La Calandria (A play)

La Calandria is a comedy of the Italian Renaissance in five acts written by Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena in 1513. The plot is based on Plautus' Menaechmi and one of the central character's, Calandro, was borrowed from Giovanni Boccaccio's, Decameron. It premiered in 1513 at the Court of Urbino.

La Calandria consists of two prologues and a argumento.

^{Bibbienna was to produce the play himself but in January, a month before the play was performed, he was summoned to Florence by Cardinal de Medici to meet with the Spanish Viceroy. Thus, is fell to Castiglione to prepare and produce the play. Although Bibbiena promised to write a prologue, it only arrived a day before the production, leaving no time for the actor to learn the new prologue. Castiglione wrote one instead that the actor had already learned. Depending on translation, publisher, and edition the play will either have one of the prologues or both.}

The first prologue was written by Castiglione and introduces this new comedy, the audience is about to be performed. The speaker states that it will be performed in prose not verse. The title of the play is named after Calandro, a great fool we are soon to meet. The explanation for the prose instead of verse is that the play deals with common every day issues. The subject matter is material the audience would be familiar with so the language used should be the language the audience uses on a daily basis. Furthermore, the speaker assures that the play will not be performed in Latin since it must be played for large and numerous audiences who are not all equally educated and the author would like to please the most amount of people.

The second prologue was written by Bibbiena. The speaker describes being woken from a dream by Ser Giuliano. He begins to describe the dream to his audience in which he had found a magical ring that if he held it in his mouth he became invisible. When deciding what he could do with his invisibility he entertains the thought of sneaking into the coffers of rich men and rob them until they were left with nothing. However, he decides to travel through Florence and spy on the women as they wake and prepare for the evening’s festivities. He tells the story of different houses he visits. Throughout the speech he makes the majority of them are husband and wife scenes/ He observes the trickery of husbands sneaking off to have affairs, of mistresses deceiving their husbands. Every scene is domestic in nature and deals with deceit in some manner.

The argumento is a summary of the play that the audience is about to witness. Demetrius, a citizen of Modon, has a set of twins/ A boy named Lidio and a girl named Santilla. When they are six their father is killed when the Turks invade Modon. The twins are separated. The servant, Fannio, disguises Santilla as her twin brother for protection. They are taken prisoner, and sold to a man named Perillo who resides in Florence. A servant, Fessenio, rescue the boy Lidio and they travel to Tuscany. As Lidio grows older and begins to search for his missing twin sister, his travels take him to Rome, where he falls in love with a married woman named Fulvia. To get closer to her without detection Lidio takes on his sister’s identity and sneaks into Fulvia’s home as Santilla. Meanwhile, Fannio and Santilla (still disguised as a boy) become part of Perillo’s household so fully that Perillo decides to arrange a marriage between his own daughter and Santilla. The argumento assures the audience after several misunderstands the twins will recognize one another. It introduces the setting as Rome and the play begins.

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