The Commedia dell'Arte

Domenico Pietropaolo, Simon Shepherd

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350144200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

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.

PART ONE

Form, dramaturgy and content of early commedia dell’arte

1

The first professionals

Prehistory

The literary antecedents of the commedia dell’arte can be traced all the way back to Roman comedy through the genre of commedia erudita or learned comedy, which flourished in the sixteenth century, chiefly in academic and courtly circles. Adopting the dramatic form of Terence’s plays, commedia erudita consisted of fully scripted comedies using material derived from literary works in Latin or Italian, structured in accordance with classical dramatic theory. Commedia dell’arte has much in common with commedia erudita, but it is with plays from another scripted genre, the vernacular comedy of the same period, that commedia dell’arte has the greatest affinity and to which its development is connected by clear lines of continuity, in the Northern states of the Italian peninsula, most notably in the Republic of Venice, as well as in the Kingdom of Naples in the South. In Northern Italy, the vernacular comedies of Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzante, and Andrea Calmo, both actors and playwrights, figure prominently in the prehistory of commedia dell’arte. The features of Ruzante’s style of greatest interest consist of his use of the dialect of Padua rather than literary Tuscan, his notorious use of expletives and the coarse humour that he aimed to generate. His treatment of rustic love in a carnivalesque setting and his use of a low-register variety of dialect are typical of his entire production and are closely related to the early repertoire of the commedia dell’arte. In L’Anconitana, for example, the role of the protagonist is virtually that of a commedia dell’arte rustic servant (Fido 1973: 212), known later as a zanni. The French director Jacques Copeau saw the similarities between commedia dell’arte and this play, and in 1927 decided to stage it in a way that made the lineage clear (Rudlin 1986: 95). In addition to the preference for a local vernacular and a crudely realistic style, Beolco’s chief legacy to the commedia dell’arte was a dramatic model for the role of the early zanni.

A similar influence on early commedia dell’arte was exercised by Andrea Calmo. Himself under the influence of Ruzante, Calmo was chronologically closer to the commedia dell’arte. A number of his characters may be regarded as antecendents of main figures of the commedia dell’arte, including Pantalone, Brighella and the Capitano. One of the most significant features that his plays had in common with the commedia dell’arte was the multilingual setting of the dramatic action, which included even some Greek, inspired, no doubt, by the Greek-speaking neighbourhoods of Venice. Calmo approached the theatre simultaneously as a playwright, as an actor and as a business man acutely aware of the commercial possibilities of the stage. He wrote plays that could be performed with a minimum of rehearsal time, composed of scenes that allowed for considerable enrichment by virtuosic improvisation directly on stage. This approach to theatre was decidedly anticlassical, in the sense that it encouraged the development of an actor-centred rather than a text-centred conception of performance (Castagno 1994: 50–1). Calmo shifted the focus from the literary playwright to the actor, emphasizing the creative role of the latter within the framework provided by the former. This was without doubt his greatest legacy to the Venetian commedia dell’arte.

In Southern Italy, the vernacular comedy that dominates the immediate prehistory of the commedia dell’arte includes the popular genre known as farsa cavaiola. The adjective cavaiola in the designation of the genre refers to the city of Cava, whose inhabitants were derided by the citizens of nearby Salerno as foolish, uncouth and clumsy simpletons, who spoke an equally unpolished dialect. The rivalry between Cava and Salerno may have been the origin of the farse cavaiole, but the derision of the inhabitants of Cava soon became just a literary convention of the genre and eventually lost its municipal specificity. The genre flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but by the end of the sixteenth century the circle of its dramatis personae was opened up to include masked characters from local carnival celebrations.

The cavaiola legacy included the notion of awkward and foolish characters, brawls and beatings, multilingual dialogue and derisive geographical stereotypes. We can find all of these elements in La scola cavajola by Giovanni D’Antonio, also known as Il Partenopeo, from Partenope, an ancient and now literary name for the city of Naples. La scola cavajola is a dramatic caricature of a rowdy school in Naples. The play is multilingual, and, despite the title, the characters no longer have any recognizable reference to Cava: the Teacher (Mastro) speaks Neapolitan and pig Latin, Pulcinella (Polecenella in the text) speaks Neapolitan, as do Zeza and Coviello, though the latter mixes dialect and Latin, while Giangurgolo performs his part in Calabrian and the Dottore speaks Bergamask hybridized with Latin. The unruly coexistence of a plurality of languages in the same community and the constant prospect of a fall into Babelian confusion are intended to bewilder the audience with humour and determine the quality of their aesthetic experience of the play. The diverse origin of the characters and their multilingual environment reflect the demographic reality of Naples, in which inhabitants from many small towns along the Tyrrhenian coast of Southern Italy, from the tip of Calabria to Salerno and beyond, had immigrated to Naples to escape incursions by pirates from north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The plot includes comic routines typical of later commedia dell’arte, such as a horseplay scene in which Pulcinella mounts Giangurgolo and rides him like a steed (D’Antonio 1788: 197). The foolishness and plebeian manners once used to satirize only the inhabitants of Cava were transplanted into a different social reality, grafted onto characters of a different origin, and were destined to become an integral part of the commedia dell’arte of Naples.

The first companies

One of the most distinctive features of the commedia dell’arte is its commercial base, the fact that the actors were organized into companies for the first time. In general, a commedia dell’arte performance was not the work of a group of actors brought together for that specific purpose, but the work of an organized company, actors who had incorporated themselves into troupes, held together by their commitment to a shared purpose and their agreement to contribute their individual talents to the collective creativity and commercial success of the company. The commedia dell’arte is a professional endeavour of companies, an area of the entertainment industry in which the principal constitutive unit is the company rather than the individual (Ferrone 2014: 25). In the commedia dell’arte the rise to stardom and the achievement of prosperity was a collective endeavour. The advantages of a professional company structure were numerous. Companies guaranteed a calendar of performances, added a sense of stability to individual careers, facilitated the attainment of high-level sponsorships and offered income security in case of illness. There were, of course, highly paid and much admired players working outside the commedia dell’arte network, but within its domain, the success of a show was the success of a company working as a corporate unit under the leadership of its director, who was both its business manager and the artistic supervisor or dramaturgical co-ordinator of its performances.

These ideas are all outlined in the earliest known legal document in the history of professional companies: a contract dated 25 February 1545 and signed in the presence of a notary public by eight actors who thereby incorporated themselves into a company, described as a ‘fraternal compagnia’ or a professional brotherhood (text in Oreglia 1968: 140–3). Under the leadership of one of the actors, Maphio Zanini, they all pledged to work together in harmony as a company of brothers, with a calendar of events for one entire year, minus the Lenten period and Easter octave. The expression ‘fraternal compagnia’ was no more than a descriptive epithet in the contract, but it distinguished the spirit of the company so well that in the scholarly literature it has been frequently treated as a lexicalized name designating the company directed by Maphio Zanini, and hence Fraternal Compagnia is occasionally printed without quotation marks and with upper case initials, like a proper name. Most details specified in the contract concern the management side of the enterprise, covering such things as common ownership of properties, the equal distribution of profits, sick pay and departure from the company. The artistic side of the company’s work is expressed in a single rule, which establishes the authority of the company director over all members: they owe him absolute obedience concerning decisions affecting performances and future engagements. By giving the company director this authoritative role, the actors recognized the fact that a performance needed to be sustained by a unifying artistic vision. The same level of authority was enjoyed by the directors of subsequent companies, the most distinguished of which was the company of the Gelosi, directed by Flaminio Scala, which began operations in 1568. The name Gelosi may mean something like jealous guardians of the art that they practised. In general, the self-naming of companies (e.g. Gelosi, Fedeli, Accesi, Uniti) resembles the practice of the literary academies of the time, which aimed to convey their cultural self-understanding by allegorical allusion. In imitation of this practice, the theatre companies chose for themselves names that, at least by analogy, vindicated their role in the development of high culture by arrogating to themselves the not-for-profit attitude of the academies (Tessari 1981–4: 70). Certainly, some of the members of the Gelosi deserve recognition in the world of high culture, reminding us with their work that the entertainment industry and high art are linked by continuity: Flaminio Scala, the Gelosi’s first director and leading actor in the role of Flavio, was also a celebrated playwright and the only commedia dell’arte actor in history to publish a collection of scenarios. Francesco Andreini, its second director, was a renowned Capitan Spavento and a writer of no mean reputation. His wife, Isabella Andreini, who rose to diva status like a bright meteor, was also a writer of considerable distinction. The company performed in every major city of Northern Italy and France, in the greatest courts of these countries, raising the artistic profile of the commedia dell’arte and laying the cultural ground for its intersection with local dramatic traditions.

FIGURE 1 Franken the Elder, Italian actors, the Gelosi troupe with Isabella Andreini in Paris, Musée Carnavalet. (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

From the records of another distinguished company, the one directed by Alberto Naselli, better known by his stage name of Zan Ganassa, we know that company directors could recruit temporary members from the local scene for roles that required special talents, such as knowledge of music. Naselli did such recruiting in Spain, where his company spent most of its active years (Ferrone 2014: 17). From the same records we know that the company had a clearly defined internal organization that enabled it to take care of the business side of its activities with relative ease. In addition to their acting, all members had important non-artistic duties to discharge, such as taking care of costumes and properties, looking after legal problems with local authorities and drafting contracts and agreements for future engagements. The logical distribution of essential labour, in accordance with expertise and inclination, enabled the company to work as a unit.

All these companies represent the commedia dell’arte of Northern Italy. In the south, commedia culture was a little different, and the difference was already visible in the formation of companies. The earliest known legal instrument for the creation of an acting company in Southern Italy, first published by the philosopher Benedetto Croce (Croce 1891: 776–7), is dated 5 July 1575, or thirty years after the establishment of the Northern brotherly company of 1545. The document is a contract by which five actors – Mario de Thomase, Jacobo Antonio de Ferrariis, Alfonso Cortese, Giulio Cesare Farina, Francisco Itiani – agreed to bind themselves into a company for two years for the purpose of ‘making and reciting plays’ (il fare et recitare comedie, Croce 1891: 776) throughout the Kingdom of Naples – which at that time was under Spanish rule and included all of Italy south of the Papal States – and anywhere else in the world where their art might take them. The articles in the contract concern the sharing of profits, sick pay, joint ownership and the like, more or less like those in the contract of the Northern ‘fraternal compagnia’.

There are, however, at least three points on which the contract of the Neapolitan company differs significantly from the 1545 document. The first is the distinction between making (fare) and reciting (recitare) plays, explicitly mentioned as two separate types of activity. The difference may refer, on the one hand, to the art of creating performance texts directly on stage by improvisation, and, on the other hand, to the art of reciting fully scripted plays in the conventional manner. The company, in other words may have performed scripted as well as unscripted plays, and referred to the latter activity using a verb of making, fare, in a sense analogous to that of the English wright in playwright, that is a maker of plays. The second difference is that, in addition to illness as a legitimate ground for compensation without work, the contract adds explicitly that a second circumstance might be imprisonment for an offence due to the activity of the company (per causa di detta compagnia). Since in its work as a troupe of players, the company could become the cause of an arrest by the authorities only by asking its players to perform acts of transgression on stage, it is more than likely that the company occasionally expected its performances to appear defiant. The third point concerns female members of the company. Although none of the players that signed the contract was a woman, the contract twice specifically refers to compagni and compagne, respectively male and female members of the compagnia created by the contract.

Women in the companies

Part of the historical importance of the company of Zan Ganassa is the fact that it explicitly listed, for the first time, a woman as a full member of a company. The historical and aesthetic significance of the presence of women in commedia dell’arte companies cannot be overstated. There is no doubt that at first women were welcomed into companies for the erotic appeal that they could give a play, particularly if they were provocatively dressed. Their commodification, observes Rosalind Kerr, was due to their sex appeal and the illusion of uninhibited availability to which their mere presence on stage gave rise (2015: 7–8). As we shall see in discussing a contemporary theological critique of commedia dell’arte, the misogynists of the age denounced their arrival for their potential to corrupt the young women in the audience and to lead men astray in their own imagination. But the artistic importance of women in the commedia dell’arte was such that a highly respected scholar has gone as far as to say that, prior to the appearance of women on stage, the entire corpus of plays featuring the familiar masked characters in acts of buffoonery can be called commedia dell’arte only by a stretch of the term (Taviani 1982: 338). In the entertainment market of the time, buffoonery (buffoneria) was a crude and clownish form of comical entertainment in the proximity of, but in tension with, professional acting, of which it was regarded a spurious variant or ‘variante spuria’ (Tessari 2017: 321), prone to expressions of vulgarity in both gesture and language. The arrival of women represented a remarkable change in the aesthetic value of productions, not necessarily because actresses could play female characters with a greater degree of verisimilitude, or because they could give rise to prurience whether they intended to or not, but because women brought into the companies that they joined something that most conventional actors did not have: a liberal education, acquaintance with literature, music, dance and skill in carrying a conversation.

This was certainly the case of the most celebrated actresses of the early commedia dell’arte – Barbara Flaminia, in the first place, since she was the earliest actress whose performances in various cities of Italy and later in Spain, where she had gone with Zan Ganassa, are well documented. She was closely followed by the enormously talented Vincenza Armani, with whom Flaminia competed but also collaborated in Mantua in 1567 and 1568, and the records celebrate them both in superlative terms. Armani could perform in all dramatic genres, sing, play various instruments and compose poetry in both Italian and Latin, skills that she probably acquired in her efforts to gain the approval and regard of powerful members of society (Taviani 1982: 333). In the third place, we find Vittoria Piissimi, who, as prima donna of the Gelosi, probably played the role of Silvia in a much celebrated production of TorquatoTasso’s Aminta in the summer court theatre of the Duke of Ferrara in 1573. Vittoria had the fortune and misfortune of being much admired by possessive dukes of Modena and Mantova as well as Ferrara and frequently found herself having to adapt her professional trajectory to their requests. Throughout her career, she was in...