5. The Divine Comedy by Dante

The Divine Comedy, or Divina Commedia, was not always so known. Dante himself titled it simply Commedia, meaning ‘comedy’. In a letter to his patron he explained that a comedy was a work that might ‘begin in adverse circumstances, but ends happily’; a tragedy, by contrast, might begin tranquilly enough but always ended horribly. The Commedia, which progresses to the happiest of all possible endings, in Paradise with Beatrice, is thus, by this definition, practically a knockabout farce. After Dante’s death in 1321 his masterpiece quickly became popular, and Dante himself became known as the ‘divina poeta’, or divine poet. The epithet was transferred to his work at some time in the sixteenth century, and the first edition that explicitly calls it the Divina Commedia was published in Venice in 1555.

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