GRAZZINI, Anton Francesco.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Comedie; First edition of this collection of comedies by the Florentine poet and playwright Anton Francesco Grazzini, called "Il Lasca", (1503-1584), who was an important practitioner of the commedia erudite, the 16th-century popular drama that spurned the classicizing taste of the age and the refined artistic ideals of Pietro Bembo. These are robust comedies built around the theme of intrigue-deception. Although in the classical tradition of Plautus and Terence, the dialogue is expressed in the lively and popular version of spoken Florentine. In its use of stock comedy characters - gullible fools, lustful young people, corrupt scheming servants, and the like - the style shares many elements with the more improvisational commedia dell'arte. Italian comedy of this era had a strong influence on the Elizabethan theatre in England, notably in the comedies of Shakespeare and Jonson, where "high" and "low" styles were mixed with similar gusto and Italian settings were favoured. Each of the six comedies here has its own title, foliation and register, and surviving copies are often found incomplete, broken into their constituent parts. Four of the comedies - La Strega (The Witch), La Sibilla (The Sibyl), La Pinzochera (The Go-Between) and I Parentadi (The Kingships) - were not staged during Grazzini's lifetime and are printed here for the first time. La Gelosia (Jealousy) was first published in 1551; La Spiritata (The Possessed) in 1561. The latter was translated anonymously into Eng

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