Staging the Imagined City: Aretino in Rome and London

Abstract

This article explores the theme of ‘cityscapes’, and Aretino as a writer of the urban experience, by focussing on the city as an unknowable and anonymous space, especially to social outsiders. It will first examine how Aretino portrays Rome in his early comedy Cortigiana (1525) as a confusing and socially stratified space when experienced from its peripheries. A key factor in achieving this is in his mapping of the imagined spaces of the city (the ‘locus’) onto the theatrical stage‐space (the ‘platea’) so that the stage represents the street and the back‐stage represents a hidden world from which both Cortigiana's main characters and indeed the audience are locked out. Those desired spaces of the city are often coded in sexual terms, and so the second half of this article will explore the way in which i modi (the ephemeral erotic images which would shape Aretino's posthumous reputation as a pornographer) would become a visual trope used by seventeenth‐century English writers to conjure up the unseen and imagined interiors of London's suburban brothels and aristocratic boudoirs.