The short, lascivious lives of two Venetian theaters, 1580-85

Renaissance Quarterly, Autumn, 2002 by Eugene J. Johnson

Apparently, this decision created considerable dissatisfaction within the city, to the point that in the following year, on 17 December 1582, the capi, or heads, of the Council of Ten forced through a repeal of the 5/6 majority, and the councilors of the doge directed orally that only a simple majority was needed for the repeal. (49) Although in the next month the Ten twice voted against motions to permit performances during carnival, (50) apparently comedies were given anyway, "to gratify the young nobles." (51)

This under-the-table concession, as well as the vote to repeal the 5/6 rule, came at a dramatic moment in Venetian constitutional history. By 1582 a group of aging patricians was regularly rotating in and out of the Council of Ten and the Zonta. Members of the Ten, who served for a year, could not immediately succeed themselves. But for a year they could rotate into the Zonta (a body created in the fourteenth century to advise the Ten on great matters of state and to spread the responsibility for the decision to depose and execute Doge Marin Falier), after which they could return to the Council. During 1582 dissatisfaction with the way the members of the Ten and the Zonta had turned themselves into a self-perpetuating oligarchy became so widespread among the hundreds of other patricians who made up the Maggior Consiglio that a constitutional crisis erupted. (52) In the fall of 1582 in a show of its displeasure the Maggior Consiglio refused to elect the prepared list of fifteen names proposed for the Zonta. Th is action precipitated a political crisis that Doge Nicolo da Ponte tried to solve by bringing to the Maggior Consiglio on 7 December a palliative parte that merely defined somewhat more clearly the roles of the Ten and the Zonta, but the doge's proposal received an inconclusive vote, with many abstentions. On 19 December, two days after the Ten had repealed the 5/6 rule for comedies, the doge brought his parte back to the Maggior Consiglio, again failing to gain a majority. The doge's councilors and the heads of the Ten who forced the repeal of the 5/6 rule for comedies were the very same people who were working with the doge to save the power of the Ten and the Zonta. The 5/6 rule of the previous year must have been seen as an egregious example of the Council of Ten's overreaching itself -- thus the urgency to repeal that vote just at the time far more important matters were pending in the Maggior Consiglio.

No mention had been made of the boxes in the comedy theaters in the Ten's act of September, 1581, but the Ten had noted with astonishment and disapproval that Venice had provided special places for such "inhonestissimi" (most unwholesome) events. The boxes, however, were one of the most problematic issues that the theater owners faced, as one realizes both from the letter of the Florentine ambassador, written in October, 1581, (53) just after the council had decreed the 5/6 majority, and from the language of the registro of the Ten of January, 1582, when the issue of the performance of comedies came up again. On 5 January the council voted on a parte to permit fifteen days of comedies during carnival, but the proposal failed by a vote of five for and ten against. In the parte the problem with the closed boxes is clearly addressed, after the usual language about hours and decent language: