noble, he was referring instead to “a doing,” that is a performance that projects conventional norms into a possible subversive play.74

Pencaro’s words seem to refer to an excess, a redundant acting out of societal norms regarding femininity by means of which these women masqueraded (“they believed to be”) rather than embodied (“they seemed to be”) their performance. Female masquerade, unlike cross-dressing, does not blur gender lines by impersonating people of the other sex. Yet, as Valeria Finucci has noted, female masquerade


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“is more dangerous than female transvestitism because to dress within one’s gender but above one’s station in a culture that rests on class dif-ferences . . . can only be subversive.”75

Ariosto’s “joke” on stage—the recognition of a woman by her attire rather than her face—was, at the same time, mirroring what was taking place in the audience. For the Pasifilos and Cleandros in the audience the scene could have been read simply as a joke on the actor’s real sex.76 The sexually explicit play on the word suppositi, how-ever, is not, in this case, at the expense of woman. In fact, Pencaro’s letter seems to indicate that those women were exaggerating their sense of femininity through an empowering masquerade, even while they were calling into question the scopic regime of voyeurism and fetishism on which Renaissance theater was based.77 Both Ariosto’s joke and the mistresses’ manifest exhibitionism played a transgres-sive role in performing “before” the male gaze and not necessarily submitting to it, thus constituting a refusal to naturalize gender and class identity by concealing its external framework.

As already mentioned, there is a third way of reading Ariosto’s lines—that they relate to the issue of homoeroticism. As many scholars have pointed out, “as males play both males and females in sexual plots, the dynamic of all-male desire, namely homoeroticism, is inevitably also introduced.”78 However, it is incorrect to draw the conclusion that this realm of desire included only the male spectators in the audience and excluded the female ones.79 In fact, as Stephen Orgel argues, “the boy player was apparently as much an object of erotic attraction for women as for men” and that “to deny a place in these fantasies to women is to deny them their place in culture.”80 By participating in a play that tended to resist the imposition of preexist-ing models and that blurred both gender and class constructions, the women in the audience had the opportunity to explore alternative ways of being and desiring.

Conclusions

The protean nature of the 1509 performances worked against the courtly ideology to contain the social mobility, heterogeneity, and multiplicity of the different sectors of society. The peculiarity of Ferrarese theatrical design could be interpreted as Ariosto’s own meditation on perspective—the search for a spatial configuration



that could open up the possibility for a different relationship between audience, authority, and the city. In place of the hegemoni-cally focused perspective typical of other courts, Ariosto substituted a more “democratic” schema, that was the result of the fusion between the paratactic arrangement of the scenographic elements typical of Ercole’s time with a view of the Ferrarese piazza that did not strictly adhere to the rules of one point perspective. Such an arrangement did not permit the rational dominion of ducal authority on the sur-rounding reality.

There are constant reminders in I suppositi that the performance is only a play,81 and as such it requires the participation of the audi-ence and their active reception. The prologue, which was probably delivered by Ariosto himself, contributes further to the creation of a sort of alienation effect, and the same could be said of all the other references within the play to contemporary Ferrarese social and cul-tural life. Even beyond these references, the fragmentary nature of this play did not foster a strong illusion of reality.82 And, as I have also shown above, cross-dressing on stage and female masquerade within the audience also contributed to this sense of heterogeneity, mobility, and discontinuous identities, and thus revealed that both gender and class differences are social constructs.

If the major trend in drama during this period was a retreat into a well-ordered and equilibrated world with the aid of the “invention” of perspective, there was also a kind of drama that attempted to sub-ject these ideological constructions to skeptical interrogation. It is safe to say that there was a kind of drama that confronted the social and political crises of the Italian city-states as they suffered political and economic damage at the hands of the nation-states, and that this drama also helped precipitate that crisis.83

In contrast with the tenets of Italian Renaissance festivals, Ariosto was able to involve the spectators in an event whose time and place coincided with their own. In Act II, 1, for example, Dulippo wanders around the city of Ferrara and forces Erostrato to look for him everywhere. Among the places with which a Ferrarese audience would have been well acquainted, Erostrato mentions also the courtyard of the Ducal Palace. Ariosto thus brings the action of the play literally underneath his spectators’ seats in that courtyard. In Act I, 2, by means of one of Cleandro’s speeches, Ariosto had already made clear that the play was not only set in Ferrara, but also around 1509. Rather than inducing a beholder to gaze on the


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theatrical scene from afar, Ariosto elicited a kind of spectator who is a moving presence placed inside the scene. Eventually, in Act IV, 4, Ariosto short-circuits the ideology of the courtly scene by means of a speech by Lico, Filogono’s servant:

Master, the world is large. Don’t you think there’s more than one Catania and more than one Sicily, more than one Filogono and more than one Erostrato, and even more than one Ferrara? Perhaps this isn’t the Ferrara where your son, whom we’re looking for, is staying.84

Pointing at the possibility of a doubling of the characters on stage and, especially, of the city of Ferrara itself, Ariosto seems to tell his audience that there are many perspectives on history, and that the sense of wholeness, completeness, and integrity that the courtly scene is trying to convey is only one appearance among others. The series of metonymies—City, Palace, Great Hall, Scene—is thus trans-formed in a mise-en-abyme, asking the spectator to view as well as read the painted scene. As Jacques Derrida argues in relation to the figure of mise-en-abyme, this abyssal inclusion of image within image “takes something away from looking, it calls for discourse, demands a read-ing . . . . Instead of a spectacle it institutes a reader, of either gender, and instead of voyeurism, exegesis.”85

Instead of naturalizing the relationship between setting and world, Ariosto relativized setting and world alike by showing the illu-sory nature of their means of production. By creating a spectator as ambulatory presence—that is, not a beholder from a privileged place, but a reader involved in the process of destabilized exegesis—Ariosto foreshadows a postmodern notion of performance.86 The result was a distancing technique that served to disrupt the specta-tor’s sense of the ideal world and immerse him or her in the Jetz-zeit, a time filled by the presence and contradictions of the now.

NOTES

1. Ariosto’s plays are not, strictly speaking, the earliest in the genre. His plays were predated by others, such as Filippo Mantovano’s Formicone (1503). See Giorgio Padoan, L’avventura della commedia rinascimentale (Padua: Piccin Nuova Libreria, 1996), 14. I would like to thank Michael Saenger who has offered precious sup-port, suggestions, and corrections in the ultimate stage of this paper.



2. Donald A. Beecher, “Introduction,” in Ludovico Ariosto: Supposes (I suppositi) (1509). Translated by George Gascoigne (1566), ed. Donald A. Beecher and John Butler (Ottawa, Ont.: Dovehouse Editions Canada, 1999), 34.

3. Some scholars have focused on Ariosto’s experience as “impresario” and actor, but unfortunately only as a sort of extracurricular activity. The consideration of his theatrical experience, in fact, has not challenged their readings of the plays. The only exception is Fabrizio Cruciani, “Il sistema drammaturgico ferrarese e l’Ariosto,” Teatro e Storia IX (1994): 190–206.

4. Ibid., 197. See also Dennis E. Rhodes, “The Printer of Ariosto’s Early Plays,” Italian Studies XVIII (1963): 13–18.

5. Graham Holderness, “Production, Reproduction, Performance: Marxism, History, Theatre,” in Uses of History. Marxism, Postmodernism, and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 163–64.

6. Ariosto’s I suppositi, after premiering in Ferrara in 1509, was then performed in Rome during the 1519 Carnival celebrations with the scene painted by Raphael. In the following decades, the play became part of the repertory of various Commedia dell’Arte troupes, and was eventually translated into English by George Gascoigne (1566) and premiered the same year at Gray’s Inn.

7. Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 198.

8. Ibid., 197.

9. As Alvin Kernan notes, once it is seen that plays take up hot political and social issues, “it is impossible not to be curious about just how they relate to the court on these matters. Or, to put the matter more directly, just what kind of service did the playwright render to his royal patron? Was he merely a curt apologist . . . [or] was he a crypto-subversive?” Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright, Theatre in the Stuart Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xx.

10. Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction, 213.

11. Fabrizio Cruciani, “Il teatro e la festa,” in Il teatro italiano nel Rinascimento, ed. Fabrizio Cruciani and Daniele Seragnoli (Bologna: il Mulino, 1987), 31.

12. See Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), in particu-lar V, 17: “The most important part is that which we shall call the ‘bosom’ of the house, although you might refer to it as the ‘court’ or ‘atrium’ . . . acting like a public forum” (146) and V, 2: “The atrium, salon, and so on should relate in the same way to the house as do the forum and public square to the city” (119).


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13. André Chastel, “Vues urbaines peintes et théâtre,” in Fables, Formes, Figures (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), vol. I, 493–505.

14. Elin Diamond, “Gestus, Signature, Body in the Theater of Aphra Behn,” in Unmaking Mimesis. Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997), 56.

15. Regarding the way perspective works in theater, and its ideological implica-tions, see, most recently, Luigi Allegri “Una nuova scena per un teatro nuovo,” in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo. Vol. I, La nascita del teatro moderno: Cinquecento-Seicento, ed. Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 1207–30.

16. Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction, 204.

17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 27.

18. Letter quoted in Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano (Turin: Loescher, 1891), vol. II, 383.

19. Letter quoted in Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, “Commedie classiche in Ferrara nel 1499,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana XI (1888): 184.

20. For a detailed reconstruction of the space, see Sergio Costola, “La prima rapp-resentazione dei Suppositi di Ariosto nel 1509,” in Lucrezia tra Letteratura e Storia, ed. Michele Bordin and Paolo Trovato (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2006), 75–96.

21. I am here indebted to Randolph Starn, “Seeing Culture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 205–32. Starn argues, “As objects of the look that they themselves seem coyly to invite, they authorize the desire of the male viewer and submit to its mastery . . . . In any case, we do not need to look further than the Camera degli Sposi to see the combination of seductive appeal and compliant submission that signals the roles of the Eternal Feminine and the Perfect Courtier.” Ibid., 214–15.

22. Maggie Günsberg, “Gender Depictions: Cross-Dressing in Italian Renaissance Comedy,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizzi (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 336.

23. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Düsseldorf-Köln: Verlag, 1956).

24. As Francis Barker has noted in relation to the premodern era, “the subjec-tion at work here is not that modern form for which the ambitiously inap-propriate name of ‘consciousness’ is frequently used. Pre-bourgeois subjection does not properly involve subjectivity at all, but a condition of dependent



membership in which place and articulation are defined not by an interiorized self- recognition . . . but by incorporation in the body politic which is the king’s body in its social form. With a clarity now hard to recapture, the social plenum is the body of the king, and membership of this anatomy is the deep structural form of all being in the secular realm.” Francis Barker, The Tremolous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 28.

25. Regarding this event see Luciano Chiappini, Gli Estensi. Mille anni di storia (Ferrara: Corbo Editore, 2001), 235–42.

26. See, among others, Antonio Cappelli, Lettere di Ludovico Ariosto (Milan: Hoepli, 1887), xxxii–iv; Rachel Erlanger, Lucrezia Borgia. A Biography (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978), 257–58; Chiappini, Gli Estensi, 238–39.

27. Regarding this episode, see Antonio Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto (Geneva: Olschki, 1930), vol. I, 243–47.

28. David M. Posner, “Montaigne’s School Plays” (unpublished article).

29. The possibility that the audience understood Ariosto’s characters as represent-ing real people and historical situations is supported by another theatrical genre: the eclogue. In fact, Ariosto wrote an eclogue that dealt with Don Giulio’s coup.

30. I am indebted here to Elin Diamond’s feminist reading of Brecht’s theories in her Unmaking Mimesis, 49–54 in particular.

31. The Pretenders, I, 1, in The Comedies of Ariosto, ed. Admond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 54 (henceforth cited as TP in the body of the text, followed by act, scene, and page number).

32. “In its narrow sense, this term refers to a genre of writing in Latin and French in which the superiority of one or the other sex is proposed. The earliest exam-ples are found c. 1200, and the genre as such declined markedly after 1650 . . . . In the broader sense, the Querelle des Femmes encompasses all writing in which the relative merits of the sexes are discussed using arguments and material drawn from the more narrowly defined debate.” Ian Maclean (s.v. Querelle des Femmes) in The New Oxford Companion to French Literature, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For an introduction regarding the querelle des femmes, see Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), and Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes 1400-1789,” Signs 8 (1982): 4–28.

33. Regarding the role of the querelle in the Orlando Furioso, see Pamela Joseph Benson, “Independence and Fidelity: The Contributions of the Querelle des Femmes to the Orlando Furioso” (PhD Diss., Columbia University, 1978); Mario Santoro, Letture Ariostesche (Naples: Liguori, 1973), 81–134; Deanna Shemek,


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“Of Women, Knights, Arms, and Love: The Querelle de Femmes in Ariosto’s Poem,” Modern Language Notes 104 (Jan. 1989): 68–97; Constance Jordan, “Writing Beyond the Querelle: Gender and History in Orlando Furioso,” in Renaissance Transactions. Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 295–315. As far as I know, there is no study mentioning Ariosto’s plays in relation to this topic.

34. Deanna Shemek, “Of Women, Knights, Arms,” 69.

35. Antonio de Luca, Il teatro di Ludovico Ariosto (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1981), 73.

36. Jordan, “Writing Beyond the Querelle,” 308.

37. Robert Davis, “The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Longman, 1998), 20.

38. For male rituals of display see Davis, “The Geography of Gender,” 23–31. For a description of different kinds of aggression, from verbal harassment to rape, see Michael Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, 150–70.

39. In a letter dated 6 July 1509, Tolomeo Spagnolo has written: “La mia illustris-sima madama hoggi si ha preso gran spasso de la Duchessa di Ferrara, qual per mostrare al marito de esser ben fidel e casta si fa dormire Petro Zorzo da Lampugnano in l’anticamera.” Quoted in Alessandro Luzio, “Isabella d’Este e i Borgia,” Archivio Storico Lombardo XLII (1915): 737.

40. For an analysis of the interrelationship between domestic and public spaces as opposed to any firm separation between the two, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

41. Earlanger, Lucrezia Borgia, 274.

42. Maria Bellonci, The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953), 197.

43. Patricia Simmons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians 25 (Spring 1988): 8.

44. Günsberg, “Gender Depictions,” 336.

45. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 194–95. Diamond suggests that “Brecht gestus refers to a gesture, a word, an action, a tableau that encapsulates the social and political attitudes in the text and beyond it.” Robert Weimann, in Shakespeare



and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre. Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), has sug-gested several reasons for perceiving an approximation of the Brechtian epic in Renaissance drama and Ania Loomba, in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 119–21 and 130–33, has added to Weimann’s argument what she perceives to be Renaissance theater’s increasing focus on discontinuous identity and on female changeability.

46. Regarding the possibility, in live performance, to make the gaze of the male spectator problematic by stripping away “his cloak of invisibility” and making his spectatorship “an issue within the work,” see Catherine Elwes, “Floating Femininity: A Look at Performance Art by Women,” in Women’s Images of Men, ed. Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau (London: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1985), 64–93.

47. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Margaret S. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995).

48. This can be seen in a medal crafted c. 1505, with the obverse showing a profile portrait of Lucrezia, and the reverse bearing the motto VIRTUT AC FORMAE PUDICITIA PRAECOSISSIMUM (virtue and beauty, modesty most precious). See George Francis Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini (London: British Musuem, 1930), vol. I, 59. The development of the art medals in the Italian Renaissance runs parallel to that of the portrait. Both attempted to portray the sitter as if from nature and life—and in this case the portrait was characterized as a “true likeness” (una vera effigie)—and at the same time under an idealized guise. See Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Ritratto al Naturale: Questions of Realism and Idealism in Early Renaissance Portraits,” Art Journal (Fall 1987): 209–16. Medals suited this task well, allowing the artists to show on the obverse the “true likeness,” and on the reverse an impresa, which through an allegory presented the individual’s virtues from which he/she should be remembered. See John Pope Hennesy, The Portrait of the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 7–28, and Mark Jones, The Art of Medal (London: British Museum, 1979), 29. In the case of Lucrezia’s medal, the impresa on the reverse shows a blindfolded cupid bound to a tree, which, as Erwin Panofksy has shown, symbolizes chastity. See Erwin Panofsky, “Blind Cupid,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Kari Lawe, “La medaglia dell’Amorino bendato. Uno studio su una delle medaglie di Lucrezia Borgia,” in La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo, 1441–1598. The Court of Ferrara and its Patronage, ed. Marianne Pade, Lene Waage Petersen, and Daniela Quarta (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag and Panini, 1987), 233–45. I owe the information regarding Lucrezia’s medal to Allyson Burgess Williams, “Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori”: Artistic Patronage at the Court of Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (PhD Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005).


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49. Judith C. Brown, “Introduction,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Longman, 1998), 11.

50. Of course, Polinesta could be considered, as Finucci would claim in her The Lady Vanishes. Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), one of Ariosto’s “fictional constructs,” which bears no connection with the reality of sixteenth-century Ferrara. However, as Michael Rocke has shown with numerous examples, “though the domi-nant ideology of gender and sexual behaviour was powerfully constraining, it was also contestable—and contested—terrain.” Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture,” 165. See also 161–64 for a description of a violent reality of rape and child abuse, presented by the author not as a phenomenon of individual aberration, but instead as partially the result of “an insecurity about mascu-line identity that and deep social, cultural and familial roots.” David Summers argues that “Renaissance images were presumed to make us see more than we are shown and, more specifically, to make us see something higher than we are shown. We see higher, spiritual inwardness in external forms . . . . The appar-ent sitter in a Renaissance portrait was thus an external appearance showing an inward truth, and so, it might be said, were Renaissance works of art in general.” David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110–11. At the basis of the new interest for theater there was also the growing demand for exemplary images that could “commemorate the individual as the model, the embodiment, of the status, values, norms, and authority of a particular class, lineage, institution, or profession.” See Harry Berger, “Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture,” Representations 46 (Spring 1994): 94.

51. Usually, the figure of this woman was exorcised in the production of misogynist sonnets. See, for example, Bruno Bentivogli, “Sonetti misogini da codici quat-trocenteschi,” in Studi in onore di Raffaele Spongano (Bologna: Boni Editore, 1980), 73–93. Maggie Günsberg argues that the representation of women as sexually desiring subjects on the Italian Renaissance stage is usually drastically undermined by a series of factors. From the start, “at the level not of fiction, but of reality, in that all these characters are played by male actors”; secondarily, the scholar continues, “to defuse these sexual possibilities, their undercutting is repeated at the fictional level by the introduction of male voyeurism, which turns to blatant male sexual gratification.” Günsberg, “Gender Depictions,” 343. Since I will consider the issue of cross-dressing later on, I focus here on the second of the two arguments. Although I agree with Günsberg’s argument, I think that Ariosto’s I suppositi represent an exception to the general picture. In fact, male voyeurism is substituted in this play by the nurse’s gaze, who is the only witness to Polinesta’s nightly encounters with Erostrato. In addition, “the baseline of homoeroticism to which all sexual dynamics are returned,” typical of Italian Renaissance comedies, is undercut in Ariosto’s prologue by the author’s explicit appeal to the spectator to focus the attention not on the homoerotic aspect of the play—a claim that, by the way, confirms Günsberg’s



reading if considered in general terms—but to the class switch between the master and the servant.

52. de Luca, Il teatro, 73.

53. Valeria Finucci, “The Female Masquerade. Ariosto and the Game of Desire,” in Desire in the Renaissance. Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 73.

54. See George Minois, History of Old Age from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For particular attention to old age in women, see Jacques Bailbé, “Le Thème de la vieille femme dans la poésie sat-irique du XVI et du debut du XVII siècle,” Bibliotéque d’Humanisme et Rénaissance 26 (1964): 98–119.

55. For the difference between material and moral value intended in its social implications as a means for Ariosto to both critique and praise his patrons, see Katherine Hoffman, “Un così valoroso cavalliero: Knightly Honor and Artistic Representation in Orlando Furioso, Canto 26,” in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 178–212.

56. TP I, 2, 59. “Or de l’uno or de l’altro più amico. Quando or l’uno or l’altro mi apparecchia miglior mensa” (IS I, 2, 305).

57. Diane Owen Hughes, “La moda proibita. La legislazione suntuaria nell’Italia rinascimentale,” Memoria 11–12 (1984): 102–103. See also Christiane Klapish-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 245.

58. See Simons, “Women in Frames,” regarding profile portraits of women as con-structions of gender conventions, and not as natural, neutral images.

59. “We are about to have you witness a new comedy by the same author who pre-sented the Coffer to you last year. It is called the Pretenders because it is full of substitution and pretense. As you know, children have been substituted for one another in the past, and sometimes are today. You have seen this in plays, and you have also read about it in history books. Perhaps there is someone in the audience who may have either experienced it personally or at least have heard about it. But, to have young men substituted for old men must certainly seem new and strange to you; and, yet, this has occasionally been done, as you will see very clearly in our new story” (TP, Prologue, 53). In their translation of the play, Beame and Sbrocchi note that there is really no English word to convey adequately all the nuances of the Italian suppositi. The sentence “children have been substituted for one another in the past” can also have a totally different meaning in Italian. In fact, “per l’adietro,” means both “in the past and “from behind,” with the latter giving to the rest of the prologue a quite explicit dou-ble meaning focused on sodomy.


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60. Günsberg, “Gender Depictions,” 334–35.

61. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 95.

62. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.

63. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 95.

64. Ibid. She also argues that “in the domain of sexuality these constraints include the radical unthinkability of desiring otherwise, the radical unendurability of desiring otherwise, the absence of certain desires, the repetitive compulsion of others, the abiding repudiation of some sexual possibilities, panic, obsessional pull, and the nexus of sexuality and pain.” Ibid., 94. As Marvin Carlson notes, “recalling that Derrida challenged Austin and Searle’s concept of performative utterances by stressing their citationality and thus their involvement in repeti-tion, Butler stresses that gender performance, too, is citational and, like all cita-tion, never precisely repeats the absent original.” Marvin Carlson, Performance. A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 171.

65. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 125.

66. “There is no English word to convey adequately all the nuances of the Italian suppositi. The Latin participle, suppositus, itself translates into a number of possible Italian equivalents: supposto (supposed or assumed); sottoposto (sub-mitted, subjected, or exposed); sostituito (substituted or interchanged); finto (pretended or feigned); scambiato (exchanged or mistaken); and even pos-posto (placed after or behind).” Beame and Sbrocchi, The Comedies of Ariosto, 95–96.

67. Regarding this point and with reference to Elizabethan drama, see Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath.’ Speculating on the Body Actor,” in Erotic Politics. Desire on the Renaissance stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992), 76.

68. Hughes, “La moda proibita,” 102–103. See also Klapish-Zuber, Women, 245.

69. Regarding the kinds of materials, shapes, colors, and sizes in Italian Renaissance clothing, see Rosita Levi Pisetzki, Il costume e la moda nella società italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1978). Regarding, more specifically, sumptuary laws, see Hughes, “Sumptuary Laws and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Disputes and Settlements: Laws and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 66–69; Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Guardaroba Medievale. Vesti e scoietà dal XIII al XVI secolo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1999. For an investigation regarding the use of distinctive marks for prostitutes, see James Brundage, “Sumptuary Laws and Prostitution in Late Medieval Italy,” Journal of Medieval History 13 (1987): 343–55; Muzzarelli, Guardaroba Medievale, 294–98. Regarding marks imposed on Jews, see Ariel Toaff, Love, Work, and



Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 214–19, and Muzzarelli, Guardaroba Medievale, 287–98.

70. Muzzarelli, Guardaroba Medievale, 247.

71. Giuliana Chesne Dauphiné Griffo, “Le regole della moda,” in Rituale, Cerimoniale, Etichetta, ed. Sergio Bertelli and Giuyliano Crifò (Milan: Bompiani, 1985), 127–40. Regarding matters of etiquette that might also apply to clothing, see Norbert Elias, The Civilization Process, 2 vols. Vol. 1, The History of Manners. Vol. 2, Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon, 1982). On Elias’s work and its reception see Giuliana Crifò, “Tra sociologia e storia. Le scelte culturali di Norbert Elias,” in Rituale, ed. Sergio Bertelli and Giuyliano Crifò, 261–72.

72. Letter quoted in Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, vol. II, 383.

73. According to Carol Schuler, “both courtesans and mistresses might be linked by their common association with sexual activities, their roles and status were not identical.” “The Courtesan in Art: Historical Fact or Modern Fiction,” Women Studies 19 (1991): 199. In fact, while the courtesan was “a woman who had a small group of lovers who each paid a certain sum help support her in return for their privilege of her company . . . a mistress . . . usually carried out on an exclusive relationship with her noble lover.” Williams, “Le donne,” 119. Regarding mistresses in fifteenth-century courts, see Helen Ettlinger, “Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance Court Society,” Renaissance Quarterly XLVII (Winter 1994): 770–92.

74. Regarding the difference between performance—a doing—and performativity— a thing done—see Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 4–7.

75. Finucci, “The Female Masquerade,” 64. To define female masquerade is not uncomplicated. Scholars, in fact, have defined it either as a dangerous act of resistance or as unconditionally repressive. See, among others, Joan Rivière, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 35–44, but originally published in 1929; Jacques Lacan, “From Love to Libido,” in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1977), 187–200, but originally published in 1958); Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23 (1982): 74–87 and “Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (1988–89): 42–54; Sue-Ellen Case, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (1988–89): 55–73.

76. Susan Zimmerman notes that “the androgynous beauty of the cross-dressed boy actor blurred socially inscribed sexual categories, thereby fusing or overlapping disparate erotic impulses in the experience of the male spectator.” “Disruptive


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Desire. Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy,” in Erotic Politics, ed. Susan Zimmerman, 46.

77. Regarding masquerade as empowering through exaggeration, by assuming “the feminine role deliberately . . . which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation,” see Irigaray, The Sex, 76.

78. Günsberg, “Gender Depictions,” 338. See also Stallybrass, “Transvestism”; Zimmerman, “Disruptive Desire”; Orgel, Impersonations. The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

79. See Günsberg, “Gender Depictions,” 344, and Zimmerman, “Disruptive Desire,” 48.

80. Orgel, Impersonations, 71 and 81. “In the Epilogue to Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1677), the actors protest that if their male spectators continue to lure female actors away from the stage, they will return to using boy actors . . . . [T]he threat to replace women with boy actors is not imagined as a general loss but as a loss to the male spectator alone. The female spectator, on the contrary, is imagined as running wild after the ‘Youth in Petticoats.’” The boy actor is thus depicted as particularly alluring to women, a possi-bility that has been addressed by Stephen Orgel in “The Boys in the Back Room: Shakespeare’s Apprentices and the Economics of Theatre,” Paper given at the Modern Language Association, New Orleans, 1989. Stallybrass, “Transvestism,” 67–68.

81. See, for example, TP, II, 2, 66. In this occasion the servant asks his master, the Sienese: “Do you want me to act dumb as I did once before?” In the verse ver-sion Ariosto is even more specific: “What would you think if I pretended to be dumb as I did in Crisobolo’s house?” The actor playing the part of the servant in I suppositi is identified as the same actor playing the part of Trappola in La cassaria, IV, 7. See also TP, V, 8, 92 where Pasifilo exclaims: “There never was a stranger situation that this; one could write a play about it.”

82. Many scholars have insisted on the fragmentary nature of Ariosto’s I suppositi and on its lack of a tight plot. Without considering the text within its performative context, these scholars have interpreted Ariosto’s apparently fragmentary struc-ture as a deficiency.

83. Regarding this topic and its repercussion in drama, Linda L. Carroll has argued that “Ariosto was a nobleman in his own right, but also in the service of, and at times economically dependent upon, the Este, whose own position during the Italian wars was often uncertain. Similarly, Italians perceived themselves as becoming servants in their own states to the Northern Europeans and the Turks . . . . The tension over social hierarchy informing the Suppositi (the final plot twist notwithstanding) stems from a thwarting of aristocratic, masculine val-ues.” Linda L. Carroll, “Who’s on Top? Gender as Societal Power Configuration in Italian Renaissance Drama,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 4 (1989): 450.



84. TP, IV, 4, 79.

85. Marie-Françoise Plissart and Jacques Derrida, “Right of Inspection,” Art and Text 32 (Autumn 1989): 27.

86. To characterize Ariosto’s art as postmodern might seem an anachronism à la Borges that disrupts linearity by imbuing of moment of birth—the so-called Renaissance or early Modern Period—with the signs of its death. However, the paradox is only apparent, if we consider postmodernism as a condition that entails the weakening of epistemological, ontological, and existential certainties.


“The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi.”

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