The Two Oedipuses: Sophocles, Anguillara, and the Renaissance Treatment of Myth

To discuss so minor a writer as Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara (ca. 1517–1571) seems like an exercise in willful obscurantism or personal enthusiasm for what is better dead and buried. Of course, it could be claimed with Ernst Robert Curtius and Aby Warburg that “God lurks in detail,” that only by a minute exploration of even the minor figures of a period can we achieve any synthesis and understanding of literary history. We are all aware from experience how often a second or even third rate writer illuminates more clearly than a master the mentality of a period. But a more tangible justification exists for conjuring up the name of Anguillara from the dusty tomes of the past. His Edippo tragedia was both the first performed and first printed vernacular version of the Oedipus story in the Renaissance. Called “among the most famous tragedies” by one of those eighteenth-century collectors of details, Crescimbeni (I. iv. 309), the Edippo was printed twice in 1565, ¹ once in Padua and once in Venice. It was also performed twice, first in Padua in 1556 (Pelaez 77) or 1560 (Lorini 88) on a permanent stage designed by Falconetto for the home of Alvise Cornaro (Fiocco 142; “Idea” 219) and, I believe, a second time in Vicenza in 1561 on a temporary wooden stage designed by Palladio for the Olympic Academy. Both productions were done with a splendor and pomp befitting the famous story and befitting a text that would return the story of Oedipus to the stage after more than a thousand year hiatus.

While the stage history of the 1585 production of Sophocles’ Oedipus for the inauguration of Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico has been told repeatedly, both in its own time (Ingegneri) and after (Gallo, Puppi, Schrade), the tale of Anguillara’s play is hardly known. And it probably will never be told, lacking as it does early MS or printed evidence and depending on contradictory reports in those ponderous but charming biographical and bibliographical texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth century: Castellini, Temanza, Mazzuchelli, Tiraboschi, Fontanini, Angiolgabriello, and others. That the Edippo has been confined to the dust bins of literature by an unfortunate loss of evidence is ironic, for Anguillara repeatedly complained, often with a broad smile, against his fate. In one poem, he said that while “Fortune” showed “Her smiling face” to his patron, he only saw “Her behind” (“culo”: “Capitolo: Nella Sedia” 115). Yet according to our standards, he was quite fortunate: a poet of many witty poems in the style of Berni; a translator who even recently was called a star (Melczer 246–265); a letterato called upon by the Olympic Academy to write the preface for the first Italian performance of the first Italian tragedy, Trissino’s Sofonisba (Corrigan 199); a writer who served at the court of King Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici; and last but not least, an aspiring inventor (“Lettera alla Signoria”).

And yet his reputation has become as small and misshaped as his body; he was, in fact, a dwarfish hunchback. Though he laughed at his deformity, calling his body a mess of mountains and valleys (“Capitolo al Cardinale di Trento” 301–302), he—I think—would have cried at his historical neglect, and especially at the neglect of his Edippo, which as his preface shows, he hoped would bring fame by association with the noble tragic genre. Not fame, but infamy came to it instead. His Edippo was damned by both contemporaries and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics, and by all for the same reason: its additions to Sophocles’ text. A Latin letter by the priest Girolamo Negri mentions its first performance, complaining that its four hour production was “undecipherable” (tota . . . est etrusca; 120). De Nores, in his 1588 Poetica, called these added episodes that ran so counter to Aristotle’s prescriptions little less than vicious. Later critics were no less kind, castigating Anguillara on the same basis: those dreaded episodes (D’ Ovidio 277; Pelaez 79; Bosisio 83–84; Symonds II 244). But these additions are at the heart of Anguillara’s...