Giambattista Della Porta

• Born: 1535
• Birthplace: Naples (now in Italy)
• Died: February 4, 1615
• Place of death: Naples (now in Italy)

Other Literary Forms

Although Giambattista Della Porta’s dramatic output was both vast and significant, and although it continued through almost the entire span of his life, the author himself often dismissed it as “youthful trifles.” Indeed, during his lifetime, the Neapolitan’s reputation derived mainly from his esoteric and multifaceted scientific pursuits. His interests in this field ranged widely, from mnemonics, cryptography, and astrology to meteorology, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and various other forms of conventional and unconventional research. His most celebrated scientific works, such as Magiae naturalis (1558, 1589; Natural Magick, 1658)—a medley of serious scientific research and fanciful probing into the occult and the exotic—and De humana physiognomonia (1586; Of Human Physiognomy, 1829)—a work propounding the idea that certain animal-like features of people’s physical appearance correspond to specific traits of their character, thus making it possible to judge people’s dispositions by their physical appearance—made Della Porta a celebrity and are remembered today. Ironically, however, and despite the fact that some modern scientists see in Della Porta’s scientific work the presage of such scientific inventions as photography (through his rediscovery of the camera obscura) and of criminal anthropology, today Della Porta’s fame rests primarily on the seventeen plays that have survived.

Achievements

The surviving fourteen comedies and three tragedies of the doubtless more than thirty dramatic works written by Giambattista Della Porta constitute one of the most imposing monuments of sixteenth century Italian theater. In mere numerical terms, these plays place Della Porta among the most significant playwrights of the late Renaissance period. Della Porta’s various other eclectic interests, however, prompted the author himself to dismiss his plays as secondary. Nevertheless, Della Porta’s theater, with its sense of life that is both facetious and sentimental, seems a deliberate and conscious effort to mitigate the popularity of the commedia dell’arte by incorporating some of its elements into the erudite dramatic tradition.

In the light of the fact that the Counter-Reformers often attempted to ban theatrical performances, especially of comedies, with the intention of cleansing drama of immorality and paganism, it is quite remarkable that a man such as Della Porta managed to publish such a large number of plays. Employing complicated plots ending in improbable denouements, Della Porta succeeded in the difficult task of reconciling belief in the Christian God with the pagan concept of fate by converting the latter into Divine Providence. In post-Tridentine Italy, his plight was a common one. Playwrights were confronted with a difficult task: that of not allowing a Peripatetic, providential solution—which would wholly adhere to theatrical tradition and to Aristotelian precepts—to contradict one’s expression of the Christian precept of free will.

Despite their often scurrilous language and ever-present sensual overtones, the general atmosphere in Della Porta’s plays is that of a commedia grave, with all the hyperboles and metaphors peculiar to the serious and sentimental pre-Baroque theater. The earliest and latest of Della Porta’s comedies, however, manage somewhat to escape this evident didactic and moral intent with their at times unwonted licentiousness. Because of their inner balance and well-developed mixture of sentimentalism and pathos, Della Porta’s plays exercised a surprising influence on other playwrights, both Italian and foreign. William Shakespeare himself may well have been influenced by Della Porta’s The Two Rival Brothers while writing Much Ado About Nothing (pr. c. 1598-1599); certainly Della Porta’s comedies found other ready imitators in England in a number of early dramatists, such as Walter Hawkesworth, Samuel Brooke, George Ruggle, Thomas Tomkis, and Thomas Middleton. In other countries, especially in France, Della Porta’s works were soon known either directly or through adaptations of the commedia dell’arte, and several of his comedies were imitated or freely translated by such writers as Tristan L’Hermite, Jean de Rotrou, and Molière. In Italy, Della Porta’s influence was widely and immediately felt, and although it was particularly evident in Neapolitan erudite comedy, it also gave rise to a plethora of disciples and imitators all over the peninsula, much later affecting even the work of Carlo Goldoni.

Biography

Giambattista Della Porta, the third of four sons, was born in the fall of 1535 in the municipality of Naples. As his father, Antonio, was a nobleman greatly interested in humanistic learning who surrounded himself with poets, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers, Della Porta was tutored in these disciplines by the most learned doctors Naples could offer. It seems probable that he also attended some of the lectures delivered by the neo-Pythagorean philosopher Gerolamo Cardano during Cardano’s brief stay in Naples, for Della Porta’s work reflects traces of Cardano’s teaching of a sort of natural magic in which both doctrine and casuistry played a part.

Although it is not known exactly when Della Porta became interested in theater, he was no doubt stimulated by the frequent dramatic performances given in Naples, not only by numerous professional troupes but also by patrician dilettantes, who often performed the works of contemporary Neapolitan playwrights and poets such as Bernardino Rota, Angelo di Costanzo, and Gianni Domenico di Lega. Yet Della Porta’s initial endeavors, which won for him an early reputation as a scientist and a cryptographer, were mostly in the area of scientific research. His Natural Magick, first published when he was twenty-three years old, though he claimed to have written it when he was fifteen, and De furtivis literarum notis: Vulgo de ziferis (of secret writing), published in 1563, brought him immediate fame. After extensive traveling in Italy, France, and Spain—where he was received by Philip II—Della Porta returned to Naples to publish yet another scientific work, his Arte del ricordare (1566; mnemonic art), which added to his growing reputation. This work was also relevant to the theatrical arts, as Della Porta stressed the importance of cultivating memory through the application of the proper methods, most particularly in the case of actors.

Despite the fact that by 1566 Della Porta had published only these three scientific works, he had already written several dramatic works, and only a few years later one of his contemporaries, Giovanni Matteo Toscano, included him among the most representative living men of letters. Indeed, Della Porta stated that he wrote his first comedy, L’Olimpia (Olympia), “at an early age,” probably in 1550.

Della Porta wrote in a time, however, in which free philosophical and scientific speculation in Italy was crippled by the Counter-Reformation, and as a “naturalist,” Della Porta could not easily have escaped investigation. Further, the character of soothsayer and sorcerer had begun to be ascribed to him via popular lore. Although no record has survived, Della Porta must have been denounced to the Inquisition sometime before 1578, for there remains an entry from 1580 that refers to his reexamination before the Inquisition’s tribunal. The actual trial, which conditionally cleared him, probably had taken place the year before. The judge, perhaps mockingly, perhaps paternally, advised him against writing on illicit subjects and suggested that he limit himself to comedy. Frightened, Della Porta complied, shortly after going to the length of joining a Jesuit lay congregation and taking active part in works of piety and charity.

In November, 1579, Della Porta’s lot improved when Cardinal Luigi D’Este, a famous patron of the arts and learning, issued an invitation to join his household in Rome. Seeing an opportunity to restore his reputation, Della Porta readily accepted the invitation and commenced many literary and scientific projects, inclusive of some theatrical works, which he sent to his patron. Invited by Cardinal D’Este to join him in Venice, Della Porta arrived there in December, 1580, and began immediately to experiment with parabolic mirrors and an “occhiale” (eyeglass), which later led him to contest Galileo’s priority in the invention of the telescope. Even after Jean Bodin in his De la Démonomanie des sorciers (1580; of the demoniac mania of sorcerers) accused Della Porta of being a sorcerer and of having shown witches how to use secret unguents, Della Porta did not lose the cardinal’s protection. In fact, in the early part of 1581, Della Porta left Venice at the cardinal’s urging, joining his patron in Ferrara, where he most likely met Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini, among other celebrated poets of the time. That same year, he wrote a treatise on palmistry, Della chirofisonomia (of chirophysiognomy), which did not see publication until 1677, almost a century later. The year following his move to Ferrara, Della Porta’s scientific experiments met with some success when he perfected a method for the extraction of beechnut oil; his patron was further delighted with the news that he was on the brink of the discovery of the greatest secret of alchemy: the philosopher’s stone, with which base metals could be transmuted into gold.

Della Porta began publishing again in 1583 and 1584, releasing to the presses a two-volume work on agriculture: Villae (1583; the orchard of his country house, and 1584; the olive grove of his country house). By the end of 1583, he had also completed the manuscript of one of his best-known works, Of Human Physiognomy, which was to appear in 1586 notwithstanding the fact that the Roman Index of 1559 had specifically banned all treatises on physiognomy. In 1583, Della Porta had also completed Phytognonomica (the physiognomy of plants), which was published that year, as well as the manuscript of the second, greatly expanded edition, in twenty parts, of Natural Magick (which reappeared in the form of a sort of encyclopedia in 1589) and in which Della Porta proudly announced that the human mind could never surpass the inventions therein to be found, ranging from the rediscovery of the camera obscura to chapters on such disparate topics as cosmetics and love potions.

In 1588, Della Porta’s first comedy, L’Olimpia, was staged (probably in Rome), though it did not appear in print until 1589, in Naples. This work was followed by others; in 1591, the tragicomedy Penelope (Penelope) appeared, the introduction of which contained the announcement of imminent publication of several other comedies. Of these, however, only La fantesca (the maidservant) and La Cintia were published, in Venice, in 1592. Della Porta’s dramatic productivity was probably the result of religious censorship. Several years earlier, the Inquisition, suspicious of Della Porta’s probing into the secrets of nature in conjunction with such questionable acquaintances as Tommaso Campanella and Paolo Sarpi—the latter of whom was to write Istoria del concilio Tridentino (1619; The Historie of the Council of Trent, 1620)—forbade Della Porta to publish Of Human Physiognomy. The death of Cardinal D’Este in 1587 had deprived Della Porta of the cardinal’s powerful protection, and in 1592—the same year in which Giordano Bruno had been arrested by the Inquisition—the Venetian Inquisitors advised Della Porta that publication of anything without securing permission previously from the Roman High Tribunal would have serious repercussions. Nevertheless, less than one year later, while in Padua, he renewed his acquaintance with Campanella and Sarpi and there, for the first time, met the young Galileo. Since Della Porta published that same year a work on optics, De refractione, optices parte (1593; of refraction), discussion of this subject must have certainly followed the meeting with Galileo.

Very little is known of Della Porta’s whereabouts in the last years of the century. It is probable that the severe penalties that the Inquisition meted out to Bruno, Campanella, and other freethinkers induced Della Porta to keep as low a profile as possible. Scarcely any new work appeared: merely the comedy La trappolaria, published in 1596, to be followed five years later by the publication of The Two Rival Brothers. Also in 1601, after almost a decade of silence, Della Porta again published scientific works: Caelestis physiognomoniae (celestial physiognomy), in which he attempted a reconciliation between free will, the divinatory arts, and astrology, and several works on hydrology and mathematics. In 1604, two years after the publication of a Latin translation of his work on mnemonics, Della Porta wrote another treatise on chemistry and alchemy, De distillatione (of distillation), which was published four years later in 1609, bearing a dedication to Prince Federigo Cesi, founder of the prestigious and still active Accademia dei Lincei. Della Porta became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1610, the same year in which he dedicated another work (now lost) on natural secrets, the “Taumatologia,” to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in a fruitless effort to obtain the Inquisition’s permission to publish. Less controversial works, in particular his comedies, fared better. Between 1604 and 1609, Della Porta published The Sister, The Astrologer, La turca, La carbonaria (the coal ruse), Il moro (the Moor), and La chiappinaria (the bear trick).

Shortly after Della Porta’s admission to the Accademia dei Lincei, a small dispute arose over who had, in actuality, first invented the telescope. The aged Della Porta, perhaps with some merit but with very little proof, claimed to have been the original inventor, preceding Galileo and others. To strengthen his claim, Della Porta wrote a treatise, De telescopio (of the telescope), which remained unpublished until 1940. In 1611, he published a sacred tragedy in verse, Il Georgio, and a year later published La tabernaria (the tavern play). In 1614, Della Porta published his last play to appear during his lifetime, the tragedy L’Ulisse (Ulysses).

Named by Prince Cesi to direct the Neapolitan branch of the Accademia dei Lincei, in the last years of his life, Della Porta busied himself with this and with the academy of the “Oziosi” whose leader was the famous Baroque poet Giambattista Marino. Having attempted the construction of a telescope that, as he wrote Galileo, would have been able to penetrate the highest heavens, and pursuing to the last his search for the philosopher’s stone, the old and ailing writer died in Naples on February 4, 1615.

Analysis

Clearly influenced by Plautus, whose works Giambattista Della Porta translated and adapted, the playwright and author of the no longer extant “De arte componendi comoedias” (the art of writing comedies) deftly melded to classical motifs the many elements of regional storytelling tradition. Though his declared intention was to restore the traditional classical theater, the language and spirit of Della Porta’s characters, as well as numerous references to daily life, unmistakingly point to the writer’s personal experience within the historical framework of sixteenth century Italy.

The second half of the sixteenth century was a turning point in the development of Italian drama. This had been marked by the emergence of the commedia dell’arte, which, in turn, signaled the crisis of the “erudite” drama. Because they were timely, Della Porta’s comedies were often adapted as canovacci by the professional actors of the commedia dell’arte, though it seems unlikely that Della Porta himself wrote scenari for them. Della Porta’s comedies do not encompass revolutionary innovations in content or technique; they are rather a consummate reelaboration of the Renaissance comic theater. His range extended by classical and Boccaccean themes, distinctly anticipating the controlled hyperbole of pre-Baroque theater, Della Porta was one of the first Italian playwrights to blend romantic and pathetic elements into the comic situation, in a manner that would soon become established in the new genre of tragicomedy.

Della Porta’s comic effects are heightened by a colorful and vigorous language. The speech of his characters is devoid of complex nuances and overly sophisticated literary allusions. Indeed, Della Porta employs a language that can produce the maximum reaction from an average, not particularly learned audience: a kind of bourgeois speech to be enjoyed by anyone possessing an average education, occasionally punctuated by expressions peculiar to a character that serve to define or reinforce that character. Even when, as frequently occurs, Della Porta borrows directly from the classical tradition, he does so in such a way as to isolate the lines and situations from their original context, emphasizing them in a contemporary manner rather than through the traditional interpretative modes.

There is scant information available regarding precisely when and where Della Porta produced his theatrical works, the number of which makes him the most prolific dramatic writer of the time after Giovanni Maria Cecchi. He began writing his comedies at an early age, and his first comedy, L’Olimpia, is introduced by a virginal and shy young girl—possibly an allusion to the fact that this was Della Porta’s first dramatic work—who declares that she would have not appeared in public if the Prologue had not forced her to do so. Of the more than thirty dramatic works probably written by Della Porta, only fourteen comedies and three tragedies have survived. Of the comedies, the majority of them share an obvious Plautine derivation as well as a resemblance to their more contemporary models—such as the works of Ludovico Ariosto, Bibbiena, or Niccolò Machiavelli. The emphasis, however, is on the plot rather than on characters: on the ingenium and maraviglia of fantastic complex twists and intrigues, burle and countertricks. Character development is not totally neglected, but though Della Porta’s characters do not wear the masks of the commedia dell’arte, they belong nevertheless to the large reservoir of traditional stock types. Wicked pedants, deceitful gluttonous servants, old and young lovers, boastful Spanish captains and other braggarts, witty wives outsmarting their unfaithful husbands—all are clearly recognizable, utterly stylized characters who permitted Della Porta to concentrate freely on the structural quality of his works, on the expressive language and situations clearly aimed at achieving the maximum, at times farcical, comic effect.

La fantesca

La fantesca, one of the most successful and representative of Della Porta’s comedies, encompasses both the Plautine and the novelesque tradition in its skillful manipulation of the many elements present in sixteenth century comic theater. Della Porta’s lively use of Neapolitan dialect and boastful Spanish, double entendres and boutades, as well as proverbs and popular sayings, is unrivaled. The plot is typically complicated by implausible disguises and coincidences, elaborate subterfuges, and amorous rivalries between fathers and sons, all of which are enriched by the spicy dialogue. Young Essandro has fallen in love with Cleria, daughter of the rich Neapolitan physician Gerasto. Disguised as a maidservant named Fioretta, Essandro enters Gerasto’s household and persuades Cleria to reciprocate the love of “her” twin brother, whom he will naturally impersonate. Gerasto, however, falls in love with Fioretta (Essandro), arousing the jealousy of his wife, Santina, and of the housekeeper Nepita. Matters are further complicated with the arrival from Rome of the pedant Narticoforo and his son Cintio, to whom Cleria had been previously betrothed. Essandro’s alert and faithful servant, Panurgo, intervenes to help his master stave off the danger. Because Narticoforo and Gerasto have not yet met, Panurgo and the parasite Morfeo successfully impersonate both Gerasto and Cleria to Narticoforo, and Narticoforo and Cintio to Gerasto, sowing at each instance discord. Panurgo and Morfeo, who behave as idiotically as possible, ultimately manage to inflame Narticoforo to such a degree that the Roman pedant hires a Spanish braggart, Capitan Dante, to teach Gerasto a lesson. Gerasto, in turn, hires another Spaniard, Pantaleone, “matador de panteras y leones” (killer of panthers and lions), to defend himself against Narticoforo. The two Spanish captains, however, rather than fighting, become friends in cowardice and together run away in the face of the abuse showered on them by the exasperated prospective fathers-in-law. After a failed attempt by Gerasto to meet with Fioretta (at the rendezvous he finds instead his angry wife, Santina), Essandro and Panurgo’s deceit is revealed. Things are about to become worse when Essandro’s uncle Apollione arrives, recognizing in Panurgo his long-lost brother, the father of Essandro. All ends well with Essandro’s betrothal to Cleria and that of Cleria’s sister to Cintio, while Gerasto promises from this point on to lead a more honest life.

Other Plays

Although equally indebted to the heterogenous sources regularly used by Della Porta, The Astrologer and La turca differ from La fantesca and Della Porta’s other comedies. A bitterly realistic and critical view of the world and, in particular, of Naples here is made manifest. In The Astrologer, the title character, Albumazar, speaks of Naples as a city of thieves and rogues. These comedies are also unique in that Della Porta adds to the recurrent Renaissance theme of romantic rivalry between fathers and sons a biting criticism of the sensual and often brutal behavior of the older men. In The Astrologer and in La turca, as in most of Della Porta’s comic theater, despite the exuberant and at times farcical use of the lazzi of the commedia dell’arte, a sentimental vein is accompanied by a judgmental, almost moralistic tone. Plays such as Il moro, La furiosa, and The Two Rival Brothers—which are often favorably compared to Lope de Vega Carpio’s comedies—all belong to a new tragicomic phase by means of which Della Porta succeeded in modernizing the genre, maintaining the lively tone of popular comedy while adapting to the stricter atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation.

Bibliography

Clubb, Louise George. Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. Clubb examines the life and works of Della Porta, paying particular attention to his plays.

Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Eamon’s examination of the scientific side of Della Porta, among others, sheds light on his literary work.

Herrick, Marvin Theodore. Italian Comedy in the Renaissance. 1960. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1970. This work on Italian comedies produced during the Renaissance describes how Della Porta’s dramatic works fit into the larger picture.