On the Deceptions of the Deceived: Lelia and The Pleasures of Play

Lelia, a young woman cross-dressed as a page named Fabio, is the female protagonist of the anonymous comedy Gl'Ingannati, performed as the main attraction of the festive giuochi of Mardigras during Carnival in Siena, in 1531. ¹ The cross-dressing of a female character as a boy on the Italian stage was not a new theatrical device, even though it was not so widespread as it would become on the English stage. The character of Lelia could be seen as following in the footsteps of Santilla, the first cross-dressed female character, in Bernardo Bibbiena's comedy La Calandria, performed approximately two decades earlier in Urbino. Quickly, gender switches gained wide popularity in Italian theaters as well, with a few cross-dressed male characters and a greater number of female, enlivening many contemporary comedies including L'Alessandro by Alessandro Piccolomini, La Fantesca by Giambattista della Porta, Il Travaglia by Andrea Calmo or Il Ragazzo by Ludovico Dolce, to cite only a few.

Italian critics have viewed cross-dressing on the stage primarily as a necessary part of the comico d'intreccio from which grow the mistaken identities, the exchange of roles and the final resolution and recognition that usually brings Renaissance comedy to its required happy ending. As a result, the Italian studies that have considered the subject, starting with the seminal work of Giulio Ferroni, ² have looked at cross-dressing and disguise from a technical point of view, more concerned with its effects on the comic structure of the play than with its cultural dimensions. Yet, stage portrayals of female and male transvestitism clearly have significant cultural ramifications as well that have been considered especially by American scholars, mainly in relation to Elizabethan theater. Recently, following in the footsteps of such studies, there has developed also a lively interest in cross dressing in the Italian commedia dell'arte.

In this article, however, I would like to follow the cultural lead of recent studies of cross-dressing on the sixteenth-century Italian stage, but take a slightly different tack by looking more closely at the role of gioco (play/game) and the pleasures of gioco inherent in this theatrical strategy. Criticism, particularly Italian, that deals with the theater has regularly used expressions such as "il gioco del teatro" or "il teatro come gioco," essentially asserting--almost as a self evident point--the ludic character of Renaissance theater. Moreover, the association of the idea of gioco with literature and specifically the theater is a pervasive one among modern theorists, spilling over into other disciplines where the notion that theater is a form of gioco has been central to the thought of philosophers such as Eugene Fink and Hans Georg Gadamer, not to mention the cultural vision of Johan Huizinga and the sociological perspective of Roger Caillois. ³

Mario Baratto, one of the most important contemporary Italian theater critics, has identified the gioco of comedy as stage events that disrupt an initial equilibrium in order to create, after overcoming a series of obstacles, a new satisfactory equilibrium--satisfactory in that things return to the original ethical and moral codes of contemporary society. ⁴ In this vein, the tricks, the frauds, the disguises, the cross-dressing that characterize much gioco in comedies have been dubbed by George Louise Clubb "theatergrams," ⁵ a definition that has won considerable acceptance and that in the words of one critic constitute "a set of identifiable units of character, dialogue and plot" that delay the final resolution of a comedy. ⁶

Pamela Stuart, in her pioneering work on cross-dressing in Italian theater, argues instead that we should define Renaissance comedy as a form of "lusory theater," stressing conventionality and predictability in the development of plot. ⁷ For her gioco is more than a plot device or "theatergram," it provides the basic form of Renaissance comedy, "lusory theater" being structured as a game. Although she seems to be...