Goggio Lecture; Amicizia at Work: Theatre, Friendship, and the Making of New Audiences

Amicizia at Work: Theatre, Friendship, and the Making of New Audiences

My final talk on “The Crisis of Solitude” will take up a theatrical group with which I have long been fascinated, Siena’s Congrega dei Rozzi.  Founded in 1531 by a group of artisans intent on finding ways to strengthen their “amicizia” or friendship on rare days off, the Congrega quickly became known throughout Italy as an edgy company dedicated to the production of plays about the villano and the challenges of life in the Tuscan countryside.  As the Rozzi bring us into the world of the poor during a time of difficulties for the city of Siena itself, they don’t necessarily remove us from that world at play’s end.  Rather, as in so many early modern plays, endings for the Rozzi signal not so much finales, as beginnings.

How to think about continuities between “art” and so-called “real life”? – a real life literally embodied in the liberal use of Sienese dialect that characterized the Rozzi’s work? How did the friendship of a dozen artisans generate other kinds of friendship, leading their audiences to think about connections between elite and popular culture, intellectual and manual labor, urban and rural spaces? In considering how the Rozzi and other playwrights ended their plays, we’ll think about how their art directs us back into the world.  Time permitting, we’ll reflect on the relevance of such work for contemporary theatre – such as Monticchiello’s teatro povero.

Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature and of Divinity at Yale.  Her primary interests are in late medieval and early modernity, especially as regards issues of literary ownership, women’s literature, and religious studies. Her books include Who Owns Literature?: Early Modernity’s Orphan Texts (forthcoming, Cambridge’s Elements series); Siena, City of Secrets (2015); Reclaiming Catherine of Siena (Winner of the 2010 MLA’s Howard Marraro Prize for Best Work in Italian Studies); and Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (1993). She recently translated  Dacia Maraini’s Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza for the series “Other Voices in Italian Literature” (Rutgers University Press, 2023); she has also translated the complete poems of Gaspara Stampa and Lucrezia Tornabuoni.  

Tylus’s previous appointments were at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison, where she served as Associate Dean of the Humanities and Arts, and at New York University, where she was founding director of the Center for the Humanities and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.