Matteo Noris's Il demone amante (1686) and the Unsanctioned Rite: Comedy, Censorship, and Theatrical Sacrament in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Abstract

This article situates Matteo Noris's Il demone amante (1686), a rare early modern opera depicting exorcism, within a broader tradition of early modern staged exorcisms, as seen in Shakespeare and Cervantes, before explaining how the libretto was censored by Venice's Esecutori contro la bestemmia. Similar to the “exorcisms” in King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, or Cervantes's Persiles, Noris plays on an instability of signs—gestures and symptoms could mean possession or lovesickness—to show exorcism as inherently theatrical. Read through Tasso's and Guarini's poetics, the opera weaponizes the “marvelous and verisimilar” against itself: its exorcism becomes a counterfeit sacrament whose adjurations and staging mimic Catholic rituals with unnerving precision. The audience's potential laughter desacralizes the rite, resonating with—and at moments echoing—Protestant polemics against Catholic imposture. Situating the opera within Venetian systems of speech and punishment, the essay argues that censorship acted as a ritual of state authority.