Amorous Hope, A Pastoral Play: A Bilingual Edition

Miani’s Amorous Hope (1604) is a play of remarkable richness, subtlety, and verve. Its exposure of society’s double-standards is scathing. Notably, women’s dramatic agency is championed vis-à-vis a poignant, center-stage placement of the bleak reality women often faced, a reality that attempted to harm and silence its victims—indeed, the play’s salient episodes reflect realities modern women still face today. Miani’s literary achievements attest to her emergence as a cultural protagonist alongside female figures far better known to modern scholars, such as Isabella Andreini. Miani’s pastoral, it is hoped, will attract theater students who can bring this long-forgotten gem back to life.

"Joining recent publications of other drama by Italian women around 1600, Miani’s Amorous Hope is a work of considerable interest by a playwright only recently becoming better known after long neglect. Coller’s introduction, which makes use of excellent and up-to-date scholarship, persuasively presents Miani’s participation within a network of literati and accademia members, and pursues this topic of interconnections through a detailed account of her poems published in anthologies alongside the verses of others. Its discussion of the play focuses on Miani’s treatment of the main issue: male injustices to women, and the corrections or penalties delivered by the two leading female characters. As Coller points out, the lessons given by female characters are also the lessons to the audience by the playwright herself."
-Janet L. Smarr, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Theatre and Italian Studies, University of California San Diego

ALEXANDRA COLLER, Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Lehman College, City University of New York, is the author of Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy (Routledge, 2017), and various articles on Italian early modern literature and culture.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women 17.2 (2023): 412–415. Reviewed by Aria Dal Molin.
Italica 98.4 (2021): 991–993. Reviewed by Janet Levarie Smarr.
Quaderni d'Italianistica 44.1 (2023): 149–151. Reviewed by Erith Jaffe-Berg.
Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 44.3 (2021): 311–313. Reviewed by Rosalind Kerr.
Renaissance Quarterly 75.3 (2022): 969–971. Reviewed by Karen L. Nelson.
Women, Language Literature in Italy / Donne Lingua Letteratura in Italia 4 (2022): 140–142. Reviewed by Serena Laiena.