Dantes Performance: Music, Dance, and Drama in the Commedia

Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dantes Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dantes Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references.

From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in Inferno IX, to Beatrices celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dantes language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance.

If hell is the Middle Ages theatrum diaboli, purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding (Par. IV 2839).