1570 – Naples, 1640) was an Italian author and poet.

Life

Born to a well-to-do family, nothing is known of Cortese's early life, though it is thought that he was a schoolmate of Giambattista Basile

Giambattista Basile

Giambattista Basile was an Italian poet, courtier, and fairy tale collector.- Biography :Born to a Neapolitan middle-class family, Basile was, during his career, a courtier and soldier to various Italian princes, including the doge of Venice. According to Benedetto Croce he was born in 1575, while...

. Receiving a degree in law, he tried life as a courtier

Courtier

A courtier is a person who is often in attendance at the court of a king or other royal personage. Historically the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and social and political life were often completely mixed together...

 in Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 and Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, without any great success. Cortese apparently had some success in the Medici

Medici

The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside,...

 court as he was sent in 1599 to Spain as a member of a Medici delegation for the marriage of Philip III of Spain

Philip III of Spain

Philip III , also known as Philip the Pious, was the King of Spain and King of Portugal and the Algarves, where he ruled as Philip II , from 1598 until his death...

 with Margherita of Austria. In his "Tuscan" rhymes there is a fruitless attempt to catch the attention of the Counts of Lemos, the foremost representatives of the Spanish crown in Naples.
He was a close friend of Luigi Caponaro

Luigi Caponaro

Luigi Caponaro was a healer in Naples and Gaeta, Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Caponaro received a medical degree in Naples but never practiced medicine per se due to a reported aversion to the sight of blood...

, who he frequently cites in his work.
Regardless of his commemoration by Basile in 1627, it is generally believed, due to several handwritten manuscripts, that Cortese lived at least until 1640 and it is consequently believed that he attended and perhaps participated in his own funeral.
Cortese is very important for Baroque and dialectical literature, in that, with Basile, he laid the foundations for the artistic and literary dignity of the Neapolitan language

Neapolitan language

Neapolitan is the language of the city and region of Naples , and Campania. On October 14, 2008 a law by the Region of Campania stated that the Neapolitan language had to be protected....

 as opposed to the Tuscan dialect

Tuscan dialect

The Tuscan language , or the Tuscan dialect is an Italo-Dalmatian language spoken in Tuscany, Italy.Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine variety...

 in which Cortese had also produced a number of largely laudatory works.

The Vaiasseide

An heroic comedy in five cantos, where the lyric meter and the heroic themes are lowered to the level of the protagonists: a group of vaiasse, common Neapolitan women who express themselves in dialect. Its writing is comic and transgressive, where much importance is given to the participation of the plebeian choir in the mechanics of the action.

The reader is literally catapulted into the day to day life of the vaiasse where the main element is the investigation of the world through which Cortese makes into a world whichis not his own and which he describes with irony and tragedy.

The Voyage in Parnassus

This work, in dialect, is a diagnosis of the condition of literature and of people of letters, with a variety of autobiographical allusions, filled with bitterness and pessimism.

The whole thing is situated in Parnassus where Apollo

Apollo

Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...

 and his Muses reside and where the poet can set forth the sins of poetry, carried out in a degraded society, where the order of the day is the crime of plagiarism. The whole resolves itself with a fairytale ending and the bitter disillusionment of the poet who see all of his ambitions coming to naught.