A Capricious Tragedy: Anello Paulilli’s Plastic Memory in the Performance of The Fire of Troy (L’Incendio di Troia, 1566)

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Naples, July 1566. Some weeks after two tragicomedies, Paris' Judgement and Helena's Abduction, Anello Paulilli presents a singular tragedy: The Fire of Troy (L'Incendio di Troia). The performance takes place before a noble court during a celebration, and it appears that this specific context transforms the play extensively, orientating it mainly towards the audience's entertainment. Thus, Paulilli deliberately chooses to draw inspiration from Virgil's Aeneid rather than dramatic sources. Bringing epic material to life on stage allows him great flexibility to deal with ancient sources and theatrical practices. In the Prologue, he claims his own freedom, or capriccio, as author. Indeed, on the thematic level, Paulilli accommodates patterns which are unusual (if not, foreign) in tragedy, especially with Coroebus and Cassandra's love story. On the formal level, he borrows from eclectic traditions, epic and lyric, both ancient and modern. The Italian poets (Ariosto and Petrarch) take over the Latin ones. The reappropriations of heterogeneous sources, their fusion with modern references, and their impact on the audience will be examined in order to question the justifications for labelling as a 'tragedy' a play which refuses to follow the usual models of the genre. Epic, gallant, musical, unjust, entertaining… All these adjectives count as many oxymorons for this tragedy, which accumulates distancing effects in order to shed a light on its own fictionality and dramatic illusion. We investigate how performative memory (awareness of the performance context) and literary memory (borrowings from the tradition) challenge the tragic nature of the play. In fact, the playwright's selective memory, through the reappropriation and fusion of heterogeneous sources, questions the generic classification of a tragedy which appears to be an author's caprice.