Letters: Volume 100

A collection of inventive writings in letter form from a sixteenth-century star of commedia dell'arte.

Isabella Andreini (15621604) was a commedia dellarte diva who toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters is a collection of epistles written by Andreini in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a hermaphroditic alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. In her letters, Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreinis modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examinesfrom surprising perspectivespertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes.
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