Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Champagne, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 71. Calandria is itself based on Plautus’s play Menaechmi, in which separated twins going by the same name cause significant confusion, only to be recognized for what they are in the course of a happy ending. The plot, a remarkably complicated knot of love, jealousy, and deception, is finally resolved when the female twin, Santilla, is revealed for who (and what) she is – predictably, marriages take place and all is made right. It cannot be called virtue virt to kill one’s fellow citizens, to betray one’s friends, to be without loyalty, without mercy, without religion by such methods one can acquire power, but not glory. Likewise in Bibbiena’s La Calandria (1507) – “one of the most important, one of the most influential, of all learned comedies” – in which mistaken identities are proliferated through the device of gender-bending twins, both of whom go by the name Lidio. Predictably, the situation is resolved in the end, when Orcheutico learns of his error and makes everything right by betrothing her to the younger Milichio, previously his rival. In Niccolò Grasso’s Eutychia, likely first performed in 1513, the audience knows that the young Eutychia, being pursued by the old schoolmaster Orcheutico, is actually Antiphilia, the schoolmaster’s long–lost daughter.
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