Dante’s Performance

Music, Dance, and Drama in the “Commedia”

von Francesco Ciabattoni

269 Seiten, Hardcover

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante’s
Commedia
which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares.
Dante’s
Performance
opens a new perspective from which to consider the
Commedia
: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references.

From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in
Inferno
IX, to Beatrice’s celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dante’s language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance.

If hell is "the Middle Age’s
theatrum diaboli
," purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding (
Par
. IV 28–39).

• Reihe: Mimesis
• ISBN: 9783111405544
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 06.08.2024
• Genre: Sprachwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft/Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft
• Verlag: De Gruyter