Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630

Natalie Crohn Schmitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032088501
• eBook ISBN: 9780429663062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

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.

1 Improvisation

Why, what, how¹

We need to understand commedia dell’arte improvisation within the context of Renaissance culture and its rhetorical tradition, a tradition that depended upon imitation and memory. Both imitation and memory were regarded not merely as skills of copying and reiteration but as arts of invention. Unlike earlier analyses of commedia dell’arte improvisation, this one calls attention to the centrality of these arts in the very process of improvisation. I look at why, what, and how commedia dell’arte actors improvised.

I limit my focus to the kind of improvisation that would most likely have been employed for the scenarios of Flaminio Scala (Scala, [1611], 1976).² This is a reasonable limitation. Theatre historian Louise George Clubb remarks that Scala’s publication of his fifty scenarios in 1611 was “an event of the first importance to theatre history” because it gives a fuller idea of the nature of commedia dell’arte performance than any other single text has done (1995, pp. 128–129). Scala’s collection represents commedia dell’arte at its height, 1570–1630. Recognizing its importance, others who have written on improvisation in commedia dell’arte, chiefly Tim Fitzpatrick (1995), Robert Henke (2002) and Quirino Galli (2005) have based their analyses on it as well.

Why did the actors improvise?

Although the principal fame of the commedia dell’arte (comedy of professional players) resulted from their playing all’improvviso, actors in troupes the caliber of those with which Scala had worked by 1611, among them the high-profile Desiosi, Uniti, and Accesi troupes, would also have acted in fully scripted plays in various genres.³ They were clearly literate. A number of participants in the commedia dell’arte – Pier Maria Cecchini, Isabella Andreini, Adriano Valerini, and Flamino Scala – each wrote at least a single fully scripted play. Ironically, in the prologue to his scripted play, Il finto marito, 1619, Scala defended the art of improvisation.⁴ Speaking as “The Player” he wrote, “Scala’s invention has always been inspired, and that counts for everything in comedy” (Scala, 1976, p. cix-cx; cited in translation in Richards and Richards, 1990, p. 198). In other words, the precise words the actors spoke were not critical. Why did Scala, who, with that play, proved that he could write fully scripted plays, apparently prefer improvised comedy? Some of the possible answers to this question also suggest why the improvised comedy absorbed so much of the theatrical energy of the culture and was so long-lived and widespread.

Scholars have provided a variety of explanations for why the improvised form was used, probably most or all of them valid. Communication through scripted drama would have been impossible for traveling players because Italy was a peninsula without a unified national language and with very distinct dialects that were virtually separate languages. The poverty and instability of the companies together with the distinct dialects required of the various roles did not make writing for them an attractive prospect. The traveling players depended upon tailoring their performances to various and numerous performance locales and exigencies. Actors improvised so that their material could not so easily be used by competing troupes. Improvised drama avoided the inconvenience and disappointment that the time spent on premeditated drama so often occasioned. Improvised drama better enabled the performers to avoid censorship.

I offer yet another practical consideration. While we know that the memory of the actors was prodigious – Virginia Andreini learned a full-length musical role in six days, Vittoria Piissimi in a week (MacNeil, 2003, p. 13) – commedia dell’arte troupes, having stays in a single place for as long as three or four months, would have profited from being able to offer an even larger number of plays than they could commit to memory and this they could have done with improvised pieces.

There are, however, reasons for improvisation more compelling than the practical ones just listed, convincing though they may be. A number of the practical reasons provided presume that if circumstances had allowed the actors to perform fully scripted plays, they would have done so, but circumstances – censorship, cost, instability of the working conditions, competition, and the local dialects – did not allow it. No such presumption should be made.

Jeremy Lopez has pointed out that the success of the drama is fueled by its potential for failure: “The joy of the drama lies in the space for negotiation between success and failure” (2003, p. 134). When the drama is improvised, that sense of the potential for failure is enhanced. The outcome of improvisation is uncertain. The form seems open, the machinery of the plot fragile. The uncertainty specifically calls our attention to the improvising actor, not just to the material improvised. In that respect, the form is non-illusory. Other non-illusory conventions specifically in the commedia dell’arte – disguises, night scenes, the practical jokes (including bed-tricks) – are of a piece with the intrigue/improvisation in contributing to our sense that the action might fail. Despite our awareness that the trickster and lovers will prevail, the possibility that the performers and, consequently, the characters will not succeed adds to the excitement. The performance takes on the interest akin to that of a sporting event, especially because improvisation suggests that the performance is provided only for the audience at hand and is a one-time occurrence.

Richard Andrews notes that “an audience can find it amusing if characters are forced progressively to pile deceit upon deceit, just to sustain a plan that started as being simple” (1993, p. 79). This pleasure is greatly increased when the audience has the idea that it is not just the characters but the actors who are also trying to make their way through the obstacles of the improvised, or supposedly improvised, deceptions.

As defined by Stephen Greenblatt improvisation is the ability “to capitalize on the unforeseen and to transform given materials into one’s own scenario. The spur-of-the-moment quality of improvisation is not as critical here as the opportunistic grasp of that which seems fixed and established” (Greenblatt, 2005, p. 27). The character’s or the actor’s ability or apparent ability to snatch the action from almost certain defeat is thrilling. When the character and actor do succeed in overcoming the hurdles, they seem to share in the pleasure of the play. The actor and the audience become complicit in the pleasure of putting on the play. The relationship between the audience and actors, then, despite the fact that some of the actors are masked, is closer than in scripted theatre.⁵

In commedia dell’arte, the asides, the visual takes of the figures at the windows and the parallels in the action, most noticeably in the double-plotting, all contribute to the audience’s double perception, the greatest of which is of both the actor and the role. This duality not only gives the audience a feeling of superiority to the clearly created characters, it keeps it very busy, leading it to believe that the action is more complicated and faster than it is, hence more exciting and funnier.

One can understand then why the improvising commedia dell’arte performers exaggerated the distance between what they called “premeditated” drama and their own playing “all’improvviso.” They downplayed the importance of the scenario, of memorization, and of rehearsal to increase the audience’s appreciation of their skills and to increase the sense of the danger and uniqueness of the occasion.⁶

Improvisation not only has its own particular theatrical interest, it was also consistent more largely with cultural values and practice of the time. The audience’s heightened consciousness of both the improvising actor and her role is of a piece with the preoccupation in the late sixteenth century with the discrepancy and interplay between reality and appearance, with what Michael Shapiro calls the “dual consciousness” of reality and illusion” (1977, pp. 104–105).

In the culture at large, great respect was given to oral skills including the art of quick and biting repartee. Making a good impression in Renaissance society required that one be a good speaker. Thus, one might compliment a new father by telling him that his son would grow up to be a bel parlatore (fine speaker). A father might advise “his sons to read history, short stories and jest books to find epigrams which ‘may bring you honour in a conversation’ ” (Burke, 1987 p. 97, 81). Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier stresses grace and the avoidance of affectation, in speech above all. The chief characteristic of the courtier was sprezzatura: a seemingly easy grace and effortlessness in speaking and acting (Castiglione, 1986, pp. xxvi-xxviii). Greenblatt calls this kind of improvisation “self-fashioning” and points to the extent to which it was “a central mode of Renaissance behavior” (2005, p. 229). In a culture where every word was part of a performance, speech and its accompanying gestures were of crucial importance in the presentation of self (Burke, 1987, p. 8).⁷ From the beginning, a grammar school education, dominated by the teaching of rhetoric, stressed the need for improvisation, for ad-lib quickness and the coaxing of chance, the need for improvisation (Lanham, 1976, p. 2). The all-important source, Quintilian, asserted that for orators “the greatest fruit of our studies, the richest harvest of our long labours is the power of improvisation” (Quintilian [95 CE], 2001, vol. IV, p. 373). In the literary academies members not only provided orations but also improvised on a theme about which they had not been told beforehand (Henke, 2002, p. 41). In the Accademia Fiorentina, orations in the vernacular in the 1540s were regularly open to the public including artisans and shopkeepers who would otherwise also have been familiar with such improvisation from the pulpit, the law, and street performance (Bryce, 1995, p. 83).

While sprezzatura was the desired skill of the courtier and orators, underclass rogues relied on the same linguistic prowess and social dexterity. They too lived by their verbal craft and wit (Henke, 1997, p. 7). In the culture at large, according to cultural historian Peter Burke, “formal oral performances were frequent and excited much interest… . Most of these performances – songs, stories, plays, sermons, speeches, the sales-talk of charlatans, and so on – were improvised, or more exactly, semi – improvised” (Burke, 1985, p. 81). Verbal games were also popular. Cultural historian Guido Ruggiero notes the great and expanding interest in play in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. Books of the period, often reprinted, served as guides to such play, usually quick and witty word play, tactfully competitive storytelling, or argumentation (Ruggiero, 2007, p. 43.⁸ While the play described in these books was intended for an evening’s gathering of aristocrats, it is well to remember the extent to which people of all classes passed their leisure time together with songs, stories, and jokes. They entertained themselves with improvised or semi-improvised performances.

Musicologist Howard Mayer Brown tells us that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musicians could improvise polyphonic music extemporaneously. They could also improvise embellishments to their own taste on some music that had already been composed (Brown, 1976, p. xx). Cantatore improvviso (improvisational singer) was a profession (Burke, 1987, pp. 81, 97). Dance historian Julia Sutton observes that the two closely related principles of improvisation and semi-improvisation (variation) are also evident in the Italian dance manuals of the same period. She describes how a courtly dancer first learned the basic steps and patterns and after that the many variations that could be used at appropriate moments while still keeping to the general structure of the music and the dance. She also finds evidence of some free improvisation within the set dances (Sutton, 1995, pp. 27–28).⁹ Thus both musicians and dancers, if their skill were sufficient, could improvise. In short, there was a context for the appreciation of the actor who could improvise and of actors who could improvise together, skillfully.

What was the nature of the improvisation?

Having enumerated practical reasons for improvisation as well as those having to do with its general theatrical interest and particular cultural circumstances, I address questions about the nature of commedia dell’arte improvisation. In this section and the next, my analysis differs from the ones on the nature of the improvisation provided by Tim Fitzpatrick in his Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Process in the Commedia dell’Arte: Beyond the Improvisation/Memorisation Divide (1995), and by Robert Henke in his Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell’Arte (2002) in my focus on the centrality of imitation and memory in the very process of impro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Improvisation: why, what, how
• 2 Acting styles: dialects, voice, gesture
• 3 The uses of masks
• 4 Coda: commedia dell’arte today
• Index