Play in Renaissance Italy. Peter Burke

Play in Renaissance Italy - Peter  Burke


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I do not wish to thank the recent virus, but its result, virtual confinement at home, concentrated the mind wonderfully and allowed me to put my notes in order and produce a first draft while major libraries were closed. I cannot thank my wife Maria Lúcia enough for looking after me in that time of crisis. Telling stories was a form of light relief for the group of young men and women described in Boccaccio’s Decameron – refugees from the plague of 1348 – and doubtless for the author himself. For me in 2020, reading and writing about play was a form of light relief from a world dominated by the Coronavirus.

      1 1. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; 3rd edn, Farnham, 2009); ‘Le carnaval de Venise’, in Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds.) Les jeux à la Renaissance (Paris, 1982), 55–64; Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (Cambridge, 1995); Burke, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present 146 (1995), 136–50; Burke, ‘Frontiers of the Comic in Early Modern Italy’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.) A Cultural History of Humour (Cambridge, 1997), 61–75.

      The three principal words in the title of this book may seem clear, but each of them is problematic. ‘Italy’ in this period might be said to be both too small and too large a unit of study. On one side, traditional forms of play in Italy, from charivaris (scampanate) to Carnival, had parallels elsewhere in Europe, while some new forms invented in Italy, such as the comedy, were adopted and adapted in other countries. On the other side, Italy was not yet a nation but a number of regions, which varied in their cultures as well as in their economies and political systems. A written language based on Tuscan was helping to unify the peninsula at this time, but the majority of the population spoke regional dialects, and the elites often employed dialect as a playful form of language, as we shall see.

      The term ‘Renaissance’ is also problematic. The main problem is the contrast between two common usages. The term is often employed in the traditional manner to describe a period of European history – more or less, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nowadays, this period is more often described as ‘early modern’ and extended to the eighteenth century. In this essay, I shall be looking at Italy during a long Renaissance from 1350 to 1650.

      The word ‘Renaissance’ is also used in a more precise and limited sense to refer to a movement, a collective attempt to recover and imitate the culture of classical antiquity (Greek and Roman). The focus of this essay will be on the movement, extended to include the work of the major artists and writers of the period, even when they were not inspired by the ancient world. The movement involved only a minority of the Italian population, but to place it in context it will be necessary to examine popular culture as well.

      Leading artists, including Leonardo (whose notebooks show that he also collected jokes), Raphael (whose playful cherubs have become iconic), Bronzino (whose comic poems show he was not as cold as his paintings may suggest), Giulio Romano (who made architectural jokes) and Arcimboldo (who invented visual puns), all produced images that were intended to provoke a laugh, or at least a smile. Even Michelangelo, often regarded as completely serious – either in agony or in ecstasy – had a sense of humour that was expressed in his poems (mocking himself at work on the Sistine ceiling) as well as in his art, and, according to legend, in practical jokes as well. He exchanged comic verses with the master of that genre at the time, Francesco Berni.1

      Insofar as the Renaissance was a movement of cultural innovation – sometimes disguised as renovation – some observations by psychologists may be illuminating. It has been suggested that innovation is encouraged by playing with ideas, trying out alternative solutions to a given problem. Dialogue is one form of this play, and printed dialogues, as well as oral ones, flourished in Italy at this time.3

      The third problem is the most complex and difficult of all. What is play? What has a fist-fight to do with a guessing game, a comedy or a parody? Among the many theorists of play who have wrestled with this question, I should like to single out three: a Dutchman, a Frenchman and a Russian.5

      What follows makes use of the work of all three theorists, but, unlike them, it is concerned not with universal principles of play but with its forms and roles in a specific culture in a specific period. Many games are international – more


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