Luigi Groto’s Adriana: A Laboratory Experiment on Literary Genre

The present paper examines Luigi Groto’s tragedy Adriana , with occasional references to the author’s dramatic oeuvre in general, and to his second tragedy Dalida in particular. An analysis of the Adriana ’s poetics reveals that two different generic templates were superimposed in the play’s composition: im-plementing a poetic program which will be illuminated in the following pages, Groto transferred Petrarchan lyricism to the genre of tragedy. The issue we are dealing with thus pertains to two thematic fields at the same time, namely the Poetics of Early Modern Drama , and the History of Genres / Cross-fertilization between Genres . If we subsequently focus our attention on the Adriana , this is only due to constraints of space: as it were, Groto’s dramatic oeuvre as a whole could well be called a large-scale laboratory experiment on literary genre. Given its sheer volume, however, – it consists of the published plays Dalida (1572) , Il pentimento amoroso (1576), Adriana (1578), Emilia (1579), Il tesoro (1580), Calisto (1582), Alteria (1584), and the “dramma sacro” Isac (first printed in 1586, but premiered as early as 1558 1 ), while other works remained unpublished and were consequently lost, among them several tragedies 2 – a more comprehensive survey will have to be deferred to another occasion. Unlike today, Groto often called in extremely well-known literary figure during lifetime. Ben Jonson’s Volpone