California Italian Studies

In three seventeenth-century comedies by the Italian playwright, poet, actor and capocomico Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654), the Mediterranean Sea plays an ambiguous role, simultaneously separating and connecting families, peoples, cultures, and empires that are scattered around its shores. In these plays the Mediterranean cannot be thought of in geographical terms—i.e. as an ensemble of bodies of water—but rather as a scene of interaction, a stage upon which distance and difference are affirmed or overcome through dialogue, sometimes with surprising results. Embodied above all in the themes of piracy and slavery, on the one hand, and in the figure of the renegade, on the other, the function of the Mediterranean in La turca (1611), Lo schiavetto (1612), and La sultana (1622) is the subject of this essay.