Ophelia de Vere

  Rudolfinum  in Pargue is  designed in the neo Renaissance style.  Italian Renaissance comedy lives a double life. On one stage, erudite men of letters resurrect ancient texts with philological care, building comedies as if they were architectural projects. On another, masked actors roam Europe with trunks, bodies, and voices, improvising plots night after night. These two traditions— Commedia erudita and Commedia dell’Arte —are often conflated. They should not be. Their difference is not merely stylistic; it is epistemological. One trusts the book. The other trusts the body. The Commedia Erudita: comedy as humanist reconstruction The Commedia erudita emerges in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy from the intellectual climate of Renaissance humanism. Its defining gesture is retrospective: a conscious return to classical antiquity, above all to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence . Their comedies—lost for centuries and rediscovered ...