With over sixty plays to his credit, the Florentine notary Giovan Maria Cecchi (1518–87) was the most prolific Italian dramatist of the entire Renaissance. Not surprisingly, his fellow Florentines nicknamed him il Comico (the playwright) not only because of his great productivity, but also because of the unquestioned success of his works. In fact, his plays seemed to please audiences that ran the gamut from adolescent boys in confraternities to the grand-ducal court, from cloistered nuns in convents to carnival brigades of carefree young men. Clearly, Cecchi knew something about theatre and about audiences that worked to his advantage. This article proposes that Cecchi’s dramatic talent rested, in part, on his keen sense of language and on his ability to adapt it as required not only by the plots and characters of his plays, but also by his audiences, their context, and the changing social political situation of sixteenth-century Florence.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Eisenbichler, K., (2025), "Words, Characters, and Context: Giovan Maria Cecchi and the Language of Theatre", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Eisenbichler, Konrad. "Words, Characters, and Context: Giovan Maria Cecchi and the Language of Theatre." Quaderni d'italianistica 36 (1): 2016. 91-113. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v36i1.26275. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.