| In the Italian Renaissance, standards of reason, unity, virtue and civility exerted an invasive control over men's behavior just as men reinscribed and redefined these standards through their dissimulation of competing discourses. My project is a study that attends to these issues as I seek to investigate how masculinity is defined in literary texts of the period. The theoretical framework for my dissertation derives from feminist theory and performance studies, two fields that curiously intersect in their analysis of self-fashioning, artifice and behavior and its power of naturalization. The dissertation focuses on two conduct manuals and several stage plays: Alberti's I libri della famiglia, Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano, Machiavelli's La mandragola, Gli Intronati's Gl'ingannati , Tasso's L'Aminta and Guarini's Il pastor fido.;In the first two chapters, I address the unique tensions that arise in the treatises between masculine ideals, putative beliefs and performances of masculinity. The manuals demonstrate how discourses such as age, marriage, sexuality, dress, music, dance and effeminacy are crucial to an understanding of the social and political order. This order is situated within specific architectural and cultural contexts such as the bourgeois home and ducal court, and these physical spaces both circumscribe male anxieties of gender performance and are produced by them. The third chapter turns to sixteenth-century theatre in order to determine how theatrical performance of masculinity may subvert or subscribe to discourses laid out in the treatises. The chapter begins by discussing how comedies stage the erotic and social politics of the male body, specifically noting how a character may go through a public rite of passage or actors themselves may seduce their audience by objectifying their bodies. In the pastoral plays, casts of ephebic shepherds and bare-chested Satyrs attest to contradictory performances of masculinity much like those found in the conduct manuals. Theatrical performances, like the treatises of the first two chapters, stage the gaps between masculine ideals and men's performances. |
