| By the end of the 16th century in Italy, pastoral had become the dramatic form most often published and performed. Owing to the absence of classical models, the new genre, created from a conflation of comedy and tragedy and set in a mythical landscape inhabited by shepherds and nymphs, allowed for the contemplation of themes not theoretically licit in the classical genres of comedy or tragedy. Writers engaged in a variety of literary activities were attracted to pastoral for its particular capacity as a vehicle for the expression of individual ideologies, or as a "landscape of the mind", as Richard Cody has called it.;In this study, I present three representative examples of pastoral drama which were widely praised in their day but have been forgotten in ours. Angelo Ingegneri's Danza di Venere (1584), Alvise Pasqualigo's Gli intricati (1581) and Cesare Cremonini's Le pompe funebri (1590) not only help to extend the study of Italian pastoral beyond Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor fido, but they serve to define the genre by illustrating characteristic types or interpretations. Moreover, the three playwrights, a professional courtier, a nobleman with state duties and a professor of philosophy, can be considered representative of the heterogeneity of Renaissance pastoralists.;Deconstruction of the comic and tragic constituents in the plays and examination of how the various dramatic topoi are organized in the plot reveal the kind of generic tempering practiced in each of these hybrid plays, rendering a collective idea of pastoral by illustrating the range of thematic and structural possibilities for the genre. Similarly, consideration of the pastoralists' particular generic conflation with regard to the writing, publishing and performing of the plays identifies the individual pastoral temperaments of the playwrights.;One chapter is dedicated to each of the plays, beginning with Ingegneri's iconographical presentation of an idea of love interpreted Neoplatonically in Danza di Venere, followed by Pasqualigo's witty, carnevalesque demonstration of astuteness in love in Intricatri, and concluding with Cremonini's erudite philosophical discussion transformed for the stage in Pompe funebri. The plays have been transcribed in the appendices in order to supply the want of modern editions. |
