Overview

Annibal Caro wrote The Scruffy Scoundrels (Gli Straccioni) in Rome in early 1543 for his patron Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of Pope Paul III. The actual performance of the play was delayed, then ultimately canceled after the death of its patron. Caro denied numerous requests for permission to stage the play and even to have it copied. First published in 1582 in an edition full of errors and lacunae due to censorship, it was not until 1942 that the work was finally edited based on the original manuscript (Vaticano Urbinate 764). In his play Caro extends the range and variety of sophisticated farce, adapting contemporary stage conventions, based on the classical Roman plays of Plautus and Terence, to his acute observation of Roman life in the 1540s and his praise of the Farnese family. At first glance, The Scruffy Scoundrels seems like a series of unrelated scenes and sketches grouped around a highly conventionalized and loosely structured love plot. But each scene hails from a particular comic genre, each with its own topoi and character types. This is a measure of Caro's comic genius. In his Prologue he boasts that he is the first to employ a triple plot in which the ""scruffy scoundrels"" genre meets Boccaccio's farce and an elaborate love story borrowed from ancient Greek romance. The Scruffy Scoundrels is a masterpiece of humanist playwriting. The two ""scruffy scoundrels,"" the love squabble between servants, the stock farcical routines, the comic invectives and the long pathetic side-tales all derive from the forms, plots and characters of ancient Roman comedy. But Caro also sets his play firmly in the streets of early modern Rome and makes it both a social satire and an endorsement of the civic and legal reforms promoted by the Farnese pope, Paul III. Drama both imitates and helps construct life. In the end, the legal order imposed on the fictive Rome of the stage anticipates the new social order the pope intended for the marble, brick and mortar city. Introduction, bibliography, plot summary, notes. 222 pages.

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Though the range of characters the three comedies contain a combination of modern figures with traditional types only slightly modified from their models, in Plautus and Terence. Although the ragged brothers of Caro's play represent the blocking generation who caused the young couple Giulietta and Tindaro to flee the island of Chios and suffer a long series of misadventures, Giovanni and Battista are involved as enraged litigants in a court battle to recover a fortune; and upon their success in the legal dispute they bless the newly reunited lovers and provide a generous dowry. In the character of the just recently repatriated Roman nobleman Giordano Cortesi... Caro intended to portray the imperious aristocrats who resisted the judicial reforms of the Farnese papacy. Whereas the ancient comedies usually presented wily servants who aided the young lovers in their struggle to overcome parental objections, Ciavolella and Beecher note in the introduce how the servants in Gli Straccioni like Marabeo and Pilucca reflect the moral corruption of Rome as they seek to defraud their masters. In opposition to Giordano's arrogance and the servants' debasement the playwright sets Messer Rossello, not the usual pedantic Latin-mouthing lawyer of Renaissance comedies but the eloquent advocate of Vatican reform. To create a drama that glorifies the physical and political reconstruction of Rome, Caro was fashioning a type of play that became popular in the second half of the sixteenth century: romantic comedy. As the source for the romantic intrigue the author turned to Achilles Tatius' Byzantine tale Leucippe and Cleitophon, transferring events to the embattled environment of a Rome caught between warring noble families. Since Caro wished to celebrate the renewal of society through marriage, his drama concludes with the wedding festivities of Tindaro and Giulietta along with the joyous reunion of a by-now-restrained Giordano with his wife Argentina. To signify a break with an unhappy and unjust past the brothers Giovanni and Battista have cast off their rags to assume the attire appropriate to their social rank Even the dishonest servants participate in the spirit of reconciliation as their masters forgive earlier offenses All classes share in the new order established by Pope Paul III. Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. Renaissance and Reformation, New Series 7.1 (1983): 63-68. http: //www.jstor.org/stable/43444401.

Author Information

Annibal Caro was born on June 19, 1507 in Civitanova Marche, a small town overlooking the Adriatic Sea. When Annibal was eighteen he left home for Florence to further his education. He entered the household of Monsignor Giovanni Gaddi, clerk of the Apostolic Chamber, as Gaddi's private secretary. Gaddi had achieved considerable renown as a patron in the publishing of classical and contemporary authors, and some delegation of editorial responsibilities almost certainly fell to Caro. In due course Caro moved to Rome. There he found himself in close contact with the entourage of the Farnese pope, Paul III, and with the leading circles of humanist writers and thinkers. From 1542 to 1547, he found new employment as a member of the secretariat in the household of Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of Pope Paul III. During that time, in early 1543, Caro wrote ""Gli Straccioni"" for his new patron. On behalf of Pierluigi, Caro also undertook a series of diplomatic missions and was named administrator of justice in Piacenza. After Pierluigi alienated the nobles of his territories and massacred those who had rebelled against his father, he was assassinated on September 10, 1547. Caro, accused of complicity and larceny, fled to Rome, where he became secretary to the pope's nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, whom he served until 1563 in administrative and diplomatic capacities. As a member of the Accademia della virtù, Caro wrote a series of salacious parodies. His two volumes of ""Lettere familiari,"" consisting of some 800 letters, form an outstanding literary achievement. Perhaps his greatest work was an Italian translation of Virgil's ""Aeneid,"" destined to become the canonical translation down to the twentieth century. His other translated works include Aristotle's ""Rhetoric"" and Longus' ""Daphnis and Chloe."" Caro died on November 20, 1566 and was buried in the center of the south aisle of the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso in Rome, not far from the great Farnese Palace where he had long worked. Donald Beecher is the Chancellor's Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Canada, where he specializes in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research and teaching have taken him in many directions from the history of medicine to the cognitive sciences, with salient adventures along the way into Ben Jonson studies, early English prose fiction, tricksters, folklore, early music, Italian theater, exploration and pharmacology, witchcraft, and the history of collecting. The Scruffy Scoundrels is his eighth book-collaboration with Massimo Ciavolella, including their collaboration on the English and French editions of Ferrand's ""Treatise on Lovesickness."" Their future projects include a new translation of tales from Boccaccio's ""Decameron"" for Broadview Press and of the anonymous Sienese theatrical masterpiece, The Deceived, for Italica Press. Massimo Ciavolella studied at the Universities of Bologna, Rome, and British Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He taught at Carleton University and at the University of Toronto before becoming Director of the UCLA Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He was the co-founder and co-editor (1970-91) of ""Quaderni d'italianistica,"" and he is currently co-editor of the Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation Series and of the University of Toronto Press's Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library. In addition to many articles, he has written and co-edited several books, including ""Saturn from Antiquity to the Renaissance""; ""Scrittori, tendenze letterarie e conflitto delle poetiche in Italia (1960-1990)""; ""Ariosto Today: Contemporary Perspectives""; ""Culture and Authority in the Baroque""; and, among the eight co-publications he shares with Donald Beecher, two critical editions of Jacques Ferrand's ""A Treatise on Lovesickness,"" one in English, the other in French.

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