Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 1998 by Constance Jordan

The case of Antonia Pulci is an inversion of Ferrazzi's; her voice had power but it also spoke for the interests of an institution designed to determine her way of life. The plots of Pulci's plays derive their motive force from a need, and perhaps a requirement, to celebrate the virtue justifying cloistered life: virginity. In The Play and Festival of Rosana, for example, virginity retains its value despite a plot that suggests romance: the heroine Rosana, imprisoned in the Sultan of Babylon's harem, succeeds in defending herself from his advances, and is rescued by the Prince of Cesaria, Ulimentus, a companion from childhood who has all the generic features of a lover. The couple returns to the King of Cesaria, who, with the prince, converts to Christianity and then retires "to give himself to God" (275). Ulimentus concludes the play by beginning his monarchy as a bachelor; Rosana is silent throughout these final scenes although apparently she remains on stage. The convent audience knew, I assume, why it was appropriate that they watch a romanzo interrotto, a play which hyperbolically illustrated the chief features of their own lives and common fate. Pulci's editors state that she represents women as "proactive forces" in society (3) - while this is certainly true, one has also to notice that her characters are, in a sense, company women: their voices are made audible within the confines, literal and symbolic, of the cloister.

The conceptual framework within which both Ferrazzi and Pulci represented a feminine experience was constructed to value the male above the female and feminists had, therefore, an obvious stake in inverting its terms. Agrippa's Declamation does just this: it places woman as preeminent over man and, in theory, it makes impossible the experiences of a Ferrazzi and a Pulci. But the interest of his treatise is to be found in passages in which he turns from the theory of sexual difference to an account of the authoritative institutions that make the speaking or writing outside a sanctioned social order so very problematic. Having cited various laws in ancient Rome that would appear to acknowledge the social role of women by granting them certain privileges (some merely honorific [89-91]), Agrippa goes on to mention others that gave women a public status and instrumentality equal to those of men. Roman women were able to be "judges and arbitrators, to have power to invest or be invested with a fief, and to decide a matter of law among their vassals. For the same reason a woman, as a man, can have slaves of her own, she can render justice even among foreigners, and she can give her name to her family, so that her sons receive the name of their mother rather than their father" (91-92). In short, a Roman woman could obtain an institutional identity and derive her authority from it. These images of parity trouble Agrippa's picture of a creation in which women are supposed superior. Equality or parity of access to institutions means, finally, that there is a presumption of sameness among those who are seeking and getting access.