The Andreini Family: Performing Erudition, Virtue, and Kinship in Counter-Reformation Italy

The celebrated Andreini family – Isabella, Francesco and their son Giovanni Battista – seems at first glance to present us with a surprising success story. How was it possible, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, for theater people like the Andreini to avoid opprobrium? Recent scholarship rightly urges us not to over-determine censorship in post-Tridentine Italy, but the stakes of public writing and speaking were unquestionably high from the 1580s through the 1620s, when the Andreini joined the republic of letters and exerted their foundational influence upon the commedia dell’arte. Moral hard-liners condemned the theater as “Satan’s proscenium” and lambasted women performers as dangerous prostitutes. Yet the Andreini family and their theatrical company (the Gelosi) enjoyed consistently positive celebrity. This paper argues that rhetorical skill determined their success. Analysis of the Andreini’s relationships with patrons and colleagues, as well as their plays and publications, elucidates a multigenerational performance of “family values,” especially within a time-honored script that fused the themes of learning, morality and kinship. The Andreini show us the wide boundaries of the possible for those who could harness the power of the word; but they also signal some enduring constraints, including the need to stay “on script” and to police the chastity of young female relatives.