venetian literature and publishing 629
though still referring to the elegant life of the well-to-do. Chivalric novels
inflamed the longings of the Venetian readerly public, especially female
readers, with their stories of valiant knights and their heroic and even
warrior women.13
tales served as guides to young men on how to provide an evening’s
entertainment to young women, a social ritual in Venice at the time, with
metaphorical language providing the necessary disguise for allusions to
erotic activity. it was the genius of giovanni Francesco straparola to first
see that this genre was most congenial to Venetians, capitalizing on it
in his Piacevoli notti (1551, 1553), involving high-born non-Venetians and
set in Carnival on the island of Murano among vacation homes. its roots
in local theater, especially that of ruzante, are evident in a number of
peasant tales and in two framing characters: the Ferier beltrame was a
member of the Compagnia della Calza that had most frequently invited
ruzante (the Ortolani or Farmers) and bishop Casali had attended a scan-
dalous 1526 ruzante performance.14
by the final quarter of the 16th century, moral strictures imposed by
both civic and religious authorities had largely brought about the demise
of the contemporary local chivalric romance. readers had to content
themselves with republications of classical novels and with spanish works
such as Don Quixote and translated english and French romances. While
the serious poema achieved favor elsewhere in the italian peninsula in the
second half of the Cinquecento, it was too strongly associated with the
empire to succeed in Venice, though translations and spinoffs of classical
poemi enjoyed some success. also of interest to Venetian readers were
collections of various kinds of musical and poetic genres associated with
courtly culture.
For those authors accepting a standard language, the more polyglot and
creative solutions proposed by courtiers such as Castiglione were eclipsed
by the need for linguistic systematicity, including as part of authorial
professionalization. the settling of the question in favor of bembo’s archaic
tuscan participated in the ascendancy of static systematicity represented
in the religious sphere by the Council of trent and in the philosophical and
literary spheres by the imposition of uniform aristotelian rules and defi-
nitions that limited creativity and variation. the aristotelian revival was
13 ginetta auzzas, “La narrativa nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” in SCV 3.2, pp.
103–06.
14 sanuto, vol. 40, col. 789. Casali was then english ambassador to Venice.