Performing theory: Gendered and erotic complications in cinquecento comedies, and some English reverberations

This project explores the intricate intersections of gender, eros, and humanist theories of performance in sixteenth-century Italian erudite comedies, and then asks how these plays reverberate with, and in some ways revise, prevalent interpretations of certain Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical performances. Inquiring into the workings of gender and sexuality in these Italian plays, I have discovered salient moments in comedies with transvestite plots---moments of complication arising from transvestite disguises and ensuing instances of confusing chiasmic desire (both hetero- and homoerotic)---that often reveal particular theatrical engagements with the larger Renaissance cultural formation of humanism. Each of the three central chapters focuses on a comedy that stands out for both its gendered and erotic complications, as well as its complex engagement with the humanist practices and traditions exerting profound cultural, social, and political influences in the sixteenth century.;I set up the critical frame of this project in the "Prologue," where I discuss how the field of Performance Studies allows me to draw on methodologies and theoretical insights both inside and outside the traditional realms of theater history and dramatic literary criticism. My models for thinking about these texts and histories negotiate the intersections of feminist, cultural, and queer theories. The first chapter, "Unsettling Masculinity: theory and form in Clizia," focuses on Machiavelli's 1525 adaptation of Plautus' Casina, and argues that the play frustrates humanist epistemology and comic anagnorisis, demonstrating an moderation of Machiavelli's hyper-masculine conception of virtu. "The Economies and Anxieties of the Intronati's Legendary Comedy, Gl'Ingannati" explores the erotic and comic economies at work in the play and its performance context, ultimately identifying an anxiety about sodomy in this 1531 collaborative production by a Sienese academy. In "Aretino's Meta-humanist Satire, Talanta," I examine how Aretino's first humanist imitatio relies on specifically gendered and eroticized disruptions of identification in order to critique the very humanist tradition the play purports to uphold. In the "Epilogue," I use the findings of the first four chapters as a lens to new readings of key moments in early modern English theater. The project aims, in other words, to advance a new understanding of the diverse kinds of work early modern English and Italian theater did with respect to gender, to sexuality, and to what I consider the performance theories of the sixteenth century.