Federico Della Valle, «Reina di Scozia»

The essay consists of a reading, analysis and commentary on the opening of the tragedy, which in the third and last version (printed by the author in 1628) took the form of a prologue spoken by the Shade of the King of France, Francis II, the first husband of the heroine.
The addition of the prologue and the lack of division into acts and scenes makes the last version of the «Reina di Scozia» similar to the author’s two biblical tragedies, which together make up an «ideal trilogy of royalty» (Federico Doglio): «Iudit» and «Ester», which he published in 1627.
Its being a historically–based tragedy, and a contemporary one at that, explains the choice of a historical character, here in the form of a shade, as the protagonist of the prologue. The introduction of the shade in the prologue is modelled on the examples of both classical authors (in particular, Euripides and Seneca) and moderns (above all, Ludovico Dolce, Sperone Speroni and Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio), but still more decisive was the shaping power of the plays produced in the Colleges of the Society of Jesus in Latin and various national languages, with the deliberate intention of creating sacred tragedy, whose protagonists — clean contrary to Aristotle’s precept of the «intermediate» hero — are «figurae Christi», taken variously from the Bible, martyrology or the classical world.
The first «tópos» of classical drama reinterpreted by the author is that concerning the shade’s place of origin, which can no longer, of course, be Tartarus, but Purgatory, a realm whose doctrine had been vigorously reaffirmed in the «Decretum de Purgatorio», promulgated in the XIV session of the Council of Trent (3-4 December 1563), in open opposition to the doctrine of the Lutheran and reformed churches.
Other important «tópoi» introduced by the author are those concerning human transience, present throughout the prologue, which is strongly influenced by Tasso; meta–theatre; the «thrênos» on the catastrophe of the protagonist, exemplifying the inconstancy of human fate; and a Senecan–Giraldian sense of the horrific.
The sophisticated style of the piece involves a marked use of poetic artifice, the most significant of which is the presence of rhyme, which had given rise to longstanding controversy.
The new opening of the tragedy, with its solemn sense of the “marvellous”, is, then, conceived and written both as a contribution to making the work contemporary, strongly marked by the neo–Tridentine appeal to catholicizing a Classical and Classicistic Tradition which drew on Greek, Latin, Biblical and vernacular sources; and as the author’s final reflection, both ethical–religious and political, on man’s destiny (and bewilderment) in the face of the unfathomable mystery of God.