Drawing on published collections and also manuscripts from Mantuan archives, Commedia dell' arte and the Mediterranean locates commedia dell' arte as a performance form reflective of its cultural crucible in the Mediterranean. The study provides a broad perspective on commedia dell’ arte as an expression of the various cultural, gender and language communities in Italy during the early-modern period, and explores the ways in which the art form offers a platform for reflection on power and cultural exchange. While highlighting the prevalence of Mediterranean crossings in the scenarios of commedia dell' arte, this book examines the way in which actors embodied characters from across the wider Mediterranean region. The presence of Mediterranean minority groups such as Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Turks within commedia dell' arte is marked on stage and 'backstage' where they were collaborators in the creative process. In addition, gendered performances by the first female actors participated in 'staging' the Mediterranean by using the female body as a canvas for cartographical imaginings. By focusing attention on the various communities involved in the making of theatre, a central preoccupation of the book is to question the dynamics of 'exchange' as it materialized within a spectrum inclusive of both cultural collaboration but also of taxation and coercion.

Drawing on published collections and manuscripts from Mantuan archives, this study locates commedia dell' arte as a performance form reflective of its cultural crucible in the Mediterranean. It provides a broad perspective on commedia dell’ arte as an expression of cultural, gender and language communities in Italy during the early-modern period, and explores the ways in which the art form reflected on power and cultural exchange.

What were the origins of commedia dell'arte and how did it evolve as a dramatic form over time and as it spread from Italy? How did its relationship to the ruling ideology of the day change during the Enlightenment? What is its legacy today? These are just some of the questions addressed in this authoritative overview of the dramatic, ideological and aesthetic form of commedia dell'arte. The book's 3 sections examine the changing role of performers and playwrights, improvisatory scenarios and scripted performance, and its function as a vehicle for social criticism, to offer readers a clear understanding of commedia dell'arte's evolution in Renaissance Italy and beyond. This study throws new light on the role of women performers; on the changing ideological discourse of commedia dell'arte, which included social reform and, later, conservatism as well as the alienation of ethnic minorities in complicity with its audience; and on its later adaptation into hybrid forms including grotesque dance and the giullarata typified by the work of Dario Fo.

This book examines Commedia dell'Arte as a performative genre, and one that should be analysed through the framework of dramaturgy and dramaturgical practice. This volume examines the way Commedia has been explored in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and details its reinventors’ dramaturgic approaches, both focusing in on specific examples such as Jacques Lecoq, Dario Fo and Antonio Fava, and also suggesting how modern discoveries may aid the study of historical performance practice. It also discusses how audiences read and receive masks; the relationship between the different masked and unmasked roles; the range of performance activities that come under the umbrella term ‘improvisation’; the performative construction of a role performed ‘live’ from a scenario; the role of language and embodied locality in performance; and the performative relationship between performative commedia and literary tragicomedy. Its focus is dramaturgy, and so it may be read both as a text describing various theatrical practices from 1946 onwards and as a way of creating one’s own contemporary Commedia practice. It is an important read for any student or scholar of Commedia dell'Arte and theatre historians grappling with the status of this unique and influential performance form.

The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration provides a wide survey of theatre and performance practices related to the experience of global movements, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Given the largest number of people ever (over one hundred million) suffering from forced displacement today, much of the book centres around the topic of refuge and exile and the role of theatre in addressing these issues. The book is structured in six sections, the first of which is dedicated to the major theoretical concepts related to the field of theatre and migration including exile, refuge, displacement, asylum seeking, colonialism, human rights, globalization, and nomadism. The subsequent sections are devoted to several dozen case studies across various geographies and time periods that highlight, describe and analyse different theatre practices related to migration. The volume serves as a prestigious reference work to help theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and educators navigate the complex field of theatre and migration.

Pulcinella, a Neapolitan clown born of the commedia dell’arte tradition, went viral in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was an unlikely hero, grotesque in his mannerisms, with a bulging belly, occasional hunchback, and an insatiable desire for macaroni. Still, this bulbous misfit took his place next to kings, caliphs, and intellectual heavyweights. Pulcinella’s Brood traces the transnational arc of the Enlightenment-era Pulcinella, from his native Naples to Paris, from Rome to London. The book explores how Pulcinella was inserted into discourses about social order, aesthetics, and politics – how he became a revolutionary, a critic of the Catholic Church, and a champion of education. It examines how Pulcinella, along with his transnational brood, was a constant, pervasive presence during the Enlightenment and a squeaky-voiced participant in the ideological and theoretical debates that defined the era. Exploring the diffusion of Italian popular comedy throughout Europe, Pulcinella’s Brood proposes that Pulcinella, a grotesque, food-obsessed clown, can be wielded as a historical disruptor and a rich and dynamic source for casting both the Enlightenment and our contemporary world in a different light.

Schmitt demonstrates that the commedia dell'arte relied as much on craftsmanship as on improvisation and that Scala's scenarios are a treasure trove of social commentary on early modern daily life in Italy.

Commedia dell'Arte Scenarios gathers together a collection of scenarios from some of the most important Commedia dell'Arte manuscripts, many of which have never been published in English before. Each script is accompanied by an editorial commentary that sets out its historical context and the backstory of its composition and dramaturgical strategies, as well as scene summaries, and character and properties lists. These supplementary materials not only create a comprehensive picture of each script’s performance methods but also offer a blueprint for readers looking to perform the scenarios as part of their own study or professional practice. This collection offers scholars, performers and students a wealth of original performance texts that brig to life one of the most foundational performance genres in world theatre.

A significant and original new study of a key dramatic form Author is both an historian and practitioner of the craft There are few up-to-date case studies of Commedia available in English

Emphasizing a performative and stage-centered approach, this book considers early modern European theater as an international phenomenon. Early modern theater was remarkable both in the ways that it represented material and symbolic exchanges across political, linguistic, and cultural borders (both "national" and "regional") but also in the ways that it enacted them. Contributors study various modalities of exchange, including the material and causal influence of one theater upon another, as in the case of actors traveling beyond their own regional boundaries; generalized and systemic influence, such as the diffused effect of Italian comedy on English drama; the transmission of theoretical and ethical ideas about the theater by humanist vehicles; the implicit dialogue and exchange generated by actors playing "foreign" roles; and polyglot linguistic resonances that evoke circum-Mediterranean "cultural geographies." In analyzing theater as a medium of dialogic communication, the volume emphasizes cultural relationships of exchange and reciprocity more than unilateral encounters of hegemony and domination.