Uncovering a Forgotten Italian Renaissance Comedy: A Commented Critical Edition of Francesco Antonio Rossi's Capriccio

Comedy is an essential literary genre for any culture and any period. It provides both a representation and criticism of society, societal norms and societal institutions, and, as such, allows scholars to reconstruct societies and regain knowledge from centuries ago. As Riccardo Scrivano argues, “with the audacity of its fictions, its hypotheses, its capacity to cancel the usual modes of conduct, it reveals to us different ways of organizing knowledge, and thus different ways of knowing” (12). Each and every play and playwright add a new dimension of knowledge and a new means of knowing to our established repertoire of understanding. Consequently, every play, comedy in this instance, contributes to the process of understanding and influencing the society in which it is set, as well as those that follow it and those from which it borrowed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead observes that “Italian playwrights turned to Roman antiquity to find a dramatic technique, but they combined literary traditions and the contemporary reality of their own country to create a comic theatre that helped determine the course of modern European drama” (Modern Comedy 243). Every play and playwright, including Francesco Antonio Rossi and his Capriccio, perform an important role in this process and should not be overlooked. The central objective of this dissertation is to produce a commented critical edition of Francesco Antonio Rossi’s Capriccio in accordance with the standard methods and practices laid down by modern scholarship in textual criticism. Until Rossi’s Capriccio is given new life in the form of a critical edition, academia’s comprehension of this author and his work will be incomplete, leaving Rossi’s comedy to sit on library shelves, never having had its significance realized.Ph.D.2018-02-09 00:00:0