Ruzante Angelo Beolco

While much of the Italian literary world of the 16th century turned to measured Petrarchan modes expressed in stylized Tuscan, Angelo Beolco (b. c. 1494–d. 1542) (better known by his stage name Ruzante, Tuscanized by others as Ruzzante) wrote comic theatrical works of raw realism largely in regional dialects. Vaunting the “natural,” they featured the peasant Ruzante played by Beolco, the natural (illegitimate) son of a wealthy Paduan doctor and university administrator and probably a servant close to rural roots. Illegitimacy excluding him from heirship, Beolco joined the household of Alvise Cornaro, a wealthy non-patrician Venetian who lived in Padua and developed its farmlands while patronizing the arts. Beolco set some of his works in the country, peopled solely by peasants; others, set usually in Padua or Venice, add prosperous urbanites and play on differing social backgrounds and linguistic uses. Many questions concerning the works’ chronology remain, with several bearing signs of extensive rewriting. The Pastoral, which refers to the reopening of the University of Padua after the devastating wars of the League of Cambrai (1509–1517), is generally regarded as his first work. In 1521 and possibly 1518, he delivered a comic oration to Marco Cornaro as bishop of Padua. From 1520 to 1526, Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo (Marino Sanuto) recorded Beolco’s performances in Venice, usually together with his acting troupe. Invited by compagnie della calza, the societies of patrician youth that organized festivities, he enacted his plays at Carnival (Pastoral, Lettera giocosa, and others) and once even at a Ducal Palace wedding. Sanudo remarked on his facility with peasant dialect and on the inappropriate bawdiness and political insolence of some works and their staging. However, patrician interest was so great that one rehearsal caused important government committee meetings to be cancelled because their members were attending it (Betia?). While earlier research proposed that Alvise Cornaro’s patronage took Beolco to Venice, recent scholarship has demonstrated that the patrician families sponsoring and attending Beolco’s performances had conducted important financial transactions beginning in the 1460s with the Beolco family, which, as the richest family in Milan, financed the Sforza and sent members to conduct business in Venice; owned country property contiguous with theirs purchased with them; and had members who knew his father at the University of Padua. With the war, famine, and plague of the latter 1520s, Beolco’s works portrayed the sufferings of the peasants (Seconda oratione, Reduce, Bilora, and Dialogo facetissimo). From 1529 to 1532 he performed at the Este court in Ferrara and in 1533 in Padua (versions of the Moschetta, Fiorina, Piovana, Vacaria). His final works re-proposed the moral superiority of peasants (here urbanized servants) against the artifice and degeneracy of wealthy characters (Anconitana, 1534–1535?) and evoked the mythically peaceful farm of Lady Mirth (Lettera all’Alvaroto, 1536). He died in 1542 while rehearsing his friend Sperone Speroni’s Canace.

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