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COMPARATIVE F?9???F Volume 37 Nos. 3, 4 . Fall/Winter 2003-04 Menaechmi and the Renaissance ofComedy Richard R Hardin If The Comedy of Errors remains, for English speakers, the supreme instance ofthe Menaechmi contribution to drama, that play deserves to be seen as part of a larger picture of European, including English, comedy. Consider, for example,tìiat watershed in die history ofEuropean theater occurring at Ferrara on 25 January I486, with Duke Ercole I's carnival entertainments honoring Francesco Gonzaga, betrothed to Isabella d'Esté. Thousands witnessed, with fireworks and other holiday events, the staging of Plautus's Menaechmi. The first publicly performed play in Ferrara,this lively comedy oftwins and mistaken identity appears, more significantly, to have been the first classical comedy so presented in vernacular translation.1 A contemporary chronicler, describing the play as"beletissima e piacevole," reports that the production showed die traveling Menaechmus arriving in a galley with a sail, while the resident brother's citywas realisticallyrepresentedandpainted in thebackground.2 Enthusiasm sparked another performance of this play at the festivities for the marriage ofyoung Alfonso d'Esté and Anna Sforza, daughter of the duke ofMilan, as one ofthree plays on successive February nights of 1491. Ercole d'Este's Ferrara, in fact, took a lead in the staging of 255 256Comparative Drama Roman comedy. In all, between 1486 and 1505 Ercole had an active role in presenting at least fourteen different plays by Plautus and Terence. In 1493 he took three productions to the Sforza court in Lombardy , an event which, as Thomas Tuohy observes, "suggests the preeminence ofthe d'Esté theatre at that date."3 We may find it difficult to believe that some ten thousand spectators saw Ferrara's first Menaechmi performance.4 Certainly one reason for choosing Menaechmi for this occasion—both celebrating the Este-Gonzaga union and inaugurating a theatrical venture—would have been its relative unfamiliarity, being part of the manuscript discovery by Nicholas of Cusa, about 1428, of twelve hitherto unknown comedies by Plautus. The "new" plays did not become widely available until the first printed edition of the comedies in 1472, though manuscript copies had circulated. Few would have read the play, much less witnessed it, at school. How and why this comedy, among the twelve—or twenty in all—acquired such widespread favor during the sixteenth century has not as yet formed the subject of comparative inquiry. The Ferrara entertainment of 1486 also helped initiate a new theatrical wave in the Renaissance. Its audience included, among the entourage of Cardinal Ippolito d'Esté, the boy Ludovico Ariosto, who would himselflater translate Menaechmi, though his version is lost. Menaechmi thus figures prominently in the backgrounds that led to Ariosto's writing the first widely recognized commedia erudita (vernacular comedy based on Roman models), La Cassaria, acted at Ferrara on a March evening in 1508. Once again, ifindirectly, Plautus contributed to Ferrara carnival festivities, as vernacular Plautine imitations would continue to do for generations following this play. Meanwhile, surely influenced by the Este precedent, vernacular performances of Menaechmi met with applause at Bologna (where influence ofthe Ferrara court was especially strong)5 in 1491,at Cesena in 1492,at Milan in 1493,and at both Mantua and Rome in 1502 for the second marriage ofAlfonso d'Esté, this time to Lucrezia Borgia. The Venetian diarist Marin Sañudo mentions seeing the comedy in 1508 ("bellisima") and 1526 ("non molta bella").6 Carrying on an Este family tradition, in 1528,Menaechmi celebrated the union ofErcole II with the daughter ofLouis XII, Renata or Renée.7 In this era royal patronage could lift the reputation even of ancient authors. Richard F. Hardin257 Latin productions ofthe comedyplayed at Rome, where Pomponius Laetus presided over the staging of many Plautine comedies before his death in 1498. In addition to the 1502 performance diere, Pope Julius II had the play acted in honor ofhis hostage Federico Gonzaga in 151 1. At Florence,for a May 1488 Latin performance ofMenaechmibefore Lorenzo de' Medici,Angelo Poliziano wrote, at the director's request, a verse prologue intended to silence critics of Plautus's style and morals. The prologue declares in part:"We're about...
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