The directory «Plots»

Držić Džore
(1461—1501)

Džore Držić, poet and playwright, was born in an eminent Ragusan middle-class family from which also came other eminent members like the poet and playwright Marin Držić, and Marin's brother, the painter, Vlaho Držić. Džore Držić has completed a humanities education in Dubrovnik and then studied law in Italy. In his mature years he entered the priesthood. Držić's poems have been preserved in the Collection made by Nikša Ranjina, together with the poems of Šiško Menčetić and other poets of that time from Dubrovnik. They are also to be found in another manuscript from the 17th century which, together with his other poems, contains the pastoral play Radmio and Ljubmir. Josip Hamm has discovered this manuscript in Ireland in 1965, and it was thus confirmed that Džore Držić was the author of a number of poems found in Ranjina's Collection. The Collection also contains some twenty new poems, which contributes to the complete opus of one of the oldest Croatian poets. The collection Kanconijer written by Džore Držić contains love poems that have been written under the powerful influence of the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca and his followers, the so called Petrarchists. The pastoral play Radmio and Ljubmir, also written in the Petrarchan manner, speaks about love, too. The poetic language of Džore Držić has been influenced by the speech of his environment, and not by the language of the Croatian literature so far, i.e. by the Croatian Glagolitic tradition. The verse he used was the twice rhymed twelve- syllable verse, but the poet also used, though rarely, the eleven-syllable and fourteen-syllable verse, related to the Italian Alexandrine verse. He also used the fifteen-syllable verse, written in two parts, 8 + 7 syllables, the faraway echo of the Byzantine political verse. Džore Držić died in Dubrovnik in 1501, the same year when Marko Marulić wrote his Judith in Split. With the poets Džore Držić, Šiško Menčetić and Marko Marulić, the Croatian literature has stepped from anonymity into an era of great authors and their activity, and has become conscious that by building up the language it is also the Croatian cultural area, reaching from Dubrovnik and Split to Zadar and Senj, that is being built simultaneously.

Croatia, 2001, Radmio and Ljubmir