“Speak; I will listen”. The Body and the Words in the Dialogue with the Nurse in Sixteenth-Century Italian Tragedy

!is essay examines the dialogue between the Nurse and the milk-daughter in a few Italian tragedies composed between 1514, when Gian Giorgio Trissino wrote So- phonisba and 1565, the year of Speroni’s Canace. In the dialogues, the essay analyses the rhetorical construction of that common ground of communication that can be intimate, con,ding, compassionate, or, at other times, modelling and prescriptive. !ree nodes are at the centre of the investigation: 1. !e relationship between Nurse and milk-daughter involves the body. !e relationship’s foundation is nourishment and care (many of the Nurse’s interventions are due to her disposition to care). !is bond is a product of male writers’ imagination: which models drive the representa- tion of such a visceral relationship between two women? !e paper investigates how Renaissance authors used classical models to de,ne the Nurse’s role and function 2. !e relationship between the Nurse and the protagonist is o-en indicative of the epis- temological set-up of the tragedy: what does the Nurse know/understand about her dialogue partner? 3. !e Nurse’s role in unfolding the facts is crucial in evaluating her character in each work: she may be in line with the main diegetic thread or compete with it. Does the Nurse’s advising construct an alternative narrative line to the un- folding tragedy, pre,guring another possible, non-tragic narrative world? !e nurse character thus seems to associate the ancillary position with a symbolic and relational density only partially investigated so far.