ONE OF THE MOST ORIGINAL AND FASCINATING COMEDYS OF THE ENTIRE ITALIAN AND EUROPEAN SIXTEENTH CENTURY REPERTOIRE


Written during his exile in Paris, in the summer of 1582, Il Candelaio is the only comedy by the philosopher from Nola. The work, with its very complicated plot, is a biting satire against the classicists, academic pedantry, on the passions that weaken or upset human reason and on fortune that drags man along at will. We are in sixteenth-century Naples. Il Candelaio is a certain Messer Bonifacio who, despite being married to Carubina, pines for Signora Vittoria. Messer Bonifacio, together with Manfurio, a pedantic, clumsy and gullible grammarian, and Bartolomeo, an amateur alchemist lost in the dream of a gold factory, is easy prey for a small group of swindlers of various calibers. From here a whirlwind of theatrically very effective events, written in a scurrilous and irreverent language, behind which lies, however, the caustic, merciless denunciation of the vacuous formalism to which the culture of the late sixteenth century has degraded: the faint, degenerate Petrarchism of Bonifacio, the science of nature turned into superstition and greed in Bartolomeo, the grammatical mania of Manfurio. An extraordinary example of rebellion against the linguistic and social conventions of the time, as well as an attempt to strike at the beliefs of a hypocritical and unjust society.
But in Candelaio it is also important to highlight the close relationship that comic language, as a language marked by “duplicity”, “ambiguity”, and the coexistence of contradictory instances, finds itself in with the general spirit of Nola philosophy, which expresses its conceptual core in the doctrines of vicissitude and coincidentia oppositorum , that is, in a contradictory and “shadowy” vision of the cosmos, in no way surmountable, an essential background of philosophical work itself. And so comedy, yes, but permeated by a profound and revolutionary philosophical spirit.