Il Capitano alla conquista della società delle lettere. Fortuna e trasformazioni delle Bravure di Francesco Andreini nella Germania del Seicento

This article broaches the subject of the transformations that the Italian Commedia dell’arte underwent in its reception in the German-speaking countries in the Early Modern Age. At the Catholic courts of Southern Germany, which were the first to perform the Commedia dell’arte at the end of the 16th century, plays were staged in Italian and thus hardly any translations were commissioned. By contrast, German translations of the Commedia dell’arte texts are found a few decades later in the Protestant part of the Empire. The thesis proposed in this article is that in this context, Italian comedy was seen by circles, academies and the learned society as a genuine literary phenomenon. From this point of view, a significative discovery was made a few decades ago when a partial print of a translation of a representative text of the Commedia dell’arte like the Bravure del Capitano Spavento by Francesco Andreini from 1627 was found in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. But in 2010 there was an even more interesting discovery in the Court Library in Arolsen, namely a handwritten German translation of the Bravure, even earlier (1610). To date, this manuscript is the only complete translation of Andreini’s reasonings so far found in another European language. After dwelling on a reconstruction of the cultural networks that emerge from the study of these translations, the final part of this contribution focuses more closely on the texts, highlighting their philological transformations compared to the original, their critical intentions against the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War and, not least, their extraordinary literary quality and knowledge.