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When Ariosto became a paid courtier at the court of Ercole I d’Este in 1497 one of his main tasks was theatre. Apart from the now lost Tragedy of Thisbe, 1493, which testifies to his quite precocious interest in theatre, Ludovico organised many shows at court, towards the end of the XV century in Ferrara, in which he himself acted with histrionic attitude. But it was the years that followed the period in which he was Ducal Commissioner for Garfagnana, after July 1525, under Duke Alfonso I, that saw the best of Ludovico’s theatrical enterprises, to which he had by then added the Lena and the second edition of the Negromante. In those years he put on his own plays and those of others, among them a play by Ruzante, in collaboration with a theatre company from Padua who were friends with the famous playwright and actor from the Veneto. With the second Negromante and the Lena the city of Ferrara became a top level place for theatre, with an interlacing of the city and theatre that exalted the point of view of the court to which the poet destined his plays. The public, on its part, was an integral part of the court and observed the city from a privileged standpoint, recognising on stage moments of the true life of Ferrara with shopkeepers, labourers, ducal families, representatives of the law, judges and lawyers. Ludovico’s activity, as playwright and the promoter of shows at court, in a first instance looked to be aimed at a re-foundation of comic theatre on the basis of the consolidated models of Plutarch and Terence, but subsequently, after the first two plays (Cassaria and Suppositi), his work was enriched with elements from the lives of his contemporaries and their city, with particular attention for the social and psychological weight of the Lena. Also the play he never finished that was the Studenti, ascribable to a period ten years prior to the Lena and the second Negromante, highlights how Ariosto intended to make of the stage that was the city the symbolic centre of a multiform and contradictory reality.
Raffaello, Design for a stage set, Gabinetto dei disegni e delle stampe degli Uffizi, Florence
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