‘Let’s joke, but seriously’ (scherzare, sì, ma seriamente)
In memory of Umberto Eco, playful scholar
Play in Renaissance Italy
Peter Burke
polity
Copyright © Peter Burke 2021
The right of Peter Burke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4344-1
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Preface
A Chinese painter, explaining to his pupils how to paint a grove of bamboo, told them to meditate for months on bamboo, to try to become a bamboo, and then produce their painting in a matter of minutes. In similar fashion, this essay in synthesis, although short and written in the course of a few months, has been long in the making. Writing about festivals, and in particular about Carnival, in my Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) made me want to continue in this direction. Conversations with Philippe Ariès a few months later led to an invitation to give a paper at a conference in Tours in 1980 concerned with ‘Les jeux à la Renaissance’. A conference on ‘tempo libero’, held in Prato in 1992, allowed me to explore the history of the idea of leisure. Writing a book about Castiglione’s Courtier, a dialogue that is presented as a game, encouraged thought about playfulness in the culture of the High Renaissance. A conference on the cultural history of humour, organized by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg and held in Amsterdam, was the occasion for a paper on ‘Frontiers of the Comic’, that turned into a chapter in a collective study of the history of humour, published in 1997.1 In short, I feel that I have been preparing for this essay for more than forty years without knowing it. I have occasionally stolen sentences from my past self in order to construct it, but I believe that this book offers new ideas as well as developing thoughts that were originally expressed in print elsewhere in new directions.
Another invitation, this time from John Henderson and Virginia Cox, to write a short book for a series of studies of the Italian Renaissance, persuaded me to return to the subject. I do not wish to thank the recent virus, but its result, virtual confinement at home, concentrated the mind wonderfully and allowed me to put my notes in order and produce a first draft while major libraries were closed. I cannot thank my wife Maria Lúcia enough for looking after me in that time of crisis. Telling stories was a form of light relief for the group of young men and women described in Boccaccio’s Decameron – refugees from the plague of 1348 – and doubtless for the author himself. For me in 2020, reading and writing about play was a form of light relief from a world dominated by the Coronavirus.
1 1. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; 3rd edn, Farnham, 2009); ‘Le carnaval de Venise’, in Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds.) Les jeux à la Renaissance (Paris, 1982), 55–64; Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (Cambridge, 1995); Burke, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present 146 (1995), 136–50; Burke, ‘Frontiers of the Comic in Early Modern Italy’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.) A Cultural History of Humour (Cambridge, 1997), 61–75.
1 Introduction
The three principal words in the title of this book may seem clear, but each of them is problematic. ‘Italy’ in this period might be said to be both too small and too large a unit of study. On one side, traditional forms of play in Italy, from charivaris (scampanate) to Carnival, had parallels elsewhere in Europe, while some new forms invented in Italy, such as the comedy, were adopted and adapted in other countries. On the other side, Italy was not yet a nation but a number of regions, which varied in their cultures as well as in their economies and political systems. A written language based on Tuscan was helping to unify the peninsula at this time, but the majority of the population spoke regional dialects, and the elites often employed dialect as a playful form of language, as we shall see.
Readers will notice that the majority of the examples offered in the book come from northern and central Italy. This does not mean that play stopped south of Rome. Obvious examples to the contrary include the storyteller Masuccio Salernitano, from Salerno in southwest Italy; Pietro Antonio Caracciolo, an actor who wrote farces in his native Neapolitan; Fabrizio de Fornaris, another Neapolitan actor who was famous for his rendering of the boastful but cowardly ‘Captain Crocodile’; Giambattista della Porta, a polymath from Naples who is best known for his comedies; and Giordano Bruno, from Nola near Naples, the author of some lively and playful dialogues. The minor role played by the south in this essay is probably the result of a relative lack of evidence. The Sicilian puppet theatre, for instance, already existed at this time, but little is known about the performances before the nineteenth century.
The term ‘Renaissance’ is also problematic. The main problem is the contrast between two common usages. The term is often employed in the traditional manner to describe a period of European history – more or less, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nowadays, this period is more often described as ‘early modern’ and extended to the eighteenth century. In this essay, I shall be looking at Italy during a long Renaissance from 1350 to 1650.
The word ‘Renaissance’ is also used in a more precise and limited sense to refer to a movement, a collective attempt to recover and imitate the culture of classical antiquity (Greek and Roman). The focus of this essay will be on the movement, extended to include the work of the major artists and writers of the period, even when they were not inspired by the ancient world. The movement involved only a minority of the Italian population, but to place it in context it will be necessary to examine popular culture as well.
Do
