“Baroque Venetian Theatre: dialectics of excess and discipline in the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries.”

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the theatre practice of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante) and the pedagogical strategies of the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) in order to forward a theory of the Baroque as a space of critical tension produced by the clash of disciplinary regimes of governance and excessive artistic expressions. I read Venice through a sceno-historiographical lens and theorize it as a staging area from which acts of Baroque composition unfolded. With a dialectical and philosophical-historical methodology (derived from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault), I assemble archival traces of Venetian theatre prior to the construction of permanent theatre buildings in order to contribute to the writing focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venetian theatre, of which currently little exists. Theatre, then, appears in this dissertation as more than mere entertainment; it becomes an active political practice embedded within an epicenter of cultural production in early modern Europe.