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The Treatment of Space in Italian and English Renaissance Theater: The Example of GVIngannati and Twelfth Night Jack D'Amico In most Renaissance comedy the fulfillment of desire involves a struggle that takes place witiiin a city. The city provides not only the setting for the pursuit of the object of desire, but, with its institutions, it obstructs desire. The cities of comedy differ in name and structure—some less restrictive, or hierarchical , others more dominated by old men and bothersome customs. But in some form the city both occasions and impedes erotic pursuits. Whether young or old, female or male, the lover seeks change but must move within the physical, legal, and social structures of the city. I am particularly interested in the way the spectator perceives the city of comedy. By comparing two comedies that have more tiian ordinary generic similarities, but which differ in the way they represent the city, I hope to demonstrate that the relationship between desire and the city is analogous to the relationship between the audience and the stage. In each kind of theater the represented interplay between desire and the relatively fixed orders of the city mirrors, and is mirrored by, the interplay between die audience and the theatrical mode of representing city space. GVIngannati and Twelfth Night, when considered from this point of view, reveal an essential continuity between the theatrical representation of the place where the action unfolds and die felt quality of that place. As related types of drama, Italian erudite comedy and JACK D'AMICO teaches in the Department of English at Canisius College, Buffalo. Professor D'Amico has taught in California, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, and China, and his most recent work focuses on Shakespeare, English and Italian drama, and Machiavelli. 265 266Comparative Drama Shakespeare's romantic comedy move in different ways between the stage as mirror-image and the text as projected image of the city. The harmonious blending of structures employed in the prospettiva of Italian comedy represents an ideal civic order and provides a visual frame for the action of a comedy as it moves temporally to its happy ending.1 But the dramatist, through the spoken word, also has the power to project images, to create fluid perspectives that dissolve obstructions and reshape the urban world of comedy. This shaping power, which operates from within, is particularly dominant in Shakespearean comedy. The place within which the comic action unfolds is both familiar, or fixed, and strange, or fluid. The stage, that theatrical space used to frame the action, is itself a familiar structure, whether a hall within a Renaissance palazzo, or a permanent theater across the Thames.2 Theater exists within die legal, political, and cultural orders of a particular society. The city has fixed dimensions, and the very presence of citizen-spectators within a theater, private or public, at court or outside London, reproduces their relationship to these cultural structures. The three-dimensionality of Italian sixteenth-century staging represents the intersection of streets and a piazza, backed by architectural landmarks such as domes and arches. It stands for the customs of civic life identified with the household's merchant fathers and, more removed from the action of comedy, the political authority of a prince or republic. Men make cities, and the comedies made in cities mirror not only a city but the cultural and intellectual tradition that led to the development of stagecraft and to the literary craft embodied in the comic genre. In its own way, Elizabethan public theater created parallels between the place where a play with its imagined civic space was performed and the structures of that city across the Thames.3 A capital city within a kingdom is not the same as an independent city-state, but the stage façade, arch-like doorways , and the theater building itself might recall the semiautonomous city with its walls, gate, and guildhall, its Lord Mayors' shows and royal entries. However tenuous its position may have been at times, the theater had its place as a part of the architectural, economic, legal, and political orders of the realm. The civic space imagined while the audience watches and hears the play is to...
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