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Il Cortegiano and the Choice of a Game

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Thomas M. Greene
Thomas M. Greene*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

The narrative of the Libro del Cortegiano involves at once subdued drama and slightly risky play. It begins with a game whose purpose is to propose a second game which will occupy the company at Urbino for the rest of the evening. This elaborately two-tiered pastime suggests immediately the centrality and formality of play for this group, and throws the dramatic focus on the question of a given proposal's suitability. The reader doesn't know what criteria will determine the excellence of the winning invention, but he is allowed to participate in the consideration of each. Thus in this preliminary contest, Gasparo Pallavicino makes a proposal, and then Cesare Gonzaga another; then the buffoon Fra Serafino and the poet, the Unico Aretino, each makes a kind of non-proposal in bad faith, which has to be dealt with by the arbitress, Emilia Pia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Summer 1979 , pp. 173 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1979

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References

1 All Italian quotations arc from Baldesar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano con una scelta delle Opere minori, ed. Bruno Maier (Turin, 1969). English quotations are from the translation by Charles Singleton (New York, 1959).

2 These examples are taken from Crane, Thomas Frederick, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, 1920), p. 10 Google Scholar.

3 ‘Homo Ludens Revisited,’ Yale French Studies, No. 41 (1968), pp. 31-57.

4 Contained in Prosatori Latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugcnio Garin (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, n.d.), pp. 44-98.

5 The Human Condition (Chicago, 1970), p. 198.

6 Playing and Reality (London, 1971), p. 102.