“I Hate Men” is a loud and clear song from Cole Porter's post-Shakespearean musical Kiss Me Kate (1948), but it has vociferous antecedents in Giovan Battista Andreini's Amor nello specchio (first performed and published 1622), a fascinating Baroque comedy now given its first complete English translation by Jon R. Snyder as Love in the Mirror. Having informed her suitors Lelio and Guerindo that she hates them and “the accursed male sex” (51) and become well-known in her city of Florence for her extreme misanthropy, the play's “cruel” and self-loving female protagonist Florinda does fall in love, and swears to her lover “that I'll despise all men” (121). Her sudden love affair is made truly surprising as well as boldly transgressive by a fact that in turn makes Andreini's play exceptional for its time, and of compelling interest for today's readers and audiences: Florinda's lover is a woman, who passionately loves her in return. In short, Amor nello specchio is anything but a satire on man-hating women.
As Snyder observes in his lucid and highly informative introduction, the play's sympathetic portrayal of a consensual same-sex liaison openly breaks the schema of several classic Italian plays of the sixteenth century, where women who fall in love with other women do so primarily because of cross-dressing and deception, and rarely with any reciprocation from the objects of their desire. This is the case with the Accademia degl'Intronati of Siena's influential Gl'Ingannati (“The Deceived”; 1532), an early romantic comedy imitated, translated, and adapted in versions throughout Europe, including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. By provocative contrast, then, Florinda and her young lover Lidia go all the way, socially even more than sexually, in their determined and mutually satisfied defiance of heterosexual bonds and marriage pressures — toward the end of the play, Lidia defends her ardent, faithful love for Florinda to the scandalized Governor of Florence — and only a “hermaphroditic” variation on the identical twins resolution of comedies like Gl'Ingannati aligns their openly lesbian relationship with prevailing norms. Presuming that most readers will be unfamiliar with the play, its complex and quite ingenious dénouement will not be revealed here.
Another virtue of this accurate as well as enjoyable translation is that it introduces Anglophone readers to the work of arguably the most prolific and innovative playwright from the early phase of the commedia dell'arte. Part of The University of Toronto's invaluable Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series — credit also needs to go to the series editors Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. — this volume worthily adds to the growing availability and awareness of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Italian theatre and its pervasive, pan-European impact. As Synder's introduction recounts and incisively explains, Giovan Battista grew up as the eldest child of the internationally celebrated commedia diva, poet, and playwright Isabella Andreini and her husband and colleague Francesco, stars and co-leaders of the “Gelosi,” the most successful professional acting company of their day. Establishing himself as an innamorato, or male romantic lead, and eventually heading his own troupe known as the Fedeli, he thus maintained his parents’ wide-ranging theatrical activities, and with his colleagues extended Isabella's penchant for cross-gendering and charismatic female self-assertion. Like Isabella and Francesco, Giovan Battista also traveled and performed throughout Europe, especially in Paris, where in 1613–14 and the early 1620s he produced several plays in the city as well as at the court of Fontainebleau, and eventually with the patronage of the prominent libertine-soldier-diplomat François de Bassompierre, to whom he dedicated Amor nello specchio. In demonstrating how the play links its experimental dramatic form and adventurous treatment of female erotic desire with both the Venus-Mars paradigm and a Neo-Platonic “sexual odyssey” towards transcendent androgynous unity, Snyder persuasively stresses its orientation towards French libertinism. He also acknowledges autobiographical aspects of the play — Andreini himself played the spurned Lelio, with his wife Virginia Ramponi in the role of Florinda and his lover Virginia Rotari in that of Lidia — while pertinently eschewing critical insistence on a roman à clef interpretation.
The translation itself captures the verve, wit, and variety of the Italian text, which appears on each facing page (the series editors are also to be commended for this fully bilingual presentation). Snyder's declared aim is to provide an accessible English “script for today's players” (33), and for the most part he deftly achieves this objective. This thoroughly and helpfully annotated edition, complete with index and comprehensive up-to-date bibliography, deserves not only to become a fixture in graduate and undergraduate courses in drama, literature, and gay and lesbian studies, but also to be staged. Directors and stage managers, however, will need to devote extra time to preparing viable prompt-books, because the translation is so faithful to the original script's nearly total lack of stage directions that not even characters’ entrances and exits are marked. Also, in its move from Baroque rhetorical intricacy to more direct twenty-first-century Anglo-American diction, the language occasionally tends toward prosaic dryness. For example, during the sensually charged interaction leading up to their first embraces and kisses, Lidia catches the fainting Florinda in her arms, and addresses the god of love: “Ah, chè veleno mortifero contra i rubelli [sic] suoi Amore” (literally, “O, what deadly poison [he uses] against his rebels, Cupid,” or possibly even “against your rebels, Cupid”). She then tells Florinda “d'Amor cotanto sparlasti” (118). This last phrase, which could be rendered “you spoke against Love so strongly,” becomes in tandem with the preceding one an almost clinical diagnosis, incongruous for the emotionally heightened on-stage moment: “This is the deadly poison that Cupid uses on those who rebel against him: you criticized Love so outspokenly” (119). A few lines later, Florinda revives, and caps her plea for a kiss with the most classic of all erotic metaphors: “per questo dalla vostra bocca di rose un sol bacio io chiedo,” but unfortunately the emblematic flower of dolce stil novo lyric, Petrarchan blazon, and Juliet's balcony musings disappears, in the rendition “I ask for a single kiss from your sweet pink mouth” (119). Thus these and other impassioned characters sometimes lose their poetic force or eccentric style, and seem like clearheaded individuals from today's world, as when the bawdy, zany servant Granello's agitated “castratemi” (literally, “castrate me”) is diluted into the more polite “have me castrated” (134–35).
Still, these slight flaws do not diminish the general excellence of Snyder's translation and commentary, which also includes a pithy, astute critical history of recent Italian productions and adaptations of Andreini's remarkable play, among them Luca Ronconi's 1987 and 2002 stage versions, and Salvator Maira's 1999 film.
