In Making a Play for God, University of Sydney professor emerita Nerida Newbigin marshals her decades of archival research and dozens of specialized publications to narrate the first comprehensive English-language history of the sacra rappresentazione. The two-volume set is encyclopedic, in many ways definitive, and consequently of broad interest not only to theater historians, but also to scholars of premodern religious art, literary studies, and codicology in manuscript and early print, as well as gender, patronage, and political economy. This review cannot do justice to the riches of the volumes, which include a comprehensive set of supplementary tables.
The Florentine “holy play” or “sacred drama” stands out among the typologies of performance devised by scholars to analyze the Renaissance culture of spectacle. The plays were composed in Florence's distinctive epic verse, ottava rima. They were devout, retelling saints’ lives, bible stories, and liturgical feasts. They were fully textualized: actors performed a written, memorized text. Each rappresentazione included an angel whose words opened and closed the play. Produced and performed by the men and boys of Florence's lay confraternities, the plays enjoyed the collaboration of churches, religious orders, city government, neighborhood groupings, and patrons monastic, secular, and lay, who provided space and funding. The majority of the plays are anonymous. These elements define the sacra rappresentazione in manuscript (from the 1440s) and, with important adjustments, in print (from about 1483 to the 1520s, and into the late Cinquecento). It was a profoundly local, republican genre.
Newbigin's introduction laments nineteenth-century scholars’ over-valuation of the handful of plays that feature authors’ names and survive in early printed editions. Chapter 1, “The Manuscript Evidence,” thus stands as a manifesto for the primacy of the manuscript sources and of those anonymous authors. Manuscript analysis “reveals a richer corpus” and “a far more varied and vigorous charitable and devotional culture than is suggested by the printed plays alone” (75).
In chapters 2–6, Newbigin foregrounds an improved chronology and highlights significant spaces of performance. Thus Chapter 2, “Plays in Churches,” examines lay confraternity performances in three large conventual churches: Santa Maria del Carmine, San Felice in Piazza, and Santo Spirito. Confraternity archives are extant for the Carmine. There, the monks granted the affiliated adult laudesi (hymn singers) permission to erect “vast mechanical devices within the fabric of the church” that stayed “year-round” (90). Special effects made these performances famous: eyewitnesses reported not on plots but on intricate machinery. Politically important as “autonomous expression[s] of neighbourhood collectivity and rivalry” (136), this bottom-up creativity was first damaged by Lorenzo de’ Medici, then ended under ducal rule in the sixteenth century. Courtier Giorgio Vasari produced one last “Annunciation” (1566).
Chapter 3, “Youth Confraternities and Their Plays,” addresses plays produced and performed by a new kind of “devotional grouping” for boys aged thirteen to twenty-four; it aimed to counter the immoral attractions of Carnival. Of the six such confraternities, Newbigin focuses on the large archive of the Purification group, housed at the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco. She presents twenty-five plays in rough chronological order—configuring that chronology is an interpretive feat. Each play gets a titled subsection: there Newbigin notes—as appropriate—title, author, plot/message, performance space, eyewitness reports, entries in accounting records, the occasional links between the plays and artistic images, and survivals in manuscript. She also evaluates each as literature and enumerates the surviving manuscripts. She asks of these plays “why and for whom?” (267). Scholarly consensus answers that the plays delivered moral improvement to both performers and audiences. Newbigin counters that confraternity plays were great fun and intensely satisfying, as youth could recognize and exercise their agency (267–268).
Chapter 4, “Edifici for the Feast of St. John the Baptist,” moves to the significant site of the Piazza della Signoria, where “mobile platforms” bearing tall, fantastically decorated structures (edifizi) were stationed to celebrate Florence's patron saint. This civic occasion allows Newbigin to observe a years-long process of textualization as she examines evidence of an exuberant material culture (310). Her chronological study of eyewitness descriptions reveals the grandeur, piety, and creativity of the constructions, but none indicate that the spectacle had a written script. Full textualization, late-achieved, reveals a top-down element, for example, humanist Matteo Palmieri, whose edifizi drafted sibyls and Hermes into salvation history.
Chapter 5, “Playing Outdoors” examines a small group of plays performed in especially eloquent spaces. The Magi processions and plays, for example, claimed the entire city (374–392). Newbigin laments that despite the “huge numbers of citizens” engaged, “none have left descriptions of how they viewed their roles” (425). A sharply contrasting use of space occurs with the “Beheading of John the Baptist.” Held beyond the city walls, at the very “place of public execution,” this play was perhaps the first time “that the Florentines saw a full-scale fiction of execution” (403). Newbigin observes “solid . . . evidence that documents how these extensive, costly plays inhabited public space” but left “no evidence of external censorship or self-censorship” (425). Il Magnifico's meddling changed that.
Chapters 6–9 move to printed books and thus, paradoxically, to private spaces and a wider public with a new emphasis on readers and named authors. Chapter 6, “Antonia Pulci, Antonio Miscomini, and the Transition to Print,” shows the plays surviving by entering print. Miscomini published the first (known) anthology of plays in print, consisting of texts chiefly by the Pulci family. Antonia Pulci's name on the first page implies her responsibility: she seems to have been the first woman to see her plays into print. Moreover, for the “first time, we find female martyrs and persecuted brides among the subjects treated.” These plays were “explorations of the female condition written by a woman,” but this new subgenre lay “wholly within the tradition of male confraternal performances” (444). The women depicted nonetheless became “eloquent models” for “boys and young men as well as women” (445) and “female virtue . . . [became] as essential to the state as male virtue” (457).
Chapter 7, “Defying Anonymity: Belcari, Poliziano, Bellincioni, and Lorenzo de’ Medici,” gives cursory attention to the four named authors, all well-studied. Belcari, “a dogged self-publicist” (521) and “Medici client” (520), created “Abramo,” “the most widely circulated of any Florentine rappresentazione” (526). Poliziano's “Orfeo,” unexpectedly successful, was not a sacra rappresentazione, but a “secular” play (534) featuring intricate, concealed machinery (535–536). Bernardo Bellincioni took the Florentine tradition of feste to Milan, where he could count on patronage, for example, for his edifizi entitled “Paradise,” “loosely modelled on the sacra rappresentazione” (540), that featured a set by da’ Vinci. Lorenzo de’ Medici's “Rappresentazione di san Giovanni e Paulo,” published in print in the fifteenth century, is the only such rappresentazione mentioned by Machiavelli.
Once illustrated texts enter the picture, Newbigin's task as a bibliographer of early printed books grows complex. In Ch. 8, “Bartolomeo de’ Libri, Antonio Miscomini, and the Illustrated Editions” (fifty pages of plates), reveals a “timeless zone,” with “little guidance [for scholars, regarding] date of composition, . . . authorship, and . . . social and devotional context.” Woodcuts, she notes, “designate[d] these books as . . . for the popolo rather than the literary elite” (567), but also ensured their great value for collectors. Painters, moreover, “were intimately involved” with producers and actors, sharing “aesthetic values, iconography, and expertise” (609).
In Chapter 9, “Savonarola and Beyond: Castellano Castellani,” Newbigin records how Florence lost its leading role in dramatic spectacle in the late Quattrocento. She denies that Savonarola was responsible for that decline: he issued no explicit ban on the rappresentazioni. Moreover, his passing seems to have been registered in four anonymous plays from 1499/1500 to the 1520s, as their subject matter reflects the changing political situation. Nineteen plays are attributed to the well-known Castellani, seven bearing his name (689). They often featured violence and anti-Judaism: “martyrdoms predominate” while Old Testament subjects are “notably absent” (690).
The short Chapter 10 traces the “Afterlife of the Plays,” from the Medici duchy's rapidly declining interest as dramaturgical fashions changed, to the complexities of library collections in early modernity. Tracking complex and multiply re-edited plays through the changing networks of collectors and libraries is work for big data enthusiasts; Newbigin expects recovery of many lost plays. She concludes by saluting her Italian counterpart, Paola Ventrone, author of Teatro civile e sacra rappresentazione a Firenze nel Rinascimento (2016). The two scholars’ investigations, now mutually re-enforcing, now mutually contesting, promise that study of the sacra rappresentazione has a vibrant future.
