Worth Its Salt: Margherita Costa’s Ridiculous Defence of Buffoonery

ABSTRACT The first comedy published by a woman in Italy was singer-writer Margherita Costa’s Li buffoni (1641). Intertwining elements of erudite comedy, commedia dell’arte, and especially ‘ridiculous comedy’, this burlesque work stages seventeenth-century debates about comedic acting. Costa challenges efforts by arte predecessors such as Pier Maria Cecchini and Nicolò Barbieri to ennoble their art, distancing the stage actor from his clownish cousin by rebending the genre back to buffoonery, which she declares better suited to the theatrical tastes of the Seicento Medici court. Hers is a hybrid script composed almost exclusively of the parti ridicole. This essay examines Costa’s comedy in relation to these genre debates and to the apologia for buffoonery published by Bernardino Ricci, her dedicatee and titular buffoon, traced through her use of the metaphor of salty wit. It concludes with Costa’s return to these questions in a subsequent manuscript, and a brief look at a modern adaptation of the play.