Dischronic Mediterranean: Space and Time Negotiations in Ariosto’s Comedies

This paper explores the pervasive reworking of space in Ludovico Ariosto’s comedies (1508–1532), which relocate the Plautine and Terentian spaces to different areas of the Mediterranean. Ariosto reimagines a new Mediterranean geography, moving within the known spaces of Venetian commerce: Negroponte, Lesbos, Albania, Crete. Parallel to this remapping, the characters receive ethnic and national identities often out of synchronicity with the imagined Greek past of the Plautine models. This paper explores Ariosto’s map of Mediterranean spaces and his destabilizing mismatching of time and place as an instance of a now lost practice of cultural negotiation.