The Hymenal Resolution in the Accademia degli Intronati’s Gl’Ingannati

Abstract

n Sexual Dissidence, Jonathan Dollimore argues that, much as in postmodernity, “in the early modern period the individual was seen as constituted by and in relation to a pre-existing order.” Revealing subjectivity as a kind of subjection, not polarized to but located at the very fulcrum of sociality, Dollimore’s definition points the queer theorist toward a project for the disruption of such order. In this essay, I consider themistaken-identity narrative as a literary and performative locale throughwhich the relation between the individual and the “pre-existing order” is disrupted by way of suspension. Locating this essay within a queer scholarly practice of troubling the normative, I turn to Queer/Early/Modern, in which Carla Freccero notes that only a “textual, nonunified, nonpsychologized subject” may allow a disruption of normative gender and desire within a cultural context of heteronormativity. Aligning my lens with Freccero’s drive toward a rupture of subjectivity-as-subjection, I seek to examine the disguising and revealing of such “order” through the mistaken-identity device on the Italian Renaissance stage. Gl’Ingannati, a comedy written by the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati, first performed in 1531 and later published in 1537, belongs to the tradition ofmistakenidentity storylines, and it is often situated as a predecessor of Shakespeare’sTwelfth Night. In the first recorded notes written about the performance of Twelfth Night in London in 1601, one of the audience members, John Manningham, famously