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Commedia dell'Arte: characters, scenarios, and rhetoric

Natalie Crohn Schmitt
To cite this Article Schmitt, Natalie Crohn(2004) 'Commedia dell'Arte: characters, scenarios, and rhetoric', Text and
Performance Quarterly, 24: 1, 55 — 73
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/1046293042000239438
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Text and Performance Quarterly
Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2004, pp. 55–73
Commedia dell’Arte: Characters,

Scenarios, and Rhetoric
Natalie Crohn Schmitt
Downloaded By: [Romanian Ministry Consortium] At: 00:05 29 October 2010
Commedia dell’arte, performance improvised upon a scenario by itinerant Italian

professional players from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, has continued
to live on in memory primarily due to the extensive iconography of it. Commedia
dell’arte widely influenced the arts of the twentieth century. And presently a consider-
able number of performance groups are inspired by it. Increasingly scholars have
discovered and learned to make use of the extensive documentation of the commedia
dell’arte other than its iconography. I here review a new edition of commedia dell’arte
scenarios, two scholarly works, both of which set the form in a context of rhetoric, and
two new performance guides. Finally, I compare and contrast commedia dell’arte to
Chicago long-form improvisation.
Keywords: Commedia dell’arte; Improvisation; Scenarios; Rhetoric; Visual Art
Commedia dell’Arte, a form of theatre in which actors improvised upon a scenario

(a play synopsis), arose in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued until
the latter part of the eighteenth century. The form originated in Italy but itinerant
Italian troupes were popular throughout Europe. In his Italian Comedy (1924), a
book about commedia dell’arte, Pierre Duchartre exclaimed, “It is astonishing to
think, that, after more than three centuries of brilliant success and fame, the only
material remains of the commedia dell’arte should be a mere handful of dry and
brittle scenarios. Even as remnants they are disappointing, being, as it were, but a
little heap of ashes left from a great and spectacular fire” (50). Duchartre’s book, as
revised in 1929, is still in print in English translation in a reasonably priced
paperback. Because it consists primarily of a great deal of iconography from the
period showing commedia dell’arte characters and performance as well as detailed
descriptions of the characters, it is still widely used by students and performers. In
Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor Emerita Theater and English, University of Illinois at Chicago. She would
like to thank Maria Carrig for her very helpful reading of a draft of this essay. Correspondence to: Natalie
Crohn Schmitt, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of English (MC 162), College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences, 601 Morgan Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607–7120, USA. Email: nschmitt@uic.edu.
ISSN 1046–2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online)  2004 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/1046293042000239438
56 N. C. Schmitt
the popular imagination, Duchartre’s view of commedia dell’arte performance as
pure improvisation that, like fire, “magically appeared from nothing,” lives on
(Lawner 195).
In this review essay I call attention to an edition of 176 newly published commedia
dell’arte scenarios that makes a substantial body of commedia dell’arte’s “material
remains” readily available to scholars and performers alike. I examine the ways in
which two recent scholarly books resourcefully call attention to and make use of the
existing and various evidence about the specific nature of commedia dell’arte
performance. And I show the ways in which disregard for the material remains of
commedia dell’arte continues to affect two recent performance guides.
Commedia dell’arte, literally “comedy of professional players,” reached its height in
Italy between the late 1560s and the 1650s, its so-called golden age. Even before 1600
commedia dell’arte players had traveled widely. In France, an Italian troupe took up
residence for over fifty years. The form continued until about 1775, long after its
quality had declined or its identifying characteristics had all but disappeared. Depend-
ing on their fortunes, the professional troupes generally had about eight to ten
performers, each of whom played a half-masked stock character, like Pantelone or
Harlequin, or an unmasked lover, throughout his or her career. At least as early as
1564, female performers were present in unmasked roles. Robert Henke, in Perform-
ance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte, under review here, argues that it was
women who added lyrical and literary dimensions to the form (85–86).1 Naturally,
over the long period of its performance, more than 200 years, commedia dell’arte
troupes, of varying quality, kind, success, fame, and longevity, were subject to mergers,
separations, and collapses. The long-lived success of the form had to do with its ability
to accommodate the particulars of the various audiences and playing conditions:
nobility and commoners, indoors and out, at home and abroad. Improvisation allowed
performers to minimize their preparation time and optimize their chances to perform.
Commedia dell’arte influenced the work of such playwrights as Goldoni, Gozzi,
Shakespeare, and Molière, as well as directors Meyerhold and Copeau, the theatre
designer, Edward Gordon Craig, and choreographers Massine, Fokine, and Nijinski,
performers Charlie Chaplin and Dario Fo, the composer Stravinsky, and visual
artists Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Legere, Klee, Edward Hopper, and Joseph Cornell.
These are only some of the names one might list. The spate of recent books and the
wealth of contemporary performance groups claiming to be influenced by the
commedia dell’arte attest to a continuing, indeed growing, interest in the form.
In point of fact, the commedia dell’arte is better documented than many other
dramatic forms. In addition to a wealth of visual documentation showing the
performers, their masks, costumes, performance style, and sets, over 800 scenarios
are known to be extant. And there remain fragmentary lists indicating stage business,
published monologues, numerous accounts of performance, and documentation of
some of the activities of the major companies.
Scholars also believe that the Italian novella and published playscripts of the
commedia erudita, the learned comedy of the period, based on Greek and Roman
comedy, can tell us much about the commedia dell’arte, which was strongly
Commedia dell’Arte 57
influenced by both and which in turn influenced the written comedy. Some
commedia dell’arte actors published the set speeches of their characters. Many
troupes not only improvised but also collaborated in court and academic perfor-
mances and, like the players in Hamlet, performed scripts from a variety of genres.
A number of commedia dell’arte performers scripted tragedies, tragi-comedies, and
pastorals as well as comedies. Their activities make clear the strong relationship
between the Italian commedia dell’arte at its height and the written drama. Indeed,
in 1619 commedia dell’arte performer and director Flaminio Scala wrote and
published a play, Il finto marito, based on a scenario, Il marito, that he had published
in 1611. Both the script and the scenario tell essentially the same story through the
same events in the same order, although, consistent with the conventions of the
time, the play is in the classical five acts and the scenario in three.
The wealth of information that can tell us what commedia dell’arte performance
was like has only begun to be utilized. In 1911, Winifred Smith observed that “the
influence of the academies in determining the character of the popular Italian drama
in the Renaissance has been somewhat overlooked, because of the too sharp
distinction usually drawn between the commedia erudita and commedia dell’arte”
(561). Almost 100 years later that remains an understatement. In 1989 Louise George
Clubb could still write that the distinction between the literary drama and the
commedia dell’arte had been allowed “to grow out of its usefulness. … There lurks
a notion of commedia dell’arte as a gestural and choreographing medium not only
different from written drama but constitutionally antiliterary … and therefore quite
irrecoverable” (Italian Drama 249–50).
The reasons why the available evidence about the nature of performance has been
so overlooked and poorly understood are numerous. Many have tried to trace the
origins of commedia dell’arte. But these diacronic studies, Quellenstudien, concentrat-
ing on a precise linear transmission (which has never been established) have left
sychronic study, including the relationship of commedia dell’arte to the literature and
rhetorical traditions of the period, largely unexplored, resulting in an over-reliance
on the visual record. Until recently, theatre histories, in general, have been written
as if the only influence on theatre was previous theatre. Thus theatre scholars have
not been encouraged to look, as does Robert Henke, at commedia dell’arte and the
relationship between orality and literature in Renaissance culture in general.
Ironically, the very thing that initially reinvigorated scholarly and performance
interest in popular “folk” art, including commedia dell’arte, has negatively affected
the research on it. The Romantics celebrated the idea of a pure natural oral tradition,
a popular art, wholly separate from the artifice of the literary. The distinction
between low and high art, the oral and written, unscripted and scripted theatre,
theatrical and literary, and between actor and playwright has continued to be
exaggerated. Accordingly, the commedia dell’arte has been enshrined as a popular art
loaded with folkloric significance and drained of its other weight, “to impart a
carefree, spur-of-the-moment image of lightning inspiration in dance and mime,
presented as freedom and inventiveness in contrast with the slavery to authority and
pedantry charged against regular drama” (Clubb Italian Drama 250).
58 N. C. Schmitt
This distinction between the oral and the written continues to motivate and
profoundly influence the acting texts under examination here. John Rudlin wrote
commedia dell’arte performance guides, he says, in both Commedia dell’Arte: A
Handbook for Troupes, reviewed here, and in his previous Commedia dell’Arte: A
Handbook for Actors, in the conviction that the regeneration of theatre in this century
must come “‘via the re-empowering of the performer rather than the continued
hegemony of the playwright and director’” (Rudlin Actors xi qtd. in Rudlin and Crick
Troupes). He sees the originative improvising actor, as did those in the actor-com-
munes of the sixties and early seventies under the influence of Artaud’s dictum, “No
More Masterpieces,” as in opposition to the supposed actor-debilitating literary
drama.2 Barry Grantham, in Playing Commedia (reviewed here), distinguishes between
the “Written and Memorised” theatre in which the written word is memorised and
reiterated by the actor and that theatre “Spontaneously Improvised” by the actor (3).
Actually, this same distinction between the oral and written tradition was first
promulgated by the original actors themselves as a way of advertising the uniqueness
of their wares. Thus Evaristo Gherardi, who acted Arlecchino in France, wrote in 1700,
“the Italians are not actors who learn off texts; in performing a play it is sufficient
if they have read its subject shortly before they go out on the stage. … [A commedia
actor] composes what he performs even as he delivers it. …” (qtd. in translation in
Richards and Richards 204). In Flaminio Scala’s case the distinction also justified the
publication of his scenarios in 1611 as unique, while at the same time attempting to
disarm academic criticism of them as fully scripted plays.3
The very structure of the commedia dell’arte scenarios reinforces the idea that the
actors were freely improvising. The plots invariably rely heavily on coincidence and
accidental discovery; they may become so entangled that their resolution depends
upon a deux ex machina. The character of the wily servant, upon whose improvisations
the plot frequently turns, also enhances the impression that it was the actors
themselves who were spontaneously improvising.4 Students at the University of
Illinois at Chicago under my direction performed a scenario by Flaminio Scala
containing all these plot and character elements. Despite the fact that in the course
of rehearsal the students largely set their dialogue and actions, and, indeed, the ornate
dialogue of the lovers was scripted, many audience members, surprisingly, had the
impression that the performance was freely improvised anew each night.
The scenarios constitute the most extensive documentation of the commedia
dell’arte we have. Yet until quite recently, they have been disregarded as evidence,
primarily due to the marked division maintained between the commedia dell’arte and
literary forms. Uncertainty about the status of the scenarios has remained a stumbling
block, particularly for Italian scholars (Fitzpatrick 82–86). In the case of the 183
Casamarciano scenarios from late seventeenth-century Naples, the largest collection
of scenarios extant, we do not know why they were collected nor whether they
preceded production or memorialized it for a reading audience and thus served a
literary purpose. This stumbling block has been even greater with regard to, perhaps,
the best scenario source we have, the 50 published by the director playwright actor
Flamino Scala under the title Il Teatro delle Favole Rappresentative, the only
scenarios to have been published close to the time of their original performance. In
introducing their publication Scala and the famous actor Francesco Andreini
specifically make literary claims for them. As a consequence, the scenarios have been
seen as unreliable guides to the nature of commedia dell’arte performance precisely
because they were written and published with an eye to the reader and to gain
respectability for their author among the members of the literary academies.
The need to publish the scenarios left in manuscript form has not been seen as
pressing. Scenarios are not texts in any conventional sense and thus have not been
regarded as such by literary scholars. Only recently has the idea of a text expanded
enough so that it might include scenarios. And the scenarios are, on casual reading,
as mind-numbing as scenarios one reads at the opera. They consist of perhaps five
to ten pages of plot summary, a list of characters, sometimes a prologue contextual-
izing the action, and variously, a description of the setting, a list of properties,
descriptions of special costumes, stage directions, indications of the nature of what

is said, sometimes quite detailed, sometimes along with statements about the
motivation for what is said and done and the emotional state of the character at the
time, and, infrequently, along with bits of dialogue. Louise George Clubb has
persuasively argued that combinatory principles and a common repertory of
“theatregrams” (moveable units: figures, relationships, actions, sayings, and framing
patterns) constituted the common building blocks not only of the improvised drama
but of the scripted Italian and English drama, including Shakespeare’s (Italian
Drama passim).
The use and recombination of these theatregrams in scenarios makes one scenario
seem superficially pretty much like another. Moreover, the scenarios make use of a
range of different redactional methods. And they may contain dialectical expressions,
many entrances and exits, and complex double plots (generally very involuted in
order to accord with the unity of time and place dictated by the Italian critic
Castelvetro in 1570) that make them hard to follow. And, of course, they contain
little or no dialogue.
A representative comic Scala scenario, The Fake Magician, after the argument, lists
of characters and properties, begins as follows:
City of Rome:
ACT ONE
PANTALONE. [PEDROLINO.] Pantalone enters, and with Pedrolino, his servant,
he laments the sickness of Flaminia, his daugh-
ter—her belly is growing very large. Pedrolino
blames it on the stay in the country where they
vacationed and says it would be a good idea to
find her a husband; he proposes Oratio. Pan-
talone, in anger, says he would sooner drown her.
FLAVIO. Just then, Flavio appears, possessed; he talks to
himself and circles around Pantalone, saying,
“Your daughter will die;” and acting as one pos-
sessed to scare them, he leaves. Pantalone sends
Pedrolino for the physician. Pedrolino leaves.
Pantalone goes off.5
60 N. C. Schmitt
The typical practice relative to the scenarios has remained that of earlier literary
historians who disrupted texts by isolating elements from them rather than discover-
ing their structures. Thus, for instance, Mel Gordon provides a book of lazzi, in
which he defines a lazzo as a “discrete independent, comic and repeatable activity
that guaranteed laughs for participants”(5). Many of his examples are taken from the
Scala scenarios of which I know them to be an integral part. And Henry Salerno, in
an appendix to his English translation of the Scala scenarios, loots the scenarios to
show plot similarities between them and plays by French and English Renaissance
playwrights, particularly Shakespeare. In 1860, Maurice Sand presented two volumes
on commedia dell’arte consisting almost entirely of descriptions of the characters,
again out of context of the scenarios, whereas, more and more, scholars see the
characters as rather more scenario specific. This practice, of more or less letting the
famous characters stand for the whole of commedia dell’arte, so much influenced by
earlier literary practice together with the iconography representing the commedia
dell’arte, is continued by Barry Grantham and by John Rudlin in his Commedia
dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook, for which the book under review here, John Rudlin
and Olly Crick, Commedia dell’Arte: A Handbook for Troupes is intended, as Rudlin
tells us, as a companion (Rudlin and Crick xi).
For these reasons, together with the difficulties involved in transcribing the
manuscripts, most scenarios have remained in manuscript form. Only two complete
editions of commedia dell’arte manuscript sources were published in the whole of the
twentieth century (51 in Italian, and around 80 in their original French versions; Gli
scenarii Correr and Biancolelli Arlecchino a Parigi), and these quite recently (1996
and 1997, respectively). A few scenarios have been published in journals here and
there and Kathleen Lea published a first compilation of 25 of them in English
translation in 1934.6 A flawed edition of the Casamarciano scenarios, limited in
circulation, was published in 1988 (The Commedia dell’Arte in Naples 1: xv). The
only other published scenarios are Flaminio Scala’s, in 1611. In his introduction to
Henry Salerno’s translation of the Scala scenarios into English in 1967, Kenneth
McKee endorses the familiar notion that the scenario or “plot outline, such as it
was,” having “no artistic value,” was never looked upon as “worth saving” (xvi–xvii).
So much for Salerno’s translation and publication! And Salerno’s translation, still in
print, contains so many errors that it cannot serve as a reliable or even comprehen-
sible guide to scholarship or performance. No one has bothered to retranslate it.
No wonder, then, as Tim Fitzpatrick observes, that of the approximately 1000
secondary sources in Thomas Heck’s comprehensive bibliography of the commedia
dell’arte, only ten entries, or 1%, have anything to do with the analysis of scenarios,
and most of these involve discussion of their themes (Primary and Secondary
Literature 81).
Of the total 183 Casamarciano manuscripts of Naples, 1650–1700, Francesco
Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck have now published the 176
legible ones both in Italian and in English in The Commedia dell’Arte in Naples. In
her foreword to their edition, Nancy D’Antuono observes that the transcription and
publication of these scenarios more than doubles the number of scenarios available
in print to students and scholars (1: xv). The aim of Cotticelli, Heck, and Heck was
meticulous transcription and English translation. It required knowledge of the
Neapolitan dialect as well as of Italian and English. The edition contains an extensive
bibliography, copious notes, and, in the English version, parenthetical insertions
clarifying staging details. The expressed interest of the editors is to make the
scenarios available to performers as well as scholars. Anne Goodrich Heck observes
that the scenarios can serve not only as record of successful stage performances but
also as a point of departure for future revivals (1: 15). That is to say, she regards the
scenarios as both literature and as guides to oral performance. And rich guides they
appear to be. They specify the stage properties, entrances and exits, indicate day or
night, staging details, and cues for set speeches and lazzi (comic business). Further-
more, the original collection of these scenarios in Naples coincides with the
publication of Andrea Perrucci’s Dell’arte rappresentativa premeditata, ed all’ im-
provviso in 1699, also in Naples. I hope this means that the value of Perrucci’s work
as a contemporary comment on commedia dell’arte performance will be more highly
appreciated than it is, especially in conjunction with these scenarios. It would be
wonderful if Perrucci too were translated into English.
Of the evidence we have, Robert Henke in his fine 2002 book argues that scenarios
provide the best indication of the specific nature of commedia dell’arte performance.
The plot, to which the characters are subordinate, was, he argues, the soul of
commedia dell’arte improvisation. Henke acknowledges that the Scala scenarios are
a product of literary memorialization but, following the lead of Tim Fitzpatrick, he
nonetheless believes that both the internal and external evidence show them to be
valuable guides to commedia dell’arte performance. Far from regarding them as a
little heap of ashes, Henke argues that the Scala scenarios are sophisticated and
detailed dramaturgical machines. They provide clear insertion points for particular
kinds of set speeches and for music and dance. They list props, provide detailed
character sketches in their argument, and in some places non-verbal signs, and
sometimes even direct quotes.
Significantly, Henke establishes the scenarios as part of a culture in which both
oral and literate modalities were of roughly equal weight. They were thoroughly
permeable. In the early modern period “oral, scribal, and printed media fed in and
out of each other as part of a dynamic process of reciprocal interaction and mutual
infusion” (Fox 410). Even the least literate part of society was permeated by the
written word (Fox 50). At the same time, written communication was strongly
influenced by rhetoric. And the five parts of rhetoric, following classical precepts as
interpreted in the Renaissance, particularly memoria (techniques, like the use of
parallelism, assonance, puns, and stereotyped epithets) used to make speech memo-
rable for the audience and, as importantly, to aid the performer’s memory and actio
(the delivery of speech—including voice, gesture, and other supplements), clearly
establish rhetoric’s basis in orality. The aim of rhetoric, following Cicero, was to
teach, delight, and move. Thus the golden age scenarios, like Scala’s, as Winifred
Smith long ago pointed out, constituted moral debates. The topics of these debates
now seem so abstract and arid that we barely recognize their presence in the
62 N. C. Schmitt
scenarios as such: for instance, whether love without jealousy is possible, whether
distance increases or diminishes love, whether one loves by free choice or fate (Smith
562). The rhetorical tradition, as C. S. Lewis observed, “is the greatest barrier
between us and our ancestors. … The ‘beauties’ which they chiefly regarded in every
composition were those which we either dislike or simply do not notice. This change
of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them” (16).
Composition, both oral and written, consisted largely of the stitching together of
the learning of the period, the commonplaces, so called because people collected
them under certain categories or places and often memorized them.7 “When a theme
had to be expanded,” explains Joan Marie Lechner in a book on the commonplaces,
“the orator [or writer] would begin the mental process of hunting through the
places, ‘pulling out’ from this one or that one whatever was apropos for his subject;
then he would skillfully integrate the material he had collected into his ora-
tion”(151). Such redisposition of existing material and intertextuality was the

principal aim of literary composition in the Renaissance (Clubb Italian Drama 279).
Shakespeare’s works, for instance, contain 4684 proverbs and proverbial allusions
(Fox 132). Eloquence, or persuasive power and the near-allied copiousness, the
ability to discourse freely on many topics, were highly valued in both speech and
writing. Improvisation was not an anomaly, but a kind of oratory, based not on free
creation, but on invention, that is the re-collection, of what was already known. And
dialogue in oratory, pro and con thinking, was believed to be the means par
excellence for the development of rational thought (Gray 214, see also Sloane passim).
Its presentation was in a style that was, from our point of view, highly artificial.
“What distinguished commedia dell’arte improvisation from twenty-first century
‘improv groups,’” according to Henke, “is that both the form and language of the
speech genres were not everyday and conversational, but drew from specific literary
and cultural codes of the kind that could have been found in Renaissance common-
place books and would have been studied in the discipline of rhetoric …” (15).
For some time now, scholars have argued that the commedia dell’arte’s verbal
improvisation consisted to a considerable extent of the recitation of more or less set
speeches. Henke’s significant contribution is to situate this performance procedure
in its rhetorical context. Moreover, Henke argues for the acceptance of evidence in
letters and in pamphlets of “genealogies, testaments, laments, dream visions, bravure,
doctrinal poems, wedding poems, dialogues, and contrasti,” prognostications and
other kinds of utopian fantasies published by commedia dell’arte performers as very
like or representative of what the actors would have provided as set speeches in
performance (115). He argues that in the Scala scenarios there are obvious insertion
points for set pieces that often match well with the kinds of available speeches and
dialogs he cites.
Given the wealth of information provided by the Scala scenarios, then, we can go
a long way toward actually reconstructing their performance. Admittedly written
when the correspondence between the literary drama and the improvised was at its
height, between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Scala scenarios
reveal commedia dell’arte to be a very verbal drama. As Richards and Richards
observe, commedia dell’arte was “a vocally and physically disciplined theatre of

distinctly verbal and rhetorical emphasis. Its history is not just that of the ‘Masks’
and the improvised drama, which the iconographic tradition and many modern
accounts have tended to foreground”(10).
Various theories have been offered about why actors improvised. Improvisation
served to circumvent the memorization and rehearsal processes that a written script
required. It allowed performers to avoid counter-Reformation censorship and to
quickly adapt to various situations and places in Italy (a country of many dialects
rather than a common language) and to foreign countries. Further, commedia
dell’arte has to be seen in a context of various unscripted street performances and in
a culture in which oral performance, of all kinds, seemingly improvised, but based
largely on memorized commonplaces was very important. Baldesar Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier, 1528, provides detailed instructions for creating the illusion of
spontaneity—if necessary through careful rehearsal (Burke 51).8

The gap between the oral and literary drama may not be so great as it has seemed.
The dramatic script has always been unstable. It may have many versions. Often
changes in it are made over the life of a play’s performances by the playwrights (and
in the Renaissance these were often multiple), by editors, script doctors, censors,
directors, actors, and, in the Renaissance, also by the copyist, printer, and revisers.
Actors fail to learn, forget, deliberately change, or reinterpret lines. Directors cut
them, rearrange them, or set them in new contexts. The idea of authorial univocalty
for drama was constructed after the Renaissance. Only subsequent aesthetic codes,
neoclassicism, Romanticism, and naturalism/realism, stressed the individuality of the
creative artist, the playwright (or the director with a “concept”), or the actor (Wiles
165). Not until the nineteenth century did the profession of playwright, a person
who could make a living as a writer of plays rather than as an actor/investor, court
poet, or theatrical manager, even exist.
The assumption that a script was extensively rehearsed is incorrectly inferred from
modern practice. In the eighteenth century play rehearsals lasted two weeks. Little
time was spent on blocking or movement patterns. Typically, the brief rehearsal
period meant that on opening night actors were often still uncertain of their lines
and depended on improvisation. Actor innovations were usually not revealed until
the first performance (Brockett 257). Peter Thomson’s “cumulative impression after
a reading of hundreds of scenes in Elizabethan plays as scenes, is that very few of
them would have needed to be rehearsed at all. Positioning in the great formal scenes
is determined by precedence. Dialogues are conducted according to formula and can
be rehearsed informally, not least as an aid to memory for the two players. Comic
scenes are permitted the greater liberty of the clowns’ physical, as well as verbal,
improvisation. The onstage readjustment when additional characters enter is as
much a matter of daily habit as of convention for a company …” (325).
Because there are records of fines for missing commedia dell’arte rehearsals, we
know that there were rehearsals (Andrews 195). We do not know how many
scenarios a typically itinerant troupe might have had at any time in its repertoire. But
repetition of the scenarios in the repertoire surely meant that they were performed,
64 N. C. Schmitt
at least the parts of them that had proven successful, in more or less the same way
over time. The great wonder today at how actors improvised upon scenarios takes
the actors out of their context, one in which the orator was the ideal and
rhetoric—and the techniques it entailed including memorization—the humanist
passion and practice.
Meredith Chilton’s beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated, oversized Harlequin
Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture is principally about 139
mid-eighteenth century porcelain sculpture pieces inspired by the commedia dell’arte
now housed in the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. In less
able hands, a book on these charming figures might be no more than coffee table
decor. But from such unlikely matter Chilton has provided a highly reflective work
as carefully wrought as fine ceramics and highly illuminating both about the
porcelain figures and the commedia dell’arte. The figures have not previously been
considered as a source of information about commedia dell’arte.

The book begins with an informed up-to-date overview of commedia dell’arte by
a commedia dell’arte scholar, Domenico Pietropaolo. Then Chilton takes over with
chapters on the porcelain figures and commedia dell’arte costume, commedia dell’arte
gesture, commedia dell’arte in the court, and in masquerades.
From the theater scholar and performer’s points of view, and I restrict myself to
that, the most exciting chapter is the one on gesture, including hands, the placement
of feet, posture, and implied activity. We know from the iconography, and because
there were performances out-of-doors where it was difficult to hear and where there
were many aural distractions, sometimes including other kinds of street performers,
that gesture and movement were very important to commedia dell’arte. Also, part of
the humor of the commedia dell’arte depended on the various dialects of its
characters, not all of which were likely to have been comprehensible to its various
Italian dialect-speaking audiences and certainly not to audiences outside Italy. The
masked characters had the advantage of being easily identifiable everywhere but the
masks also required that the actors rely on their bodies as expressive means.
Those who have seen the iconography will remember the characteristic bow of
Pantelone and the endearing jauntiness of Harlequin. But Chilton is able to go much
further than such observations. The sculptures represent a period in commedia
dell’arte about 150 years later than the Scala scenarios—although some of the
sculptures may be based on considerably earlier iconography, examples of which are
shown in the book. The later date of the sculptures allows Chilton to utilize a
number of books by authors from the same period and somewhat later, on dance,
acting, oratory, and rhetoric. Chilton uses the dance books of the period to recover
the actual dances represented in the Harlequin and Columbine sculptures. And with
the aid of the books on acting, oratory, and rhetoric, Chilton precisely reads the
gestural language of the sculptures. So could much of the audience for these
porcelains and for the theatre they represented. Gesture was a language taught as
part of rhetoric. What becomes very clear, then, is that this gesture can be recovered
for recreation of commedia dell’arte performance.9 My own study of gesture in
medieval English iconography suggests that gesture does not change rapidly over
time (Schmitt “The Body in Motion”, “Continuous Narration”). Particularly in the

Renaissance when much of gesture was based on a rhetorical tradition that had
spread throughout Europe, there may be considerable continuity in it.
John Rudlin and Olly Crick’s book, Commedia dell’Arte: A Handbook for Troupes,
is, Rudlin says, a response to the financial success of Rudlin’s 1994 book, Commedia
dell’Arte: A Handbook for Actors, to my knowledge, the first such handbook. It is also,
Rudlin says, a response to a review of that first handbook that he quotes as follows,
“Rudlin offers this book as an introduction to the individual and group study of
commedia. It is to be hoped the main course arrives soon” (Rudlin and Crick xi).10
The earlier handbook consists of the familiar explanation of commedia dell’arte,
that is to say, primarily of its stock characters based, in the usual way, largely on the
iconography: the costumes, masks, props, and stances. The main language of the
“Masks,” the term Rudlin uses to refer to all the characters, was, he says, action.
Rudlin supplies the familiar inferences that might reasonably be made from the
iconography about the movement and gestures of the characters, of course, without
benefit of Chilton’s work. He provides brief improvisational exercises, monologues,
and dialogues for each of the characters. The most original part of the book is
Rudlin’s history of some of the most famous directors, actors, and groups in the
twentieth century to have been influenced by commedia dell’arte: among them,
Meyerhold, Copeau, Le Theatre du Soleil, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, and
Dario Fo.
Further than this the 1994 book does not go in the attempt to “give commedia
dell’arte back to the actor in the hope that it may again provide one of the base
languages of a theatrical lingua franca” (Rudlin, reiterating what he wrote in 1994,
qtd. in Rudlin and Crick xi). Rudlin dismisses the scenarios in five pages as “bare
bones” (Rudlin 51). He believes that “reconstructive attempts to play full-length
scenarios as if they had never gone out of fashion lead up a blind alley”(Rudlin 241).
He also dismisses the scenarios because “it takes all your time onstage to get the plot
over plus a few set-pieces: one becomes trapped into trying to make the story funny
rather than diverging from it ad libendum whenever the audience/actor relationship
stimulates a possibility for appropriate lazzi” (Rudlin 244).
What then should be the basis for the characters’ and actors’ interactions? Rudlin
does not say. Actors should use the commedia dell’arte figures as a starting point, but
“don’t mess with the Masks,” Rudlin concludes, “unless you already have your own
present-day political and artistic standpoint worked out. Otherwise they will suck
you into their own historicity rather than provide you with sharp comedic tools with
which to create modern meanings” (248). This is a depressing conclusion to a whole
book on commedia dell’arte because political and artistic standpoints invariably
follow from process, itself profoundly affected by the materials with which one
begins. That there are recent directors and performers who have used commedia
dell’arte to arrive at original aesthetically pleasing and political ends I know to be
true; I have seen the work, for instance, of El Teatro Campasino, The San Francisco
Mime Troupe, and Dario Fo. But Rudlin’s accounts of famous directors in the
twentieth century influenced by commedia dell’arte are not such that they help to
66 N. C. Schmitt
suggest what the aspiring performer might do with the seemingly culture-bound
commedia dell’arte characters he describes.
In the second book, Rudlin promises to take up the challenge to “provide the
main course,” the information about what performers might do together with their
commedia dell’arte Masks. But once again, he, and now Crick, sidestep the challenge.
Rather, the book begins with 50 pages on famous troupes that performed commedia
dell’arte in the seventeenth century. It moves on to 127 pages of documentation of
the histories of many contemporary groups and their travails.11 From this documen-
tation, valuable as it is in its own right, one still cannot get an idea of what to do
with the commedia dell’arte characters presented in the first book.
At the end, Rudlin and Crick finally provide a 60-page section on “forming a
troupe, training and performing.” The 25 pages of this devoted to scenes, the means
of actor interaction, give the impression of being padded. Seventeen pages of brief
practice scenes are set in large type, two scenes to a page, with dotted lines around
each—as if to suggest that these scenes might be cut from the book and distributed
as assignments: “impro cards,” they call them. The following scene, taking up half
a page, is representative: “Arlecchino pretends to be Petunia, the object of his
master’s affections, so that Flavio can practice the arts of courtship” (146). Far from
providing an example of a scene with a “modern meaning,” the authors give no
indication that the stereotyped female impersonation, the master/servant relation-
ship, and the covert homosexuality are all politically loaded and might not be seen
today as sources of humor at all. Some of the suggested scenes do introduce movies
or Disneyland but these hardly imply any updated “political and artistic standpoint”:
Pedrolino and another comic servant “want to go to Disneyland, but can’t afford it.
Instead they create it for each other” (149).
Unlike the first book, which provides a bibliography of works on commedia
dell’arte in English, the new book contains no bibliography. Its endnotes make clear,
however, that Rudlin and Crick are familiar with the scholarship on commedia
dell’arte in English from the 1990s. In the first book, Rudlin asserts that the
commedia dell’arte actor was free of the literary man and that the actor today,
attempting to perform commedia dell’arte can be as well (262). That freedom is
explicitly the source of Rudlin’s interest in the form. But the scholarship from the
1990s emphasizes the relationship between the literary and oral traditions and the
importance of the scenario. Thus it severely challenges Rudlin’s ideal of the
performer and is a far cry from his original assertion that “in the end, or rather the
beginning, the only way to learn to play Commedia is to go outside, put on a mask,
stand on a box and give it a try” (Rudlin 48).
In an attempt to accommodate the scholarship, Rudlin and Crick mention in
passing that “emanating as they do from a literary past” all the roles, except those
of the servants, and, moreover, the prologue will eventually have to be scripted and
rehearsed (182, 139). “There was not anything like as much improvisation in a
traditional commedia dell’arte performance as the modern predilection for ‘impro’
might lead us to suppose. In commedia dell’arte nearly all the elements used were
‘stock’ and simply applied as needed to different scenarios” (Rudlin and Crick 171).
The idea of scripted roles, so antithetical to Rudlin’s motivating idea of the actor free
of the “hegemony of the playwright,” is, not surprisingly, no further developed.
Further confronted with the scholarship and with the challenge to inform the
reader about what it is the characters might actually do in relationship with one
another, Rudlin and Crick now write, “It must never be forgotten that all worthwhile
scenarios and canovacci [plots] have a dramatic story at their core, as with all
conventional plays, and that is the reason audiences stay to watch.” (173). Nonethe-
less, apparently clinging to the initial premise of the centrality of the character and
the freedom of the actor from the playwright, they relegate scenario writing to a
ten-page appendix along with appendices on masks, stage building, backdrops,
costumes, and songs, and dances. In ten pages their recommendations cannot begin
to suggest what is involved in sophisticated plot construction. Scala’s scenarios, for
instance, have repeated motifs, parallel structuring, rapidly contrasting scenes,
sudden changes in emotion, lazzi inherent to the action, a logical and typically
complicated set of causally related circumstances, and inherent moral debates.12
It might seem that Barry Grantham’s Playing Commedia: A Training Guide to
Commedia Techniques should not be subject to the same standards as Rudlin and
Crick’s handbook because Grantham’s interest in commedia dell’arte is simply as the
jumping-off point for “all types of physical and stylized theatre” that he calls simply
“Commedia” (5). His single specific example, however, is commedia dell’arte. He
ought to have begun with a caveat. While commedia dell’arte utilized masks, music,
gesture, dance, and even acrobatics, and surely varied in kind and quality from
troupe to troupe and over its long life, since at least the late 1980s scholars have
seen it as a primarily verbal theatre. And they have observed how much the
situations, moral debates, characters, language, and even the intervention of divine
providence in the commedia dell’arte realistically represented the culture, beliefs,
and values of which it was a part. And it is well to remember that commedia dell’arte
was not restricted to comedy but also provided tragedies, tragicomedies, and
pastorals.
Grantham’s own suggestions for “physical and stylized theatre” are highly imagin-
ative and, I think, would be great fun to employ in various kinds of comic
performance. He provides, for instance, an exercise in which a zanni, or comic
servant, might lean in a different direction for each phrase of a speech (54). Inspired
by a period picture of Arlecchino, he suggests what he calls “tapis walks” to give the
effect of being on a moving carpet, small rhythmic steps with the knees held
together, heels first, toes turned up. These are to be made on counts with the head
facing first one way and then another on various of the counts (57). There are
imaginative ideas for rib-cage movements, wrist swivels, head ducks, word games,
and much more. These training drills are followed by 120 pages of suggestions for
playing the individual commedia dell’arte “Masks.” Here Grantham slips too easily
between scholarship and his own performance experience, and his fine fabrication,
and romantic ideas about the commedia dell’arte. Grantham is, he says, inspired
primarily by the iconography, hence his familiar focus exclusively on the characters
and on the physical. He believes that the pictures “give us greater insight into how
68 N. C. Schmitt
the players performed than a mass of description and information even from the
players themselves (259).” “The actor makes up the dialogue and develops the drama
before the eyes and ears of the paying public and it is for a ‘once only’ occasion,”
he tells us (14). It is no wonder then that Grantham provides a commedia dell’arte
bibliography that, apart from Rudlin’s 1994 book and one book from 1978, is at least
35 years out-of-date. And like Rudlin and Crick, he provides no sense of how the
commedia dell’arte characters might be updated to provide “new commedia.”
In Chicago, where I live, there is a kind of theatre that is a genuine actors’ theatre
and that, unlike commedia dell’arte, is wholly improvised anew at each performance.
While lacking the appeal of commedia dell’arte’s masked characters and their stock
antics, and direct address to the audience, it does provide the excitement of
something made from nothing that commedia dell’arte performance once seemed to
promise. This kind of theatre is called long-form improvisation and Chicago, where
it was developed, continues to be the center for it, although it can now be seen in
other parts of the country as well. Given the sizeable community of its participants
and audiences, the form calls for more scholarly attention than it has received.13 At
any week in Chicago alone, one can see over twenty performances of this kind of
improvisation. Although Second City, the improvisational group for which Chicago
is best known, has occasionally worked with this form, its stock in trade is short skits
improvised and then set in rehearsal. At the present time there are also a dozen
performances in Chicago of this kind, as well as audience interactive pieces that
depend to some extent on improvisation.14 Chicago is a city rife with various kinds
of improvised performance.
Chicago’s long-form improvisation is generally based on audience suggestion and
consists of a combination of wholly improvised scenes and theatre games less linearly
and logically related than the parts of a commedia dell’arte scenario. It achieves its
more contemporary unity through an interweave of more freely associated ideas,
characters, and plot lines. It uses neither scenarios, nor established characters, but
rather consists of extended improvisation of everything, sometimes even including
original songs, in rhyme, accompanied by improvising musicians. It is a primarily
verbal theatre but because its performers, usually eight to ten in a troupe, may enact
scenery, props, and sound effects, as well as characters, it can become extremely
physical and “stylized.” Performers, in fact, frequently utilize and satirize particular
period or contemporary styles in their work. No performer is restricted to the
playing of a single character, period, or style, even within a single performance. As
much as or more than commedia dell’arte, this is technologically “poor theatre.” It
relies on the actors to convey the periods, costumes, settings, and styles.
The troupes rapidly dispel the idea, now accepted by commedia dell’arte scholars,
that improvisation can only take place between two people or, if more than that, two
points of view, generally with one person taking the initiative. It shows that a
number of people can learn to perform at once and with more than two points of
view expressed. For unlike commedia dell’arte, which is based on debate, Chicago’s
long-form improvisation is based on total agreement, referred to as “Yes, and.”
Every performer must accept as real and build on whatever anyone else has initiated.
Thus the form, unlike commedia dell’arte, does not usually accommodate direct
address to the audience, meta-commentary, nor set speeches and lazzi.
The performers of long-form improvisation are within audience view at all times,
attentively watching and listening to the performance. This extreme attentiveness to
where every other performer is and what they are doing lets the actors enter the
action in any capacity at any time. In this the actors dispel another idea about
improvisation present in scholarship on commedia dell’arte: that it is difficult for
more than two people to arrange themselves on the stage without pre-established
blocking.
In performance, the improvising group tries to establish the “group mind,” a sense
of the group as an entity with a mind of its own. This, and the “high” the actors
claim results from the “group mind,” not comedy, is the goal. But while there is
occasionally serious long-form improvisation, like commedia dell’arte, it is mostly
comic.
Until recently the performance groups have been largely male, white, heterosexual,
and urban and so has their point of view and subject matter. This they have in
common with the commedia dell’arte. The homogeneity resulting from the group
mind has not always been one with which women, gay, and minority performers
have been comfortable. And their expressed unease has led to more integrated
groups as well as all female, gay, Latino, Asian, and African-American groups.
The performers, like the audience, are almost always young and the references are
generally to middle-class popular culture, although one group, the Free Associates,
parodies literary works.15 One group, the Annoyance Theatre, offers performances as
obscene and scatological as anything suggested by some of the commedia dell’arte
iconography. In no case does the speech reflect anything of the rhetorical tradition
of the Renaissance.
I have suggested the ways in which the recent scholarship on commedia dell’arte
cannot be welcome news for those who seek to find in commedia dell’arte a
movement-based theatre free from a text. On the other hand, an important message
to take away from the study of Renaissance drama and performance is that the
hegemony of the playwright and director, which Rudlin and Crick, and Grantham
write to resist, did not exist in the Renaissance. The scenarios are texts that cannot
continue to be overlooked. The actors were not subservient to them but they did
depend on them. The scenarios, at least the Scala scenarios, published when
commedia dell’arte was at its height, are a rich source of information about and
guidelines for their performance. They reveal a strong correlation between the
scripted and the improvised drama. They also suggest a commedia dell’arte im-
meshed with the Renaissance rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric relied not only on
eloquence, specific methods of delivery, including gestures, techniques for memo-
rization, and for making speech memorable, but above all, on invention, that is to
say, primarily, on the collection of existing material, and then of its redisposition. It
was not free creation.
Of course, like the original commedia dell’arte actors, contemporary performers
are free to take their inspiration from any sources they wish and to use them in any
70 N. C. Schmitt
way they choose, even when those choices entail limited understanding of the
sources. It would be wonderful for performers and scholars alike, however, should
some troupes choose to produce CD-ROMS of period-specific gestures and relevant
dances. And I hope that performers will take up Thomas Heck’s challenge to
perform the Casamaraciano scenarios (Cotticelli, Heck, and Heck 4). Thomas Heck
reports that the I Sebastiani Troupe in Boston has already begun to do so (on ASTR
ListServe; see “Commedia dell’arte—more scenarios”). Heck suggests that it would
be valuable to be able to compare the productions of two different troupes working
independently, and presumably faithfully, on the same scenario (Cotticelli, Heck,
and Heck 4). It would be useful also to learn the extent to which these scenarios, like
the Scala scenarios, provide indications for particular kinds of set speeches and lazzi,
the extent to which particular kinds of lazzi are integral to the plot, the extent to
which the blocking can be determined from the scenarios, the extent to which the
characters are scenario specific, and whether the scenarios entail moral debates. If the
current scholarship diminishes the Romantic interest in commedia dell’arte repre-
sented in my opening quote from Duchartre, I hope it will ignite a new one fueled
not only by the characters but also by the scenarios and the rhetoric of the period.
Notes
[1] Anne MacNeil, in Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century,
which came out too recently for consideration here, argues this same point in considerable
detail.
[2] For argument that, in fact, a script serves to empower the actor, see Richard Hornby.
[3] Anne MacNeil believes that the scenarios in Scala’s collection were probably those of the
Gelosi troupe with whom Scala performed, written collaboratively with its members, and
published only after the troupe had disbanded and consequently no longer needed to fear
their theft by other troupes (MacNeil 30). Indeed, their publication might have served to
preempt such theft.
[4] Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero call attention to the importance of “virtu” in Italian
Renaissance culture and in the scripted drama of the period. It is a combination of cleverness
and skill, reason and cunning that made one man superior to another (xxi). Pedrolino, the
wily servant in the scenarios of Flaminio Scala, frequently shows this quality in abundance.
[5] Translation by David Harwell.
[6] Louise George Clubb points out that Lea’s book title, The Italian Popular Comedy,
inadvertently perpetuates the oral/literary drama distinction (“The State of the Arte” 263).
[7] For the Renaissance art of memory as it was related literally to places see, of course, Frances
Yates, The Art of Memory.
[8] Peter Burke observes that “speaking was an art, a kind of performance. …” In elite culture
at least “speech—and its accompanying gestures—were of crucial importance in the
presentation of self, and every word was part of a performance …” (80–81). In Castiglione’s
book on good behavior, set in dialogue like a play, much space is devoted to speech,
including jokes. One part is devoted to practical jokes—in effect, lazzi. The translator,
George Bull, comments that hardly a page of this elegantly written book is without “bold
plagiarism from Plato, Plutarch, Cicero or Livy” and its subject matter is largely common-
place for the period (13).
[9] For an amusing representation, with photographic demonstrations, of the extent to which
Italian is still a gestural language, see Cangelosi and Carpini.
[10] Rudlin cites only the source of the review: Theatre Research International, 20.2 [1995]: 165.
The reviewer was Gerard Flanagan.
[11] On their website, the I Sebastiani troupe in Boston tries to keep track of and, insofar as they
are familiar with various American commedia dell’arte groups, provide limited accounts of
them.
[12] Usually, the complex pattern of intrigue is built on compounded mistakes, or error, as the
fourth-century Donatus would have it. Its theme, on which variations are intertwined, serves
to strengthen its unity.
[13] The only scholarly work to date is Amy E. Seham’s. This book provides a good history of
Chicago long-form improvisation with a focus on its sexism and racism and the struggle
against them. For more on the form, originated by Del Close together with Charna Halpern,
see Halpern et al., also Koslowski.
[14] For instance, the audience-interactive works Flanagan’s Wake and Late Night Catechism
originated in Chicago—and have played here for eight and eleven years, respectively.
[15] The performers and audience for The Compass Players, the first improvisational group in
Chicago and forerunner to Second City, had University of Chicago ties at a time when the
University had a strong Great Books program and many of the references made by the
performers were highly intellectual and sometimes political.
References
Andrews, Richard. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Biancolelli, Domenico. Arlecchino a Parigi: Lo scenario di Domenico Biancolelli. Ed. Delia Gambelli.
Rome: Bulzoni, 1997.
Brockett, Oscar G., with Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999.
Burke, Peter. The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Cangelosi, Don, and Joseph Delli Carpini. Italian without Words. New York: Meadowbrook
Press/Simon & Shuster, 1989.
Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. and with an introduction by George Bull.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976.
Clubb, Louise George. Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1989.
—. “The State of the Arte in the Andreini’s Time.” Studies in the Italian Renaissance: Essays in
Memory of Arnolfo B. Ferruolo. Ed. Gian Paolo Biasin, Albert N. Mancini, and Nicholas J.
Perella. Naples: Societa Editrice Napoletana, 1985. 263–281.
Duchartre, Pierre Louis. The Italian Comedy. Trans. Randolph T. Weaver. New York: Dover, 1966.
Fitzpatrick, Tim. The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes in the Commedia
dell’Arte: Beyond the Improvisation/Memorisation Divide. Lewiston, NY/Queenston, Ontario,
Canada/Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.
Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Gianetti, Laura, and Guido Ruggiero, ed. and trans. Five Renaissance Comedies. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2003.
Gli scenari Correr: La commedia dell’arte a Venezia. Ed. Carmelo Alberti. Rome: Bulzoni, 1996.
Gordon, Mel. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Performing Arts
Journal, 1983.
Gray, Hanna H. “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence.” Renaissance Essays from the
Journal of the History of Ideas. Ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener. New York:
Harper & Row, 1968. 199–216. Originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIV
(1963): 497–515.
72 N. C. Schmitt
Halpern, Charna, Del Close, and Kim “Howard” Johnson. Truth in Comedy: The Manual of
Improvisation. Colorado Springs, Colorado: Meriwether Publishing, 1994.
Heck, Thomas F. Commedia dell’Arte: A Guide to the Primary and Secondary Literature. New
York/London: Garland, 1988.
—. “Commedia dell’arte—more scenarios,” Theatre History Discussion List. American Society for
Theatre Research ListServe. 25 Nov. 2002.
Hornby, Richard, “Forgetting the Text: Derrida and the ‘Liberation’ of the Actor,” New Theatre
Quarterly 8 (2002): 355–58.
Kozlowski, Rob. The Art of Chicago Improv: Short Cuts to Long-form Improvisation. Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann, 2002.
Lawner, Lynne. Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts. New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1998.
Lea, Kathleen M. Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620, with a
Special Reference to the English Stage. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1934.
Lechner, Joan Marie. Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces: An Historical Investigation of the
General and Universal Ideas Used in All Argumentation and Persuasion with Special Emphasis
on the Educational and Literary Tradition of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New
York: Pageant, 1962.
Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.
MacNeil, Anne. Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2003.
Perucci, Andrea. Dell’arte rappresentativa premedita ed all’improvviso. 1699. Ed. Anton Giulio
Bragaglia. Florence: Sansoni, 1961.
Richards, Kenneth and Laura Richards. The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Rudlin, John. Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook. London: Routledge, 1994.
Sand, Maurice. Masques et Bouffons (comedie italienne): teste et dessins. 2 vol. Pictures by A.
Manceau. Preface by George Sand. Paris: Micel Leve freres, 1860. Translated into English
as History of the Harlequinade. 2 vol., omitting the preface and avant-propos and 34 of the
50 plates. London: M. Secher, 1915. No translator’s name provided.
Scala, Flaminio. Il Teatro delle favole rappresentative. 1611. Translated as Scenarios of the Commedia
dell’Arte: Flaminio Scala’s Il Teatro delle favole rappresentative. 1967. Trans. Henry F.
Salerno. Foreword by Kenneth McKee. New York: Limelight, 1989.
—. Il finto marito. 1619. Reprinted in Commedi dia comici dell’arte. Ed. Laura Falavolti. Torino:
Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1982. 221–365.
Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. “The Body in Motion in the York Adam and Eve in Eden.” Gesture in
Medieval Drama and Art. Ed. Clifford Davidson. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute
Publications, 2001. 158–77.
—. “Continuous Narration in the Holkham Bible and Queen Mary’s Psalter.” Word and Image, 20
(2004): 123–37.
Seham, Amy E. Whose Improv is It Anyway: Beyond Second City. Jackson: U of Mississippi P,
2001.
Sloane, Thomas. On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric. Washington, DC: Catholic
UP, 1997.
Smith, Winifred. “The Academies and the Popular Italian Stage in the Sixteenth Century.” Modern
Philology 9 (1911): 561–70.
Thomson, Peter. “Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama.” A New History
of Early English Drama. Ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP,
1970. 321–35.
Wiles, David, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1987.
Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.
Books Reviewed
Commedia dell’Arte: A Handbook for Troupes. By John Rudlin and Olly Crick. London/New York:
Routledge, 2001; pp. ix–251. $75; Paper $25.95.
The Commedia dell’Arte in Naples: A Bilingual Edition of the 176 Casamarciano Scenarios, 2
volumes. Translated and edited by Francsco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas
F. Heck. Lanham/Maryland/London: Scarecrow Press, 2001, volume 1, pp. xi–563; volume
2, pp. xi–569. $99.50.
Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture. By Meredith Chilton with
an essay by Domenico Pietropaolo. New Haven/London: The George R. Gardiner Museum
of Ceramic Art with Yale University Press, 2001; pp. vii–368. $65.00.
Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte. By Robert Henke. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002; pp. xi–251. $60.00.
Playing Commedia: A Training Guide to Commedia Techniques. By Barry Grantham. London: Nick
Hern, 2000; pp. vii–272. $21.95.

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This article was downloaded by: [Romanian Ministry Consortium]

On: 29 October 2010

Text and Performance Quarterly

Commedia dell'Arte: characters, scenarios, and rhetoric

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Commedia dell’Arte: Characters,

Commedia dell’arte, performance improvised upon a scenario by itinerant Italian

Keywords: Commedia dell’arte; Improvisation; Scenarios; Rhetoric; Visual Art

Commedia dell’Arte, a form of theatre in which actors improvised upon a scenario

ISSN 1046–2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online)  2004 National Communication Association

descriptions of special costumes, stage directions, indications of the nature of what

tion”(151). Such redisposition of existing material and intertextuality was the

observe, commedia dell’arte was “a vocally and physically disciplined theatre of

spontaneity—if necessary through careful rehearsal (Burke 51).8

considered as a source of information about commedia dell’arte.

time (Schmitt “The Body in Motion”, “Continuous Narration”). Particularly in the

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