(b Padua c1496; d Padua, 17 March 1542). Italian playwright, actor, singer and poet. His plays are remarkable for their innovative use of popular Paduan genres combined with pastoral eclogue and learned comedy in imitation of antiquity. In the plays 52 songs, mentioned or sung, divide scenes or carry the action, as in L’Anconitana, where a Paduan servant named Ruzante holds a song contest with his Venetian master. Speaking the dialect of the Paduan countryside, Ruzante appears in most of Beolco’s plays. The playwright-actor performed Ruzante’s role and adopted his character’s name. Modern critics have identified the author with his character, whose polemics against the rustics’ historical antagonists, whether Venetian merchants, Paduan noblemen or proponents of a Tuscanizing academic culture, inform Ruzante’s theatre. Not least, Ruzante satirizes the country figure he impersonates.
Ruzante was also renowned for his singing voice. In addition to the songs in the plays, nine extant canzoni are attributed to him. Settings by Willaert of Zuogia zentil, Quando de ruos’e d’oro and Occhio non fu zà mai survive incomplete; there is also a setting of the last by Filippo Azzaiolo.
L. Zorzi: ‘Canzoni inedite del Ruzante’, Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, cxix (1960–61), 25–74
E. Lovarini: Studi sul Ruzzante e la letteratura pavana, ed. G. Folena (Padua, 1965)
L. Zorzi, ed.: Ruzante: Teatro: prima edizione completa: testo, traduzione a fronte e note (Turin, 1967)
N. Pirrotta and E. Polovedo: Li due Orfei: da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Turin, 1969, 2/1975; Eng. trans., 1982, as Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi)
D.G. Cardamone: The canzone villanesca alla napolitana and Related Forms, 1537–1570 (Ann Arbor, 1981)
L. Carroll: ‘Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, xvi (1985), 487–502
N. Dersofi: ‘Le canzoni del Ruzante e l’Anconitana’, Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Ruzante [Padua, 1983], ed. G. Calendoli and G. Vellucci (Venice, 1987), 49–54
N. Pirrotta: ‘Willaert e la canzone villanesca: Scelte poetiche di musicisti’, Teatro, poesia, e musica da Willaert a Malpiero (Venice, 1987)
H. Colin Slim: ‘Two Paintings of “Concert Scenes” from the Veneto and the Morgan Library’s Unique Music Print of 1520’, In cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta on his 80th Birthday, ed. F. Della Seta and F. Piperno (Florence 1989), 155–174
M. Feldman: ‘The Academy of Domenico Venier, Music's Literary Muse in Mid-Cinquecento Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, xliv (1991), 476–512
NANCY DERSOFI