The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte

Judith Chaffee, Oliver Crick, Judith Chaffee, Oliver Crick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317613367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Renaissance européenne

From Commedia dell'Arte came archetypal characters that are still with us today, such as Harlequin and Pantalone, and the rediscovered craft of writing comic dramas and masked theatre. From it came the forces that helped create and influence Opera, Ballet, Pantomime, Shakespeare, Moliere, Lopes de Vega, Goldoni, Meyerhold, and even the glove puppet, Mr Punch.The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte is a wide-ranging volume written by over 50 experts, that traces the history, characteristics, and development of this fascinating yet elusive theatre form. In synthesizing the elements of Commedia, this book introduces the history of the Sartori mask studio; presents a comparison between Gozzi and Goldoni's complicated and adversarial approaches to theatre; invites discussions on Commedia's relevance to Shakespeare, and illuminates re-interpretations of Commedia in modern times. The authors are drawn from actors, mask-makers, pedagogues, directors, trainers and academics, all of whom add unique insights into this most delightful of theatre styles. Notable contributions include: • Donato Sartori on the 20th century Sartori mask
• Rob Henke on form and freedom
• Anna Cottis on Carlo Boso
• Didi Hopkins on One Man, Two Guv'nors
• Kenneth Richards on acting companies
• Antonio Fava on Pulcinella
• Joan Schirle on Carlo Mazzone-Clementi and women in Commedia
• and M.A. Katritzky on imagesOlly Crick is a performer, trainer and director, having trained in Commedia under Barry Grantham and Carlo Boso. He is founder of The Fabulous Old Spot Theatre Company. Judith Chaffee is Associate Professor of Theatre at Boston University, and Head of Movement Training for Actors. She trained in Commedia with Antonio Fava, Julie Goell, Stanley Allen Sherman, and Carlos Garcia Estevez.

Part I The Defining Features

Actors, scenarios, troupes, stock character, masks, language and lazzi

Actors

1 The Pre-Eminence of the Actor in Renaissance Context

Subverting the social order

Scott McGehee

DOI: 10.4324/9781315750842-2

The sixteenth century represents the summit in the history of laughter…

(Mikhail Bakhtin 1984)

It is commonplace to refer to the Commedia dell'Arte as actor’s theatre when considering the centrality of the actor ensemble in creating performance through various modes of improvisation. Dario Fo goes so far as to assert that the Commedia can be distinguished from all other forms of theatre not by the use of the masks or the fixed stereotypes but “by a genuinely revolutionary approach of making theatre, and the unique role assumed by the actors” (Fo 1991: 13). But, if we are to appreciate fully the “revolutionary” quality of the Commedia and its lessons for contemporary theatre, it is important for it to be understood historically as a part of the wider cultural complex of the Renaissance from which it was both an offspring and a cultural force in itself.

Modern attitudes toward the Commedia tend to cluster around two opposing poles. One might be called the pole of naïve exuberance, imagining the masked comedy as the apogee of world theatre; the other pole tends to simply ignore the Commedia with an attitude of benign neglect. In the first instance we get enthusiastic but naïve theatre, in the second we get only a snobbish disregard for a truly extraordinary moment in theatrical history. But the exuberant and the neglectful suffer from the same historical myopia that prevents each from understanding both the depths of the art as well as the extraordinary potential for contemporary theatre that lies buried in its comic form.

It is not by chance that twentieth century theatrical innovators turned to the Commedia as an endless source of inspiration. Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Nikaloi Erdman, Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht and many others saw in the Commedia the protagonist of a renewed theatre, the actor “filled with unconstrained joy, youth, laughter, improvisation, immediacy and closeness with human emotions side by side with irony and humor.” (Vakhtangov in Fisher 1992: 139) For all of them, unleashing the creative powers of the actor was the essence of a new theatre. As Max Reinhardt wrote, “Where the actor is also a dramatic writer, he has the power to create a world according to his own image, thus awakening the drama to its highest form of life…” (Fisher 1992: 166) He envisioned a theatre in which the actor would be “at once sculptor and sculpture” (1992: 172). It is at this precise point that we will find the strongest link between the Commedia dell'Arte and the social imaginary of the Renaissance: man as the self-creator, sculptor and sculpture. If we fail to grasp this link, the Commedia will have little of significance to say to us today.

In the post war period a new interest in the Commedia was centered in Milan around the work of Giorgio Strehler, Paolo Grassi, Jacques Lecoq, Ameleto Sartori, Dario Fo and others. They engaged in intense historical research and experimentation in an effort to reinvent the skills of the trade for modern audiences. Their influence spawned a new generation of artists with a deep interest in the Commedia, notably, Théâtre du Soleil, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troup, the TAG, etc. Many, if not most, of these artists and groups were also politically engaged activists who imagined theatre generally and Commedia specifically as a potential force in political struggles. Their interest was in utilizing the Commedia to provoke a comic critique of existing power relationships: against war, against racism, fascism, sexism and capitalism itself. The form of Commedia was valuable in that it was structured by social formations of real power relationships between masters and servants. However, attempts to utilize an antique art form in a modern context are fraught with anachronistic dangers and in less capable hands could quickly become naïve and even cartoonish, unwittingly distorting the animating spirit of the sixteenth century.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his ground-breaking study of Rabelais writes:

In the Renaissance, laughter in its most radical, universal and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture. It emerged but once in the course of history over a period of sixty or seventy years… and entered with its popular language the sphere of great literature and high ideology…. The wall between official culture and non-official culture inevitably crumbled…. This thousand year old laughter not only fertilized literature but was itself fertilized by humanist knowledge and advance literary techniques.

(Bakhtin 1984: 72)

Bakhtin places the Commedia squarely within this historic conjuncture (Bakhtin 1984: 34). To grasp what is most vibrant in the Commedia it is essential to explore what is meant by laughter that is radical, universal and gay or, in Bakhtin’s expression, carnivalesque. But equally important is to explore the humanist ideology that formed an essential component of Renaissance laughter.

What follows will be an effort to delineate three points of intersection in which the Commedia is embedded with Renaissance culture. The first point will explore the humanist ideal of the self-creating man: an ideal explicitly opposed to the medieval vision of eternal and fixed character-types bound within a cosmic order of ascending values. The second point will explore the structure of contemporary power relations within Renaissance culture from which the Commedia drew its inspiration. It staged a microcosm of conflicting social forces into which the audience was invited to play a conspiratorial role. And finally, the aesthetic technique of “grotesque realism” as a means of “uncrowning” all that is high, abstract and sacred will be recast as a mode of comic subversion. All three of these points of intersection find their embodiment in the free imagination of the actor.

The maker and molder of thyself: sculptor and sculpture

In The Moving Body Jacques Lecoq rejects the idea that the Commedia is an expression of a specific place and time believing that a better nomenclature would be la comédie humaine, or the human comedy, suggesting that “historically, the social relations of the Commedia are immutable” (Lecoq 2002: 124). Its function is “to shed light on human nature…” and the “timeless elements of the human comedy…” (Ibid.) But Lecoq’s idea runs diametrically opposed to the ethos that was emerging in the Renaissance, an ethos that was certainly part of the intellectual culture that profoundly influenced the emergence of the Commedia. Many modern interpreters of the Commedia miss this point and, like Lecoq, revert to the idea of universal tipi fissi (fixed types) as if the springs of human action are to be found beyond the individual’s control in the primordial character of man. Still others make reference to Carl Jung’s concept of human “archetype” and the theory of the collective unconscious where the ancient image, character or pattern of circumstances is considered universal, originating in pre-logical thought, outside of time, space and culture. This distinctly modern and conservative version of Commedia is the inversion of the Renaissance idea of man as a self-creator. Alternatively, the ancient idea of the Platonic archetype, derived from Plato’s ideal forms, an idea prevalent during the Renaissance, would also be misplaced as Platonism explicitly excludes man as being modeled from an archetype (Plato 2013: 320d–322a). But, in either case, it implies that the social structure is the product of man’s fixed character and that hierarchies of power are natural hierarchies. Thus, only a fool would challenge such hierarchies.

While Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais reveals the influence of folk culture on high literature in the Renaissance, another recent study by Robert Henke demonstrates the profound influence that contemporary literature had on the popular theatre where “actors are the full bearers of humanist culture…” (Henke 2002: 109). Among the principle characteristics of Renaissance thought, at its most radical, was the humanist concept of self-creation. That is to say that man was not a tipo fisso, nor governed by necessity, as was the case in medieval thought and virtually all official culture. Original sin, manifesting itself in the seven deadly sins, corresponding to character-types within a timeless cosmos of a fixed order was precisely what was being rejected in the Renaissance. For the new humanists, man was mutable, embedded in real time and real space moving forever forward, ever changing. As Ginnazzo Manetti wrote in 1452, “All that surrounds us is our own work, the work of men… seeing such marvels we understand that we can create even better, more beautiful, more refined, more perfect things than hitherto…” (Manetti 1452). Moreover, man himself was the result of this creative process. In The Oration on the Dignity of Man, often referred to as the manifesto of the Renaissance, Giovanni Pico writes, at the moment that God created Adam,

there was not among his archetypes that from which he could fashion a new offspring…. He therefore took man as creature of indeterminate image… saying to his creation, …constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine free will, in whose hand we have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature… so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.

(Pico 1981: 478)

Man as self-maker, as the architect of his own being, had its counterpart in popular culture in what Bakhtin refers to as the people’s “second world and second life outside officialdom” in which determinant necessity, expressed in the fixed order of official life, is “uncrowned” by the carnival spirit to free “human consciousness, thought and imagination for new potentialities.” (Bakhtin 1984: 6, 49) This ideology of mutability and self-creation had its material expression in the very social structure of the Renaissance through the expansion of commercial life and the emergence of a mercantile spirit. Merchants, craftsmen, traders, innovators of every sort needed to loosen the ridged structures of the social order and laughter was but one of their methods. It should not be surprising to note in this context that Machiavelli, the founder of political science, also wrote one of the most important comedies in the Italian Renaissance, La mandragola, nor that Galileo, the founder of the new physics, was also known to write scenarios for the Commedia dell'Arte.

It is also logical that among the eight members of the first Commedia group registered in Padua in 1545 there were four members from the artisan class: two shoemakers, one blacksmith and one stonecutter (Henke 2002: 70). Artisans, like merchants, wanted above all, control of their craft. Seeking guild status was an effort to guarantee the integrity and autonomy of their creative production and to find a relative freedom from patronage in the marketplace. Bakhtin describes the Renaissance marketplace as a “world unto itself” with an atmosphere of “freedom, frankness and familiarity…. The marketplace was the center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality.” (Bakhtin 1984: 153–154) Henke importantly points out that one of the dynamic elements of the Commedia was the creative tension between the centrifugal tendencies of the virtuosic actor originating in the buffone and zanni piazza performers and the “well-made plots” based on literary models (Henke 2002: 2). Within this tension—the fusion of high and low, popular and elite–the actor did indeed find the power to create a world according to his own image.

All attempts to depict the Commedia as a comic form that is eternal and immutable, a form that captures the essential archetypes of humanity, and a form that reveals man’s eternal essence, runs counter to the spirit of the age. In Renaissance laughter, the fixed and essential nature of the world crumbles to become ambiguous, ever mutating, ever changing, and ever inverting to reveal a world of endless possibilities. This was the spirit of the age and the Commedia was its comic expression.

Subverting the symbolic order: masters, lovers and servants

A great deal has been written about the forms of social power during the Renaissance, a fact notably marked by the publication of Machiavelli’s Prince in 1513. The subject of this extraordinary text was power itself. It should not be surprising that this should be the focus of many erudite studies at this time as old powers were dissolving and new ones emerging. There was, in a word, a self-conscious reflection of the meaning and modes of power throughout this period. It is worth pointing out that the history of the Commedia dell'Arte roughly bridges th...