A 1582 comedy translates "pedant" as "worthless idiot, donkey head"
By 1600 almost 50 Italian plays mocked the Renaissance pedant and his mangled schoolroom Latin.
Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center…
