The Negromante

Is Ariosto’s first play in verse. After a first draft written in 1509, presumably still in prose, Ludovico completed this new play in verse and sent it to Leo X on 16 January 1520 for it to be staged in Rome (on the wave of the highly successful staging of the Suppositi for carnival in 1519) but which it never did. Of this play there is a version ‘for Rome’ and one ‘for Ferrara’: the first, that dates back to 1520, was published in print posthumously in Venice in 1535. The second, done for the court of Ferrara in about 1528, was also published posthumously by Gabriele Giolito de’Ferrari in 1551. This second version was presented during the same celebrations and with the same scenery as the Lena and the Moscheta by Ruzante. The play was inspired by the Calandria by Bibbiena and highlights the world of the ‘giunteria’ with the figure of Lachelino, a fake magician and necromancer. This man tries to rob the various characters in the play but the complexity of his subterfuge and the intervention of the servant Temolo unmask him and lead to the final solution of general pacification that excludes no one except the sorcerer. Compared to the other, the ‘Ferrara’ edition has a new prologue and plays more upon the figure of the sorcerer, whose name changes from Lachelino to Iachelino, and has a further three scenes in which the fake necromancer is subjected to further plights and punishments. At the centre of this comedy, in both its versions, there is the theme, that is recurrent also in the Furioso, of the way people are easily beguiled by dubious smooth talking characters.