Tragico e sacro all’ombra del Tasso: «I Santi Innocenti» di Malatesta Porta

The essay focuses on the tragedy «I Santi Innocenti» (printed for the first time in 1604) by Malatesta Porta, a man of letters best known for championing and commenting on the work of Tasso, with whom he corresponded.
Already in the short preface Porta tends to underline the «novitas dicendi» of his work, resorting to a post–Tridentine moralistic–religious polemic against the Classical and Classicistic Tradition of secular tragedy, a polemic that led him to openly question Aristotle’s precept of the protagonist occupying a middle state between innocence and guilt, which Porta had already challenged in an exchange of letters with the Genoese religious man of letters Angelo Grillo.
Reinterpreting Aristotle’s «auctoritas», Porta tended to give much more weight to the sentiment of pity over fear in the process leading to tragic catharsis, a choice that came to represent the «Stimmung» of counter–Reformation–Baroque sacred tragedy, which leaned intentionally towards edifying pathos.
Research on the Classical, Christian and vernacular “sources” of the tragedy shows how well the author trod the subtle path between deference to Aristotelian–Horatian orthodoxy and the “shift” towards martyrology, as happened at the time in the plays produced, principally but not exclusively, by the Jesuits.
The textual analysis of the tragedy, which is presented without the acts divided into scenes, is mainly intended to bring out the various historical–literary and cultural threads in a work that is not only particularly significant for some of the possible outcomes of the relation between sacred and profane, but that was also part of a multi–faceted dramatic canon which even the greatest authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt obliged to come to terms with.