Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio

• Born: November 1, 1504
• Birthplace: Ferrara (now in Italy)
• Died: December 1, 1573
• Place of death: Ferrara (now in Italy)

Other Literary Forms

Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio is best known today for his critical theory on drama and epic and for his short-story collection Hecatommithi (1565), though in his time he was an important and influential playwright and theatrical producer as well. His Discorso intorno dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie e di altre maniere di poesia (1554) contains a treatise on chivalric and epic poetry, Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi (On Romances, 1968), and two treatises on theater, one on comedy and tragedy, Discorso intorno al comporre delle commedie e delle tragedie, and another on satyr plays, Discorso sopra il comporre le satire atte alla scena. He was probably the author of the anonymous Giuditio sopra la tragedia di Canace et Macario (1550), which attacked Sperone Speroni’s tragedy Canace (1542). He experimented in many other literary genres, writing Italian and Latin verse, an epic poem, and a manual of courtly deportment.

Achievements

Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio was an inventive, though not a great dramatist who made a unique and often determining mark on sixteenth century tragic theater, pastoral drama, and literary theory. His major dramatic success, the tragedy Orbecche, which had at least eleven editions in the sixteenth century, became the model for the tragic theater that followed. Giraldi Cinthio did not approve of pastoral drama, and with his Egle he sought to recover the ancient Greek satyr play for the contemporary stage. Although Egle had no direct following, certain of its features reappeared in the later masterpieces of pastoral drama, and despite its author’s intentions, it seems to have been an important precedent for the development of the genre. Finally, Giraldi Cinthio was one of the first to write a commentary on Aristotle’s De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705) and, among Italian critics, the first to question some of its central precepts, though he did so by claiming to be in agreement with them. His critical writing on theater and epic proved to be even more influential than his theater, both in Italy and throughout Europe.

The appearance of Giraldi Cinthio’s first tragedy, Orbecche, was an important moment in the history of the tragic genre in Italy, which is largely the history of the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, and it was a decisive one for the fortunes of Seneca in the Renaissance. Senecan tragedyhad long been the model of Italian tragic theater, but Giraldi Cinthio accommodated it where necessary to Aristotle’s views, adapted it for the stage, and popularized many of its specific features.

Orbecche in general follows Roman models rather than the Greek ones proposed by Giangiorgio Trissino, Giovanni Rucellai, and Alessandro de’ Pazzi. While taking from the Greek certain elements such as the dialoguing chorus and the messenger who recounts offstage events, Giraldi Cinthio used the Roman five-act division rather than an episodic organization of the plot, a separate Terentian prologue as well as a Senecan prologue in the first act, Senecan themes and especially horrors. His particular composite imitation was guided by an interest in the pleasure and the moral improvement of his audience as well as by his desire to please fellow literati with an ingenious act of imitation.

Giraldi Cinthio purported to follow the Poetics while accommodating it to his modern audience, claiming that Aristotle too had had the audiences of his times in mind. His interpretations were often imaginative innovations. For example, Giraldi Cinthio did not share Aristotle’s view that costumes and scenery were relatively unimportant; he used costume to suggest an exotic setting, and his productions were lavish. The 1541 production of Orbecche had sets designed by the important Ferrarese artist Girolamo da Carpi and music by one of the musicians of the ducal court, Alfonso della Viola, calculated to satisfy a public enamored of spectacle. Giraldi Cinthio followed the model of the popular Italian comedies in using musical intermezzi in addition to choruses between acts. His characters were not always noble, and his women often exhibited “masculine” virtues. His tragic plots were generally fictitious, not historical as Aristotle preferred, and he employed the sort of double ending and double plot that Aristotle disparaged. Finally, in perhaps his most creative misreading, Giraldi Cinthio understood catharsis to bring about, through fear and compassion, the moral improvement of the audience.

Orbecche was an immediate success. Following its first performance in 1541, there were several others the same year, and after its first edition in 1545, it was frequently reprinted in the sixteenth century. Its acclaim cannot be attributed to its poetic merits, which, at least to modern critics, have seemed scant, but must lie in its appeal both to literati, as a classical imitation that satisfied Aristotelian requirements and that used a popular vernacular model, Giovanni Boccaccio, as well, and to the spectators generally for the magnificence of the production and the excellence of the acting. Giraldi Cinthio, himself, in his Discorso intorno al comporre delle commedie e delle tragedie, repeatedly praises the moving performance in the role of Oronte of the famous actor Sebastiano Clarignano da Montefalco. Moreover, the Senecan elements were well received; the spectacular deaths onstage and even the so-called precious gift, the offering to the heroine on silver platters of the head and hands of her murdered husband and the bodies of their sons, were thereafter frequently imitated. Later Italian sixteenth century tragedy followed the example of Orbecche and was measured against it. Giraldi Cinthio wrote eight more tragedies, the plots of which were quite inventive and varied, but only Orbecche left such a legacy.

Giraldi Cinthio’s critical theory was, as noted above, even more influential than his theater, both in Italy and abroad. In Italy, it was attacked by more orthodox Aristotelians, and at the same time, its insistence on the moralizing role of literature was well received in the years of the Council of Trent and its aftermath. His views remained at the center of the literary debates that continued throughout the century, and his “mixed” tragedy with a happy ending contributed to the controversy over the mixed genre of tragicomedy. Outside Italy, Lope de Vega Carpio and Miguel de Cervantes in Spain, Sir Philip Sidney in England, and Jacques Pelletier and François Ogier in France were among the leading cultural figures who were influenced by Giraldi Cinthio’s critical doctrines. Finally, his short story collection, Hecatommithi, provided subjects for dramatists such as Lope de Vega (El piadoso veneciano, 1618; Servir a señor discreto, 1618; La cortesía de España, 1619; and others) and William Shakespeare (Othello, 1604; Measure for Measure, 1604).

Although no one argues that Giraldi Cinthio was a poet (Carlo Dionisotti has remarked that the boring lines of Trissino’s Italia liberata dai Goti, 1547-1548, are a festa di poesia, a festival of poetry, when compared with Giraldi Cinthio’s epic poem, Hercole, 1864), he was indisputably an innovator and perhaps the most important Italian critic of his age.

Biography

Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio was born in Ferrara in November, 1504. He received a humanistic education and studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Ferrara, where he received his degree in 1531. In that year, he became a lecturer in philosophy at the university, and in 1534, he was given a chair of philosophy. He published a book of Latin verse in 1537, and it was then that he first used his pen name Cinthio. He belonged to the Ferrarese Academy of the Elevati, and he succeeded its most illustrious academician, Celio Calcagnini, in the chair of rhetoric at the university when the latter died in 1541. Giraldi Cinthio was also a member of the Academy of the Filareti, which was founded in 1554, some years after the closing of the Elevati.

The years between 1541 and 1563, which roughly coincide with those of the Council of Trent, were the years of Giraldi Cinthio’s greatest literary activity. At the university, he taught the poetics of Horace and Aristotle and at the same time wrote and produced his first tragedy, Orbecche, in 1541. The play was performed in Giraldi Cinthio’s house on a special stage constructed for this purpose. It was sponsored by, among others, law students at the university and was attended by Giraldi Cinthio’s patron, Duke Ercole II d’Este, courtiers, and literati. The play was repeated at least twice that same year and soon was performed in other Italian cities and, in French translation, for the king of France. Following the success of Giraldi Cinthio’s first tragedy, Duke Ercole commissioned him to write two plays on historical themes, Didone, which had a public reading in 1541, and Cleopatra, which was finished by 1543 and performed in June of 1555, if not before. After this experience, Giraldi Cinthio returned to fictitious plots, the most famous of which, after Orbecche, was Altile, written to be performed on the occasion of the visit of Pope Paul III to Ferrara in April, 1543, but canceled because of the death, the morning of the scheduled performance, of Flaminio Ariosti, the young actor who was to have played the part of the heroine. With Altile, which had been performed by 1545, Giraldi Cinthio departed definitively from traditional tragedy with an unhappy ending. Altile is what Giraldi Cinthio in his critical writing calls “mixed” tragedy, or tragicomedy: It is characterized by a plot that ends negatively for the evil characters and positively for the good.

In 1545, Giraldi Cinthio produced and published his satyr play Egle, with which he intended to reinvent the genre know to him through Euripides’ Kyklōps (c. 421 b.c.e.; Cyclops, 1782) and its Italian translation by Alessandro de’ Pazzi. It was staged in February and then again in March in Giraldi Cinthio’s house, with Montefalco acting and the duke and his brother Cardinal Ippolito d’Este in the audience. It seems that Giraldi Cinthio experimented with all the traditional genres about the same time by writing his only comedy, Eudemoni. This play is known to have been written after Giraldi Cinthio’s first four tragedies, after, that is, 1543, and the manuscript bears the date 1549, either the date of composition or of a production. Gli antivalomeni was presented for the wedding of Anna d’Este to Francis of Lorraine, Duc de Guise, which took place on July 29, 1548, and it was revived for a performance in November, 1549. Selene was written by 1554 and was produced before mid-1560. Euphimia was probably written after 1554, since its theme of ingratitude suggests that it followed his dispute with Giambattista Nicolucci, the former student whom he accused of that failing, and P. R. Horne, on the basis of internal evidence, thinks that it was written after the departure of Reneé of France, Duchess of Ferrara, from Ferrara in August, 1560. Arrenopia was staged shortly before Giraldi Cinthio left Ferrara in 1563, and in its prologue Giraldi Cinthio bids his city farewell. Celso Giraldi, the playwright’s son, claimed that Epitia was the last tragedy that his father wrote; it was probably not performed during the author’s lifetime. Giraldi Cinthio was the most important and active playwright at the Ferrara court after the death of Ludovico Ariosto.

Giraldi Cinthio wrote nine tragedies, perhaps because he thought that Seneca had done so. His entire literary production seems to have been carefully scheduled. Indeed, he even wrote, or began to write, a pastoral drama, despite the objection he voiced to this genre in his treatise on the satyr play; two autograph fragments of it have survived.

Literary theory went hand in hand with Giraldi Cinthio’s dramatic work. In 1543, as he began to compose tragedies, he also wrote Discorso intorno al comporre delle commedie e delle tragedie. In 1549, he wrote Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, his famous defense of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532; English translation, 1591) from the objections of Aristotelians who faulted the poem’s lack of unity. His dispute with his former pupil Giovambattista Nicolucci, known as Pigna, was over this defense of Ariosto, to which both writers claimed priority. Discorso sopra il comporre le satire atte alla scena, a discussion of the satyr play, was published together with the other discorsi in 1554. The anonymous Guiditio sopra la tragedia di Canace et Macario, an attack on Speroni’s tragedy Canace for not following Aristotle, was probably written by Giraldi Cinthio and was certainly written between 1540, two years before the date of Canace, and 1550, the date of the publication of Giuditio sopra la tragedia di Canace et Macario. These works, together with the prologues and dedications to Giraldi Cinthio’s plays, constitute an important body of sixteenth century literary theory and criticism.

During his Ferrara period, Giraldi Cinthio also published a collection of his Italian lyrics, entitled Fiamme, in 1548, a heroic poem, Hercole, dedicated to his patron, in 1557, and he probably began to write the short stories that he would later include, very likely rewriting them, in his collection Hecatommithi, published during his stay in Mondoví in 1565.

Giraldi Cinthio did not stay in Ferrara long after the death of his patron Ercole II in 1559 because he did not have good relations with Ercole’s son and successor, Alfonso II. He left Ferrara in March of 1563 for Mondoví, where he had been called by the duke of Savoy to teach classics at the university. After three years, when the university was transferred to Turin, he followed and remained there until 1568. In that year, he accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Pavia, and there he joined the Academy of the Affidati. However, he suffered from gout, and the climate aggravated his condition, so in 1573, he returned to Ferrara, where he died that year.

Analysis

Scholars of Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s work have long argued about his position in literary history. His major literary activity came at mid-century, at the time of the Council of Trent. Some see him as a classicist who continues the humanism of the beginning of the century; others find in the religious, moralizing element of his writing a reflection of the post-Tridentine program and in his theory of mixed genres and his modern reinterpretations of the ancients an anticipation of the Baroque.

Orbecche

The tragedy Orbecche, which launched Giraldi Cinthio’s career as a dramatist, established the formal model to which he returned in all of his tragedies, even those with happy endings. It stands alone, however, as a horror drama, for none of the plays that followed it depended as it did on horror to produce catharsis.

The action of Orbecche is close to the plot of one of Giraldi Cinthio’s short stories, which is in turn a version of Boccaccio’s tragic tale of Ghismonda and Tancredi, in Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620). A background story of incest and murder is told in the first act by Nemesis, the Furies, and the ghost of Selina, the slain wife of Sulmone. Selena, executed by the king for incest with their eldest son, had been unwittingly denounced by their very young daughter Orbecche and now wants revenge. With the second act, the action proper begins. Orbecche has married Oronte secretly for love. They have had two children, but Sulmone has been told nothing of it, since Oronte, who is of noble origin, is thought to be a commoner and, therefore, an inappropriate match for the princess. Sulmone arranges a political marriage for his daughter, and the couple is forced to act. Orbecche is fearful because she knows her father’s character, but Oronte believes the king will forgive them, and they decide to confess. Sulmone pretends to pardon them but, outraged by the affront, plans a terrible revenge. He mutilates Oronte, kills the children, then the father, and finally presents the “precious gift” of their mutilated bodies to Orbecche—Oronte’s severed head and hands and the bodies of the children, with knives in the chest of one, and knives in the throat of the other. Orbecche too feigns, asks for forgiveness, and seizes the opportunity to kill the unsuspecting Sulmone. Then she kills herself. The slaughter of Oronte and his sons is recounted by a messenger, but their mutilated bodies are brought onstage. Onstage Orbecche fondles the head of her dead husband, and then proceeds with the rest of the bloody slaughter; the murder of Sulmone is hidden from the audience’s view, but it is narrated by a semi-chorus, and Orbecche’s suicide is in full view. Such gruesome events, which in Seneca were recounted, are staged by Giraldi Cinthio, who intended the horror of them to elicit compassion in the audience and thereby bring about the catharsis.

The action of this, and of all Giraldi Cinthio’s plays, transpires during the course of a single day. He did not concern himself with unity of place, and in some of his plays, the action moves around widely (from battlefield, for example, to private chamber). He believed that if the plot were good, it had the important kind of unity of action imparted to it by the artist’s conception; this departure from Aristotle allowed him to defend the episodic narration of Ariosto’s romance and to justify the double plot for tragedy.

Not the story but certain aspects of its presentation are modeled on Seneca’s Thyestes (c. 40-55 c.e.; English translation, 1581): the prologue spoken by divinities and a ghost in act 1, the horrors of the final act, and the use of a messenger to narrate offstage events. A discussion between Sulmone and his counselor Malecche, in which the latter tries to persuade the king of clemency, derives from a similar scene between Seneca and Nero in Octavia. The lyric choruses at the close of each act are also Senecan, as is the theme of tyranny versus clemency, while nobility of lineage is a theme of the dolce stil nuovo that is central to Boccaccio’s short story. The first prologue, detached from the play, which serves to present the views of the author and the circumstances of the play, was taken from the prologues of Terence and his Italian imitators. The text is full of moral apothegms of Senecan inspiration, which seem perfectly congenial to Giraldi Cinthio’s moralizing.

The dramatic tension of the play is not provided by suspense because the horrible ending is foreseen in act 1, but it is rather created by rhetorical means, through discussions in which characters argue opposite views and through the elaborate and sensational accounts of offstage events. The buildup in the final two acts proceeds from the progressive revelation of horrors.

Plot, spectacle, and rhetorical virtuosity are of central interest, although characters are one-sided, and language is often awkward. A cruel tyrant punishes innocent victims; there are evil counselors and their good counterparts, but few characters are more complex. The language is awkward, offering repetition, exaggeration, conventional expressions of emotion in the place of persuasive argumentation or representation. Literary echoes, especially of Dante and Petrarch, are often inappropriate in tone for the tragic context. It is easy to agree with Guiseppe Toffanin, who says that as a poet Giraldi Cinthio “doesn’t count.” Giraldi Cinthio did, however, understand plotting and dramatic effects, and he employed the best actors of the time, making it easy to understand the success he had with a viewing if not a reading public.

Didone and Cleopatra

Following Orbecche, Giraldi Cinthio wrote only two other “regular” tragedies, Didone and Cleopatra. The subjects were given to him by Duke Ercole, and he turned to the obvious sources for guidance, to Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553) for his Dido and to Plutarch’s Bioi paralleloi (c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579) as well as the Romaika (probably c. 202 c.e.; Roman History, 1914-1927) of Dio Cassius for Cleopatra. He stays very close to his sources, so much so that often his Didone seems to be an excuse for staging Vergil. In Cleopatra, he suppresses sensuality in the interest of what he considered “decency” and creates a dull heroine who is only a humiliated queen.

Altile

With Altile, Giraldi Cinthio began to write a different kind of tragedy, which he called “mixed” tragedy because it included one of the elements of comedy, the happy ending. He knew that his audiences preferred a happy ending, and he believed that such an outcome would arouse their compassion. He no longer needed horror to produce the catharsis. In other respects, Altile is quite like Orbecche, and its plot, similar to that of one of his short stories, is also greatly dependent on Boccaccio’s tragic tales. The triangle is different: brother, sister, lover, the former the tyrant, the latter two his victims. There is also a jealous suitor who serves as evil counselor. In this play, as in all the other “mixed” tragedies, there is an atmosphere of impending doom interrupted only by the happy conclusion, which in this play is brought about by divine intervention (the marvelous remains an important element in Giraldi Cinthio’s plays). Venus alerts Norrino’s father, the King of Tunis, to his son’s peril, and he arrives in time to save the lovers and bring about a happy conclusion for everyone save the evil suitor Astano, whose political ambition has caused all the fuss. Astano commits suicide offstage, allowing Giraldi Cinthio to use one of his favorite devices, that of the messenger who relates the details of the event.

The heroine Altile is better developed than her predecessor Orbecche, and she defends her choice of a husband with dignity and conviction. Giraldi Cinthio’s heroines belong to a modern Italian tradition, that of Boccaccio, of Matteo Boiardo, and of Ariosto. They fall into two types, the active, aggressive heroines and the passive, long-suffering ones. The first are enterprising and determined, like most of Boccaccio’s female characters, and they are sometimes even capable of leading armies, for example, the lady warriors of Ariosto’s and Boiardo’s chivalric romances. The others are of the patient, long-suffering type. Altile and Orbecche belong to the first category, as do Epitia, Arrenopia, and Philene (in Gli antivalomeni; she is the only heroine who does not give her name to the play). Selene and Euphimia, of plays of the same names, belong to the second category, and the latter seems as unreal as Boccaccio’s Griselda, on whom she is modeled. Giraldi Cinthio’s female characters such as Altile, who choose their own husbands and defend their rights, were characteristic of the Italian tradition and are another aspect of Giraldi Cinthio’s modernization of tragedy.

Tragicomedies

Each of Giraldi Cinthio’s tragicomedies varies the basic story of victim and villain. The same variety that exists in the victims can be found in the villains: Some are cunning, some quite mediocre, and some have been demoted to the position of secondary characters in the plot. The actions have different structures that are either love triangles or parallel stories. Gli antivalomeni has a double plot, and, with its two sets of siblings, cross-dressing, and mistaken identities, it owes more to the comic than to the tragic tradition. Horrors are not generally a part of these later plays, only of Selene and Epitia, and in these, while bloody bodies and body parts are brought onstage, it is a hoax that is revealed in a final reversal and happy ending.

Egle and Eudemoni

Most of Giraldi Cinthio’s plays are tragicomedies, and that is the genre he preferred and that he made the greatest effort to defend in his theoretical writings. Apart from these and his “regular” tragedies, his work in other dramatic forms seems to have been only experimentation. He wrote or attempted to write one of each kind of genre. Egle, his satyr play, was produced, as was his comedy, Eudemoni, but it is not even clear that the pastoral play was finished. Both Egle and Eudemoni, like the tragicomedies, or “mixed” comedies, are unique with respect to the traditions to which they belong. The comedy, for reasons of propriety, has none of the risqué humor of the sixteenth century Italian genre. The satyr play, which was not intended to be pastoral, includes an element of that genre, the love theme, which was not a part of the only surviving satyr play, Euripides’ Cyclops. Although the definition of genre is such a large part of Giraldi Cinthio’s theoretical writing, the blurring of genre distinctions characterizes his theatrical production.

Bibliography

Di Maria, Salvatore. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovations. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Di Maria examines the development of drama, particularly tragedy, in Italy. Includes bibliography and index.

Horne, P. R. The Tragedies of Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Horne examines the tragic drama of Giraldi Cinthio. Includes bibliography.

Morrison, Mary. The Tragedies of G. B. Giraldi Cinthio: The Transformation of Narrative Source into Stage Play. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. This scholarly study focuses on how Giraldi Cinthio adapted narratives and made them dramas for the stage.