Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater

Eric Nicholson, Robert Henke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138251861
• eBook ISBN: 9781317006961
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

PART I
Traveling Actors

Chapter 1
Border-Crossing in the Commedia dell’Arte

Robert Henke

If, as this volume argues, early modern drama was an international phenomenon, the commedia dell’arte was from its very inception the perfect transnational machine, and the reasons for this were material, systemic, and linguistic. Although almost infinite variety (and all of the major early modern dramatic genres) could be alchemized by the arte’s system of theatergrams and “rhapsodically” combinable verbal units,¹ the actors must have realized from the very beginning that their repertoire would have cloyed a year-round, geographically fixed audience. Nor, of course, did they enjoy a national center such as London or Madrid, or the capacity for capital accumulation of which Shakespeare’s joint-stock company was capable. Having to learn from the very beginning the perilous art of border crossing between the Italian states, facilitated but not guaranteed by ducal passport letters, they were always, already viaggianti.² After the “virtual,” international road was established by cross-dynastic alliances, such as those manifold links forged between the Gonzagas and the Habsburgs in the late sixteenth century, the comici plied the real road from Mantua to Linz, or from Florence to Paris. Their systemically based repertoire of theatergrams, appropriating a transnational language of gesture and acrobatic-style theater, traveled well across regions and nations, whether distinct by dialect or language. Linguistic hybridity was built into the commedia dell’arte from the beginning. The very character structure of the commedia dell’arte generated translinguistic exchanges (albeit of a stylized nature) between the Venetian Pantalone, the Bolognese Dottore, the Bergamask zanni, the Spanish Capitano, and others. When actors such as Zan Ganassa and Tristano Martinelli crossed borders, they mixed languages.

The commedia dell’arte, which emerged in the Veneto in the 1540s, could find roots for its translinguistic exchanges in the routines of famous buffoni such as Zuan Polo and in the dialect theaters of the Venetian playwrights Ruzante, Calmo, and Giancarli.³ Especially after the recovery of the spice trade, sixteenth-century Venice was an international emporium. Buffoni such as Domenico Taiacalze (d. 1513) and Zuan Polo Liompardi (d. 1540) developed stylized theatrical-linguistic personae drawn from various groups who had migrated to Venice: Greeks, Albanians, Germans, and most importantly, Dalmatians from Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik).⁴ The displaced Dalmatians lived in the Venetian zone of the Castello, on the so-called Riva degli Schiavoni, and worked as sailors, fishermen, menial laborers, servants, soldiers, and merchants. The bujfoni’s performances in greghesca, albanese, tedesca, and schiavonesca amounted to complex forms of mimicry, the buffoni generating a stylized amalgam of Venetian and the particular foreign language, spoken by an ethnic persona who could either be the object or subject of ridicule (in the later case, potentially levied against the Venetian patritiate). Zuan Polo published texts in schiavonesca, and adopted the Croatian persona “Ivan Paulavicchio” from Ragusa.⁵ The demographic migrations of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were thus encoded into the early Cinquecento Venetian theater on which the commedia drew.

While the links between the famous Venetian buffoni and the commedia dell’arte proper are indirect, vestiges of the Dalmatian maschera do occur in the organized theater. Francesco Moschini, an important actor in the troupe that left posterity the first extant actor’s contract (documents spanning 1545 to 1553) was of Dalmatian origin and may well have used the dialect in productions.⁶ Although best known for his role as Capitano Spavento da Vall’Inferna, Francesco Andreini states that “he also played the part of a magician named Falsirone—stupendous because of the many languages that he possessed such as French, Spanish, schiavonesca, Greek, and Turkish.”⁷ For his wife Isabella’s part, in a 1589 Florentine performance before an international audience attending the international wedding of Ferdinando dei Medici and Christina of Lorraine, she performed a polylinguistic tour de force of not only the major European languages but also the various dialects employed by the parti ridicolose in the commedia troupes.⁸ In the complex Mediterranean crossings that pervade the 1611 scenarios of Francesco Andreini’s colleague Flaminio Scala, especially in the romance-type argomenti that provide the plot backgrounds for the unity-bound plays, the regular arte characters are conveyed, against their will, by Ragusan, Turkish, Arabic, and Algerian ships across the Mediterranean.⁹ Transnationality, of a kind that opened out to all points of the Mediterranean, was built into the early commedia dell’arte.

Central to the 1545–1553 contracts regarding Moschini’s and Ser Maphio’s troupe—an assemblage of actors from different parts of the Veneto—is the prerogative of travel. If the “Venetiani” recorded as performing in the Castel St Angelo in Rome in 1550 were Ser Maphio’s troupe,¹⁰ as seems plausible, the commedia dell’arte crossed regional-linguistic boundaries from the very beginning. And on the fractiously divided Italian peninsula of the sixteenth century, transregionality was tantamount to transnationality. Itinerant actors crossing from one duchy or republic or state into another were considered to be “foreigners”; they required a letter from a ducal secretary or the like as a passport, and were subject to the same kinds of control and surveillance that other “foreigners” were.¹¹ Siro Ferrone has argued that the location of the Baldracca theater in Florence on the second floor of a customs house is not accidental, and provided in fact a perfect theatrical venue for these habitual crossers of boundaries.¹²

In Venice, an important regional group who often worked as porters in the customs house were the Bergamasks, who migrated to Venice in significant numbers after Bergamo was annexed to the Venetian republic in 1428.¹³ In the early sixteenth century Bergamo and its outlying regions were devastated by war and agricultural crisis, resulting in overwhelming land dispossession and forced migration. Some of the Bergamasks in Venice were destitute; some were successful enough to have perhaps generated some anti-Bergamask sentiment among native Venetians who might have felt that they were losing their jobs to these immigrants. Fused from this social context and a tradition of popular Bergamask literature already in place, the commedia dell’arte zanni emerged. The encounter between the zanni and the Magnifico, the dramatic kernel at the heart of commedia dell’arte production, is indirectly based on large-scale demographic migrations.

Transnational travel complemented transregional travel from the very beginning. Here, I propose a synthetic, if admittedly incomplete, account of commedia dell’arte travel to the German-speaking regions, the Netherlands, France, England, and Spain, focusing on the early period of 1549–1585, which I hope will demonstrate several things: the geographical range of commedia dell’arte travel, the important role played by international dynastic alliances (including frequent triangular alignments), the particular blend of acrobatics and acting that was often “translated” across boundaries, the varying relationships between court and public performance established by commedia dell’arte actors in various countries and regions, and ties between professional and amateur activity that appear to have particularly flourished outside of Italy. For the raw material of this overview, I largely rely upon the work of archivally based specialists, offering a pan-European and synthetic perspective as my own contribution.

Travel to the German-speaking regions, sparked by ties between the Gonzaga and Habsburg dynasties, preceded the better-known journeys of the commedia dell’arte to France by some two decades.¹⁴ Three sisters of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (reigned 1564–1576) married dukes in northern Italian courts. In 1561, Eleanor of Austria married Guglielmo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. In 1565, her sister Barbara of Austria married the widowed ruling Duke of Ferrara, Alphonso II, and another sister, Joanna of Austria, the Duke of Florence, Francesco dei Medici. As a result of these extensive connections, a marked taste for Italian artists of all kinds developed in the German-speaking courts of the late sixteenth century, and Habsburgian courtiers such as Orlando di Lasso were frequently sent to Italy to recruit Italian musicians, artists, and actors.

Ariosto’s comedy I suppositi was performed in 1548 at the Spanish court of Valladolid by members of the Accademia degli Intronati for the wedding of the future Maximilian II with the Infanta Maria of Spain, thus providing an early example of a triangular relationship among Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italian comedy.¹⁵ In 1549, a troupe of six Venetian spilleuten, perhaps following a series of festivals arranged for the entrance of the young Philip II into the Netherlands, performed in Nuremberg and before Charles V in Nordlingen.¹⁶ In Nuremberg, this itinerant, probably professional troupe staged “einer Romishcen histori vom Hercules” [a Roman story of Hercules] which was probably based on an acrobatic human pyramid routine called “Forza d’Ercole” and also performed in later festivals by an Italian troupe in Strasbourg in 1572, as well as by the Earl of Leicester’s men in Utrecht in 1586.¹⁷ Just as we would expect in international performance, as M.A. Katritzky’s essay on English traveling troupes in this volume confirms, the non-verbal dimensions of music, dance, and especially acrobatics were chief among the pleasures offered by the foreign troupes.¹⁸

The accounts of Italian acrobats and actors performing in Habsburgian courts and their environs are too numerous to mention here.¹⁹ Of particular note are several references between 1568 and 1575 to distinctly professional activity. Giovanni Tabarino, the Venetian actor whose fame probably rendered “Tabarino” a stage name that was taken up by a famous early seventeenth-century actor working the Pont Neuf in Paris and by a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• General Editor’s Preface
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Traveling Actors
• 1 Border-Crossing in the Commedia dell’Arte
• 2 English Troupes in Early Modern Germany: The Women
• Part II Transportable Units
• 3 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Italian Pastoral
• 4 Dramatic Bodies and Novellesque Spaces in Jacobean Tragedy and Tragicomedy
• Part III The Question of the Actress: Moral and Theoretical Transnationalisms
• 5 Ophelia Sings like a Prima Donna Innamorata: Ophelia’s Mad Scene and the Italian Female Performer
• 6 Theorizing Women’s Place: Nicholas Poussin, The Rape of the Sabines, and the Early Modern Stage
• Part IV Performing Alterity: Doubled National Identity
• 7 The Dutch Diaspora in English Comedy: 1598 to 1618
• 8 Foreign Emotions on the Stage of Twelth Night
• 9 Translated Turks on the Early Modern Stage
• Part V Performing a Nation: Transregional Exchanges
• 10 Epicene in Edinburgh (1672): City Comedy beyond the London Stage
• 11 Proto-nationalist Performatives and Trans-theatrical Displacement in Henry V
• 12 Shakespeare on the Indian Stage: Resistance, Recalcitrance, Recuperation
• Epilogue: Reading Shakespeare, Reading the Masks of the Italian Commedia: Fixed Forms and the Breath of Life
• Select Bibliography
• Index