La Calandria (play)

The first prologue was written by Castiglione and introduces this new comedy, the audience is about to be performed. The speaker states that it will be performed in prose not verse. The title of the play is named after Calandro, a great fool we are soon to meet. The explanation for the prose instead of verse is that the play deals with common every day issues. The subject matter is material the audience would be familiar with so the language used should be the language the audience uses on a daily basis. Furthermore, the speaker assures that the play will not be performed in Latin since it must be played for large and numerous audiences who are not all equally educated and the author would like to please the most people.

The second prologue was written by Bibbiena. The speaker describes being woken from a dream by Ser Giuliano. He begins to describe the dream to his audience in which he had found a magical ring that if he held it in his mouth he became invisible. When deciding what he could do with his invisibility he entertains the thought of sneaking into the coffers of rich men and rob them until they were left with nothing. However, he decides to travel through Florence and spy on the women as they wake and prepare for the evening's festivities. He tells the story of different houses he visits. Throughout the speech he makes the majority of them are husband and wife scenes/ He observes the trickery of husbands sneaking off to have affairs, of mistresses deceiving their husbands. Every scene is domestic in nature and deals with deceit in some manner.

The argumento is a summary of the play that the audience is about to witness. Demetrius, a citizen of Modon, has a set of twins/ A boy named Lidio and a girl named Santilla. When they are six their father is killed when the Turks invade Modon. The twins are separated. The servant, Fannio, disguises Santilla as her twin brother for protection. They are taken prisoner, and sold to a man named Perillo who resides in Florence. A servant, Fessenio, rescue the boy Lidio and they travel to Tuscany. As Lidio grows older and begins to search for his missing twin sister, his travels take him to Rome, where he falls in love with a married woman named Fulvia. To get closer to her without detection Lidio takes on his sister's identity and sneaks into Fulvia's home as Santilla. Meanwhile, Fannio and Santilla (still disguised as a boy) become part of Perillo's household so fully that Perillo decides to arrange a marriage between his own daughter and Santilla. The argumento assures the audience after several misunderstands the twins will recognize one another. It introduces the setting as Rome and the play begins.[2]

The power of love, what love does to one's mind, what one will do for love are all topics repeatedly discussed between characters. Fulvia is overwhelmed by her passions for Lidio and his love for her. However, his love is overwhelmed by his fear of being discovered in the affair.

This theme comes not from just the subject matter of the play but rather the action on stage. Symmetry in the script emphasizes the importance of the theme. The switching of clothes with the changes in identity and sex. Lidio, primarily dresses as a man, and only on occasion does he wear women's clothing. Santilla on the other hand primarily dresses in drag as a man and very little does she get to wear female clothing. The twins appear together on stage four times exactly. This is exactly the number of times necessary to exhaust all possible combinations of drag: once both dressed as men, once both dressed as women and two others with their genders swapped including one in which they are dressed as their true sex.[5] However, at the end the twins must reconcile that they can no longer disguise themselves and continue with their duplicitous lifestyles. Only when they abandon their exchangeable identities and return to separate, different beings can the play end. In the twin's recognition of one another and their appearance in clothing of their true sex is their maturation and entry into adulthood and marriage.[6]

Bibbiena used the plot of Menaechmi as the basis for his plot. Sources assume that Bibbiena changed the genders of the twins from two males to a male and female to remove aspects of homosexuality.[6] This allowed him to end his play with the correct social and engendered behavior of the time.

This is to say a scene in which the twin or lover is locked out of his house, a twist that is seen throughout Italian theatre and late in plays such as Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. This motif creates comic tension, enhanced by the presence of two pairs of twins and increases the errors.[7][8]