1 My italics. As cited in Maria Carmi, Pier Jacopo Martelli, Apostolo Zeno e Girolamo Gigli: una pagina della storia del Vocabolario Cateriniano (Florence: Bernardo Seeber Libraio-Editore, 1906), 3. All translations are my own. Although Gigli's Vocabolario began fairly innocently as a series of entries on Sienese usage to be included in the latest edition of the Accademia della Crusca's comprehensive dictionary of the Tuscan language, the Vocabolario della Crusca, its eventual rejection by the leaders of the Crusca led to an increasingly satirical and aggressive attack not only against the Florentine language, but also against the Academy and the dictionary's proponents. Because of its controversial content, Gigli was forced to stop circulating it after the letter ‘R’; the remainder of the entries appeared in a complete but ‘pirated’ edition after Gigli's death.

2 For more information on the performance context of the 1711 L'Anagilda see Reinhard Strohm, Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 39–40, and Saverio Franchi, Drammaturgia romana 2 (1701–1750): annali dei testi drammatici e libretti per musica pubblicati a Roma e nel Lazio (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997), 78–79.

3 Gianvincenzo Gravina, ‘Discorso sopra L'Endimione’, in Gianvincenzo Gravina: scritti critici e teorici, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Rome: Laterza 1973), 51.

4 Bosco Parrasio refers to the outdoor meeting places of the Arcadians: the name refers to a region of classical Greek Arcadia, and embodies the pastoral symbolism of the Academy. According to Ursula Kirkendale the Arcadians met at Ruspoli's palace south of San Matteo in Merulana from September 1707. By 1712 there is evidence that Ruspoli was hosting the Arcadians at his palace on the Aventine Hill. Kirkendale also provides evidence of weekly performances given at Ruspoli's palace for the benefit of the Arcadian Academy. Ruspoli built a theatre in his palazzo by the year 1710, though it was used for opera performances only during Carnival in 1711; the two works performed during this season were Caldara's pastoral drama La costanza in amore vince l'inganno and the opera L'Anagilda, which was performed thirteen times between 4 January and 5 February. Other hosts of the Arcadian Academy at this time were Cardinals Pietro Ottoboni and Benedetto Pamphili. See Ursula Kirkendale, ‘The Ruspoli Documents on Handel’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 20/2 (1967), 241, 250. See also Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, Storia dell'Accademia degli Arcadi istituita in Roma l'anno 1690 (London: T. Beckett, 1804), and Daniela Predieri, Bosco Parrasio: un giardino per l'Arcadia (Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1990).

5 Girolamo Gigli, La Fede ne' Tradimenti, dramma per musica: Fatto cantara da' SS. Convittori del Nobil Collegio Tolomei di Siena (Siena: Stamperia del Publ. [sic], 1689), no pagination.

6 Girolamo Gigli, L'Anagilda, ovvero La Fede ne' Tradimenti, dramma per musica (Rome: Rossi, 1711), 3–4.

7 The comic incidents that Gigli added to create the 1711 version, which correct his prior omission, are not borrowed from any of the opera's precursors. Although many of Gigli's works include comic elements coinciding with serious characters, a practice which would seem to contradict the Arcadian ideal, Crescimbeni praised him for his dramatic works in L'istoria della volgar poesia in 1698. Gigli was later expelled from the Arcadian Academy because of his controversial writings. In spite of this rift, Gigli looked back at his connection with Ruspoli's bosco Parrasio affectionately in the Preface to Regole per la toscana favella, which was dedicated to Ruspoli's son Alessandro in 1721. Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, L'istoria della volgar poesia, volume 2 (Rome: Chracas, 1698), 169–174; Girolamo Gigli, Regole per la toscana favella (Rome: Antonio de' Rossi, 1721).

8 For Muratori, the goal of Arcadia was not just to form a ‘Republic of Letters’, but to use the power that comes from the implementation of systematic, widespread literary principles to bolster the entire corpus of contemporary Italian literature in the face of recent French criticisms. In spite of the heated nature of the French–Italian aesthetic debate, the Italians derived much of their inspiration from French literature, ranging from early Provençal poetry to contemporary French drama. For more on the French–Italian critical debate see Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Georgia Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music, 1600–1750 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), and Robert S. Freeman, Opera without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1675–1725 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981).

9 For surveys of Gigli's career see Walter Binni, ‘La letteratura nell' epoca arcadico-razionalistica’, in Il Settecento letterario, Storia della letteratura italiana, volume 6, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1968), 326–450, and ‘Il teatro comico di Girolamo Gigli’, in L'Arcadia e il Metastasio (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963), 176–206; Gaetano Compagnino, Guido Nicastro and Giuseppe Savoca, ‘Il teatro del primo Settecento: discussioni ed esperimenti’, in Il Settecento: L'Arcadia e l'età delle riforme, ed. Carlo Muscetta (Rome: Laterza, 1973), 213–264; Valentino Carloni, ‘Girolamo Gigli interprete di Giovanni Racine’, Aevum: rassegna di scienze storiche, linguistiche, filologiche 46 (1972), 49–115; and F. Corsetti (Oresbio Agieo), La vita di Girolamo Gigli, detto fra gli arcadi Amaranto Sciatidico scritta da Oresbio Agieo, pastore arcade con aggiunta delle lettere delle principali accademie d'Italia scritte dal medesimo in approvazione delle opere di S. Caterina da Siena (Florence: Apollo, 1746).

10 One must also wonder whether there is an alternative motive for Gigli's use of the phrase ‘Venetian tradition’. It is possible that he is referring here to mid- to late seventeenth-century Venetian opera, as exemplified by Cavalli and his successors, which routinely mixed comedy with tragedy, utilized complicated subplots, included fantastical and supernatural events and relied on mistaken identity, cross-dressed characters and costume disguises to extend the narrative and engage the audience's interest. These are exactly the characteristics of opera that the Arcadians wished to stamp out. If Gigli is indeed crafting a sort of subtext here, then we may also consider how Gigli's progression, from a 1689 libretto that apologizes for essentially not being ‘Venetian’ to a 1711 ‘Arcadian’ production that is quite a bit more ‘Venetian’, inverts the paradigm sought after, and ultimately established by, Arcadia.

11 Even non-Arcadian critics found these elements distasteful in Italian renaissance works that display components of the mock-heroic mode. Despite his own use of the mock-heroic genre, Boileau criticized Ariosto for mixing fiction with reality and for his general lack of good sense, while Dryden complained about the lack of probability in plot elements and complete disregard for ‘unity of action, or compass of time, or moderation in the vastness of [Ariosto's] draught’. Cited in Ulrich Broich, The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8–11. While Boileau did use the mock-heroic genre in his influential work Le Lutrin (1674–1683), as we shall discuss below, he was also a neoclassicist whose philosophies regarding rationalism and truth and the lack thereof in Italian literature sparked a strong rebuttal from Italians, which became the foundation of the Arcadian aesthetic.

12 Clotilde Bertoni, Percorsi europei dell'eroicomico (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1997), 90.

13 His discussion is found in the comments appended to the revised 1714 version of L'istoria della volgar poesia, which were initially published only within Arcadia, but later, in 1730, by a Venetian publisher. Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, Commentarii intorno all' Istoria della volgar poesia (Venice: Basegio, 1730), volume 1, book 6, part 3, 355–358. See also Bertoni, Percorsi europei dell'eroicomico, 91–92.

14 Bertoni, Percorsi europei dell'eroicomico, 91–92.

15 Bertoni, Percorsi europei dell' eroicomico, 93.

16 For recent literature on the schism see Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque, and Susan M. Dixon, Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and Its Garden in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006).

17 This interesting new hypothesis has been formulated by Paola Giuli, ‘“Monsters of Talent”: Fame and Reputation of Women Improvisers in Arcadia’, in Italy's Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth and Catherine M. Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 303–330. For more information on women members of Arcadia see Elisabetta Graziosi, ‘Revisiting Arcadia: Women and Academies in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, in Italy's Eighteenth Century, 103–124.

18 See Broich, The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem, 8–11.

19 On Tassoni see Barbara Zandrino, ‘Il gusto della deformazione e la degradazione dell' eroico nella Secchia rapita’, Lettere italiane 18/2 (1966), 180. Despite the posture of novelty that Tassoni assumes, his work is indebted to the Italian renaissance tradition and also to Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615). See Luigi Montella, ‘Il poema eroicomico e La secchia rapita di Alessandro Tassoni (I canto)’, in Teoria e storia dei generi lettarari: il poema eroicomico (Turin: Editrice Tirrenia Stampatori, 2001), 77, and Zandrino, ‘Il gusto della deformazione’, 192, note 48. On Boileau see H. A. Mason, ‘Boileau's Lutrin’, The Cambridge Quarterly 4/4 (1969), 363, and J. Douglass Canfield, ‘The Unity of Boileau's Le Lutrin: The Counter-Effect of the Mock-Heroic’, Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 42–58.

20 This is one version of a complex series of connections and influences, and several scholars have provided different historical narratives of the genre, particularly William Hutchings, ‘Boileau, Pope and the Mock-Heroic’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 292 (1991), 107–117, and Gregory G. Colomb, Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). On Pope see Nigel Wood, ‘Mocking the Heroic? A Context for Rape of the Lock’, in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 233–255.

21 For example, Tassoni's La secchia rapita derives from several sources: it confronts the rape of Helen and the council of the gods from Homer, and the historic battles between Bologna and Modena of 1225 and 1249, all in ridiculous fashion. Montella, ‘Il poema eroicomico’, 76 and 83, note 3.

22 And further: ‘Radical disjunction between the heroic pretensions of the protagonist and the actual banality of his world is basic to all mock-heroic literature.’ Roger B. Salomon, Desperate Storytelling: Post-Romantic Elaborations of the Mock-Heroic Mode (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 7, 8.

23 On Don Quixote: ‘The scenario of most episodes involves an encounter and a transformation; the self, through its capacity for belief and imaginative experience, transforms the encountered object and, so to speak, passes through it into a realm of wonder and adventure.’ Salomon, Desperate Storytelling, 12. For Tassoni see Zandrino, ‘Il gusto della deformazione’, 183, 191. Disjunction with reality in the mock heroic not only occurs within the work, as a formal aspect of the narrative, but also played a role in the historical development of the genre. The mock heroic blossomed in the seventeenth century, when the un-heroic cast of contemporary characters contrasted severely with the epic ideal highly esteemed by the period. The lack of suitable subjects spawned various forms of comedy epic, including the mock heroic. For discussion of this background of the genre see Broich, The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem, 1–3.

24 Hutchings shows how the oxymoron is a fundamental element in both Boileau's and Pope's mock-heroic works: ‘If the mock-heroic – as that very name clearly implies – is a mixed genre, then its rhetorical origins might be traced to an equivalently mixed figure. Both Boileau and Pope were attracted to the oxymoron throughout their work. This is so whether we restrict oxymoron to its commonest form, the juxtaposition of noun and conflicting adjective, or whether we release it to a more general form of contradictory terminology.’ Hutchings, ‘Boileau, Pope and the Mock-Heroic’, 108. For a metaphorical interpretation of oxymoron and disjunction, and how they comment on the art and meaning of poetry, see Michael Edwards, ‘A Meaning for Mock-Heroic’, Yearbook of English Studies 15 (1985), 48.

25 In his application of periphrasis to the mock heroic, Boileau was most likely inspired by his translation, the first ever into French, of Longinus's On the Sublime, which includes definitions of this rhetorical figure. Boileau worked on his translation during the same period in which he worked on his mock-heroic poem (c1672). Later, Boileau coined the now obsolete term circonduction to describe periphrasis in his Réflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur Longin in 1694. See Edwards, ‘A Meaning for Mock-Heroic’, 53–54.

26 Edwards, ‘A Meaning for Mock-Heroic’, 55.

27 Girolamo Gigli, ‘Ristretto dell'Opera’, L'Anagilda (Rome, 1711), 3.

28 My thanks go to Massimo Ossi for assisting me with this passage and for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

29 Similar uses of statues occur in several of Gigli's operas, including La Geneviefa (1685), La forza del sangue e della pietà (1686) and Amor fra gl'impossibili (1693). For discussion of the statues' function and representation in these works see Chiara Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse: Girolamo Gigli's Theater and Prose’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1998), 33–34. Here one can also discern the influence of Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de piedra (1630), which links Fernando to another anti-heroic ‘hero’ of seventeenth-century Spanish comedy, the legendary figure of Don Juan.

30 As it turns out, Anagilda is fated to be Fernando's defender; she subsequently rushes in, grabbing the sword from Fernando moments before he attempts to use it to take his own life.

31 When referring to Cervantes's character I will use the spelling ‘Don Quixote’, as is customary in English; when referring to Gigli's character, I will use his spelling, ‘Don Chisciotte’.

32 For analysis of Gigli's use of Don Chisciotte in the aforementioned works see Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 51–76, and Franco Vazzoler, ‘Don Chisciotte e le ‘genti americane’: comicità ed esotismo nell'Atalipa, dramma per musica di Gerolamo Gigli’, Annali d'Italianistica 10 (1992), 190–210. For a discussion of metatheatre see Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963). For the literary devices associated with the mock heroic in Don Quixote, including madness, exile and transformation, see Salomon, Desperate Storytelling, 12, 15–21.

33 Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 53 n.

34 Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706), ed. Ada Ruschioni (Milan: Marzorati-editore, 1972), 581.

35 For a thorough discussion of the differences between the original and the revised versions of the opera, an analysis of Caldara's setting and a consideration of issues of verisimilitude see my ‘Opera in the Arcadian Bosco’, in ‘Opera in Arcadia: Rome, Florence and Venice in the Primo Settecento’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2001), 46–84.

36 The only extant score of L'Anagilda is a manuscript copy made by Francesco Antonio Lanciani for the famous music collection of Fortunato Santini now held in the Santini Collection at the Diözesanbibliothek in Münster, D-MÜs SANT Hs 801 I.II.III.

37 The use of the mock heroic in classical Latin literature is discussed in William S. Anderson, ‘The Mock-Heroic Mode in Roman Satire and Alexander Pope’, in Satire in the 18th Century, ed. John Dudley (New York: Garland, 1983), 199–208.

38 Gigli and Martello were closely aligned and maintained correspondence. In fact, Gigli's close association with Martello, a prominent Arcadian satirist, also testifies to Gigli's parodistic intentions. Four letters between the two scholars regarding Gigli's separation from the Crusca remain. They probably met in person in Rome. Martello lived in Rome from 1708 to 1718 in the capacity of secretary to the Bolognese ambassador, Filippo Aldrovandi, except during brief sojourns to Bologna and during a few months spent in Paris in 1713. Gigli made trips to Rome during 1709 and 1718. Carmi, Pier Jacopo Martelli, 1–2.

39 Carmi, Pier Jacopo Martelli, 16–17. The actual date of composition for Martello's Il piato dell'H is uncertain. It must have been composed sometime between, first, Gigli's change in tone and scope of the Vocabolario (January 1716) in reaction to the work's rejection by the Cruscan Academy and, second, Gigli's reference to Martello's work in his manuscript (May 1717). Il piato dell'H never was appended to Gigli's Vocabolario because of Gigli's forced cessation of that project, but it was published later in 1723 as a part of Martello's complete works.

40 Gigli explains that Martello's Piato dell'H is modelled after Lucian's The Consonants at Law: Sigma vs Tau in the Court of the Seven Vowels and that it surpasses the Dialogue of the Letters of the Alphabet, a version by Monsieur de Frémont included in a translation of Lucian by d'Ablancourt. As Martello's work treats issues of orthography and pronunciation satirically, it forms a perfect parallel to Gigli's Vocabolario. Furthermore, Martello converts Frémont's dialogic structure into a theatrical work. Although Lucian's original was not composed in dialogic form, Lucian was well known as a master of that genre in his other satirical writings. See Carmi, Pier Jacopo Martelli, 3–4, 18.

41 ‘Presta’, cited in Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 188n. My translation.

42 Vernon Hyde Minor, ‘Ideology and Interpretation in Rome's Parnassian Grove: The Arcadian Garden and Taste’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 46 (2001), 221.

43 Minor, ‘Ideology and Interpretation’, 223.

44 Manfredi Piccolomini, Il pensiero estetico di Gianvincenzo Gravina (Ravenna: Longo, 1984), gives the dates of writing as 1691–1698; the earliest published edition is 1694. See Lodovico Sergardi, Le satire, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Ravenna: Longo, 1976), for more information on the complicated publication and manuscript history of this collection and for an Italian translation. See also Arrigo Pecchioli, Cecco Angiolieri, Quinto Settano e Girolamo Gigli (Siena: Tipografia Senese, 1961).

45 Gigli, L'Anagilda, 4.

46 Cited in Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 53–54.

47 Gravina, ‘Discorso sopra L'Endimione’ (1691).

48 Similar results are found in Handel's revisions of an earlier libretto for his production of Rodrigo (1707) for Prince Fernando de' Medici, who was not an Arcadian but was aware of the Arcadian reform agenda and supported the Arcadian journal Giornale dei letterati d'Italia. Because of Handel's own association with Arcadia, we might reasonably consider this work an ‘Arcadian drama’. In Rodrigo verisimilitude is obtained not just by creating structural change, but also by clarifying the motivations and actions of the main characters, creating enhanced humanity, clarity and logical relationships between emotion and action. Given the neo-Aristotelian influences within Arcadia, these types of modifications may have been motivated by Aristotle's definitions of character and probability in the Poetics. More work on this topic would reveal the extent of this practice within Arcadia.

49 Frenquellucci cites a letter from Muratori to Gigli dated 7 April 1700 that explains that the performance was cancelled initially, but was resumed with many arias truncated and with the new title L'innocenza difesa. The exact nature of the patron's religious objections is unclear. Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 44, 44n.

50 My descriptions are based on the detailed account of Gigli's controversial forms of satire, parody and forgery in Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 121–157.

51 See Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 37; for further discussion of Gigli's concern over censorship see also pages 24–25, 28–29, 41n, 44, 78n.

52 ‘Dalla necessità di riformar la Poesia Teatrale’, in Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della Perfetta Poesia Italiana, ed. Ada Ruschioni, Scrittori Italiani (Milan: Marzorati, 1972), volume 2, book 3, 597. Although Muratori speaks in general about Molière's works, Tartuffe is singled out for specific criticism.

53 The court actually first took an interest in Gigli because of his innovative use of the character Don Chisciotte, especially in L'Atalipa. Subsequently the Emperor Leopold commissioned Zeno and Pietro Pariati to write Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena (1719). See Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 61.

54 According to Gigli, expressed in a letter dated in Rome on 22 March 1721, this occurred because of satirical passages mocking Crescimbeni in Il pazzo di Cristo, ovvero il Brandano of 1720. Gigli had also used his Arcadian pseudonym without authorization in Il Brandano, for which Crescimbeni requested a retraction. Gigli did send the retraction on 3 September 1720, but also wrote a burlesque entitled ‘La patente’, which further satirized Crescimbeni. See Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 147n.

55 For full discussion of these events and the scandals leading up to them see Carmi, Pier Jacopo Martelli, 5–6, Frenquellucci, ‘A Passion to Amuse’, 12–14, 61, and Jane Tylus, Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–52. Tylus suggests that one reason for the opposition to Gigli's work on the Vocabolario stems from cultural views of literacy. Saint Catherine of Siena, a theologian whose work was partially oral, partly written down by someone else and not in Latin, was not considered erudite by the Accademia della Crusca. The resonance between Gigli's promotion of a female theologian and scholar, Crescimbeni's open-minded policy towards the admission of women into the Arcadian Academy and Gigli's mocking of the male hero whose role is supplanted by two strong women characters is worth exploring.

56 For example, Wendy Heller, ‘Reforming Achilles: Gender, Opera Seria, and the Rhetoric of the Enlightened Hero’, Early Music 26/4 (1998), 562–581, and Ellen Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).