La donna innamorata da vero di Carlo Gozzi e la tradizione scenica del Pedro de Urdemalas

La Donna innamorata da vero, staged in 1771, is one of the nineteen works within Carlo Gozzi ‘Spanish’ theatre corpus. He took the idea from D. Pedro de Urdimalas, defining this type of play as a «commedia spagnuola senza nome d’autore», revealing as its source a suelta from 1750 claiming it is anonymous. Gozzi seems to ignore the textual history of the comedy which is also a rewriting of a previous play attributed to Lope and Montalbán and is attributed in two manuscripts to Diamante and Cañizares. Through a comparison between the Spanish source and the Italian rewriting, we will explore how, from the merging of two traditions in decline – the Commedia dell’Arte and the theatre of the Siglo de Oro – Gozzi gave life to a new genre, reworking the Commedia dell’Arte masks and their dialects into a late comedia de capa y espada, with the mixing of verse and prose and the insertion of numerous stage directions which were absent in the original.