The Theatre of Angelo Beolco (Ruzante): Text, Context and Performance by Ronnie Ferguson (review) (2005)

MLRy 100.4, 2005 1127 describe its style as anything other than stodgy. Sometimes, indeed, a good deal of pudding needs to be dug through in search of the plums. But the plums are there; and, in the absence of any serious rival to this erudite and comprehensive study as an English-language introduction to Cecco Angiolieri's work, they should be savoured. University of California, Berkeley Steven Botterill The Theatre ofAngelo Beolco (Ruzante): Text, Context and Performance. By Ronnie Ferguson. Ravenna: Longo. 2000. 253 pp. ?25.82. ISBN 88-8063-259-0. More than any other anglophone critic, Ronnie Ferguson has helped correct Richard Andrews's trenchant 1993 observation (in his Scripts andScenarios: The Performance ofComedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 143) that Ruzante has been the 'great unapproachable' of Italian Renaissance playwrights be? cause of the obscurity (for modern readers) of the Paduan dialect in which he chiefly wrote and the performance-oriented nature of the scripts written by this consummate man of the theatre. Ferguson's study is meticulously researched (the fruitof his long engagement with Ruzante), elegantly organized, sensibly reasoned, and beautifully written. It should do much to help English readers both with and without Italian indeed draw nearer to this great early sixteenth-century figure. The initial chapter provides a wealth of information regarding the fourteen-work corpus?extant manuscripts, original titles, genre affiliations, plot summaries, first and modern editions, English translations, critical bibliography?that makes the book immediately useful even before one reads it in its entirety. From this close, material look at Ruzante's corpus the book proceeds to the contemporary and subsequent reception of the playwright (an important issue since he was both popular and con? troversial); an examination of Ruzante's life and his all-important relationship to his patron, Alvise Cornaro (especially revealing to the critical interpretation of his plays, although Ferguson sensibly desists from undue psychologizing); a trenchant analysis of the complex workings of genre and dialect in the plays (about which the author is particularly eloquent); a discussion of staging and stagecraft that provides theatrical ballast for the preceding literary discussion; and a final thematic chapter that discusses Ruzante's 'ethics of the natural', convincingly linking him to Paduan Aristotelianism and ending with a moving evocation of Ruzante's cyclical, materially based understanding ofnature and 'eternity'. The six-chapter structure of Ferguson's book therefore appropriately matches its matter, forthe ideas and themes of Ruzante never emerge but from a material basis (most notably, for Ferguson, from Ruzante's deep attachment to the Paduan countryside, comparable to Rabelais's homage to the Touraine and, it might be added, Shakespeare's to Warwickshire?does any other Renaissance playwright mention more birds than Ruzante or Shakespeare?). Ferguson's book coherently establishes the many contextual factors that made the Ruzante phenomenon possible. It was the very moment, he explains, when elite Paduan and Venetian culture (the university, young Venetian patrician males who made up the various Compagnie della Calza, aristocratic patrons such as Cornaro) displayed a persistent interest in popular forms such as the villanesca, buffonesca,and bulesca (the urban 'bravo', or 'bully-boy' play). That Ruzante had exposure to so many differentcultural worlds?philosophical, Venetian patrician, Paduan elite, the rural wealthy, the rural destitute?does much to explain the extraordinary range and power of his work. Ferguson's Ruzante is a relentless explorer of new literary and theatrical forms: he infused popular formswith social and political animism (not in his plays are we comforted with the stereotypical yokel of traditional villanesca); the tragic demographic encounter of country and city in II parlamento, Bilora, and La moscheta ii 28 Reviews is formally shaped by the melding of the country villanesca and the urban bulesca and animated by the theatrical energies of buffonesca;the 'commedia regolare' stage of Ruzante's career (1532-35) displays the wide-ranging contaminatio oiseveral New Comedic sources as well as a felicitous melding ofpopular and elite formsand energies. A progressive, but complex and non-linear, narrative of Ruzante's dramatic 'are', illuminated by a brilliant account of why certain dialectal alignments predominated in the roughly five stages of his dramatic corpus, gives us a...