The Buffoons, A Ridiculous Comedy [A Bilingual Edition] by Margherita Costa (review)

Díaz and Goethals deliver a thoroughly modern, lively, colorful, and eminently readable translation into English of Margherita Costa's mid-seventeenth century Italian comedy, Li buffoni (The Buffoons). The volume's Introduction also offers a well-researched panorama of Costa's myriad publications and, while doing so, promises to debunk some of the (misleading) assertions of previous biographers and literary critics.

To that end, the editors provide a detailed and sensitive account of the Roman letterata's works and her sojourns up and down the peninsula from Rome to Florence to Turin to Venice and on to France and (possibly) to Germany where she courted her various formidable benefactors. Costa's unparalleled versatility in her handling of literary genres and linguistic registers is underscored as she is observed crossing the boundaries between the lowly and the lofty with ease and dexterity. Notably, Costa's talents manifest themselves in the literary domain but also in the fields of music and performance. Not only was she the first woman known to publish a secular comedy but she published a libretto—the first of its kind by a female author (14). A poet, dramatist, and performer (virtuosa) Costa was also a skilled courtly politician whose success is in no small part due to the stratagems she used to achieve a veritable network of sponsors, both in Italy and abroad at the French and German courts. At the time, the French court was under the authority of the notoriously famous and powerful Cardinal Mazarin; Costa's invitation to perform on stage in Paris at the behest of the regent, Queen Anne of Austria, came from the Cardinal himself. Therefore, if at some point down the line Costa lost the backing of the Barberini in Rome, she surely proved to have the ability to drum up a whole new cast of equally noteworthy substitutes: the Medici in Florence, the Savoy in Turin, the royal house of France, Germany's nobility.

One of the most important goals, in my opinion, is to show how incredibly unique Margherita Costa was—not simply as the author of her "commedia ridicolosa" but in terms of her entire literary career and her authorial persona. She could not have been more different in style, content, and choice of genre when compared to the traditional well educated and respectable female writer of the early modern period. The editors of this volume show this to be the case at every turn and have therefore done a superb job in accomplishing what is most valuable to the reader who comes to this volume with little or no knowledge at all of this remarkable letterata and the particular historical moment to which she belongs. As they summarize, "Much like Marino and the marinisti, Costa strove to inspire awe and wonder, or meraviglia, in her readers with an array of surprising metaphors, novel word plays, and unexpected conceits. Her language is often bizarre, contradictory, and hyperbolic, and embraces monstrous forms that purposefully subvert Petrarchan canons of female beauty" (25). In fact, this Roman letterata often goes so far as to associate her own authorial persona and, by extension, her own writing, with "bizarria," a term that escapes translation but is emblematic of all of those heterogenous ingredients reflective of Costa's writing and the age in which she produced it. In all of her output, Costa showed her comfort with Baroque aesthetics: its incongruity with the decorous and the measured standards of the previous century ran counter to feminine decorum and proved to be the impetus behind women writers' sharp decline during the seventeenth century—precisely the period in which the author of Li buffoni was most prolific. Costa's anti-classicizing, transgressive approach—the staple of Seicento aesthetics—proved to be her asset and the reason for...