La regina algida e l’insidia delle passioni. Note sul teatro di Antonia Fontana e Maria Antonia Scalera

The article focuses on the representation of passions in the dramatic plays of two late seventeenth-century female playwrights, Antonia Fontana and Maria Antonia Scalera. By examining Fontana’s musical drama Erginda (1680), performed in the Contarini estate in Piazzola sul Brenta, and Maria Antonia Scalera’s tragicomedy Il Coraspe redivo (1683) for the court of Ariccia, presided over by Agostino Chigi, the author individuates a similar approach to the stage of the female protagonist. Both plays, in giving shape to a frigid queen, allow in the end to accept love after a sort of sentimental education. They configure a new paradigm of woman, affected both by the tradition of seventeenth-century Venetian female literature, and by Descartes’ Passions de l’âme, spread in Rome by Christina of Sweden.