Revisiting The Tempest

The Capacity to Signify

Silvia Bigliazzi, L. Calvi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349462063, 9781137333131
• eBook ISBN: 9781137333148
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Revisiting The Tempest offers a lively reconsideration of how The Tempest encourages interpretation and creative appropriation. It includes a wide range of essays on theoretical and practical criticism focusing on the play's original dramatic context, on its signifying processes and its present-time screen remediation.

Part I

Meaning and Genre

2

The Tempest and Italian Improvised Theatre

Richard Andrews

There exists a critical prejudice, which seems to be quite long-standing, maintaining that The Tempest is one Shakespeare play – perhaps the only one – whose plot comes entirely from the dramatist’s imagination, without being based on any narrative or dramatic source. It is a myth regularly perpetuated in programme notes even for the most prestigious theatre companies.¹ We shall show here, not for the first time, that this is simply untrue. There is a substantial body of material, mostly but not exclusively in the form of scenarios for improvisation, which show that dramatic models for Prospero’s island and its inhabitants were established in Italy, well before the first performance of The Tempest in 1611.

The relevant Italian material has been available now to scholars for nearly a century: many scenarios were first published by Ferdinando Neri in 1913. Since then, at intervals, other critics and historians have drawn attention to their importance, and also added more texts which need considering (see Neri, Lea, Andrews 2004: 123–49, Henke, Calvi). The response of Shakespearean critics has continued, on the whole, to be a deafening silence. There seems to be an ingrained assumption by anglocentric scholars who themselves have no knowledge of early modern Italian drama that English Tudor and Stuart dramatists were equally ignorant of it – despite works such as Gascoigne’s Supposes and Munday’s Fedele and Fortunio which are clearly adaptations of Italian plays. The precise means by which Shakespeare and others gained knowledge, even at a distance, of the content and methodology of Italian drama will have varied from individual to individual, and will rarely have left documentary traces. But when sheer concrete similarity between English and Italian dramatic formulae reaches a certain level of frequency, then common sense leads us to conclude that we must be dealing with something more than a coincidence; and this, we shall argue here, is the case for Shakespeare’s Tempest.

It is necessary also, however, to understand accurately the nature of the Italian phenomenon with which we are dealing. The least obstinately anglocentric editor of The Tempest has been Frank Kermode. He gave careful consideration to the scenarios as possible sources; but he was induced to play down their relevance most of all by factual misunderstandings about what kind of theatre those scenarios represented, and about the dates which can be attached to their content. This essay will address those particular misapprehensions, as well as give yet another account of what the Italian texts repeatedly contain.

In engaging with Italian improvised, unscripted, theatre before and after 1600, it has seemed advisable not to use the term commedia dell’arte. The meaning of that term – ‘comedy of the professionals’ – is not deeply inappropriate for the period; but the words themselves do not appear before 1750, in a play by Carlo Goldoni. Because of its critical history since the nineteenth century, the label has come to imply a separate genre, distinct from all types of scripted drama, and a tendency towards cartoon-like stage farce. Such notions have some validity with regard to ‘Italian comedy’ in the eighteenth century, especially as it developed in France; but they are distracting and misleading in relation to the much more complex and less stratified world of Italian theatre which flourished at the time of Shakespeare.

The main thrust of this inquiry is to identify a set of large-scale plot theatergrams which were common in Italian scenarios, and of which – using the ‘unlikely coincidence’ argument – it is hard to conclude Shakespeare was not in some way aware. For reasons which will emerge, however, we shall start with a comparison on a smaller scale, regarding the content and structure of a single scene.

In 3.2 of The Tempest, we have Ariel eavesdropping on the conspiratorial conversation between Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban – Ariel is invisible to the other three, but of course visible to the audience. Three times Ariel interjects the words “Thou liest!” into their exchanges. Since the others cannot see him, they naturally attribute the accusation to someone else present, and in the end Trinculo gets beaten for something which he did not say. To a reader accustomed to Italian scenarios, this scene feels very much like the sort of trick which a Zani or Arlecchino would play on other characters: though in Italian examples the trickster, not having magical powers, would be hidden behind something (or using ventriloquism) rather than actually invisible. The Italian feel of the scene does not depend only on the trick itself, but most of all on the fact that Ariel says the same words more than once. Repetition was one of the most common comic structures in Italian improvised theatre, partly because it is a pattern which overrides the need to memorise lines. An actor does not need to learn a verbal text – he simply has to understand the basic shape of the gag, and pursue it. What is more, the repetition is actually funny in itself: for a while, at least, the more often Zani says “Thou liest!”, or equivalent, the more laughs he is likely to get. In improvisation, the number of times the same words are repeated is in the control of the actor, and he will stop when he feels that he has done enough for that particular performance. This is the structure which in analyses of dialogue units in improvised theatre, I have referred to as the “elastic gag” (Andrews 1991: 21–54; 1993: 169–203; 2005: 444–63) because any sequence involving such repetition can be ‘elastically’ stretched or curtailed by actors according to their judgement.

In this particular case, one can point not just to a generic or structural similarity, but also to a concrete analogy from an Italian scenario, involving the same comic concept. In 1611 (the same year as the first performance of The Tempest – and this, unlike other things treated in this essay, really is a casual coincidence), the actor-manager Flaminio Scala published the only collection of scenarios ever to be printed while the genre was still flourishing (Scala, Marotti, Andrews 2007).² Scala’s 14th item out of fifty – a comedy entitled Il pellegrino fido amante – contains a short sequence given to Arlecchino which uses something close to Ariel’s “Thou liest!” gag in a different dramatic context. This, with my own emphases added in bold type, is the text of the closing sequence of Act 1 (which, if Scala had numbered his scenes, would count as Scenes 6 and 7):

… Fabrizio, ridendo, racconta le miserie de gli amanti, dicendo in uno <sic> male d’Amore; in quello Arlecchino, vestito da furfante, li dà una mentita, e fugge. Fabrizio di nuovo torna a dir mal d’Amore. Arlecchino fa il medesimo, e fugge. Fabrizio caccia mano alla spada, e li corre dietro. e qui finisce l’atto primo. (Marotti I, 152)

[… Fabrizio, laughing, tells stories of the sufferings of lovers, in each case saying bad things about Love; next Arlecchino, dressed as a ruffian, calls him a liar, and runs off again. Fabrizio goes back to saying bad things about Love, Arlecchino does the same again, and runs away. Fabrizio draws his sword and runs out after him, and here the first act ends. (Andrews 2007: 72–3)]³

Arlecchino was not on stage during Scene 6; so he has to burst in from outside with his first “Thou liest!” and make the audience jump. The fact that he interrupts twice, in a printed version of the scenario, is in effect an invitation for him to use the words as often as he likes – elastically – during the slapstick mayhem which concludes the act.

In this case, of course, Arlecchino is not invisible or in hiding, and does not cause the same kind of confusion as that produced by Ariel; but Scala shows us here an example of “Thou liest!” being repeated with a disruptive comic effect. There is another case of Italian improvising clowns playing with truth and disbelief. Kathleen Lea, in her Italian Popular Comedy of 1934, translated a scenario which appeared in English as The Unbelieving Zanni and the Four Alike (Lea II, 602–9).⁴ That text uses Zanni’s constant repetition that he “doesn’t believe” whatever is said to him (using phrases such as “non lo crede”, “non gli crede”, etc.; but also “le dà una mentita”, as in Scala) as a running catch phrase for the play.⁵ This is another example of the centrality of repeated gags and phrases to the dramaturgy of improvised theatre. It is also another example of repetition around concepts of what is and is not true.

Scala’s collection dates, as we have noted, from the same year as The Tempest. It is unlikely that any of the other surviving collections of scenarios,⁶ all of which remain in manuscript, come from earlier than 1611: the only ones which are actually dated (the two volumes by Locatelli) are from 1618 and 1622. Anglophone scholars have used these later dates as a reason for denying any connection between this kind of Italian material and Shakespeare’s plays. But those scholars have not understood the nature of the surviving Italian collections. We are not dealing here – and we never will be – with the kind of source relationship which is explored in normal textual criticism. The reappearance both in Shakespeare and in Scala of versions of that repeated elastic “Thou liest!” gag tells us only that by 1611 that joke, or scenic idea, already existed. It existed in a stock of theatre material which transcended linguistic boundaries, an orally transmitted patrimony available for any clown or any dramatist to use. With scenario collections, the date at which they were composed – in the rare cases when we know that date – is never anything more than a terminus ante quem. None of the material which was included in Scala, or in Locatelli, or in the Correr manuscript, was invented at the moment when the collection was put together. Everything in those compilations – and this is absolutely by definition – was put there precisely because it had already been used by professional companies, because it was circulating in a commonly owned repertoire, because the compiler judged that it worked and so was worth recording. The authors of two seventeenth-century manuscript collections state, in Robert Henke’s words, that “they are merely recording scenarios that have long been in existence” (Henke 51).⁷ It is impossible for us to guess how long any theatergram, large or small, had been in the repertoire.

We say ‘large or small’ because we are not just dealing with isolated comic gags. The Tempest is based on a well-known well-diffused Italian plot template, a formula on which professional troupes regularly played a series of variations. Henke, in his article of 2007, has given it the genre label “magical pastoral”, located in “Arcadian scenarios” (Henke 48, 51, passim). It has a set of easily defined components – in terms of characters, relationships and setting – which can be listed here.

1. The story takes place in a remote realm or territory, set apart from normal civilisation. This can be an island on which characters can be shipwrecked, but it can equally be an isolated woodland Arcadia (hence the Henke label). The fact that the action takes place far away from cities and palaces is what tended to give these dramas the genre label of pastorale, or commedia pastorale.
2. The territory is ruled over by a person with magical powers – usually a male Mago, but sometimes a female Maga – who presumes to control the other characters in the play, either for their own good, or for his or her own enjoyment.
3. Those characters will include anonymous aerial Spiriti, and a more earthy Satyr (Satiro) or Wild Man (Selvatico), both of these non-human categories being indigenous to the locality. The Spiriti are usually anonymous and wordless, simply contributing on command to elaborate stage effects of magic and marvel. The Satyr or Wild Man is more often a malignant figure, though sometimes (as in our only example of this genre from Flaminio Scala) more of a tame slave to the magician.
4. The human characters fall into two social ranks, the more gentlemanly and the more clownish: what Italian actors would have designated parti serie and parti ridicole. Most often – and this is the biggest difference from what Shakespeare did with the format in The Tempest – the parti serie are a string of nymphs and shepherds with amorous problems, often a chain of Nymph A in love with Shepherd B who pursues Nymph C who pines for Shepherd D. And Shepherd D is likely to be besotted on Nymph A. (This, of course, is much more like A Midsummer Night’s Dream than The Tempest: something of which editors of the Dream need to be aware; Henke passim). These ‘serious’ characters are most often identified as permanent residents of the island, or of the Arcadian territory.
5. The parti ridicole come straight from the more farcical side of Italian improvised theatre: figures like Pantalone, Dottor Graziano, Zanni, Burattino, Policinella, even a braggart Capitano. They are usually newcomers to the land who arrived there by cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Prologue Meaning as Allegory
• Part I Meaning and Genre
• Part II Meaning and Time–Space
• Part III Meaning and Spectacle
• Part IV Meaning and Magical Realism on Screen
• Epilogue Meaning as Allegory
• Afterword
• Index