Cecchi, Giovan Maria

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Giovan Maria Cecchi (1517–1587) was the most prolific and popular of sixteenth-century Florentine dramatists. His best-known play, L'Assiuolo ( The Horned Owl), brings to the stage the amorous adventure of two students at the university of Pisa who fall in love with the same married lady. Through a servant's ruse they both succeed in gratifying their senses and in establishing a love affair that will see them through their undergraduate career.

In Michel Plaisance, L’ Accademia e il suo Principe. Cultura e politica a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo I e di Francesco de’ Medici. L’ Académie et le Prince. Culture et politique à Florence au temps de Côme Ier et de François de Médicis, Manziana, Vecchiarelli, 2004, pp. 363-374. 
Publié d’abord in Piero Gargiulo, Alessandro Magini, Stéphane Toussaint, éds., Neoplatonismo, musica, letteratura nel Rinascimento. I Bardi di Vernio e l’Accademia della Crusca, Prato, « Cahiers Accademia », I, 2000, pp. 31-39.

In all but three of his plays, Giovan Maria Cecchi (1518-1587) used a prologue with a format similar to that of classical, Plauto-Terentian comedy, or to contemporary erudite comedy.' In the case of his secular comedies, the use of such a prologue was consistent with general sixteenth-century practice and, therefore, to be noted only as an example of the genre. In the case of the religious plays, however, the format of the prologue was an original and important innovation. This article will examine the structure of Cecchi's prologues and will show how his use of the standard erudite prologue for his later religious plays was, in fact, revolutionary. By adopting the formal, elegant prologues of erudite comedy for the religious plays he began to write in 1559, Cecchi was refining and elevating a dramatic "genre" that had fallen into disuse and disrespect. In addition, he was also taking advantage of the polemical and didactical traditions of the prologues of erudite comedy to propose a renewed type of religious drama, one better suited to the changing social and religious climate of the sixteenth century.

Textes réunis et présentés par Michel Plaisance
Contributions de Jacqueline Brunet, Alexandre Cioranescu, Françoise Decroisette, Silvia Fabrizio-Costa, Françoise Glénisson, Gina Iannella, Michel Plaisance
ISBN: 2-903981-71-X
Disponible sur Internet  OpenEdition Freemium : <http://books.openedition.org/puv/8742>. ISBN : 9782379241284. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.puv.8742.

In the prologues to his plays, Giovan Maria Cecchi (1518-1587), * the most prolific of sixteenth-century Florentine dramatists, makes several references to the basic characteristics of certain dramatic genres which were then in vogue and which some more than others, he himself used. The genre which he discusses the least, and which in fact he used only once, is tragedy. In the prologue to the sacred drama La morte del re Acab (1559), Cecchi re-