[ITALIAN DRAMA].

NARDI, Jacopo (1476-1563). Comedia di amicitia.

      First edition. Although the book has been in the past treated as a Florentine incunable, the type is now identified as the 102R of Gian Stefano di Carlo, a native of Pavia who printed at Florence from c. 1505 to c. 1520. The date of printing has been variously assigned to 1510, 1511 or 1512, but since the composition of the play is now dated to 1512 or a little before, it must be one of the latter two years. ISTC, Edit16, KVK and RLIN between them record a total of 14 copies. A second Florentine edition (in 8vo.) was printed by Bernardo Zucchetta, apparently about 1512.Jacopo Nardi (1476-1563), best known now for his History of Florence (printed in 1582) and in his own day for his Tuscan translation of Livy, also played an important part in the growth of secular drama. The passion for Plautus and Terence that among the humanists displaced the wooden performances of the sacre rappresentazioni, especially in the period 1480-1500 in the circle around Poliziano, soon developed into original compositions for vernacular comic theatre. Ariosto at Ferrara led the way with two five-act comedies in the Roman mould, Cassaria of 1508 and I suppositi of 1509, full of the stock characters and amorous intrigues of the ancient genre. It was Nardi’s innovation a few years later to take a plot from Boccaccio (X.8, the only story in the Decameron with a classical setting) and people it with Plautine characters in his verse Amicitia, a comedy in five short acts. In Amicitia the Boccaccian plotline, essentially a rhetorical argument about the competing claims of love and friendship, takes second place to the comic activities of the servants, friends and parasites who attend the two principal characters, Lucio and Eschino. Bocaccio’s setting in Athens and Rome could not be accommodated in drama which held to the ancient idea of unity of place (Nardi calls his work ‘togata o palliata’), and much of the back story is consequently related at Rome by the parasite Ergastilo and Lucio’s servant Lico, Nardi’s additions and not in Boccaccio. Croce saw in the play a measure of psychological penetration wanting in Boccaccio’s original.Nardi borrowed another plot from the Decameron (V.5) in his Due felici rivali, a play performed before the newly restored Medici court in 1513. A similar mix of Plautus and Boccaccio took place in the same carnival period, this time at Urbino, with the performance of Bernardo Dovizi’s La Calandra (see following item) where the language and comic devices as well as the plot are more firmly based on Boccaccio. The fame and importance of Dovizi (‘il Bibbiena’) rather eclipsed Nardi’s experiments in classical comedy at Florence, and the whole early period from Ariosto on was altogether overshadowed by the éclat with which Machiavelli’s Mandragola was greeted in 1518. [Florence, Gian Stefano di Carlo, c. 1512].