Genre-Bending in Early Modern Performative Culture

When a play has a character called ‘Eteorogeneo’ (literally, heterogeneous) and a prologue delivered by one ‘Folletto’, the audience should almost certainly expect to encounter something unexpected. When the elf himself announces that the public is about to be offered a grotesque (‘grottesca’) – crazier and more bizarre than anything previously performed – it becomes abundantly clear that the play will not be a conventional one. Indeed, terms such as ‘grottesca’ (decorative painting or sculpture made of freely combined human, animal, and vegetal forms) and the lexicon of ‘bizzarria’ point towards an artistic product informed by artifice and – as per the elf’s own words – capriciousness: