(‘release’), solazzo (‘solace’), spasso (‘fun’), svago (‘distraction’), trastullo (‘pleasure’) and trattenimento (‘entertainment’).
What these terms have in common is their opposition to noia, at that time a word with a range of meanings for unpleasant feelings such as sadness and anxiety. To poets, the contrast and the rhyme of gioia and noia proved irresistible. Annoiare meant ‘to bother someone’, while noisoso meant ‘fussy’. In Renaissance Ferrara, the ruler built a villa near the city and named it Schifanoia, ‘avoid noia’. Although life was absurdly short, as Renaissance poets regularly remarked, time often hung heavily on people’s hands, to judge by the popularity of terms such as passatempo or fuggilozio (‘avoid idleness’ – or, perhaps, ‘find something to do’). The idea of boredom is said to have emerged only in the eighteenth century, but it is surely hiding behind some of the terms listed above, together with ‘tedious’ (tedioso).12
Other terms were more precise. Inganno meant ‘deceit’, itself a keyword that will recur in this essay, just as the practice recurred in Italy at this time. Burla was defined by Castiglione in his famous Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano) as ‘a friendly trick’ (un inganno amichevole). The literary term ‘burlesque’ is derived from it, and a leading comic poet of the sixteenth century, Francesco Berni, was described by a colleague as ‘master and father of the burlesque style’ (maestro e padre del burlesco stile). Beffa refers to a practical joke, a common practice in Renaissance Italy – a word that generated related terms such as the adjectives beffardo and beffabile. The term scherzo ranged from child’s play to adult wit.
An important cluster of words centred on the idea of madness (pazzia) and included ‘oddities’ (bizarrie), ‘caprices’ (capricci), ‘whims’ (ghiribizzi) and ‘eccentricities’ (stravaganze), all terms that may now seem negative but were used at the time in a positive manner as well. They were associated with jesters and clowns (buffoni), some of them much admired at court as well as in the piazza, and also with creative individuals such as Leonardo, whose ghiribizzi are described in the life of the artist by Giorgio Vasari. These terms were also employed on the title-pages of comic texts as a kind of advertisement. Take the case of the Venetian comic actor Andrea Calmo, whose letters were published under the title Cherebizzi (a dialect form of ghiribizzi), while his verses were described as concerned with ‘ridiculous and bizarre subjects’ (soggetti ridicolosi e bizzarri). Calmo’s contemporary Alessandro Caravia, a goldsmith and a comic poet, recounted the exploits of a sympathetic ruffian under the title Naspo Bizzarro (1565).
In the Middle Ages, only a few of these terms were in use, among them buffone, derisione, diletto, diporto, giocare, ludere, recreazione, solazzo, spasso, svagare (‘to amuse’) and trastullo (‘pleasure’). A witty saying was already described as a motto, while to produce one was known as motteggiare. In the fourteenth century, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio used the words beffa, festevole (‘light-hearted’), piacevole (which meant ‘witty’ as well as ‘courteous’), scherzare, trastullare (‘to deceive’) and trattenimento, (‘entertainment’).
If texts are to be trusted (since they usually lag behind speech), the number of words available to describe forms of play expanded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, we find baia, a synonym for beffa; canzonare (‘to joke’); ciurmare (‘to deceive’); furbo (‘trickster’) – a term still common in Italy, with a positive meaning; ludicro (‘funny’); mottevole (‘witty’); scherzo (‘joke’); stravagante (‘over the top’); and uccellare (‘to fool’).
In the sixteenth century, leading Renaissance writers such as Aretino, Ariosto, Bembo, Berni, Castiglione, Grazzini, Machiavelli and Vasari added terms such as acutezza (‘wit’); arguzia (‘shrewdness’ or ‘wit’); bagatelle (‘frivolities’); bizzaro; buffoneria; burla, burlesco; capriccio, capriccioso; commedia (in the sense of ‘comedy’); faceto (‘witty’); furbesco (‘sly’); ghiribizzi; giocamente (‘for fun’); grottesco (‘grotesque’); passatempo; pazzeggiare (‘to act like a mad person’); piacevolezze; ridicolo and ridicoloso. The proliferation of words is surely a sign that more attention is being given to play than before, a conclusion that is confirmed by the rising number of treatises on particular games, and the learned discussion of the nature of humour.
In what follows, Chapter 2 describes forms of play in Renaissance Italy. Italians of the period played many games, including mock-battles and the ancestors of football, tennis, and some ‘parlour games’. Chapter 3 is concerned with different kinds of humour, in words, images and actions, from comedies to practical jokes. Chapter 4 discusses the debate about play, the critics and the defenders. Chapter 5 adopts a sociological approach, asking who played, where and when. Chapter 6 discusses changes over the long term, from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, while the Epilogue continues the discussion up to our own time. Throughout the book, I shall be concerned with the uses and functions of play, which are surely just as important as work in the construction, expression and maintenance of both individual and collective identities.
As the Further Reading makes abundantly clear, this book is very far from the first contribution to the subject. Academic historians only began to take play seriously in the last few decades, from the 1970s or 1980s onwards, but they had a long chain of predecessors, a varied, unexpected and sometimes eccentric group of pioneers.
The History of the History of Play
A concern with the history of play goes back to the Renaissance itself. Books about play, such as the treatise on games of chance by the polymath Girolamo Cardano or the dialogue on games by the Sienese patrician Girolamo Bargagli, illustrated the antiquity of games with examples from ancient Rome, while the humanist physician Girolamo Mercuriale wrote a treatise on ancient Greek and Roman gymnastics.13 In the seventeenth century, a study of the comic poetry of the ancients was published by the poet and scholar Nicola Villani.14 After Villani, the history of play fell out of favour. A few eighteenth-century historians, notably Ludovico Muratori and Girolamo Tiraboschi, wrote on the subject, but not very much and often with disapproval. Muratori’s dissertations on Italian medieval antiquities discussed what the author called ‘public games’, while Tiraboschi’s history of Italian literature described the ‘frivolities’ (frivolezze) of the Renaissance academies, including the ‘ridiculous names’ of these organizations.15
In the early nineteenth century, Isaac D’Israeli, an English man of letters (as well as the father of Benjamin Disraeli), wrote an essay on the Italian academies in which, following the lead of Tiraboschi, he claimed that these ‘denominations of exquisite absurdity’ revealed the ‘national levity’ of the Italians.16 Later in the century, in a multivolume study of the Renaissance, another man of letters, John Addington Symonds, criticized what he called the ‘frivolity’ of the Italian comic poet Annibale Caro.17
The great cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt was unusual in his day in devoting ten pages to what he called ‘ridicule and joking’ (Spott und Witz) in his famous essay on the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Viewing it as a corrective to ‘the modern desire for fame’, part of a larger trend that he described as ‘the
