In Inferno, XVI 128 and XXI 2, Dante explicitly gives the title of his poem as Comedìa, accented as in Greek. The label appears regularly in the earliest manuscripts, often written as Commedia. While it is true that in Paradiso the author refers to his work only as the “sacrato poema” (Par., XXIII 62) and “poema sacro” (Par., XXV 1), it is clear from Epistle XIII that Dante did not intend the term Commedia to refer only to the first cantica. The letter clearly indicates the title of his book as “Incipit Commedia Dantis Alagherii”, and a dual explanation is also provided: regarding content (unlike in a tragedy, a “comedy” has a happy ending) and form (unlike the sublime style of tragedy, that of a comedy is lowly and humble, a “vernacular tongue, used by young women too”[1]: Ep., XIII 31). This letter has been the source of frequent doubts, since the style of the Commedia is not always lowly and humble and since the Aeneid, which Dante had described as a “high tragedy” (Inf., XX 113), in fact ends happily. The dissatisfaction regarding the title that was expressed by many readers, including Boccaccio, was thus symptomatic of the complete novelty of the genre, which simply did not fit into traditional conceptual categories. More recently, there has been renewed interest in a definition of comic poetry that can be traced to Horace and was widespread in Medieval times: in contrast with tragedy, it is said to include satire, namely “a militant denunciation of political and moral corruption”[2], a theme that pervades Dante’s poem.
Boccaccio’s addition of the adjective divina became a stable feature with the version edited by Ludovico Dolce and printed in Venice in 1555, for the Gabriele Giolito Press.
[1] “locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule comunicant”.
[2] M. Tavoni, Il titolo della ‘Commedia’ di Dante, in “Nuova Rivista di Letteratura Italiana”, I 1998, pp. 22.
The Commedia: title and literary genre
