Poetics, Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy

Lucy Rayfield

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Transcript 18

Legenda

23 February 2022  •  228pp

ISBN: 978-1-781885-12-3 (hardback)  •  RRP £85, $115, €99

ISBN: 978-1-781885-16-1 (paperback, forthcoming)

ISBN: 978-1-781885-20-8 (JSTOR ebook)

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RenaissanceFrenchItalianDramaPolitics

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.

Reviews:

  • ‘[Rayfield] provides in-depth socio-cultural and cross-cultural context. She has contributed an unusual study of the very small world of French humanist comedy, stimulatingly expanding it both from the inside and from the outside, schoolboys, polygraphs, and printers brushing elbows with French royals and wealthy Florentines.’ — Corinne Noirot, H-France 23 (May 2023), no. 86

For a contents listing, see this volume at JSTOR.

Bibliography entry:

Rayfield, Lucy, Poetics, Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy, Transcript, 18 (Legenda, 2022)

First footnote reference: 35 Lucy Rayfield, Poetics, Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy, Transcript, 18 (Legenda, 2022), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Rayfield, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Rayfield, Lucy. 2022. Poetics, Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy, Transcript, 18 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Rayfield 2022: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Rayfield 2022: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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