Career
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. Receiving a degree in law, he tried life as a courtier in Spain and Florence, without any great success. 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.
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 as opposed to the Tuscan dialect in which Cortese had also produced a number of largely laudatory works.