The Performance of Male Nobility in Molière's Comédie-Ballets: Staging the Courtier (review)
the works of Italian authors who had achieved some success. Such was the case of Della Porta’s La sorella and I due fratelli rivali. Larivey opened in France the vein of serious comedy, while Rotrou introduced tragic comedy (or pastoral comedy). The relationship between Italian Renaissance commedia erudita and the French theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been the object of many studies by Stiefel, Hauvette, Sanese, Chasles, and Toldo, just to mention a few names. Patrizia de Capitani’s more modern approach lingers on the intercultural relationship of the two theatrical forms, studying the works in their own imitative process. Unlike the critics, the scholar was able to demonstrate in her works that the comedies of the second half of the sixteenth century, characterized as they are by romance and pathetic elements, do not show the disappearance of the model, but its own dynamism and its capability to adapt to the variations in mentality and taste. French playwrights showed their necessity to overcome their own models in order to integrate them into a new culture. MAUDA BREGOLI-RUSSO University of Illinois at Chicago