Performative Text, Dynamic Editing: Textual Scholarship of Renaissance Italian Drama (with Anna Terroni)

In the Italian Renaissance, comedies were performed – with various degrees of loyalty to their Classical models – in a variety of places: public squares, private homes, theatres or “courtly” contexts of various kinds. Such adaptations often demanded radical changes in the play’s articulation and structure: desired length, availability of actors and backstage room, possibility of swift costume changes were factors that heavily affected the author’s work and were responsible for a major gap between plays designed for actual performance and others that – published in print to great success – were just read for entertainment purposes. This paper will set out some possible guidelines to assess a play’s various versions in the light of its possible performance and in the context of a florid market of specialized publishers and Academies that endorsed such productions, with an interesting case study (A. Donzellini’s Gli oltraggi di Amore e di Fortuna, I ed. 1585) presented by Anna Terroni.

After teaching at some length in Dublin, Oxford and Verona, Michelangelo Zaccarello is currently professor of Filologia italiana at the University of Pisa and the president of the Italian Culture on the Net (ICoN) consortium: his main research areas are the textual scholarship of early Italian literary texts, mainly comic verse and short stories (with critical editions of Burchiello, Pulci, Sacchetti), and digital philology. He has spent visiting terms in several North-American universities (Berkeley, Tucson, Indiana, Notre Dame, Toronto) and in European ones: Cambridge (UK), Helsinki (Finland), Nitra (Slovakia), Lausanne (Switzerland). Of his more than a hundred publications, many appeared outside Italy: Belgium, Estonia, France, Finland, UK, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, USA. Amongst his recently published volumes on textual scholarship: L’edizione critica del testo letterario (Mondadori 2017), Teoria e forme del testo digitale (Carocci 2019), Leggere senza libri (Cesati 2020).

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All times stated in Eastern time.