Il Cromuele tragedia del Co: Girolamo Gratiani Segretario, e Consigliere di Stato del Serenissimo Signor Duca di Modona

4to (190x138 mm). Engraved frontispiece, [14], 160, [2: errata] pp. and [5] engraved folding plates. Collation: [+]^4(-+2) ++⁴ A-V⁴ χ². Lacking the final (blank?) leaf. Woodcut arms of the dedicatee, King Louis XIV, on the title page. Woodcut initials, head- and tail-pieces. Later boards, red sprinkled edges (joints repaired, slightly rubbed and soiled). Upper outer corner of the half title repaired, lower margin of the title page trimmed with loss of a line of text, some foxing, marginal tears to some of the plates skilfully repaired, tiny portion of a plate missing, all in all a good copy.

Rare first illustrated edition, also printed in the same here without illustrations in Modena by Soliani and reprinted in Bologna by Manolessi in 1673, of this five-act tragedy by Count Girolamo Graziani, a man of letters from Modena who served as secretary and advisor to the Duke of Modena. The play, conceived in the 1660s during Laura Martinozzi’s regency in Modena, depicts the dramatic events of the English Civil War, pitting the tyrant Oliver Cromwell against the martyr Charles I. Inspired by the typically seventeenth-century tendency to rewrite recent historical events for political purposes, the play paints a hagiographic portrait of the English monarch, whose blood comes to take on a strong symbolic and almost Christ-like significance following his death sentence (cf. P. Di Nepi, Girolamo Graziani e la politica come arte: “Cromuele”, in: “F.M. Annali dell’Istituto di Filologia Moderna dell’Università di Roma”, 2-1979, Rome, 1981, pagg. 113-24).

From the very beginning, the tragedy presents itself as a Baroque device in the service of defending the monarchy, through a pseudo-historical - yet theatrical - reconstruction of the events of 1649. It is true that the tragedy makes use of specific historical references, but - as is usually the case in seventeenth-century theater - these are condensed into a single night, that of January 30, 1649 (cf. S. Miglierina, Il sangue di Carlo: apologia e licenza teatrale nel Cromvele di Girolamo Graziani, in: “Krypton”, vol. 1, 2013, p. 47).

The first mention of the tragedy’s composition appears in the preface to Girolamo Graziani’s Varie Poesie e Prose (1662). Beginning in 1666, the composition of the Cromuele was accompanied by an extensive correspondence with Jean Chapelain, with whom Graziani - who was on the payroll of Colbert on behalf of the Sun King - corresponded regularly (cf. R. Galli Pellegrini, La Tragédie Italienne à l’école du classicisme Français: le rôle de Chapelain dans la genèse du “Cromuele” de Graziani, in: “Quaderni del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne, Università di Genova”, 2-1987, pp. 35-57).

There is no mention of a performance of Il Cromuele in the preface to the second edition of 1673, nor is there any trace of it in the extensive documentation on theatrical performances in the Este States preserved in the State Archives of Modena. The likely reason for the play’s failure to be staged was the dynastic marriage that took place in 1673 (just two years after the 1671 publication) between Maria Beatrice d’Este and Giacomo Stuart, who had been widowed in the very year of Il Cromuele’s publication by Anna Hyde - the woman with whom he appears to be in love in the tragedy. This was an inconvenient presence for Graziani, who, as secretary of state, had looked after the Este family’s interests in that marriage (cf. M. Fasce, Introduzione e note alle edizioni de Il Cromuele, in: “Storie Inglesi, l’Inghilterra vista dall’Italia tra storia e romanzo XVIII sec.”, C. Carminati-S. Villani, Pisa, 2011, pp. 297-330).

Girolamo Graziani, who earned a degree in law and humanities in Bologna, served as an advisor and secretary to the princes, that is, to the sons of Alfonso III of Modena. After several legal disputes, he traveled in 1648 on a diplomatic mission to Paris, where he witnessed the Fronde, before returning to Modena in 1649, where he continued his diplomatic and literary career. Graziani was in Paris, at the French court, at the time of the execution of the King of England, and this suggests that he was a direct witness of the scandal that the event could have caused at the court of the nephew of the murdered king. Graziani decided to recount those events in a dramatized version twenty-two years after Charles’s death, thirteen after Cromwell’s, and eleven after the restoration of the monarchy in England (cf. F. Tarzia, Graziani, Girolamo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 58, Rome, 2002, s.v.).