Poetics, Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy

By Lucy Rayfield

There is nothing funny about comedy in Renaissance France. Comic theatre in the sixteenth century was employed, primarily, as a tool for teaching Latin; it was also judged to be a canny means of enriching and elevating one's national literature and language. Increasingly, comedy was transformed into a political and polemical weapon, capable not only of resisting the influx into France of the forward-looking and fashionable Italian culture, but also of helping to replace the Italians as arbiters of European literature. In this intertextual and cross-cultural survey, Lucy Rayfield explores the productive and at times antagonistic relationship of French playwrights with Italian paradigms, documenting the move from classical comedy regarded as a scholarly exercise to drama revived in print and performance, which was anything but a smooth transition.

Lucy Rayfield graduated with a doctorate from Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 2019. She is currently a Research Associate in Renaissance French at St Benet's Hall, University of Oxford.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1781885168
• ISBN13: 9781781885161
• Release Date: October 2024
• Publisher: Legenda
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.7" x 9.6"