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.

Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570-1630 explores the performance techniques employed in commedia dell’arte and the ways in which they served to rapidly spread the ideas that were to form the basis of modern theatre throughout Europe. This book is winner of Ennio Flaiano Award in Italianistica, 2020. Chapters include one on why, what, and how actors improvised, one on acting styles, including dialects, voice and gesture; and one on masks and their uses and importance. These chapters on historical performance are followed by a coda on commedia dell’arte today. Together they offer readers a look at both past and present iterations of these performances. Suitable for both scholars and performers, Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570-1630 bears on essential questions about the techniques of performance and their utility for this important theatrical form.

In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell’arte. Along the way, she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more than fifty years later. Wilbourne considers a series of case studies structured around the most important and widely explored operas of the period: Monteverdi’s lost L’Arianna, as well as his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and Marazzoli’s L’Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli’s L’Ormindo and L’Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell’arte theater—specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play—produced an audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater. Highlighting productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success of opera as a genre.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources is about the complex dynamics of transmission and transformation of the Italian sources of twelve Shakespearean plays, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Cymbeline. It focuses on the works of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, Da Porto, Bandello, Ariosto, Dolce, Pasqualigo, and Groto, as well as on commedia dell’arte practices. This book discusses hitherto unexamined materials and revises received interpretations, disclosing the relevance of memorial processes within the broad field of intertextuality vis-à-vis conscious reuses and intentional practices.

This book focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson’s dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the Greek and Roman playwrights and satirists. It illuminates the interdependence of the aspects of Jonson’s creative personality by considering how classical performance elements, including the Aristophanic ‘Great Idea,’ chorus, Terentian/Plautine performative strategies, and ‘performative’ elements from literary satire, manifest themselves in the structuring and staging of his plays. This fascinating exploration contributes to the ‘performative turn’ in early modern studies by reframing Jonson’s classicism as essential to his dramaturgy as well as his erudition. The book is also a case study for how the early modern education system’s emphasis on imitative-contaminative practices prepared its students, many of whom became professional playwrights, for writing for a theatre that had a similar emphasis on recycling and recombining performative tropes and structures.