Five Plays for the Archangel Raphael by Giovan Maria Cecchi (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Five Plays for the Archangel Raphael by Giovan Maria Cecchi Richard Andrews Five Plays for the Archangel Raphael. By Giovan Maria Cecchi. Trans, and ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler. (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, 14) Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2020. 227 pp. $21.95. ISBN 978–0–7727–2488–5. Scholars of sixteenth-century Italian theatre tend to focus on the secular genres of comedy, tragedy, and pastoral, which had roots, or at least claimed them, in Graeco-Roman antiquity. We often overlook the fact that there was a parallel tradition of religious and didactic drama, less erudite and more popular, which probably figured more strongly in the imagination and the theatrical experience of the average citizen. One of the Anglophone scholars who has reminded us most effectively of this fact, over a long career, is Konrad Eisenbichler, who has previously published The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). This was a ground-breaking history of the Confraternità dell' Arcangelo Raffaello, a young men's social and devotional brotherhood also known as the Confraternità della Scala. Mounting plays with a religious or moralistic content was a key public activity of Florentine confraternities, and some of the playwrights involved are known to history. Giovan Maria Cecchi (1518–1587) was a particularly prolific dramatist, producing both secular comedies and a wide range of religious and didactic plays. Eisenbichler now offers English translations of five scripts composed by Cecchi for the Arcangelo Raffaello confraternity. Like much of Cecchi's work, they did not reach print until the nineteenth century. In editing them now, Eisenbichler takes full account of their surviving manuscript sources, and he also relays what can be deduced about the circumstances in which each spectacle was staged by the 'boys of the Archangel Raphael', the surviving evidence being different in scope and detail for each item. None of the five scripts is longer than a thousand lines of verse—not even the three-act Cleofas e Luca ('Cleopas and Luke') composed between 1580 and 1587, which dramatizes biblical and apocryphal events traditionally narrated as surrounding Christ's Resurrection. This play contains nineteen characters: they include Christ and an Angel, but also the Virgin Mary, male and female disciples, hostile Jews, and the staff of an inn at Emmaus who provide an episode of low-life slapstick comedy. The other four plays are an Act Suitable for Recitation in Front of the Nativity Scene; a presentation of Contempt for Love and Earthly Beauty; a Duel of Active [End Page 628] and Contemplative Life; and Dolcina, where a single eponymous human character appears alongside figures such as Humility, Pride, and Religion. She is stated to represent Human Fragility, and in practice she too offers something approaching comic relief, with her down-to-earth plebeian language. Otherwise, apart from Dolcina, the characters who recite these texts are either abstract personifications, angels, or biblical personages recruited to deliver sermons and homilies rather than to interact in a stage narrative. Eisenbichler readily observes that confraternity spectacles tended to be static rather than dramatic. However, as well as composing predictable general lessons about pious and moral behaviour, Cecchi was well enough instructed in religious matters to express some coherent doctrinal views, in particular about justification by works as well as by faith, which locate his plays in the context of current theological controversies. He also made way in his scripts for musical numbers to be inserted: the texts of his laude are known from elsewhere, and indeed there are some spoken scenes clearly influenced by sacre rappresentazioni created earlier by other authors. Eisenbichler translates all the scripts carefully and accurately, so that theatre historians not expert in Italian will understand what they do and do not contain. His English versions also show how the originals are divided into lines of verse, giving an impression of their rhythm and their degree of stylization. (A few minor typographical errors suggest that a final proof-reading would have been helpful, but none of them interferes with a reader's understanding.) This volume achieves its precise scholarly aims, and...