The Art of Ambiguity: Mirrors, Mimesis, and Metamorphosis in Italian Renaissance Comedy

This project investigates the relationship between imitation, dissimulation, and gender representation dramatized in Italian Renaissance comedy. The most renowned definition of comedy in the Italian Renaissance was from Cicero: "Comedy is an imitation of life, a mirror of manners, and an image of truth." Elucidated in this definition are the underlying precepts of the Renaissance: mimesis, mirrors, and the articulation of perspective. However, comedies in the sixteenth century also stage the nuanced mechanisms of deception. Their derivative status as works of literary imitation invites the thematization of fraudulence as both a metaliterary concern and a central motif in the performance of plots based on disguises that generally center on sexual ambiguity. My dissertation therefore shows how the poetics of dissemblance informs the project of such comedies at a literary level, while concomitantly prefiguring the erotic deceptiveness of visual play enacted in the context of theatre--thus contending that there is always a metamorphosis behind the "mirror" of comedy.;Through both close textual analysis and the consideration of dramaturgical implications in these plays, I attend to how their comedic reliance on cross-dressing and mistaken identity stages the question of. gender ambiguity as not only an erotically driven exploration of social norms, but also as a means of representing the problematization of interpretation as part of the duplicitous aesthetic of Renaissance imitation. Thus, I attempt to examine the importance of ambiguity and dissemblance in the erotic sensibility of the period, and in turn, to investigate how the indeterminate characterization of erotically rendered figures in these comedies was informed by the poetics of duplication inherent to the art of mimesis in the Italian Renaissance.