venetian literature and publishing 631
rejected the claims of aristotle that male physical superiority engendered
social and political superiority. she chastized men for restricting women’s
sphere of action and failing to record their excellent deeds, which she
attributed to fear of female superiority. stopping short of condemning
men, she, as had Pozzo, proposed equality of the sexes.
biographical factors shared by Pozzo and Marinella that facilitated their
work were the support of male relatives and associates and a late marriage
age. another element important to the success and status of many women
writers was association with prominent patrons, often including aristo-
cratic or patrician women, though their relationships with male patrons
were not always tranquil. their publishing fortunes varied from that of
Pozzo, whose only published work, her treatise defending women, was
issued after her death, to Marinella, numerous of whose works enjoyed
one or more issuings.
The Stagetheater participated in this and other trends of the late 16th century
that would continue well into the next and even beyond. as censorship
increased, remaining comedies adhered more closely to established social
norms and were more frequently published for reading in private. On the
stage, several trends developed. the masks of arcadia became established,
as did the Commedia dell’arte’s semi-realistic masks such as the peasant
and the soldier. a light-hearted genre, the commedia ridicolosa [silly
comedy], mixed arcadian literary characters with realistic peasant ones
(one of the first known attestations was ruzante’s Pastoral, c.1517).
Professional italian troupes took Commedia dell’arte to international
venues including germany, France, and england, where it and other forms
of italian theater influenced local authors including shakespeare, a topic
that is generating promising new scholarship.16
tragedy, which was strongly associated with princely forms of govern-
ment, received virtually no attention in Venice, though important texts
were written by mainland imperialists. Sofonisba (1515), by the Vicentine
gian giorgio trissino, is the first known italian tragedy. the preference for
16 Major works in this growing field are Louise george Clubb, Italian Drama in
Shakespeare’s Time (new haven, 1989), and the numerous volumes written or edited by
Michele Marrapodi, including his Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, and Refashioning (aldershot/burlington, Vt., 2007).