"Questo è il mal mio, che toccherà a ridersene a ciascuno ed a me piangerne". Il ridicolo e la beffa: criteri metateatrali nella commedia del Rinascimento

[Autom. eng. transl.] As the Renaissance comedies recall, deception and prank are part of the theater as much as of real life. Machiavelli summarizes its essence in Il Principe: "he who deceives will always find those who will be deceived" because according to the laws of nature men are 'so simple' and 'so much obey the present needs' to be easy and vulnerable victims because or their stupidity or because the urgent needs, desires and needs lead them to show the weaker side. The joke, like a distorting lens, amplifies these defects and imperfections to the point of making them extreme, caricatured, exaggerated. It exposes them to the public eye along with the shame and humiliation of the victims. However, in the comedy the mocked, a submissive of the deception that exploits his human weaknesses, is put in a position to provoke laughter even when the cruelty of the joke is extreme. However grave the humiliation, there is no shadow of pathetic or suffering in his misadventures. Neither the cruelty nor the possible roughness of the jokes diminishes or affects the comic result when the metateatral mechanism balances in the play the degree of involvement and detachment of the spectator. Abel does not remember that the characters in the comedies should not convince us of their existence, but that all they have to do is make us laugh? However, if on the narrative level the pure and light comedy is exalted, on the dramatic and metateatral level, in the brief foray behind the scenes, it leaves room for a feeling that goes beyond the ridiculous: the Renaissance comedy likes to experiment in the border area between laughter and mocking, joking and taunting, between lightness and humiliation, passing almost imperceptibly from the comic to the tragic.