| This dissertation analyzes the theatre practice of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante) and the pedagogical strategies of the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) in order to forward a theory of the Baroque as a space of critical tension produced by the clash of disciplinary regimes of governance and excessive artistic expressions. I read Venice through a sceno-historiographical lens and theorize it as a staging area from which acts of Baroque composition unfolded. With a dialectical and philosophical-historical methodology (derived from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault), I assemble archival traces of Venetian theatre prior to the construction of permanent theatre buildings in order to contribute to the writing focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venetian theatre, of which currently little exists. Theatre, then, appears in this dissertation as more than mere entertainment; it becomes an active political practice embedded within an epicenter of cultural production in early modern Europe. |
