ITALIAN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

ITALIAN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. Italian literature entered an active and important phase in the late fifteenth century that was stimulated by the revival of classical literature, a flourishing popular culture, and the growth of courts. Among the genres developed were the comic epic, lyric poetry, the pastoral, and comic theater. Intruding onto the cultural scene were worries about trade competition, Turkish aggression, and domination by outside powers. Although France initially seemed likely to succeed in such conquests, by 1530 Holy Roman emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) had gained control of most states, except Venice, through a series of wars fought on Italian soil.

POETRY: THE COMIC EPIC AND THE COURTLY LYRIC

Three important comic epics were written during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Morgante (1478, 1482 or 1483) by Luigi Pulci, a member of the Medici circle; Orlando innamorato (1483, 1495) by Matteo Maria Boiardo; and Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532) by Ludovico Ariosto, the latter two at the Este court in Ferrara. The works continued the Italian tradition of adding local color to the medieval epic that narrated the defense of France by Charlemagne and his nephew Roland against Saracen attack. An infusion of comedy and fantasy qualified these works as mock or comic epics.

Morgante recounts the adventures of Charlemagne's knights and a giant, for whom it is named, and the betrayal of Roland and the aged Charlemagne's inability to discern the betrayal. Orlando innamorato creates a French origin for the Este dynasty, which in the work is said to be the progeny of Ruggiero, a Saracen convert to Christianity, and his French bride Bradamante. Ruggiero, like Virgil's Aeneas, is descended from a Trojan soldier, further strengthening Este claims to legitimacy. Boiardo's poem also introduced Roland's love for the Chinese princess Angelica, an enemy of France. In Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Roland's passion costs him his sanity. Discovering that Angelica has married a lowly Saracen foot soldier, he hurls to the heavens the trees on which the history of their love is carved.

A renewed interest in lyric poetry was sparked in Italian courts by Spanish performers who followed the Aragonese and the Borgia to Italy. Pietro Bembo, who frequented several of those courts, spearheaded the revival of Petrarchan poetry dedicated to Platonic love, the most influential movement in lyric poetry. A fondness for pageantry is evident in Angelo Poliziano's Stanzas for the Joust of the Magnificent Giuliano (1475–1478), which glorified a Medici family member's winning of a tournament. The pastoral, prominent in Roman and medieval literature, inspired the Arcadia (1504) of Jacopo Sannazaro, which was set in an idealized countryside of shepherds tending their flocks and was marked by the practical subtext of court patronage.

COMEDY: CONTINUATION OF TRADITIONS, REVIVAL OF THE ANCIENTS, AND CREATION OF NEW GENRES

Theater developed along several lines during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Continuing from the Middle Ages was the religious play or sacra rappresentazione, which was particularly popular in Tuscany. Folk plays celebrating marriages and seasonal festivities such as Carnival were staged in rural and urban Italy. States, especially Venice, utilized folk genres to influence the popular classes' opinions on political questions. Urban life among the popular classes of Naples was the subject of several comic compositions by Sannazaro. The pastoral tradition inspired the first known vernacular nonreligious drama, Poliziano's Orpheus (1480).

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, theatrical developments gained momentum. The Este rulers of Ferrara staged the comedies of Plautus and Terence in Latin and in Italian translation. Playwrights in Venice composed their own comedies in Latin about contemporary subjects. In the early sixteenth century, a new genre began to form: the learned comedy. Taking its general framework from ancient comedy, learned comedy was also influenced by Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313–1375) Decameron (1348–1353), which was written in the vernacular and emphasized characters' ingenious and fair solutions to the contemporary social conflicts in which they were caught up. Comedies were performed at Carnival and wedding festivities; they explored the conflicts between parents arranging financially advantageous marriages for their children and the young people's dedication to the contemporary vogue for love. Typical of the genre are Ariosto's The Coffer, The Pretenders, and The Necromancer or The Magician (all written in 1508–1520), The Mandrake Root (1504–1518) by Niccolò Machiavelli, and The Follies of Calandro (1513) by Bernardo Dovizi (Il Bibbiena).

The lower classes and undignified behavior subsequently assumed greater importance in comedy. The works of several Sienese playwrights and those of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante), who wrote between about 1516 and 1536, mixed Arcadian shepherds with real peasants, exploiting their mutual misunderstandings to comic effect. Beolco's plays of the late 1520s concentrated on peasant life and the terrible sufferings inflicted by a wave of war, famine, and disease. Ariosto's final play, Lena (1528–1529), presents a bleak picture of the moral compromises called for by impoverished urban life that was probably influenced by Beolco, with whom he was working. Aretino's comedies The Courtesan (1525) and The Stablemaster (1526–1527) satirized urban and courtly life. The anonymous work The Venetian Woman (1510–1517 or 1536) depicted the clandestine and forbidden erotic rivalry of two Venetian patrician women.

THE NOVELLA

The most popular genre of nondramatic prose was the novella, which favored plot variety and armchair travel. Inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron and a strong indigenous tradition, Florentine writers of the late fifteenth century created popular and aristocratic variants of the novella. Tommaso Guardati (Masuccio Salernitano) ushered in a new phase marked by pessimism and moralizing. His 1476 collection, whose title Il Novellino is a pun on 'little novel' and 'novice', introduced the convention of dedicatory letters to aristocrats. The mid-sixteenth century saw the publication of numerous novella collections. Matteo Bandello's Novelle and Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio's Hecatommiti, the latter including a philosophical dialogue on civil life, share a somber tone and assign tragic outcomes to transgressive actions. Shakespeare employed a number of the novellas as the bases of his plays. The Pleasurable Nights of Giovan Francesco Straparola, tales supposedly told during Carnival on the Venetian island of Murano, return to the bawdy tone of the earlier tradition and the magic realism of the comic epics. The Renaissance novella, like its medieval counterpart, emphasized restraint, analysis, and intelligent deployment of resources. Added to those features were the new conventions of strengthened support for social hierarchy and the inclusion of a chorus that commented on the actions of the protagonists. The latter convention was perhaps derived from theater, for which many authors of novellas also wrote.

NEW PROSE GENRES

Expository prose developed several new vernacular genres. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) provided an illustrious beginning for scientific writing. The behavioral manual, indispensable in a period of changing social relations, was embodied by The Courtier (1528) by Baldassare Castiglione. A somewhat subversive variant was Aretino's Dialogues (1534), some of which teach the arts of eroticism. Normativity returned with Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo (1558), whose title became synonymous with good deportment.

LITERARY THEORY AND ARISTOTELIANISM

One of the most important results of the humanistic search for lost classical texts was the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics. The translation of the Poetics into Latin in 1498 and into Italian in 1549 initiated a theoretical debate about the classifications and definitions of various literary genres. Of special interest was poetry's relationship to history, ethics, and moral philosophy. The two parts of Gian Giorgio Trissino's Poetics opened the topic with the first part (1529) and closed it with the second (1562); other participants included Giovanni Pontano, Francesco Robortello, Benedetto Varchi, Alessandro Piccolomini, and Lodovico Castelvetro. Over the decades of debate, Aristotle's concern with civic order caused a shift in emphasis from poetry as a solitary and pleasurable activity to poetry as bearer of civic responsibilities.

Among the genres most affected by this rediscovery were comedy and tragedy. Renaissance theorists formulated a set of norms for each on the basis of Aristotle's observations on art as imitation, on the nature of genres, and on appropriate and effective forms of representation. These were combined with Roman drama criticism to produce a value-based literary hierarchy; a series of rules governing plot, character, sentiment, and diction; a progressive fiveact structure; and the renowned unities of time, place, and action (plot), which require that a play be based on one action occurring in one place on one day. Important contributions to this movement included Trissino's Poetics, Francesco Robortello's On Comedy (1548), Madius's On the Ridiculous (1550), and Giraldi Cinzio's On Composing Comedies and Tragedies (1543).

At the same time, theatrical presentations acquired established sites, with a permanent theater becoming a requirement of a ruler's palazzo.

TRAGEDY

The first tragedies were written during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–1517): Gian Giorgio Trissino's Sophonisba (1515), in which a queen defeated by the Romans commits suicide, and Giovanni Rucellai's Rosmunda. Aristotle believed that tragedy's concentration on rulers and on the emotions of horror and compassion made it superior to comedy. The rediscovery of his theories promoted respect for tragedy, which was staged exclusively for aristocratic audiences. Although Renaissance authors adhered to the strict rules that classical theoreticians developed for tragedy, they also included contemporary issues in their works. The Este court in Ferrara undertook the first staging of a vernacular tragedy, Giraldi Cinzio's Orbecche, in 1541. The Paduan Academy of the Enflamed's performance of Sperone Speroni's Canace, planned for 1542, was postponed by Beolco's death and never rescheduled. The first generation of tragic performances shocked aristocratic audiences with depictions of ruling families as bloodthirsty, ruthless, and incestuous.

THE QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA

Related to literary theory was the questione della lingua, the question of which form of the vernacular to employ in various writings. The Italian peninsula's political and vernacular fragmentation and the extensive use of Latin made this a complicated and thorny issue. Early in the sixteenth century a group of literary courtiers, including Baldassare Castiglione, proposed a contemporary language that would both transcend and respect regional differences by allowing local variation and foreign terms. Pietro Bembo opposed their suggestion in his Prose della volgar lingua (Vernacular writings), advancing instead fourteenth-century literary Tuscan, for which he provided a detailed grammar. Florentine writers including Machiavelli, resisting such archaic usage, favored contemporary Florentine. Northern Italian writers Trissino and Speroni unsuccessfully attempted to revive the proposal of an eclectic language that would draw upon the vernaculars of all regions.

Bembo's proposal prevailed, an early sign of which was Ariosto's Tuscanization of Orlando furioso. Bembo's success was due to his own printed grammar and the many printed copies of the texts of Petrarch and Boccaccio, his models for poetry and prose, respectively. Also influential were the power of the Florentine popes Leo X (1513–1521) and Clement VII (1523–1534) and the pressures on the publishing industry to increase the market with a standard language. Although some viewed Bembo's solution as aristocratic, it encouraged the spread of reading, as the popularity of printed chapbooks and grammars attests.

THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: VARIATIONS ON ESTABLISHED THEMES

Literary developments during the second half of the sixteenth century largely consisted of variations on the themes established in the preceding years. Lyric poetry in the Petrarchan tradition enjoyed renewed vitality in the middle decades of the century: the appeal of its interiority and allusive language increased in a time of uncertainty in the civic and religious spheres. Women began to write in this style, their numbers including courtesans such as Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, women of the popular class such as Modesta Pozzo, and upper-class women such as Vittoria Colonna and Chiara Matraini. Themes of the love of woman for man and the love of God were added to the traditional theme of the Platonic love of man for woman. Some genuine, rather than comic, epics appeared as a result of the high value accorded to the epic by Aristotle. These included Trissino's Italia liberata dai Goti (1547–1548) and Torquato Tasso's great Jerusalem Delivered (1581), which celebrated the recapture of Jerusalem by Christian knights during the Crusades.

Comedy, which Aristotle confined to the lowest sphere of society and values, became associated largely with the nascent commedia dell'arte. Performances were conducted not by courtiers but by the first professional troupes, who abandoned scripts for type characters and conventional plot devices. Only Venice and Florence, with their republican governments, maintained a robust scripted tradition with the comedies of playwrights such as Andrea Calmo and Anton Francesco Grazzini. The pastoral, which reached its zenith with Tasso's Aminta (1573), provided courtly entertainment.

In the final decades of the century, doubts about the validity and sustainability of strict Aristotelian categories crept in. New mixed genres appeared, along with interest in nonaristocratic and female characters, and subversive and distorted language. The comedies of Giovan Battista Della Porta and Giordano Bruno's The Candlebearer (1582) embody these developments. Both playwrights' restless questioning of religious orthodoxy led to investigations by the Inquisition; Bruno was burned at the stake. Tragedy, after a brief absence from the stage, developed along more moderate lines. The tensions generated by the absolute power of God and inescapable human guilt were softened in the new genre of the tragedy with a happy ending. Kings, while still all-powerful, owed their ill deeds to advisers rather than their own defects, and horror-inducing actions no longer occurred on-stage. The pastoral continued in Ferrara as a mixed genre with Giovanni Battista Guarini's Faithful Shepherd, written in a tragicomic style. Other popular blended forms included the melodrama and the serious or dark comedy. The Aristotelian debate underwent a final shift toward a view of poetry as art. In the linguistic sphere, archaic Tuscan, that is, the fourteenth-century Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, suffered a setback when Tasso eschewed it for his epic.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Seventeenth-century Italian literature continued a number of important late-sixteenth-century trends. Many of the most significant developments occurred in academies, which were selective private groups of learned men. Scientific rationalism produced great though isolated monuments in the writings of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a member of the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynx-like). Scientific rationalism was applied by Paolo Sarpi to human affairs in his works on church–state relations and by the Accademia Della Crusca (Academy of the Bran) to language in a Florentine dictionary that they compiled under Medici patronage. The dictionary was a milestone in the questione della lingua, its affirmation of archaic Tuscan stimulating much debate and instigating a countertrend in the use of local dialects in literary compositions. Theatrical productions abounded, led by the commedia dell'arte, a variety of mixed genres, and melodrama. The construction of theaters to which the public was admitted for a fee opened a profitable enterprise, while the leading family acting troupes such as the Andreini attracted a large public following. The novella, with its variety of characters, locations, and outcomes, experienced continued popularity. Poetry comprised both the floridity of the baroque, with its love of the bizarre and the marvelous, and the severity of classicism. The leading figure in the former style was Giovan Battista Marino, whose Adone (Adonis), the longest poem in Italian literature, recounted the loves of Venus and Adonis. His followers, the Marinisti, wrote numerous love poems.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century, known as the Age of Enlightenment for its emphasis on secular rationalism, saw the growth of scientific research. Learned men wrote the first histories of literature and the theater and compiled collections of historical documents. In his New Science (1725, 1730, 1744), Giambattista Vico studied human society in a systematic manner for the first time. Newspapers brought discussions and debates on many topics to a wider audience. The backdrop of many of these developments was a reform of the aristocratic regime, most of whose proponents aimed to eliminate excesses and restore the aristocracy to a role of leadership, but whose egalitarianism and respect for work and the law contained the seeds of a new order.

Aristocratic life received comic treatment in Giuseppe Parini's The Day (1763 and 1765). The last of the mock epics, it recounts a day in the life of a young Milanese nobleman, a day dedicated entirely to his pleasure. Implicitly in The Day and explicitly elsewhere, Parini expressed his admiration for the sobriety, practicality, and work ethic of the lower classes who produced the items consumed by the young nobleman. Yet Parini was not a revolutionary, preferring that the aristocracy reform itself and earn its privileges, not vanish entirely.

The stage attracted the interest of many talented writers. Most renowned among them was one of the world's great playwrights, the Venetian Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793). While his early plays conformed to the typed characters and plot devices of the commedia dell'arte, Goldoni soon spearheaded a move toward realism that appealed to many theatergoers. The plays of his reform period recognize the worth of middle- and lower-class characters, depicting the impoverished aristocracy as arrogant and frivolous. Opposition came from many, including Carlo Gozzi, whose exotic tales filled with aristocratic wealth and privilege also attracted a large following. Venetian authorities censured the theater and required Goldoni to rewrite some of his plays. In 1762, Goldoni left for Paris, where he worked with the Comédie Italienne and wrote his memoirs.

A desire to liberate the states of the Italian peninsula from the tyranny of foreign rule inspired the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803). After extensive travels outside the peninsula, Alfieri took up residence in Florence, where he wrote plays and the treatise Of Tyranny (1777) to expose the defects of tyrannical rule. Yet Alfieri's works showed that he was unable to completely renounce the old order. He chose tragedy, the most conservative, aristocratic genre, and he deposes no ruler in his plays. The innermost sentiments of the characters are conveyed in lyrical language. His masterpiece Saul depicts King Saul's struggles with the knowledge that David will soon replace him as ruler, yet the old king maintains his dignity throughout the work.

Autobiography, which began with the poets Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth century and reemerged in the sixteenth century with Benvenuto Cellini's Life, reached its culmination in the eighteenth century. With the old social order weakened and under scrutiny, personal reinvention through prose was more possible than at any time since the fourteenth century, and more useful. The unusually large number of authors seeking public affirmation by creating a written persona included Goldoni, Gozzi, Casanova, Alfieri, and Vico.

The gathering momentum for the liberation of Italy from foreign rule breathed life into the questione della lingua. Alfieri preferred contemporary Tuscan, while the Verri brothers, associated with the newspaper The Caffé, opposed it. Goldoni typified the open approach, writing plays both in Tuscan and in the dialects of Venice and the neighboring fishing town of Chioggia. In his influential Essay on the Philosophy of Language (1785), Melchiorre Cesarotti advanced the view that all Italians possessed their language, and that control of it should pass from a closed local academy to a committee of learned men from all regions.

See also Castiglione, Baldassare ; Cellini, Benvenuto ; Drama: Italian ; Galileo Galilei ; Goldoni, Carlo ; Leonardo da Vinci ; Machiavelli, Niccolò ; Tasso, Torquato .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Alfieri, Vittorio. Of Tyranny. Translated by Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan. Toronto, 1961. Translation of Della tirannide (1777).

Aretino, Pietro. Aretino's Dialogues. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York, 1971. Translation of Ragionamenti (1534).

——. The Marescalco. Translated by Leonard G. Sbrocchi and J. Douglas Campbell. Ottawa, 1986. Translation of Il Marescalco (1533).

Ariosto, Lodovico. The Comedies of Ariosto. Translated and edited by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi. Chicago, 1975. Translations of The Coffer [in prose], The Pretenders, The Necromancer, Lena, The Coffer [in verse], The Students, The Scholastics (1508–1533).

——. Orlando furioso. Translated by Guido Waldman. Oxford and New York, 1998. Translation of Orlando furioso (1532).

Beolco, Angelo (Il Ruzante). L'Anconitana. The Woman from Ancona. Translated by Nancy Dersofi. Berkeley, 1994. Translation of L'Anconitana (1536).

——. La Moschetta. Translated by Antonio Franceschetti and Kenneth R. Bartlett. Ottawa, 1993. Translation of La Moscheta (1528–1530).

——. Ruzzante Returns from the Wars. In The Servant of Two Masters and Other Italian Classics. Edited by Eric Bentley. New York, 1958. Translation of Il Parlamento (Il Reduce) (1529).

Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando innamorato. Translated by Charles Stanley Ross. English verse edited by Anne Finnigan. Berkeley, 1989. Translation of Orlando innamorato (1482 or 1483, 1495).

Bruno, Giordano. Candlebearer. Translated by Gino Moliterno. Ottawa, 1999. Translation of Il candelaio (1582).

Casanova, Giacomo. History of My Life. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Baltimore, 1997. Translation of Mémoires (1797).

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by Charles Singleton. Edited by Daniel Javitch. New York, 2002. Translation of Il libro del cortegiano (1528).

Cellini, Benvenuto. My Life. Translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. New York, 2002. Translation of La vita (1562).

Della Casa, Giovanni. Galateo: A Renaissance Treatise on Manners. Translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett. Toronto, 1994. Translation of Galateo (1558).

Della Porta, Giambattista. Gli duoi fratelli rivali. Edited and translated by Louise George Clubb. Berkeley, 1980. Translation of Gli duoi fratelli rivali (1601).

Dovizi, Bernardo (Il Bibbiena). The Follies of Calandro. Translated by Oliver Evans. In The Genius of the Italian Theater. Eric Bentley, ed. New York, 1964. Translation of La Calandria (1513).

Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. Translated by Stillman Drake. New York, 2001. Translation of Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (1632).

——. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo: Including The Starry Messenger (1610), Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), and Excerpts from Letters on Sunspots (1613), The Assayer (1623). Translated by Stillman Drake. New York, 1990. Translation of Siderius nuncius, Lettera alla Gran Duchessa Cristina, Lettere, Il saggiatore.

——. Galileo against the Philosophers in His Dialogue of Cecco di Ronchitti (1605) and Considerations of Alimberto Mauri (1606). Translated by Stillman Drake. Los Angeles, 1976. Translation of Dialogo de Cecco di Ronchitti da Bruzene in perpuosito de la stella nuova, Considerazioni di Alimberto Mauri.

Goldoni, Carlo. Four comedies [by] Goldoni. Translated by Frederick Davies. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1968. Translation of I due gemelli Veneziani (1750), La vedova scaltra (1748), La locandiera (1753), and La casa nova (1761).

——. Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni. Translated by John Black. Edited by William A. Drake. Westport, Conn., 1926. Translation of Mémoires (1787).

——. The Servant of Two Masters. Translated and adapted by Frederick H. Davies. London, 1961. Translation of Servitore di due padroni (1747).

——. Villeggiatura Trilogy. Translated by Robert Cornthwaite. Lyme, N.H., 1994. Translation of Le smanie della villeggiatura, Le avventure della villeggiatura, Il ritorno dalla villeggiatura (1761).

Guarini, Battista. The Faithful Shepherd. Translated by Thomas Sheridan. Edited and completed by Robert Hogan and Edward A. Nickerson. Newark, Del., and Cranbury, N.J., 1989. Translation of Il pastor fido (1589).

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Comedies of Machiavelli. Edited and translated by David Sices and James B. Atkinson. Hanover, N.H., 1985. Translations of Mandragola (1504–1518), Andria (1517/1518), Clizia (1524/1525).

Poliziano, Angelo. A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo Politian and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso. Translated by Louis E. Lord. Reprint. Westport, Conn., 1986. Translation of Orfeo (1480).

——. The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano. Translated by David Quint. Amherst, Mass., 1979. Translation of Stanze cominciate per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de' Medici (1475–1478).

Pulci, Luigi. Morgante: the Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante. Translated by Joseph Tusiani. Introduction and notes by Edoardo A. Lèbano. Bloomington, Ind., 1998. Translation of Morgante (1478, 1482 or 1483).

Sannazaro, Jacopo. Arcadia, & Piscatorial Eclogues. Translated by Ralph Nash. Detroit, 1966. Translation of Arcadia (1504).

Sermini, Gentile, et al. Renaissance Comic Tales of Love, Treachery, and Revenge. Edited and translated by Valerie Martone and Robert L. Martone. New York, 1994. Translation of tales by Gentile Sermini, Giovanni Gherardo da Prato, Lorenzo de' Medici, Matteo Bandello, Masuccio Salernitano, and Anton Francesco Grazzini.

Tasso, Torquato. A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo Politian and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso. Translation by Louis E. Lord. Reprint. Westport, Conn., 1986. Translation of Aminta (1573).

——. Jerusalem Delivered. Edited and translated by Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore, 2000. Translation of Gerusalemme liberata (1581).

Vico, Giovan Battista. New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. London and New York, 1999. Translation of Scienza nuova (1744).

Secondary Sources

Andrews, Richard. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.

Angelini, Franca. Vita di Goldoni. Rome, 1993.

Ascoli, Albert Russell. Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton, 1987.

Asor Rosa, Alberto. Storia della letteratura italiana. Florence, 1985.

Attolini, Giovanni. Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento. Rome 1988.

Baratto, Mario. La letteratura teatrale del Settecento in Italia: studi e letture su Carlo Goldoni. Vicenza, 1985.

——. Tre studi sul teatro: Ruzante, Aretino, Goldoni. Venice, 1964.

Carroll, Linda L. Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Boston, 1990.

Clubb, Louise George. Giambattista della Porta, Dramatist. Princeton, 1965.

——. Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time. New Haven, 1989.

Croce, Benedetto. La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza. Bari, 1949.

Di Maria, Salvatore. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovations. Lewisburg, Pa., 2002.

Ferroni, Giulio. Storia della letteratura italiana dal Cinquecento al Settecento. Milan, 1991. Vol. 4 of Storia della letteratura italiana.

Fido, Franco. Guida a Goldoni. Teatro e società nel Settecento. Turin, 1977.

——. Nuova guida a Goldoni. Teatro e società nel Settecento. Turin, 2000.

Hall, Robert Anderson. The Italian questione della lingua, an Interpretative Essay. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1942.

Herrick, Marvin Theodore. Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana, Ill., 1950.

——. Italian Comedy in the Renaissance. Urbana, Ill., 1960.

——. Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance. Urbana, Ill., 1965.

Marinelli, Peter V. Ariosto and Boiardo: the Origins of Orlando furioso. Columbia, Mo., 1987.

Oreglia, Giacomo. The Commedia dell'Arte. Translated by Lovett F. Edwards. London, 1968.

Panizza, Letizia, and Sharon Wood, eds. A History of Women's Writing in Italy. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Chicago, 1969.

Sabbatino, Pasquale. La "Scienza" della scrittura: Dal progetto del Bembo al manuale. Florence, 1988.

Siciliano, Enzo. La letteratura italiana. 3 vols. Milan, 1986–1988.

Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago, 1961.

Linda L. Carroll