In the almost forty years since he first enunciated his thesis, Paul O. Kristeller's view that the Italian humanists were essentially rhetoricians has found wide acceptance. His analysis of the humanist movement, however, indicates that he includes among the humanists' interests the four other disciplines comprising, along with rhetoric, the studia humanitatis: grammar, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. His decision to characterize the humanists as rhetoricians rather than as grammarians, poets, historians, or moral philosophers derives from his interpretation of the professional role played by the humanists in their society. For Kristeller the humanists performed the same professional functions in their world as the medieval dictatores did in theirs. Both groups were primarily teachers of rhetoric and chancery officials, and both devoted a substantial portion of their creative efforts to composing in two literary genres, the epistle and the oration.

The account of an elaborate theatrical entertainment which appears in Canto V of Marino's Adone (1623), like so many features of the poem, presents a glorified portrayal of the life style of royalty in the Baroque age, its splendor, its extravagance, its ingenuity. Though the passage may strike the modern reader as being largely fanciful, almost every detail of it can be duplicated in the extant records of festivals and masques of the European courts from Rome to London between 1550 and 1625. There is one feature of Marino's theatrical presentation, however, which represents a striking departure from the familiar practices of the scenographers of the period: namely, the rapid changing of scenes through the use of a revolving stage.