Note sulla scrittura tragica e tragicomica barocca italiana

In the complex panorama of baroque theatre, speaking of tragic and tragicomic writing can lay one open to three kinds of objection: first, this approach seems to offer an exclusively literary–historical image of the question; secondly, it might — quite justifiably — seem arbitrary to carve out one specific feature from a theatrical form that was intrinsically and increasingly hybrid, a sort of «quidditas» that defines the writing of these genres; and finally, it is absolutely legitimate to regard the adjective «baroque» as a general label placed on a chaotic reality, whose characteristics are rooted in and extend far beyond the chronological boundaries usually assigned to it.
Examining the question in response to these reservations, we can say, in the first case, that an analysis of baroque tragic and tragicomic writing that respects the nature of the texts must renounce «a priori» any claim to comprehensiveness, any temptation to aim at an exhaustive account of this topic, and remain open to any other viewpoint that serves for understanding it.
In the second case, we need to recognize how the protean nature of the tragic and tragicomic mannerist–baroque genre is just one aspect (however important) of the more general multi–form nature of the “Regular Drama Prism” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an essential contribution to whose development was provided by the Classical and Classicistic Tradition, which gave authors all the material needed for the ingenious re–creation of forms and experiences, through an anamorphic reutilization of them, in which the work of the «ingenium» managed to found a kind of «theatre of memory».
In the third case, it will emerge that it is not enough to use the adjective «baroque» in purely functional terms as marking/indicating a period that is actually much more multi–faceted, but that we need to enter in greater detail into the literary–historical and theatre–historical dynamics in question, and this means extending the definition to include, with the term «late–mannerist», all the tragic and tragicomic experiences following Tasso’s «Re Torrismondo» and «Aminta».
All these factors are abundant evidence, if it were necessary, of the vitality of Italian tragedy and tragicomedy in the mannerist–baroque period. It was not a mass–produced genre of merely “archaeological” interest, but was to have abundant fruit in the future, and not only in Italy, but even in Europe. Individualized study of it can only lead to a map of this vast territory that will be much more differentiated and reveal far more tensions than previously imagined, under its apparently unmodified and unmodifiable shell.