California Italian Studies

Leone de’ Sommi’s sixteenth-century treatise on stagecraft, Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche, defines drama as a mirror of human life and society. For Leone, dramatic form is patterned on the human body, its meaning conveyed through gesture and vocalization. While Leone’s theatrical worldview seems to embrace civic unity, I argue that it also reflects the anxieties of a period of aggressive marginalization of Italian Jewish communities due to the rise of ghettos. The Dialoghi develop a counter-argument to the dominant humanist (Christian) narrative of theater’s origins and de-center the Aristotelian model, citing Hebrew scripture as drama’s highest ancient authority. Moreover, de’ Sommi’s prescriptions for actors’ uses of voice and body in performance dramatize the politically and socially charged relationships of Mantua’s Jewish artists and artisans to the Gonzaga court. Through his dramatic theory, Leone de’ Sommi enacts a challenge to the structural and ideological confines of the ghetto.