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COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE SCENARIOS
Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios g athers together a collection of scenarios from some

of the most important commedia dell’arte manuscripts, many of which have
never been published in English before.
Each script is accompanied by an editorial commentary that sets out its
historical context and the backstory of its composition and dramaturgical
strategies, as well as scene summaries and character and properties lists. These
supplementary materials not only create a comprehensive picture of each script’s
performance methods but also offer a blueprint for readers looking to perform
the scenarios as part of their own study or professional practice.
This collection offers scholars, performers, and students a wealth of original
performance texts that bring to life one of the most foundational performance
genres in world theatre.
Sergio Costola is Associate Professor of Theatre at Southwestern University,

Georgetown, Texas.
COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
SCENARIOS
Edited by Sergio Costola in collaboration

with Olly Crick
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sergio Costola; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Sergio Costola to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-60838-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-60836-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10067-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003100676
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of figures viii

Acknowledgments x
Preface xii
Notes on the translation xviii
PART I
An introduction to commedia dell’arte 1
Introduction: the dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte 3

Sergio Costola
The secret of the commedia dell’arte 3
The birth of commedia dell’arte 6
The companies and their composition 7
The stock characters of the commedia dell’arte 13
The scenarios of the commedia dell’arte 16
The generici or zibaldoni 21
The lazzo 23
The folds of the commedia dell’arte 25
Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the commedia dell’arte 31
The Madness of Orlando. Opera eroica rappresentativa
(Locatelli collection) 39
Orlando’s madness. Opera reale (Corsiniana collection) 59
vi Contents
PART II
The collections of scenarios 77
1 Abagaro Frescobaldi, Codex II-1586 (Madrid,

Real Biblioteca) 79
Sergio Costola in collaboration with Olly Crick
Primary text 80
Recent editions and translations 81
The Three Cuckolds (I tre becchi)– canovaccio 82
Two Crazy People (Doi pazzi)– canovaccio 86
Perseus (Perseo)– canovaccio 89
2 Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (Venice, 1611) 96

Primary text 98
The Jealous Old Man (Il Vecchio Geloso)–comedy 99
The Husband (Il Marito)–comedy 109
The Tooth-Puller (Il Cavadente)–comedy 119
The Mirror (Lo Specchio)–comedy 129
The Madness of Isabella (La pazzia d’Isabella)–comedy 139
3 Raccolta di scenari più scelti d’histrioni divisi in due volumi.

Codices 651 and 652, manuscripts 45.G5 and 45.G6
(Rome, Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale dei
Lincei e Corsiniana) 153
Primary text 155
Elisa Alii Bassà (Elisa Alii Bassà)–Turkish opera 156
The Nobility of Bertolino (La nobiltà di Bertolino)–
Tragicomedy 161
The Enchanted Fount (Il fonte incantato)–Pastoral 164
4 Basilio Locatelli, Della scena de Soggetti comici et tragici di

B. L. R. Manuscripts 1211 and 1212 (Rome, Biblioteca
Casanatense) 171
Primary text 173
Contents vii
Zanni Puts on Airs (Le grandezze di Zanni)–Tragicomedy 174

The Two Look-Alikes by Plautus (Li duo simili di Plauto)–
Comedy 185
A Comedy Within a Comedy (La commedia in commedia)–
Comedy 194
5 Ciro Monarca, Dell’opere regie. Manuscript 4186 (Rome,

Biblioteca Casanatense) 204
Primary text 205
The Thunderstruck Atheist (L’ateista fulminato) 207
6 Anonymous Manuscript Correr. Manuscript 1040 (Venice,

Museo Correr) 218
Primary text 220
The Honest Courtesan (La cortigiana onesta)–Comedy 221
The Three Captains (Tre Capitani)–Comedy 228
7 Gibaldone [. . .] Manuscripts XI.AA.40 and 41. (Naples,

Biblioteca Nazionale) 236
Primary text 237
Pulcinella in Love (Pulcinella innamorato) 238
Arcadia Enchanted (Arcadia incantata) 242
The Lady as Pulcinella (Donna Zanni) 251
Bibliography 260
Index 269
FIGURES
I.1 Scheme of a typical scenario 8

I.2 Parts and roles: Elizabethan theatre 14
I.3 Parts and roles: commedia dell’arte 15
I.4 Image from the frontispiece to the scenario La nobiltà di
Bertolino. Tragicommedia in the Raccolta di scenari piú scelti
d’Istrioni (Manoscritti, 45 G6, c. 18r) housed in the Biblioteca
dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana 36
I.5 Image of the title page of the Raccolta di scenari piú scelti d’Istrioni
(Manoscritti, 45 G5) housed in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia
Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana 60
I.6 Image of the title page to the scenario La Gran Pazzia d’Orlando.
Opera reale in the Raccolta di scenari piú scelti d’Istrioni (Manoscritti,
45 G5, c. 1r) housed in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale
dei Lincei e Corsiniana 61
I.7 Image from the frontispiece to the scenario La Gran
Pazzia d’Orlando. Opera reale in the Raccolta di scenari piú scelti
d’Istrioni (Manoscritti, 45 G5, c. 2r) housed in the Biblioteca
dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana 62
I.8 Image of Act One of the scenario La Gran Pazzia d’Orlando.
45 G5, c. 3r) housed in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia
I.9 Image of Act Two of the scenario La Gran Pazzia d’Orlando.
45 G5, c. 3v) housed in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia
Figures ix
I.10 Image of Act Three of the scenario La Gran Pazzia d’Orlando.

45 G5, c. 4r) housed in the Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale
dei Lincei e Corsiniana 69
I.11 Image of the list of characters and properties of the scenario
La Gran Pazzia d’Orlando. Opera reale in the Raccolta di scenari
piú scelti d’Istrioni (Manoscritti, 45 G5, c. 4v) housed in the
Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana 71
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the result of a long and multifaceted journey that took me to differ-
ent countries on both sides of the Atlantic and that began in 2006, while I was
collaborating as Resident Dramaturg with the Leon Katz Rhodopi International
Theater Laboratory (RITL) in Smolyan, a small city in the Bulgarian Rhodopi
mountains, where students and artists from all over the world used to gather each
summer (2005–2012). There I had the pleasure to meet Alexander Lubenov Iliev,
at the time Associate Professor at the National Academy in Sofia. An expert in
movement traditions from around the world, Alexander Iliev has been an incred-
ible mentor and supporter of my work. Using commedia dell’arte masks and
techniques, we collaborated on the production of a series of pieces, all performed
at the Rhodopi Dramatichen Teatar: The Virgin and the Unicorn (2007), Aristo-
phanes’ The Birds (2008), Orlando Furioso (2010), and Hypatia (2011). In addition,
Alexander Iliev, Tania Karbova, and I also collaborated on the creation of a com-
media dell’arte workshop that was offered in 2008 at the Rhodopi Dramatichen
Teatar, and in 2010 at the National Academy in Sofia and at the Vassil Indzhev
Soring Laboratory in Ruse, a city on the border between Bulgaria and Romania.
A few years later, I also began my archival research in Italy, where I had the
pleasure to consult a variety of scenario collections from different manuscripts
at libraries such as the Casanatense and Corsiniana in Rome and the National
Library in Naples. I am especially grateful to Andrea Dibitonto and Giovanni
Fraioli at the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome for their precious help.
During the same years, I also had the opportunity to share my work at a series
of conferences (The International Conference on Commedia dell’Arte at the
University of Windsor, Windsor Canada, 2013; The Sixteenth Century Soci-
ety and Conference, New Orleans, 2014; The Global Improvisation Initiative
Symposium at the UC Irvine and Chapman University 2017), where I either
attended insightful paper presentations or received useful feedback from various
Acknowledgments xi
colleagues: Claudia Wier, Joan Schirle, Nikole Pascetta, Katrien van Beurden,
Giulia Filacanapa, Carlo Boso, Javier Berzal de Dios, and Erica Stevens Abbitt.
I am the primary writer of this volume, but Olly Crick has also contributed
in a substantial way. While working individually on our own projects, Olly
and I have constantly collaborated on each other’s volumes since we first met at
the Global Improvisation Initiative Symposium. Olly and I are truly grateful to
Nikole Pascetta for organizing the panel “Improv(is)ing Interculturality through
Five Centuries of Commedia dell’Arte” and for bringing all of us together.
My work at RITL with my students, my archival research, and my attendance
at national and international conferences have all been made possible through
numerous grants and awards by the generous support of my institution, South-
western University in Georgetown, Texas. My appreciation goes to my col-
leagues, past and present, of the Theatre Department: Desiderio Roybal, Kerry
Bechtel, John Ore, CB Goodman, Kathleen Juhl, Rick Roemer, and Paul Gaff-
ney. A special thanks goes to my colleague and friend Michael Saenger, whose
help with editing and content was instrumental for the completion of this book.
All translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own, with the exception of
the passages by German-speaking scholars, for which I would like to thank Joyce
Crick.
PREFACE
This book offers a selection of newly translated commedia dell’arte scenarios

from some of the most important Italian manuscript collections – most of which
are currently unavailable in the English language – and presents a diachronic anal-
ysis of commedia dell’arte dramaturgical practices. Each single collection and
scenarios are preceded by introductions offering a brief historical contextualiza-
tion and a bibliography. The general introduction to the anthology serves instead
the purpose of introducing the reader to the most recent trends in commedia
dell’arte scholarship, with a particular emphasis on the books published in the
Italian and English languages. It also addresses, among other things, the history
of the term ‘commedia dell’arte’; a brief survey of the first companies and their
composition; the format and dramaturgy of the scenarios; and, to conclude, an
analysis of the relationship between commedia dell’arte and the Baroque culture,
with specific references to two scenarios based on Ludovico Ariosto’s famous
poem Orlando Furioso.
There has been no edition of commedia scenarios from various collections
to date in the English language: the editions of Flaminio Scala’s scenarios edited
by Henry Salerno (1967) and Richard Andrews (2008) refer mainly to the one
collection, as does the bilingual edition of the Casamarciano scenarios, edited by
Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck (2001). Nata-
lie Crohn-Schmitt’s recent partial edition of the Scala collection (2014) again
focuses on the one source. The only similar book is the one edited by Anna
Maria Testaverde (2007), which is available only in the Italian language.
Roberto Cuppone (2001), in his “Appendix. Overview of the main known
collections of scenarios” (136–138), lists about twenty known collections: the
first one, dated 1568, is not properly speaking a collection, since it contains only
a single scenario and is part of a work by Massimo Troiano meant to describe
the entertainments organized for the wedding between William V, Duke of
Preface xiii
Bavaria, and Renata of Lorraine, which took place in Munich on 22 February

1568. The last collection listed by Cuppone, Luigi Riccoboni’s Discorso della com-
media all’improvviso (1743), showcases, among other things, six scenarios. We have
decided to select seven collections for this anthology, chosen primarily on the
basis of their importance in the evolution of the genre and also for the conspicu-
ous number of scenarios therein contained – from the forty-eight contained in
the Ciro Monarca collection to the 183 contained in the Casamarciano collec-
tion. The first three chapters offer a selection of scenarios from the oldest known
collections that most probably belonged to professional actors. Chapter 1 presents
the translation of three scenarios from the Zibaldone compiled between 1574 and
1580 by the actor Abagaro Frescobaldi, better known as Stefanelo Botarga, who
toured throughout Spain as the Magnifico of the Zan Ganassa troupe (Ferrone
2014: 300–302). This is the oldest known collection of materials compiled by a
professional actor, and its scenarios present clearly identifiable borrowings from
the regular Italian comic, pastoral, and tragic dramaturgy (Testaverde 2007:
xxxi). Chapter 2 contains the translation of five of the scenarios contained in
the collection written by Flaminio Scala and printed in Venice in 1611. Scala,
himself a professional actor who used to perform the young innamorato under
the name Flavio, was also responsible for the only known collection to have
been published in its entirety during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Chapter 3 contains three scenarios from the anonymous collection conserved
in the Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome and with bindings that have been dated
between 1621 and 1642. This collection, however, seems to predate its binding,
and according to Elsebeth Aasted, through external as well as internal evidence,
it could be considered “the earliest extant collection of commedia dell’arte
scenarios dating from the second half of the 1500’s,” thus placing the Corsini
manuscripts “in a central position in commedia dell’arte research” (1991: 108).
Chapter 4 introduces the reader to three scenarios from the collection compiled
by Basilio Locatelli between 1618 and 1622 and conserved in the Biblioteca
Casanatense in Rome. Because of the strong similarities of some of their plots,
Anna Maria Testaverde (2007) believes Locatelli’s scenarios to be amateurish
variations of the ones contained in the Corsiniana collection, and according
to Cesare Molinari, the similarities between these two collections can also be
understood as proof of the close relationship that existed between professional
and amateur actors (1985: 43–44). This group of four collections, according to
Anna Maria Testaverde (2007: xxx), represents the dramaturgical repertory of
the golden age of the commedia dell’arte.
The collections of scenarios showcased in the last three chapters of this book
and compiled in the second half of the seventeenth century constitute examples
of a well-established theatrical tradition ( Testaverde 2007: xxxvii). Chapter 5
presents a scenario from the collection compiled by Ciro Monarca and conserved
in the Casanatense Library in Rome. This collection is very important because it
contains only tragedies – opere regie or royal works – it has clearly been inf luenced
by the plays of the Siglo de Oro by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón
xiv Preface
de la Barca, and it is the only collection of the second half of the seventeenth
century to have been compiled by the actors of a professional commedia dell’arte
troupe. Chapter 6 highlights two scenarios from the anonymous collection that
can be found in the library of the Museum Correr in Venice: according to Car-
melo Alberti, the editor of the entire collection, these scenarios offer an idea
of the “involution” of the practices of the commedia dell’arte, with the almost
worn-out repetition of those dramaturgical modules based on the fixed types
(1996: 21). Chapter 7, the last chapter, presents three scenarios from the lively and
multifaceted theatre world of Naples, with the omnipresence of the Neapolitan
masks of Pulcinella and Coviello.
To select twenty-two scenarios out of more than six hundred is a daunting
task and presupposes some arbitrary choices. However, the specific scenarios
were chosen to make the reader aware of the broad spectrum of dramatic genres
actually performed by the commedia dell’arte troupes – not only comedies but
also pastorals, tragedies, tragicomedies, royal works, and Turkish plays, to name
but a few – together with scenarios that were either presenting original stories or
were instead adaptations of a variety of preexisting sources – poems, short stories
from the Italian novella tradition, like Boccaccio’s Decameron, classical sources
such as the plays by Plautus and Terence, plays from the Siglo de Oro, etc.
Commedia dell’arte has achieved an almost mythical status among theatre
makers, not because of its commercial successes within the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries (though there have been several) but because of its adoption by a
succession of iconic practitioners who used the form, in their own way, to recre-
ate, reform, reinvent or reenergize a theatre they saw as lacking in something
vital. Whenever theatre became too cerebral, too shallow, too star-studded, too
static, or too literary, there emerged voices claiming that a return to the spirit and
practice of the ancient commedia dell’arte would resolve these issues and restore
a missing vitality to the stage.
What the spirit of commedia dell’arte actually is and what its ancient practices
were are still a matter of debate and some disagreement. To broadly generalize,
the ‘spirit of commedia’ is often identified within modern comedy as a feeling
of unexpected joy and release in an audience, gained through laughter, as per-
formed by actors who are not merely good at their trade but comic virtuosos
to boot. Many worthy and highly relevant academic investigations of the genre
have, when eventually hitting the twin brick walls of historical distance and the
performance’s ephemerality, invoked or at least mentioned ‘the spirit of com-
media’ as a significant element within their deliberations. How a person devel-
oped the skills to become a commedia virtuoso in the Renaissance is a matter of
informed guesswork and conjecture based on an incomplete jigsaw of tantaliz-
ing fragments because, for various reasons, commedia dell’arte disappeared or
evolved beyond its early roots at the time of the French revolution. What exists
now as commedia dell’arte is an asynchronous and synthesized practice drawn
from a variety of methodologies but mainly focused around the two cognate
disciplines of theatre training and theatre performance.
Preface xv
Although the most successful drive toward recreation occurred from 1946
onwards in Italy, attempts to recreate, revive or reinvent commedia dell’arte were,
of course, made before 1946 (Stanislavsky, Mayerhold, Vakhtangov, Copeau,
Reinhardt, and Brecht, to name but a few).1 This date is significant because the
four theatre artists generally accepted as founders and inventors of the contempo-
rary genre, Jacques Lecoq, Giorgio Strehler, Giovanni Poli and Carlo Mazzone-
Clementi, are still present within living memory of the second generation, and in
some cases the third generation of its practitioners (Crick 2019). The memory of
their working practices still exists as a guiding force within practitioners today.
Associated with these four exists a raft of significant other luminaries, including
but not limited to Amleto Sartori, Dario Fo, Eduardo de Filippo, Leo de Berar-
dinis, and Gianfranco di Boso.2 Significantly, the end of the Second World War
also signaled an artistic freedom and optimism within which commedia dell’arte,
among other art forms, could develop and f lourish. The downfall of fascism, espe-
cially in Italy, signaled a return to celebrating regional diversity through the arts.
These four founders, of course, did not create their practice in an artistic
vacuum. Giovanni Poli,3 for example, mentions Stanislavski’s method acting as
a key element in his practice, and Lecoq traces his inf luence in a direct line to
Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), who, “considered by many as the fore-father of
a new way of making theatre” (Sartori 2015: 140), experimented with using
comic masks in contemporary contexts with “Les Copiaus” in 1924 as part of
this new approach (Frost and Yarrow 1990: 20–30). Copeau also trained Charles
Dullin (1885–1949), who then inspired a young Pierre-Louis Duchatre to find
out more about commedia dell’arte, resulting in the 1925 book (translated into
English in 1929) The Italian Comedy, a work of seminal scholarship on commedia
dell’arte. In Russia, Konstantin Mikaleševski (1886–1944) published a first draft
in 1925 in Meyerhold’s Journal of Dr. Dapertutto, what was later to become the
book La Commedia dell’Arte (1927) (published under the nom de plume of Con-
stant Mic). Meyerhold himself experimented with commedia dell’arte, both in
terms of creating work from a scenario rather than a full script and in the physi-
cal preparation of an actor (Frost and Yarrow 1990: 18–19). Etienne Decroux,
the inventor of expressive Mime, was also a pupil of Copeau and also had as his
pupil Marisa Flach, who was one of the artists responsible for movement train-
ing for Giorgio Strehler. Copeau’s inf luences included Maurice Sand’s illustrated
book Masques et Bouffons (1862) and a friendship with Edward Gordon Craig
(1872–1966), whose theatrical periodical The Mask (1908–1929) proselytized for,
amongst other things, a return to the spirit of the historical commedia dell’arte.
It is within this ref lexive web of practice, inf luence, and inspiration that the
founders and reinventors of commedia dell’arte operated.
Although the end of the Second World War can be seen as catalyzing artistic
expression and the war itself potentially as only temporary blockage in artistic
development, if there was one single event that signified the start of the current
wave of reinvention, it was the meeting of Jacques Lecoq and Amleto Sartori
at the University of Padua. Lecoq saw the masks produced by Amleto Sartori
xvi Preface
for a production of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, directed by

Gianfranco De Bosio in 1948 (Sartori 2015: 143). He subsequently invited Sar-
tori, the then professor of sculpture, to his classes, where his students were busy
making their own version of Copeau’s Noble Mask, and “with great respect and
some compassion” (144) Sartori noted the masks were neutral only in name and
announced he would take over the mask making. Later, Lecoq brought Sartori
to the attention of Giorgio Strehler, and since then, Sartori masks have been
associated with the Piccolo Theatre of Milan’s canonical production of Carlo
Goldoni’s Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters. Lecoq took Sartori masks with him
when founded his (still running) school in Paris, and Mazzone-Clementi took
a set of Sartori masks with him when he went to the United States. The intense
focus on developing commedia through corporal acting or mime dramatique
postwar is arguably different from the reinvention of Copeau, because of the
specialist artistic expertise introduced by Donato Sartori (2015: 143). The design
and finish of the Sartori masks arguably presented both actor and audience mem-
ber with the ideal comedic vehicle for the genre.
In 1946, the Piccolo Theatre of Milan reopened after the war and in 1947
introduced the world to Giorgio Strehler’s adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s Il ser-
vitore di due padroni (1753), retitled Arlecchino servitore di due padroni (Malia 2013:
x). This show, now in about its tenth reincarnation, is still in repertoire and is
arguably the most canonical of commedia shows within both the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Both Goldoni’s script and Strehler’s various productions
of it are significant to contemporary Commedia.
Goldoni captured Commedia as it was dying, diluted and disfigured, to

record . . . the rhythmic system, the rhetoric and construction. . . . The Ser-
vant of Two Masters holds keys to unlock techniques of rehearsal, construc-
tion and performance that make Commedia such a success. If we peel away
Goldoni’s words, what is revealed represents the scaffold on which the
architects and storytellers of Commedia built their improvised scenarios.
( Hopkins 2015: 480)
And whilst Strehler was conscious that what he was not doing was recreating
commedia dell’arte, what he did do was to create a blueprint that showed what
it might have been like, and by doing so inspired many who saw the production
to make the attempt.4 This volume is arguably a result of that inspiration and,
presenting to us a collection of scenarios previously unavailable in the Eng-
lish language, shows us from what few written words the ancient commedia
actors constructed their performances. This, surely, required the virtuoso skills
for which they were renowned and which are now the stock in trade of current
teachers such as Carlo Boso, Antonio Fava, and the two schools founded by Carlo
Mazzone-Clementi, appropriately enough called Dell’Arte and Commedia.5
Sergio Costola and Olly Crick
Preface xvii
Notes
1 Regarding the relationship between commedia dell’arte and Stanislavski and Meyer-
hold, see Douglas Clayton (2015) and Ruffini (2018); for Jacques Copeau, see Consolini
(2018); more in particular, for the staging of Carlo Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte plays by
Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Brecht see Vazzoler (2018); for Max Reinhardt’s staging of
Carlo Goldoni, see Fischer-Lichte (2018).
2 For the relationship between Eduardo de Filippo and commedia dell’arte, see Megale
(2018); for Leo de Berardinis, see Filacanapa (2015b).
3 Regarding Giovanni Poli and the commedia dell’arte, see Filacanapa (2015a).
4 For an overview of the relationship between commedia dell’arte and experimental the-
atre, see Schino (2018)
5 On Carlo Boso and the commedia dell’arte, see Cottis (2015); for Antonio Fava see Rud-
lin (2015); for Mazzone-Clementi see Schirle (2015).
NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
As Antoine Berman has noted in his “negative analytic” of translation, every

translator is “inescapably exposed” to a play of “deforming forces,” a system that
is the “internalized expression of a two-millennium-old tradition, as well as the
ethnocentric structure of every culture, every language.” Thus, Berman contin-
ues, only languages that are “cultivated” translate (2000: 286). When a nonstan-
dard literary – or non-cultivated – language is used, a triangulation between the
source text, “standard translation,” and new “deviant or heterodox” translation
becomes unavoidable. In this case, however, the nonstandard literary language is
not the one chosen by the translator but is the one of the source. As a result, the
“deforming forces” – ethnocentric, annexationist, etc. – characterize the reader’s
expectations more rather than the translator’s intent. The language of the com-
media dell’arte scenarios are “practical, unadorned, and repetitive, sometimes
descending to a kind of telegraphese” (Andrews 2008: li) arguably being more
“a record of orality than of literacy“ (Heck 2001: 1). In the present English edi-
tion of some of the commedia dell’arte scenarios, we have tried to reproduce as
much as possible the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the original, with its terseness,
use of repetition, and some technical jargon. When needed, the text has been
expanded for clarification through the use of square brackets or endnotes for
more complex points. Most proper names have been regularized (e.g., Pulcinella
for Policinella, Orazio for Oratio or Oracio, etc.). Dottore and Capitano, despite
referring to professions, have been treated as proper names, like Pantalone, and
the article ‘the’ has thus been omitted. For clarity, when characters in a scenario
refer to Dottore and Capitano, but they mean their profession, we have used
‘the doctor’ or ‘the captain’ instead. We have also kept the original elision of the
‘e’ in Dottore, when followed by the proper name Graziano, as it is the case in
the original scenarios by Scala (Dottor Graziano). In addition, some scenarios
constantly switch, for example, between Dottore and Graziano or Zanni and
Notes on the translation xix
Ganassa, or Pantalone and Magnifico. The list of characters might list Dottore,
but the scenario itself might only use Graziano instead. We have decided not to
substitute the stage name for the given name for the sake of clarity and opted
instead for being faithful to the original.
A few editorial interventions were nonetheless necessary. For clarity, we have
introduced a more modern use of punctuation, and certain words – especially if
of a technical nature – have not been translated: the word ‘lazzo,’ being so perva-
sive, does not appear as italicized, while all the other foreign words (for example,
burla) appear in italics. The only technical word that has been translated is the
phrase used to usually end a scene: in questo or in quello. Here, following Richard
Andrews (2008: l–li), we have accepted the suggestion of Corinna Salvadori
Lonergan and translated the phrase as next and in italics, because of its technical
status.1 In addition, we have included uninterrupted scene numbers (i.e., they
do not restart with the beginning of each act) even when numbering was not
present in the original. These numbers, we think, might make it easier for actors
or students when referring to specific passages. We have also adopted Ferruccio
Marotti’s strategy for newly entering characters: those who cannot syntactically
introduce the opening scene are listed in square brackets (1976).
To conclude, a few words regarding the hypothetical stage layout for the per-
formance of commedia dell’arte scenarios, with the typical houses on both sides
of a street (see Figure I.4), and “with practicable doors for the entrances and exits
of the different characters, and windows from which the characters can witness
to the events happening in ‘the street’” (Alberti 1996: 19). In some scenarios the
use of ‘enter’ and ‘exit,’ as a result, might create some confusion in the English
language, as a character ‘exiting’ is actually entering the scene (by exiting from
one of the houses). We decided not to change the original since the meaning can
be easily gleaned from the context.
Note
1 Thomas Heck (2001) has opted, for his translation of the scenarios in the Casamarciano’s
collection, for the unitalicized ‘at that.’
PART I
An introduction to commedia
dell’arte
INTRODUCTION
The dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte
Sergio Costola
The secret of the commedia dell’arte

To study and analyze the dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte, regarded by
both scholars and practitioners “as one of the most significant phenomena in the
history of European theatre” (Vianello 2018: 1), is a rather difficult task because
the term, as Ludovico Zorzi (1990) points out, improperly refers to a “con-
fused multitude of pure epiphenomena” (149)1 that, for convenience, have been
grouped under this denomination. In addition, the commedia dell’arte, accord-
ing to Ferdinando Taviani, is not a well-defined theatrical form, as certain forms
of Asian theatre are:
Whether the composition of its style is reduced only to the masks and
fixed characters . . ., or analyzed as a multifarious interlacement of differ-
ent strands . . ., it is always an analysis that takes for granted the historical
existence of a codified style of theatre, with its fixed attributes, and with
the persistence of a tradition. It is not thus a surprise if, after having read
the books, enthusiasts and scholars of foreign theatres come to Italy and ask
where they can see commedia dell’arte performances, as they would ask,
going to Japan, India, or China, where they could see some good Noh the-
atre, a good example of Beijing Opera or Kathakali. . . . The illusion that
the theatrical genre ‘Commedia dell’Arte’ existed in Italy . . . does not have
historical and material roots, if not in the ways in which the commercial
expertise of the Italian actors took advantage of the system of organiza-
tion of the Parisian theatres, which was based on the specialization and the
monopoly of genres.
( Taviani and Schino 1982: 308)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003100676-2
4 An introduction to commedia dell’arte
At the basis of the commedia dell’arte there isn’t a form, but its fame. Of the
commedia dell’arte, in fact, only its skeleton has been preserved – the scenarios
published by Flaminio Scala and the ones of the different manuscript traditions.
These scenarios, according to Ferdinando Taviani, cannot be considered as a
specific form but only as a different level of dramaturgy and a different level of
preservation.2
It would be useful to begin by first taking into consideration the denomina-
tion itself and also, although brief ly, those firm points concerning the history
of this theatrical ‘form’ by mentioning some of the most recent acquisitions that
have been the result of the careful archival work conducted in prevalence by
Italian scholars, to whom we owe, starting with the 1970s, the rectification of
some of the myths that had developed around the commedia dell’arte. Benedetto
Croce (1933) had already pointed out how the denomination of the commedia
dell’arte was to be intended in the sense of “profession and craft,” since this was
the meaning of the word ‘arte’ in old Italian:
These were not theatrical representations performed by occasional actors,

students, academicians, jolly fellows, members of confraternities, or similar
people; instead, this was industrialized theatre, characterized by the for-
mation of companies regulated by contracts and statutes, by masters and
apprentices, by the knowledge of a craft that was handed down from father
to son, and from mother to daughter, and by the exercise of that industry
traveling from one city to another.
(503)
The expression commedia dell’arte, in fact, cannot be found before the eigh-
teenth century, and the phenomenon that began around the middle of the six-
teenth century was called different names by different cultural environments:
commedia all’improvviso, commedia degli Zanni, commedia delle maschere, commedia mer-
cenaria, comédie italienne. ‘To be in art’ simply meant to exercise the acting profes-
sion, to be part of a guild – corporazione – according to the medieval acceptation
of the term.
“The growth and development” of this theatre, Benedetto Croce insists, “took
place in the middle of a literary and spiritual decadence” (505), so that “the com-
media dell’arte was nothing more than this: clownish theatre” (506), rather than
“poetry or art in a strict aesthetic sense” (510). This view, although not completely
incorrect, was nonetheless partial in its delimitation of the term ‘arte’ to only its
professional aspect and thus ended up obscuring the aesthetic side of the phenom-
enon, allowing for the subsequent proliferation of myths around the commedia
dell’arte. Even today, if we look at tertiary sources – especially in the English lan-
guage – the commedia dell’arte is still primarily characterized as a street theatre of
popular origins that could rely on the absence of a play-script and that was based
on the mimetic and gestural skills of an actor who, unable to read and write, was
improvising farces for the entertainment of an unsophisticated audience.3
Introduction 5
As Laura Falavolti (1988) argues, “there is a dominant tendency nowadays to

consider its actors’ professionalism as the main characteristic of the commedia
dell’arte and also, turning this line of reasoning on its head, to consider the
dell’arte actors as the first real theatre professionals” (12). As we shall see, the
comici’s professionalism should not go at the expense of a wider acceptation of
the term ‘art.’ In the first of the two prologues to the comedy Il finto marito – a
fully written comedy that was based on an original scenario by the same author –
Flaminio Scala defines his idea of dramatic composition and, at the same time,
offers us an idea of the commedia dell’arte. It is worth mentioning a passage from
this prologue:
Comedian. I think that the true art of making comedies resides in those who
perform them well because, if experience is the teacher of all things, it
can teach to those who already possess the spirit for forming and best
representing the theatrical subjects, and for writing them down; unless
the person in question was born in Voltolino, or any other place where
people write I when they should write me. But what does this art, by
grace, consist in?
Foreigner. It consists in preserving the precepts and in imitating as much as
possible.
Comedian. Who then can better know the precepts of the acting art than
the comedians themselves, who exercise it daily by practicing it and by
learning from using it? And who can better possess the true art of imita-
tion than them, who not only imitate the effects and properties of actions,
but also, by introducing different idioms, must imitate in the best possible
way, not only with their own idiom, but also with all the others? Because
if a Florentine would try to speak Venetian, and the Venetian the idiom of
Bergamo, we would reward them by throwing vegetables.4
It is a declaration of a new poetic and at the same time an ideology for defend-
ing a novel way of doing theatre: not only the pure and simple defense of a
technique that could allow the manufacture of a product suitable for the tastes
of a variegated audience but also the claim to a ‘know-how’ that was at the very
basis of a new idea of art and thus a new culture. Numerous scholars have in
fact pointed out that Scala’s insistence on the value of experience rather than
tradition finds a parallel in the experimental method that Galileo Galilei will
develop between 1624 and 1630 and then describe a couple of years later in 1632
in his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems – a parallel that makes the com-
media dell’arte part of those major upheavals that characterized the sixteenth
century.5
As Francesco Cotticelli reminds us,
We cannot rule out the possibility that the commedia dell’arte became, at
times, just that: the pleasure of mise-en-scène for its own sake, lazzi (comic
routines) and acrobatics performed without regard to context, novelty

without the slightest pretense of lasting, hardened traditions incapable of
renewal. It was successful, however, despite being an anomalous and haz-
ardous enterprise, and f lourished in the juncture between the absence of
the text and its open-ended presence (as proposed by F. Taviani), where the
author merged with the actor.
(2001a: vol. 1, 12)
Let us see, then, what were the origins of this “anomalous and hazardous
enterprise.”
The birth of the commedia dell’arte

On 25 February 1545, some “comrades” – Ser Maphio, Vincentio da Venezia,
Francesco da la lira, Hieronimo da S. Luca, Zuoandomenego detto Rizo, Zuane
da Treviso, Tofano de Bastian, and Francesco Moschini – went to a notary from
Padua to constitute “a brotherhood” that should last for a whole year “without
any hatred, rancor and dissolution.”6 Scholars have endowed this document with
a symbolic value, since it is considered to be the oldest document to witness the
birth of the first theatre troupe of professional actors. Among the things that
these comrades “together concluded and deliberated,” there was the election of
a “leader in the reciting of his comedies from place to place,” said Ser Maphio,
who would “take control” of “how to recite the comedies” and who would cre-
ate a “little box” with three keys, where to keep “the potential profits.” Who
were these eight men? What kinds of comedies did they perform? How were
they staged? What was the difference with the kind of theatre that had pre-
ceded them? Cesare Molinari (1999), despite the lack of precise documents in
this regard, answers these questions convincingly: the capocomico, Maffeo dei Re,
was probably a man of a certain culture and economic ease who, at one point,
driven by his passion for the theatre, joined other craftsmen to be able to perform
“his comedies.” What the document means by “his comedies” we cannot know.
However, we know that by the middle of the sixteenth century, Italian dramatic
literature could already count on a rich repertoire: apart from the texts by Plautus
and Terence, the company could also draw on the texts of the so-called commedia
erudita (learned comedy) – that is, those texts that had been written and repre-
sented at court since the early years of the sixteenth century (Ariosto, Machia-
velli, Ruzante, Bibiena, and Aretino, to name but a few). Molinari also assumes
the presence of original texts written by the same Maffeo dei Re. Furthermore,
the scholar continues, these texts were no longer memorized and recited ad ver-
bum but staged in a new way:
The actors read or listen to the director while reading the play, they mem-
orize the main points and then they go ad lib, chasing the fragments of
Introduction 7
their memory. Then they will find more comfortable to simply summarize
the comedy in a canovaccio, in a scenario, as more precisely it was said to
indicate that the plot of the play was not merely summarized, but described
scene by scene, event by event. This would also explain why so many cano-
vacci collected by the amateur Basilio Locatelli, as well as the others most
likely owned by professional companies such as the seventeenth century
Raccolta di scenari più scelti di histrioni (known now as scenari Correr), are
nothing more than well-known ancient and modern comedies reduced to
a scenario.
(viii)
As most scholars nowadays agree, the commedia dell’arte will fully come into
existence only a couple of decades later, in 1564 – another symbolic date – with
the arrival of the actresses. In fact, until this point, the female roles were acted by
men or boys, as it had also been the case in the Roman theatre and court theatre
in the early sixteenth century. With the arrival of women, while “the struc-
ture of the ‘regular’ comedy” remained the same, it was nonetheless “violated”
because “so much room was reserved to the monologues of these characters
whose main characteristic was their ‘eloquence.’” 7 In 1564 a contract similar to
that of 1545 was stipulated in Rome; the novelty of no small importance was
the presence of a certain Lucrezia Sienese, probably an actress, but of whom we
know only the name.
The companies and their composition

The arrival of women on stage also helped define the basic structure that will
then characterize for a long time the commedia dell’arte companies. The char-
acters of this theatrical ‘form’ can be divided into two main categories: fixed
and moving parts. Among the fixed parts there are the characters without a
mask – although it is quite inappropriate to speak of characters without a mask,
even for those without one on their faces – which can vary in number: there are
the Innamorato (young male lover) and the Innamorata (young female lover), and
the scenarios can present one, two, three, or sometimes more pairs of this type;
among the fixed parts there are also the two Vecchi (old men: Pantalone and
Dottore, for example); and the two servants or Zanni. Among the moving parts,
instead, there are the Capitano, the Maid, the Innkeeper, and many other figures
depending on the genre of the play and needs of the scenario (the magician, the
sorceress, various animals, etc.) The different characters can also be divided into
serious and comic parts,8 as can be seen from the scheme (see Figure I.1) pro-
posed by Ludovico Zorzi (1990), who also reminds us that this set of characters,
with a few substitutions and variations, reappears with great frequency not only
in the theatre of Flaminio Scala but also in the whole tradition of the commedia
dell’arte that has come down to us:
FIGURE I.1 Scheme of a typical scenario. Author’s reconstruction and translation of

the image created by Ludovico Zorzi (1980: 434).
The last symbolic date, that of 1564, also coincided with the emergence and
proliferation of professional acting troupes: by the early seventeenth century,
those companies that will characterize the golden age of the commedia dell’arte
had already been formed.
The Gelosi (1568)

First recorded as performing in Milan in 1568, the company was performing
in Paris in 1571, showing how “the nomadic vocation of Italian actors” was
“already clear since these remote times” (Molinari 1999: xxii). The Gelosi com-
prised some of the most important commedia dell’arte actors of the time; Fran-
cesco Andreini, in a passage of his Le Bravure del Capitano Spavento,9 describes his
interaction with the Gelosi Company and names its actors and characters:
“Not only did I meet him [Dottor Graziano], named Ludovico da Bolo-
gna, but I also met Giulio Pasquati from Padua, who played Pantalone;
Simone da Bologna, who played Zanni; Gabriele da Bologna, who played
Francatrippa; Orazio from Padua, who played the innamorato; Adriani
Valerini from Verona, who also played the same; Girolamo Salimbeni from
Introduction 9
Florence, who played the Florentine old man, called Zanobio, and also
Piombino; Mrs. Isabella Andreini from Padua, who played the prima donna
innamorata; Mrs. Prudenza from Verona, who played the seconda donna;
Mrs. Silvia Roncagli from Bergamo, who played Franceschina, and a cer-
tain Francesco Andreini, husband to Mrs. Isabella, who played the part of
a superb and boasting Capitano and who, if I remember correctly, called
himself Capitano Spavento da Valle Inferna.”10
At the head of this company there were, since 1578, Francesco Andreini and his
wife Isabella, both of them among the first examples of actor–authors. The death
of Isabella, which occurred in 1604 during her stay in France, is used to symboli-
cally mark the end of the company.
The Confidenti (1572)

One of the most long-lasting companies – we have documents testifying their
existence as late as 1640 – in 1612 they accepted the patronage of Giovanni de’
Medici, thus abandoning what had been the cooperative organizational and hier-
archical structure of the first commedia dell’arte troupes (Molinari 1999: xxii).11
According to Siro Ferrone, the generic denomination of Confidenti, with which
scholars have often grouped those Italian actors performing in France and Spain
in the 1570s and 1580s, “most probably does not refer to a specific company but
needs to be considered as an illustrious denomination freely used by the actors to
achieve prestige” (2014: 290–291). Scholars have even argued for the existence
of two different companies with the same name: the one initially led by Vit-
toria Piissimi and operating under the patronage of the Duke of Mantua (1574–
1599), and the one managed by Flaminio Scala and under the patronage of Don
Giovanni de’ Medici (1611–39) (Crick and Rudlin 2002: 31). Recorded as part of
this company were Drusiano Martinelli and his wife, Angelica Alberghini (prima
donna innamorata), and Tristano Martinelli, Drusiano’s younger brother, the first
Harlequin in the history of the commedia dell’arte.
The Uniti (1578)

Led by the famous Dottore Bernardino Lombardi, this company is first
recorded playing in Ferrara in 1578 “in the private rooms of the Duchess of
Urbino, who was, presumably en visite“ (Crick and Rudlin 2002: 40). The
company played the usual circuit of the Northern Italian cities until the early
1600s and, in a rare case for the commedia dell’arte troupes of these years,
there is no record of them having performed abroad. Both Vittoria Piissimi
and Isabella Andreini occasionally worked for this company, thus testifying to
a reversal of trend in the theatre of the time: “it was no longer the ensembles
that enhanced the actresses, but the actresses who enhanced the company”
( Ferrone 2014: 146).
The Desiosi (1581)

This was the first commedia dell’arte company to be headed by a woman as
capocomico, Diana Ponti, who was both renowned actress and poet. Under the
patronage of Cardinal Montalto, the Desiosi probably lasted until the early 1590s
and toured the most important Italian cities – Mantua, Cremona, Verona, Milan,
Bologna, Genoa, and Rome. In 1595, the famous Tristano Martinelli left the
Uniti company and joined the Desiosi, to eventually join the Accesi together
with Diana Ponti.
The Accesi (1590)

At the service of the Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga, between the years
1590 and 1628, this company comprised actors such as Pier Maria Cecchini (aka
Frittellino), Orsola Cecchini (aka Flaminia), Drusiano Martinelli, Tristano Mar-
tinelli (aka Arlecchino), Diana Ponti, and Angelica Alberghini. Its capocomico,
Pier Maria Cecchini, was the author of two plays – La Flaminia schiava (1610) and
L’amico tradito (1633) – as well as of numerous essays on theatre arts and acting.
Initially active in Northern Italy, the company eventually became very popu-
lar with European royalty. In 1660, for example, it was invited by Henri IV to
perform in France, a very important event, since “it was quite unprecedented
at that time for a crowned monarch to write personally to an actor” (Crick and
Rudlin 2002: 42).
The Fedeli (1601)

At the service of the Duke of Mantua, this company was founded by Isabella
and Francesco Andreini’s son, Giovan Battista, the author of numerous plays and
treatises on acting and theatre arts and who became famous as innamorato with the
name of Lelio, playing opposite his wife, Virginia Ramponi, who played the role
of prima donna innamorata with the name of Florinda. The French queen Marie
de Médicis arranged for the company to make several tours of France, and the
Fedeli ended up alternating with French players at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and
at court. The company also toured Prague and Vienna.12
These, in short, were the companies of the first two generations of comedians,
actors who had been able to create a new way of doing theatre characterized by
a dramaturgy based on roles or fixed masks. But what is even more important
regarding the first generation of actors of the commedia dell’arte is the social
composition of those companies. As Ferdinando Taviani (1982) argues, these
companies formed a “living paradox” because they were constituted by people
“who differed in terms of their social background, geographical provenance,
culture, and age, and who were united in a stable relationship of cooperation
and without a precise hierarchy.” In particular, they differed from the tradi-
tional relationship of subordination between man and woman, “disrupted by
Introduction 11
the evident need to recognize a greater weight to those who – regardless of their
sex – contributed the most to the success of the company” (416) – all elements
that could hardly convene well in a society forcefully engaged in naturalizing
gender boundaries and legislating class rigidity. Their universe constituted thus
a microculture, people who were “free in a society of subjects” (Ferrone 1993:
287). As Raimondo Guarino has recently stated,
The actors created an autonomous and approved way of life, which was
separate from normal society in regard to material conditions but was,
at the same time, dependent on it as far as economic dynamics and the
development of values were concerned. The business model of the compa-
nies relied on a combination of princely patronage and paying city audi-
ences. The ‘encompassing’ and ‘dominant’ culture which allowed the
companies to be tolerated and to survive was characterized by opacity and
contradictions.
(2018: 152)
These companies, unlike much of what Romantic historiography had made us

to believe, not only performed in squares or streets but also in stanze leased to
brighten the whole population or in the palaces of the main city authorities for
elite audiences. In fact, the comici of the commedia dell’arte were often attempt-
ing to differentiate themselves from street artists and charlatans, as can be evi-
denced, for example, from the following passage by Andrea Perrucci, taken from
his Dell’Arte rappresentativa, premeditata ed all’improvviso (1699):
The trouble is that today everyone considers himself capable of plunging

into comic improvisation, and the lowest dregs of society devote them-
selves to it, thinking it is an easy thing. Their unawareness of the danger
derives from ignorance and ambition. This is way the basest charlatans and
mountebanks, take it into their heads to attract and entertain people with
words, in the guise of so many crowing Hercules in golden chains. They
try to perform improvised comedies in public squares, mangling the plots,
talking nonsense, gesticulating like madmen, and, what is worse, perform-
ing a thousand obscenities and filthy acts, so that they can afterward make
a sordid profit from people’s purses by selling them their quack remedies of
snake oils, poison antidotes, and potions that bring on diseases not already
present.
(102)
Nonetheless, the comici dell’arte were “comfortable in the shadow line of bor-
ders,” exercising ‘difference’ not so much at court but rather in the “inns, the
post stations, the taverns, the customs, the ports,” all places that could “feed the
traveling inventions” of these “natural observers” (Ferrone 2014: 69).
Of special importance were also the commedia dell’arte performances abroad.

Several scholars, in fact, have investigated in detail the direct inf luence that the
Italian actors had on the different European dramaturgies, a contribution that
affected not only their dramaturgy but also their production system and acting
techniques13 – so much so that, according to Siro Ferrone,
the constitutive factors of the commedia dell’arte cannot therefore be

sought in an approximate Italian root, and they must rather be identified
in the negotiation between different cultures: first within the peninsula,
but immediately after in a territory extended to various European regions.
It was therefore a theater no more Florentine than Venetian, no more Nea-
politan than Bolognese, no more Italian than French, and resulting rather
from the measurement of differences.
(2014: 63)
Ferdinando Taviani, in a recent contribution regarding the ‘double’ character of

the commedia dell’arte, supported the thesis that “Molière should be included
in the history of the commedia dell’arte and be considered a comico dell’arte among
the others (2018: 24).
These performances abroad also affected, as Ferdinando Taviani (1982) notes,
the lives of the Italian companies themselves and their growth. This fact initially
created a balance
for which the foreign market was a moment of stability, which became
more valuable in relation to their nomadism and non-specialization. . . .
The use of both theatrical markets – one at home and one abroad – one as
a sort of compensation chamber for the other, served, primarily, to defend
and enhance the prestige of the big companies.
(413)
When this balance was altered and their nomadism and nonspecialization came
to a halt, the Italian companies began to specialize and assumed the image of a
fixed genre. Cesare Molinari (1999) describes what was the image of eighteenth-
century commedia dell’arte, contrasting it to that of the origins:
The masks, reduced to four, are visibly juxtaposed to the four Innamorati:
the balance is also numerical. The masks that have survived, or at least
those of the two servants, Arlecchino and Brighella (since Dottore and
Pantalone come into being with a caricatural and precise stylization,) have
emphasized the stylization of their presence in terms of their costume, as
well as their vocal and gestural characteristics, erasing any possible ref-
erence to real-life situations: the masks are characters who do not have
course in everyday life. The Innamorati, instead, though they may be child-
ish, can immediately find a referent within the social reality, even if a
Introduction 13
generic one. . . . They represent two completely opposite worlds, between

which any communication seems impossible, and whose qualification does
not seem to be based on any logical or social reason: why Pantalone is an
intensely stylized and unreal mask, while his son Silvio is not at all? The
dramatic structure contrasts sharply with its stage counterpart. . . . In the
Commedia dell’Arte of the origins the situation was very different.
(xiv)
The stock characters of the commedia dell’arte

Before moving to an analysis of the scenarios, let us first consider the main fea-
tures of the commedia dell’arte dramaturgy regarding its characters – maschere
[masks] in Italian). In most of the scenarios there is a set of characters that, with
minor variations, remains constant: two or more pairs of Innamorati; occasionally
a Capitano (as the type of the braggart warrior, but more often as a comic Innam-
orato); two servants or Zanni (one intelligent, the other foolish); one or two Vecchi
(Pantalone and Dottore, for example); a Servetta (Franceschina, Colombina, etc.);
and, if necessary, a series of secondary characters. But what kind of characters
were those of the commedia dell’arte? According to Leon Katz, a character is a
construct that can refer to “person” without being for this reason a reproduction
of “person.” The set of characteristics that constitute a dramatic character, in fact,
is the result of an original formulation, of a random montage of the moral and
psychological beliefs of a particular era, together with, paradoxically, all the for-
mulations of the past (2012: 126). Starting with the fourth century bce, with the
Greek New Comedy, the masks worn by the actors became, for the first time,
representative of specific social types. If we look for example at the Book IV of
Pollux’s Onomastikon, the characters are divided by gender (male or female), age
(young, mature, and old), occupation (cook, servant, lover, prostitute, matron,
etc.), and finally, moral bent (rude, sly, greedy, etc.). A character was therefore
the sum of these four main features: for example, an old-man-merchant-miser.
The ‘mask,’ therefore, required that the characters, once an integral part of the
plot, would remain constant and with no possibility to change. This understand-
ing of ‘character’ can be found in Roman comedies and Italian learned comedies
of the early modern period, and it became, with rare exceptions, the basic model
for the characters of the Western comedies of later centuries.14
Ferdinando Taviani (1982), in a very important essay concerning the drama-
turgy of the commedia dell’arte, focuses on what was once the norm in terms of
how to produce and recite comedies in the early modern period. Until the advent
of the director, according to the Italian scholar, “there wasn’t a theatre based
on the play-text,” but a “theatre based on parts” (155). What is the difference?
Taviani reminds us of an event that occurred in 1496 in Ferrara. Ferrara was
the city in which, toward the end of the fifteenth century, plays by Plautus and
Terence had been staged for the first time in translation; these were followed,
in the early sixteenth century, by the first performances of the new and original
plays by Ludovico Ariosto. On 5 February 1496, when the Marquis of Mantua

Francesco Gonzaga asked his father-in-law, the Duke Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara,
the texts of the plays that had been staged at his court, he was answered that the
texts did not exist anymore, because they had already been recited. In fact, the
text in its entirety had never existed, and the actors had learned each their own
part. “The part is,” Taviani continues, “the transcription of all and only the lines
of a character, with indicated the last words of the other character or of the pre-
vious scene” (155). The system of dividing a play into parts will characterize the
entire European theatre production from the mid-sixteenth century until the
early twentieth century:
They [the parts] have a meaning on their own, and can therefore be inter-
preted and performed by actors, because they are part of a context that is
larger than the play-text itself, and that is somehow prior to and indepen-
dent from it. . . . A character, for example, is an old, meek, merchant of a
certain city and time: the actor knows, then, how he will have to recite the
lines of his part, without the need to know the dramatic text in its entirety.
(156)
This production system led to a further specialization, which was that of a theatre
based on roles: this system allowed an actor to learn his part more quickly and thus
be able to collaborate with other actors and produce plays in a fast and continu-
ous way. A part was entrusted to an actor not so much on the basis of his or her
human and professional characteristics but on the basis of the parts that the actor
already knew. This dramaturgical system needed a writer who could take care
of both the montage of actions and the dialogues and monologues, while to the
actor pertained only the details of the actions of a particular character, such as
their ways of walking, posing, moving, and talking (Figure I.2).
FIGURE I.2 Parts and roles: Elizabethan theatre.

Introduction 15
If this was the norm with regard to the mode of production of comedies, what
was the difference, if there was one, with the ways in which commedia dell’arte
companies operated? The Italian professional theatre companies developed a
“theatre with scenarios and free parts,” a more ‘economic’ way of doing theatre,
which allowed the Italian actors to multiply their theatrical possibilities and be
successful abroad as well (Figure I.3):
What are given to the actors of the European companies (and to the Italian
actors from the eighteenth century onwards) are parts without plots. The
comici dell’arte, instead, move from the opposite principle: they provide the
actor plots without parts. In the first case we can assume that the characters
determine the action. In the second case, it seems that it is the action to
determine the characters. . . . The production system developed by the
Italian companies is not, on closer inspection, opposed to that based on
parts and roles. It is, if anything, an improvement. It means, for the actors,
to learn parts that are free from belonging to a particular play and only that.
( Taviani 1982: 159–160)
The characters of the commedia dell’arte, therefore, were not, properly speak-
ing, fixed types. Of the four basic characteristics, the comici fixed only three of
them – gender, age, and occupation – and made them easily recognizable thanks
to a kind of hyperrealism that suggested or alluded to real life situations with-
out having to recreate an illusionist kind of mimesis. The ethos, or moral bent,
however, depended on the specific comedy. Pantalone, therefore, was always an
old man and a merchant, but depending on the given circumstances, he could
be stingy in one comedy, in another an understanding father, and in still others
a fop.
FIGURE I.3 Parts and roles: commedia dell’arte.

This, as Roberto Tessari (2000) argues, created a constant dialectic between

tradition and creation, a dialectic according to which the mythopoeic elements
ended up, more often than not, to prevail on the mythological ones. For exam-
ple, the Capitano was never simply the stereotype of the braggart warrior from
Plautus, but depending on the situation of the scenario and the sensitivity of the
actor that played the part, he could take on aspects of Don Quixote or Faust.
The scenarios of the commedia dell’arte

As Cesare Molinari (1999) points out, despite the fact that there are still scholars
supporting the idea that the commedia dell’arte was popular in origin and with
a dramaturgy characterized primarily by gestures and by the absence of a script,
the literary production of the comici has been nonetheless impressive, both in
quantity and quality, ranging from Petrarchan poems, essays on history and art,
prayers, burlesque poems, and letters to works pertaining more directly to the
history of theatre. These works, continues Molinari, can be divided into three
categories: “the treatises, the zibaldoni, and the dramaturgy” (v). In the following
pages we will mainly focus on a particular aspect of the dramaturgy of the comici:
the scenarios.
What is a scenario? A scenario – or canovaccio, basic story line, favola
rappresentativa – consists in the progressive description of the actions, scene by
scene, event by event. The novelty introduced by the comici dell’arte was that the
montage of actions could exist without a written dialogue. Before proceeding to
an analysis of the main features of a scenario, for convenience we will provide a
list, in chronological order, of the main collections.
The repertories of the first generation of comedians

The oldest collections of scenarios can be dated between the last three decades
of the sixteenth century and early decades of the following century.15 There
are four collections that, as pointed out by Anna Maria Testaverde (2007), are
representative of the “dramatic repertoire of the golden age of the Commedia
dell’Arte” (xxx).
a Stefanelo Botarga, Zibaldone. Real Biblioteca, Madrid. Ms. II-1586; 23 sce-

narios, 1574–1580.
b Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative [The Theatre of Tales for
Performance]. Pulciani, Venice; 50 scenarios, 1611.
c Basilio Locatelli, Della scena dei soggetti comici [Scenarios Based on Comic
Subjects], 2 vols. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome. Ms. 1211, 1212; 103 sce-
narios, 1618–1622.
d Anonymous, Raccolta di scenari più scelti [Collection of Selected Scenarios].
Biblioteca Corsiniana, Rome. Ms. 45 and 45 G5 G6; 100 scenarios com-
piled, probably between 1621 and 1642.
Introduction 17
The repertoires of the tradition

The collections of scenarios compiled in the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury constitute, as Testaverde argues,
a well-established theatrical tradition, which developed among the profes-

sional companies, the academic circles, the commercial theatres, the stages
of religious theatre, or simply because of the desire of some noblemen, who
wanted to develop an “exemplary” directory for their own private theater.
(xxxvii)
a Ciro Monarca, Dell’opere regie. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome. Ms. 4186; 48

scenarios, compiled in the mid-seventeenth century.
b Anonymous, Manuscript Correr 1040. Biblioteca Museo Correr in Venice; 51
scenarios, compiled in the mid-seventeenth century.
c Anonymous, Commedie XII all’improvviso. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence.
II.I.90; 22 untitled scenarios completed in mid-seventeenth century.
d Anonymous, Codex Vaticano Latino 10244. Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome; 12
scenarios compiled in the second half or end of the seventeenth century.
e Anonymous, Codex Barberiniano Latino 3895. Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome;
nine scenarios compiled in the second half or end of the seventeenth century.
f Gibaldone de soggetti da recitarsi all’impronto, alcuni proprij e gli altri da diversi
raccolti di Don Annibale Sersale, Conte di Casamarciano. Biblioteca Nazionale,
Naples. Ms. XI.AA.40 and XI.AA.41; 183 scenarios collected toward the
end of the seventeenth century.
g Selva overo Zibaldone di concetti comici raccolti da P. D. Placido Adriani di Lucca.
Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, Perugia. Ms. A.20; 22 scenarios, 1734.
As Ludovico Zorzi (1990) notes, “the interpretation of this metawriting presents

some difficulties for an ordinary reader” and requires “a certain familiarity with the
laws of the theatre” and therefore, to be able to fully comprehend its characteristics,
“we need to deal with it personally, directly, and I would say first of all optically”
(145). This is the beginning of A Comedy Within a Comedy by Basilio Locatelli:16
A Comedy Within a Comedy

[Comedy]
B.L.R.
43
Characters
Pantalone
Lidia, daughter
Zanni, servant
Coviello
Ardelia, daughter
Tofano, Doctor
Lelio, then Curzio, Coviello’s son
Graziano, an actor
Capitano, an actor, then Orazio, Pantalone’s son
The scene is Sermoneta
Properties
A scenery, chairs, lots of arms.
ACT ONE
1
Pantalone [Zanni]
from the house; he says that he wants to marry Lidia, his daughter, because
she has come to that age and Coviello has asked for her hand; he wants to
give her to him; he knocks.
2
Coviello
from the house; he hears from Pantalone that he agrees to give him Lidia as
his wife; they do lazzi, and they agree on the dowry; he calls. Next
3
Lidia
from the house; she hears that she has been promised to Coviello and
rejects him; they do lazzi and, in the end, after some scolding and threat-
ening, she touches Coviello’s hand; Lidia, unhappy, goes back inside the
house; Coviello says that he will go to the notary to prepare the papers,
asks them to wait for him, and exits; Pantalone orders Zanni to invite the
relatives and to call for the comedians, because he wants to stage a comedy
for the occasion; Zanni agrees to do everything and exits; Pantalone goes
to look for Coviello and exits.
4
Lelio
from the street, he says he had left the University of Padua and come incog-
nito because he fears his father and for his love for Lidia; he knocks. Next
As can be evinced from this excerpt, at the beginning of each scenario there
is the title, followed immediately by the theatrical genre – comedy, tragedy,
Introduction 19
pastoral, tragicomedy, heroic poem, etc. The title always precedes the scenario
both in the Scala collection and in all the manuscript ones, while the genre is, at
times, omitted. Although most of the scenarios are comedies, a quick overview
of the manuscript and printed collections shows how extremely varied was the
repertoire of the comici dell’arte.
In the Scala collection, after the title and genre, there is also an Argu-
ment.17 Apart from a few exceptions – as is the case, for example, of La forza
dell’amicizia,18 the ninth scenario of the Codice Vaticano Latino 10244, which
shows, in the argument, the events that precede the plot itself – the scenarios
of most manuscript traditions do not include the argument. As noted by
Steen Jansen (1990), these arguments, more often than not, simply describe
in general terms the relationship between the characters and do not provide
information that can already be inferred from the text. These arguments,
found almost exclusively in the Scala collection, do not have a direct rela-
tionship with the dramatic text; in addition, their only possible models of
reference are, first, the prologues of the comedies by Plautus and Terence
published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, second, the summaries
that precede all the stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose division in Gior-
nate is also used by Scala. On the basis of these elements, Steen Jansen (1990)
argues that the arguments found in Scala’s scenarios are addressed in the first
place to a reader and do not therefore have “a specific function with respect
to performance” (344).
In most collections, after the title and genre, there is the list of characters –
the only exception being the collection of the Biblioteca Corsiniana, where
the characters’ names are listed at the end, after the list of properties needed
for the play. These lists are organized by families and also clarify the kinds of
social relationships of the various characters. The father is usually the first on
the list, followed by his wife, children, and servants. The characters that do not
belong to a family (the Capitano, for example) are usually listed separately from
the others. These groupings, in those instances when these lists were posted in
the backstage area, allowed the actors to remember, at first glance, what kind
of relationship their character entertained with other characters for that specific
scenario.
Usually, a list of properties necessary for the performance is placed after the list
of characters while, in some scenarios, it is either missing or placed at the end.
These lists tend to be accurate, detailed, and record the items needed for the vari-
ous scenes – for example, two boxes with candies inside, a nice chair, lots of arms; letter
with writing, big bag – and the costumes and disguises when necessary – things for the
dentist, a dress for Zanni as spirit, three dresses for slaves, etc.
Sometimes the scenario itself is preceded by the geographic location in which
the action takes place – usually the name of an Italian city. According to Jansen,
“it means that the scenery represents a single locale that the reader has to imagine
as a street or piazza, with different windows, and where an actor can either stay
in the center or aside, not seen by the other actors” (1990: 345).19 However, the
stage directions regarding the scenery are in general quite scarce. The water-
colors that accompany the Raccolta di scenari più scelti at the Corsiniana Library,
as Testaverde points out, “make up for the small amount of textual information
and provide the likely model for a set of an unknown company of comedians”
(2007: xii). Some scenarios contain indications regarding the scenery, especially
those based on plays that had been staged at court with complicated set machin-
eries – as is the case for La Flora, belonging to the Ciro Monarca collection. Also
belonging to the Ciro Monarca collection is the scenario entitled Vittoria cacciatrice,
lo scherno delli favolosi dei antichi, con le metamorfosi amorose e Zaccagnino creduto Apollo
e Spinetta Diana, which also includes – in a very rare if not unique case – the
description for the apparatus for the scene.20 Given its rarity, I thought it useful
to offer the full description:
Apparatus for the scene

In front of the perspective panel there must be a great mountain that
shows, behind it, other mountain peaks; at the foot of that mountain, in
the middle, there will be a large door with its ornaments, which looks
like was excavated from it with the force of the chisel; and this, by open-
ing, will show the inside of a temple with an altar with two shrubs in two
vases, one with a sun, and the other with the moon. Above the top of said
mountain there will be two large trees, similar to the others, one with the
sun, the other with the moon. On one side of the scenery, at the bottom,
there will be the enchanted fountain that turns and transforms into a spirit;
on the other side, there will be the sea. Everything will take place in the
countryside with trees, forests, rocks and logs.
This description is then followed by the scenario itself, scene by scene, as seen in
the example previously presented.
The scenarios of the commedia dell’arte are all divided into three acts, and this
fact also represented a novelty: the comedies of the previous tradition, in fact –
both the learned comedies and the printed editions of Plautus and Terence –
were divided into five acts, as the neoclassical treatises on dramatic composition
required. The division into three acts constituted a novelty that, once introduced
by the first comici dell’arte, then soon became the norm. This division, more essen-
tial if compared to that in five acts proposed by the treatises based on Aristotle’s
The Poetics, was adopted by the comici because more practical. With minor varia-
tions, this division into three acts presents constant structural characteristics that
are common to all scenarios belonging to the different traditions:21
Act One
• Prologue/Frame
• Exposition of past events
• First scene in the present: a static initial situation
• First complications affecting the initial static situation
Introduction 21
Act Two
• Summary of the events
• Intensification of complications
Act Three
• Further complications
• Summary of events
• Extreme consequences
• Solution
• Final with celebration
We provide here an example of this scheme applied to the scenario by Basilio

Locatelli, A Comedy Within a Comedy, the example we previously considered:
Act One
• Prologue/Frame
• 1.1–5: Exposition of past events
• 1.6–14: First scene in the present and beginning of the comedy within
the comedy
• 1.15: First complications and chaos at the end of Act One
Act Two
• 2.16–17: Summary of the events
• 2.18–25: Further complications (Capitano and Ardelia)
• 2.26: Lazzo of the two Dottori
Act Three
• 3.27.33: Lazzo of the night and further complications
• 3.34–39: Extreme consequences
• 3.40–41: Resolution (by recognition)
• 3.42: Final with celebration
A typical scenario was composed of parts – theatergrams, as Louise George Clubb

(1989) has successfully defined them – taken from preexisting comedies – learned
comedies, Plautus and Terence – or from short stories and then cut, reshaped,
and adapted to new stories. As has been pointed out by many scholars, the dra-
maturgy of the commedia dell’arte was an actor’s rather than a writer’s one. But
what did this juxtaposition really mean for the way of doing theatre at that time?
The generici or zibaldoni

According to Roberto Tessari, the dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte was
based on two open and complementary dramatic structures: on one hand the
scenarios and on the other the generici (1969: 108). The generici, the scholar argues,
were the “hidden weapon” of the comici dell’arte and consisted of series of mono-
logues and dialogues collected in zibaldoni or repertori. These disparate “literary
fragments” – coming from preexisting sources and sometimes composed by the
actors themselves – were memorized in advance by the actors and then com-
bined according to the needs of a specific scenario: an interweaving of corp-/
orality and textuality, as Stefan Hulfeld has defined it (2018: 46). As Ferdinando
Taviani argues, the text, instead of being written in its entirety, “suddenly appeared
and was not improvised”:
What the professional theatre companies refused – or what they simply

could do without – was not the primacy and centrality of the text, but the
primacy and centrality of the book. . . . Scala juxtaposes the action to the
word so as not to oppose a theatre based on the body (“gesture”) to a theater
based on text . . . but in order to strengthen, with a striking similarity, his
argument according to which what is important in a comedy is not the
blanket of words but the substance constituted by the series of events.
(1982: 326–328)
The starting point for a performance was therefore not the written text but a
‘text’ structured thanks to a combination of well-known memorized fragments
that were linked together by the actor through a strong and innovative skill, as it
was also described by some actor-theoreticians of the seventeenth century. This
is how Nicolò Barbieri recalls the work of professional comedians in his La sup-
plica (1634):
The comedians study and enrich their memory with a great jumble of
things, including judgments, concepts, discourses on love, blame, despair,
and delusion, in order to have them ready for the occasion; their studies are
in accordance with the characteristics of the characters that they play: and,
since those who play serious rather than comic parts are more numerous, so
they attend more to the study of serious rather than playful things, so that
the majority of them study more the ways that make you cry than those
that make you laugh.22
As María del Valle Ojeda Calvo points out, the result of this compositional
method was always different “because the players built on both the successes
and failures of previous experiences and always innovated in favor of the
performance” (2007: 118). A similar compositional method is also described
by Andrea Perrucci in his Dell’Arte rappresentativa, stating that the actor,
through intense study, has to “accomplish all’improvviso what a poet does with
premeditation:”
The staging of improvised comedies, which was unknown to the Ancients,

is an invention of our times; I have not found a word about it in any of
Introduction 23
[their writings]. On the contrary, it seems that until now only in fair Italy
has such a thing emerged. A famous Spanish comedian named Adriano,
who came to Naples with other [actors] to put on their comedies, could
not understand how one could produce a comedy by simply coordinating
several characters and staging it in less than an hour. An undertaking as
fascinating as it is difficult and risky, it should not be attempted except by
qualified and competent people, who know what the rules of language
mean, [who understand] the figures of speech, tropes, and all the art of
rhetoric, since they have to accomplish all’improvviso what a poet does with
premeditation.
(1699: 101)
The “great jumble of things” that, according to Nicolò Barbieri in the passage
quoted here, the comici had to possess, was collected through the years by the
actors in so-called generici or zibaldoni. Despite the fact that various historical
documents, as noted by Cesare Molinari, testify to the existence of these col-
lections, unfortunately “only one came down to us that presents itself explicitly
as an instrument of work” (1999: xvi): the Dialoghi scenici that Domenico Bruni
wrote for the actresses that used to play the role of the Innamorate in the Confi-
denti troupe.23 Thanks to the work of María del Valle Ojeda Calvo, we can now
also add the zibaldone composed by Abagaro Frescobaldi, most probably toward
the end of the fifteenth century, and conserved in the Real Biblioteca in Madrid.
This is a “fragmented and heterogeneous” notebook containing “motley mate-
rial that ranges from notes and loose phrases to works such as poems – some
unfinished – prologues, dialogues, scenarios, fragments from various tragedies,
and even what appears to be an auto sacramental” (2007: 121). In addition, scholars
can also consider the generic parts contained in the treatise by Andrea Perrucci
(1699) and in the Zibaldone by the friar Placido Ariani, although these works are
of a much later date and were not compiled by actors. In fact, as noted earlier,
during the eighteenth century the commedia dell’arte began to specialize and
be fixed into the image of a crystallized genre. The zibaldoni began to propose
scenarios based on repetitive models, and the actor-authors stopped designing
new and original canovacci. This was a situation of slow and gradual exhaustion of
the stimuli that characterized the earlier commedia dell’arte and was described
by Andrea Perrucci in the late seventeenth century: “The soggetti in circulation
are numerous. . . . Writing new ones is somewhat difficult for anyone who is
not particularly creative and does not know how to avoid the traditional lazzi”
(1699: 86).
The lazzo
To these two open and complementary dramatic structures – the zibaldone and
the scenario – we must add a third one: the lazzo. Both the etymology and the
function of the lazzo have been of difficult interpretation for scholars. Luigi
Riccoboni (1728) proposed the idea that the word lazzo could be a Lombard
variant of the Tuscan laccio [laces] and added that the lazzi were “what masked
actors do in the middle of a scene that they have interrupted . . . and to which
it is therefore always necessary to return” (1728: 65).24 According to the Italian
scholar Antonio Valeri (1894: 43–46), the word lazzo could instead be a simple
variation of the word l’azione [the action], while Andrea Perrucci insisted that
lazzo “means simply a jest, a witticism, or a metaphor, in words or actions” (1699:
192).25
More important than its etymology, however, is the function of the lazzo
for the dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte. Luigi Riccoboni, in the passage
quoted in the previous paragraph, proposes a definition that “is not related to
physical, pantomimic or physical-acrobatic action, but generally finds its place in
a dialectic between separation and return to the initial situation” (Vescovo 2018:
56). There are many kinds of lazzi, as it can now be inferred from the catalogue
of the commedia dell’arte lazzi compiled by Nicoletta Capozza (2006), and clas-
sified as follows:
• Acrobatic lazzi
• Silent, mimic, and mimetic lazzi
• Verbal lazzi
• Erotic lazzi
• Obscene and scatological lazzi
• Lazzi “by night”
• Lazzi of disguise and misunderstanding
• Lazzi of cunning and mockery
• Lazzi of clubbing and anger
• Lazzi of fear
• Lazzi of crying
• Lazzi of hunger
• Lazzi of money
• Lazzi of revenge
• Lazzi of the pimp
• Lazzi in sequence and hybrid lazzi
• Lazzi by Adriani
In most collections, however, the information provided for the understanding

of the lazzo is very scarce. In the collection by Basilio Locatelli, for example,
often appears the simple expression fanno parole et azzi [they do words and lazzi],
without there being shown the ‘name’ of the lazzo and without even a brief
description.
According to Ludovico Zorzi, the lazzi of the different collections can be
reduced to two main types: the ones with an extradiegetic function – “this is an
action which, as it were, begins and ends on itself ” – and the ones with a func-
tion of catalysis – in this case, the lazzo “helps to advance the action, to complete
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“A good riddance of bad rubbish,” said Ned contemptuously; “if
there’s anything I loathe in this world it’s an eavesdropper. There’s
only one thing worse, and that’s a religious hypocrite.”
“I only hope he didn’t hear you call him a mean spy-cat, Ned,” I
said, anxiously regarding my coxswain.
“Bless your young heart, sir, I don’t care a snap of the fingers if he
did or not. He can’t do me more harm than he has already, I take it.”
“I wouldn’t give him the chance if I were you, my man,” said Mr.
Triggs in a low tone. “For the future we’d best just talk in whispers,
for that swab is sure to be up to his spy-catting tricks again from time
to time.”
This was good advice, and we determined that we would follow it.
At about the hour of sunset, Miguel brought us our supper of
porridge; but he made no reference to the late episode, and indeed
did not vouchsafe to utter a word, good, bad, or indifferent. We did
not at all object to his taciturnity, but ate our suppers with as good an
appetite as we could muster up—certainly with many wry faces on
my part. Even Ned allowed that the hominy and rancid butter wasn’t
a patch on the salt fish and rice.
We were kept well supplied with water, a pannikin being always
near us.
The sun went down, and our prison-deck became wrapped in
gloom. It seemed as if night was to be ushered in by the baying of
bloodhounds, for I distinctly heard a mournful chorus from those
four-footed man-hunters, which was kept up for some little time. Ned
was very superstitious about this, and declared that the Irish
“banshee” was nothing to it.
Soon after darkness fell a couple of armed sentries arrived to
mount guard over us. For the greater part of the time they marched
up and down with rifles in their hands; but occasionally they sat
down upon the deck within easy reach of us, smoked bad cigarettes,
and played at dominoes. They were relieved at intervals, I believe;
but I slept very soundly, strange to say, and was hardly cognizant of
what went forward during the night hours.
I was awoke in the early hours of the morning by a chorus of
shouts and angry yells, and a grinding and buffeting noise and
vibration which seemed to shake our little vessel violently from her
cutwater to her stern-post.
“We’ve struck on a rock, I’m afraid!” cried the gunner, starting up in
great alarm. “I hope, if the vessel begins to sink, they’ll knock off our
manacles in time to give us a chance for our lives.”
“Maybe ’tis a collision,” said Ned, “and that would be as bad
perhaps. I take it these furriners are only fair-weather sailors at the
best of times.”
Our guards had rushed on deck at the first sound of alarm.
At this moment the crash of a volley of musketry rang out above
the confused din on deck. Then we heard shrieks and yells of agony
mingled with the shouts of commanding voices and the baying of the
bloodhounds.
We exchanged glances of astonishment and horror.
“Didn’t I say they were pirates?” exclaimed Mr. Triggs in an excited
tone of voice. “This proves it. There is no need to be on deck to
watch their villanous deeds, for ’tis all as plain as a pikestaff. We’ve
run alongside some merchant vessel, and these precious scamps
are going to board and take possession of her.”
I clung to the hope that the other vessel was the attacking one,
and might prove to be a Spanish man-of-war or revenue boat; but I
could not help feeling that the gunner was most likely correct in his
conjecture.
Without doubt we were in the hands of lawless, bloodthirsty
pirates.
A brisk fire of musketry was being kept up, and now and again I
distinguished the sharp crack of pistols and the clash of steel. The
shouts and yells of the contending parties were indescribable, so
prolonged and violent were they. The fight was evidently a desperate
one.
The grinding and buffeting noise still continued as if the two
vessels were lashed to each other pending the issue of the conflict.
We listened intently for every sound, exchanging remarks now and
again in awestruck, subdued whispers.
At times we thought we could distinguish the voice of the chief
ringing out like a brazen trumpet, as he directed the operations of his
followers. To my surprise, no guns were fired from the upper deck,
although, in my hasty glance around, when I was carried on board, I
had noticed that the brig was provided with some sort of armament.
Presently the shouts and yells of the combatants grew fainter, as
also did the rolling reports of the musketry and the sharp, spiteful
cracks of the death-dealing pistols.
“The pirates have boarded ’em, poor chaps,” said the gunner;
“there can be no doubt about that. The fight is being carried on
aboard t’other craft now.”
“God help ’em if they gets the worst of it, poor chaps!” said Ned; “I
don’t believe they’d get quarter from men like Miguel and his mates.”
At this moment a piercing shriek rent the air, followed by a dead
silence which lasted for some seconds. Then we heard loud hails,
apparently from a distance, and answering shouts from some one on
board our brig. This was immediately followed by some orders given
in a piercing voice by an officer on deck.
A rush of men’s feet—a rattling of ropes and blocks—a steady
tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.
“Bracing up the yards,” said Mr. Triggs, “and altering course to
close t’other craft, which has shot clear of us somehow. That shriek
haunts me, shipmates, and I’m afraid it meant some deed of infamy.”
There was no doubt that the gunner was quite correct as to the
two vessels having in some way swung clear of each other, for we
had noticed for some little time that the two hulls were no longer
clashing and colliding together.
“Well, I’d give summat to be on deck and to see what’s going
forward!” exclaimed Ned impatiently; “and what’s more, I’d like to be
striking a blow for those poor chaps what’s in danger of losing their
vessel.”
Bump, bump, bump! The two ships were evidently alongside each
other once more. We heard shots, the creaking of spars, and the
rattling of cordage, but no sounds of conflict.
The fight had evidently been settled the one way or the other.
A few minutes later, the chief, with a look of animal ferocity
gleaming from his sombre eyes, came slowly down the ladder. He
had a bloodstained bandage around his head, and walked with a
limp. Close at his heels stalked his bloodhound, which had evidently
lost an ear in the fray.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PIRATES’ ISLAND.
W HAT the chief’s intention was in seeking us I do not know, for

before he had reached our side of the ship he turned livid,
swayed heavily forward, and fell prone upon the deck, evidently in an
unconscious state.
“The fellow has fainted from loss of blood,” exclaimed the gunner;
“what shall we do?”
“Rather a good job he has, I take it,” said Ned with great
complacency; “for he looked mighty vicious as he came down the
ladder, as if he hadn’t half slaked his thirst for slaughter.”
The bloodhound seemed much concerned at the mishap that had
occurred to its master. For a few seconds it stood and glared at us
ferociously, as if convinced that we were in some way responsible for
what had happened. Its bristles were erect upon its back, and, in the
semi-darkness of the lower deck, its eyes glowed like red-hot coals,
whilst blood oozed from its shred of a mutilated ear and dripped
upon the deck. It flashed across my mind for a moment that the great
beast was going to spring upon us like a tiger upon its prey, and that
with our legs in irons we should be in a very awkward predicament;
but to my immense relief the savage animal at that moment sat down
beside its master, and throwing back its massive head with a jerk,
gave vent to a loud and most pathetic howl.
“If that dogerwauling don’t bring some of the swabs tumbling down
the hatchway, smash my top-lights if anything will!” observed Ned;
“’tis the most onnatural shindy that ever I came across by a long
chalk.”
My coxswain was right. The dog had just lifted his head for
another ear-piercing howl, when a confused hubbub of voices was
heard at the top of the hatchway, and the next moment Miguel and
two or three other swarthy fellows came rushing down the ladder in a
reckless manner, evidently very perturbed in mind.
They were all talking at once, vociferating at the top of their voices,
and gesticulating wildly. All were armed, and bore unmistakable
traces of the late fray.
“Your boss has fainted from loss of blood, I reckon,” said Ned,
pointing out the chief’s motionless recumbent form to Miguel. “He
suddenly fell down as if he had been shot.”
Miguel made some surly rejoinder, the meaning of which we did
not catch. Then he made a sign to his comrades, and together they
stooped and raised their leader’s apparently lifeless body, and bore it
swiftly up the companion ladder, closely followed by the bloodhound.
“I wonder if he’s dead,” I remarked in an awestruck voice as soon
as they were out of sight. “He may have suffered from heart disease,
and the excitement of the battle may have brought on an attack.”
“That’s possible,” said Mr. Triggs; “but it’s much more likely to be
the effect of the wound in his head, which, I expect, was more
serious than he thought.”
Soon after this occurrence Miguel brought us some breakfast of
coffee and brown bread. As the reader may suppose, we did our
best to wheedle some information out of him; but he was even more
taciturn than usual, and would not deign to respond to our questions.
An admirable spy and an admirable jailer, was he not?
Before we had finished our meagre breakfast, we knew that the
two vessels were no longer alongside each other, and that our brig
was cleaving her way through the waves again as if nothing out of
the common had happened. She had doubtless been brought to her
course again; but what of the captured craft? Had a prize crew been
put on board, and was she accompanying us on our mysterious
voyage? We came to the conclusion that this must be so; for there
had been no time to transfer her cargo to the deck of the brig, and
the pirates would not have scuttled her without performing this very
necessary operation.
We were now very careful not to talk on subjects that might be
considered treasonable by our captors, for fear of being overheard. I
managed, by great good fortune, to sleep away a good many hours
of this particular day, which was an uncommonly hot one. The pain in
my head from which I had suffered so much on the two previous
days had now entirely disappeared, but the place where I had been
struck by the miscreant’s pistol was still swollen and sore. For this
latter misfortune, however, I cared but little.
It was about the hour of sunset that Mr. Triggs aroused me from a
fitful slumber into which I had fallen.
“Wake up, Mr. Darcy,” he said; “we’ve come to an anchor.”
I was keenly on the alert in a moment. At anchor! Yes, but where?
Of course, I had been expecting to hear the news at any moment;
and yet, when it came, it gave me a sort of electric shock.
The brig was lying steadily upon the water. I heard the last links of
her cable rumbling out of the hawse-hole. Yes, we were at anchor.
A half-hour of anxious suspense followed, during which we hardly
spoke. I felt very despondent, and so, judging from their looks, did
my companions. Then heavy footsteps resounded on the deck
above us, and half a dozen armed men—one with his left arm in a
sling, and another with a bandaged head—descended the
companion ladder, bringing tools with them wherewith to release us
from our manacles.
This latter operation did not take long, and our guards then
secured our wrists with stout twine and led us on deck. How thankful
I was that they did not blindfold us.
The chief was on his quarter-deck, looking rather haggard. His
head was still bandaged, but was surmounted by a very large broad-
brimmed felt hat. He was armed with his sword and silver-mounted
pistols; and grouped about him were some of his principal followers,
several of whom had evidently not come scathless out of the late
affray. I noticed that upon the upper deck the brig carried six small
brass guns, and abaft all, under a small poop, were stands for rifles
and side-arms. I took all this in with a hasty glance, and then
hurriedly turned my attention to the long, low stretch of land which
was just visible over the port bulwarks.
Was it an island?
I was just debating this point in my mind, and trying to obtain a
clearer view of the brig’s surroundings, and to see if there was
another vessel with us, when I received a severe blow upon the back
from a sheathed sword.
Turning hastily to ascertain who my cowardly assailant was, I
found that it was Miguel, whose face wore its usual malevolent smile.
“Keep eye shut,” he said significantly, “or you get your troat cut,
like plentee moch of ze udder Ingleeshmans!”
I considered that this was a delicate hint worth taking, for I had no
wish to be put out of the way, or even blindfolded. So I cast my eyes
sheepishly to the deck, and answered not a word.
But I very quickly had fresh opportunities of using my powers of
observation. The chief issued some order, and we were at once
marched to the entry-port by our guard, and conveyed down the side
into a large cutter-shaped boat which lay alongside, manned by half
a dozen of the brig’s crew. We were placed in the stern-sheets; and I
had no sooner taken my seat there than my eye fell on a topsail
schooner lying at anchor a few cable-lengths ahead of our own
vessel. Everything on board her looked in great disorder, and I
noticed that some of her rigging was shot away and hanging in
bights, while her sails were loosely flapping about, and her yards and
gaffs at all sorts of queer angles. I heard a confused hubbub of
voices proceeding from her upper deck, but could not see the
speakers owing to the schooner’s very lofty bulwarks.
“Yonder is the prize,” whispered Ned to me; “and a taut little craft
she looks.”
I could not answer him, for I saw Miguel’s glittering eyes upon me.
I gave my coxswain a warning nudge, and at the same moment the
order was given to shove the boat off.
The oars splashed into the water, our bows were turned towards
the land, and the crew struck up some kind of a boat-song with a
weird refrain.
The chief and some of his followers remained on board the brig,
but I fancied that they were preparing to follow in another boat.
There was a dead calm on the sea. The surface was like a mirror,
unruffled by the faintest zephyr of a catspaw. The sky in the west
was aflame with the ruby tints of sunset, fading away above in
delicate gradations of colour into topaz, aquamarine, and pale
sapphire; while faint bars of amethyst cloud, edged with gold,
seemed to hover above the horizon line, as if preparing to follow the
sun on his nightly journey. The exquisite sky-tints were reflected in
the motionless ocean mirror in tender shades of colouring.
I thought of my messmate Fitzgerald, and how he would have
raved about this fairy-like scene; then my mind reverted to my chum,
Charlie Balfour, lying wounded on board the Rattler, and I wondered
if he would be told of my disappearance. Again my thoughts travelled
across the broad seas, and concentrated themselves on my happy
home in the old country; and with tears gathering in my eyes I found
myself muttering a prayer to the Creator of the universe, that those
near and dear to me might never know the painful particulars of my
capture and captivity.
I strove to shake off these gloomy thoughts, and turned my
attention to the island we were now fast approaching.
I could not be certain whether what I saw before me was an island;
but it had every appearance of being so, and I felt sure that we had
not sailed far enough to reach the coast of Central America. An
exuberant tropical vegetation seemed to cover the low hills, and the
shore was fringed with dense groves of palm trees, some of the
latter appearing almost to kiss the waves with their great drooping
fronds. I saw no signs of any inhabitants, or of buildings of any kind,
nor could I detect any traces of cultivated land. As we drew inshore,
however, I noticed that there were numerous outlying cayos, as they
are called in these seas, or coral reefs, covered with exquisite
verdure. To thread one’s way in a boat through these labyrinths of
tiny West Indian islets is often an operation requiring great skill and
nerve, and a thorough knowledge of the winding channels.
The world looked beautiful, bright, and happy, and as if wrapped in
a sublime repose. How strange it seemed that we should form part of
such a fair scene! A band of bloodthirsty pirates, their souls black
with recent crime, were indeed an incongruity in such a picture.
I glanced at them for a moment. Their swarthy, unprepossessing
faces were positively irradiated with the fast-fading roseate tints of
the western sky, but even that could not redeem them. They were
stamped too legibly with the brand of their evil passions.
I had for a long time felt convinced that our captors had no
connection with the Cuban insurgents, or with the mutineers of the
Flying-fish. There could be no doubt that Mr. Triggs had surmised
rightly, and that they were pirates first and smugglers afterwards. It
was merely a coincidence that their great cave happened to be not
far distant from our line of march; and undoubtedly our reliable spies
had mistaken them for a body of insurgents, and had so led us
astray. The pirates’ reason for kidnapping us, of course, I could not
fathom. It remained a mystery.
We threaded our way carefully through the cayos, and presently I
noticed that we were approaching what appeared to be a narrow but
fairly deep lagoon, fringed with mangrove bushes, and overhung with
clumps of tall feathery bamboos, and picturesque palm trees. Flocks
of sea-birds, which had apparently been fishing, rose into the air with
shrill screams of protest as we approached, and then winged their
way seawards.
The boat’s crew had ceased their wild singing, and now began to
pull rather leisurely, the oars dipping very irregularly in and out of the
placid waters.
In a few minutes we were gliding up the lagoon, which seemed to
teem with fish. I noticed that two or three cranes were standing in a
watchful attitude in the shallows, and that kingfishers and several
kinds of waterfowl were seeking the shelter of the mangrove-studded
banks. Far above our heads soared a frigate pelican.
A rude pier, constructed of roughly-hewn logs of wood, now came
into view, and the boat was steered directly for it. The steersman
gave a loud and very peculiar shout, which echoed with weird effect
among the trees, and seemed to die away in mocking laughter on
the slopes of the more distant hills.
Two dark alert-looking figures almost immediately emerged from a
grove of trees near the head of the pier, and gave a shrill answering
shout, at the same time moving forward rapidly in the direction of the
boat. It was now getting dusk, and I could not distinguish them
clearly, as the triumphant glories of the sunset sky were fast fading in
the western heavens.
Amid much jabbering and inane laughter on the part of the crew,
we glided alongside the pier. I just had time to notice that one of the
men who stood there to receive us was old, and wore a grey pointed
beard, although his figure was erect and military-looking. The next
instant, we were hustled out of the boat by our guards, and marched
off without any delay towards the head of the pier. I had time to
notice that four men remained in the boat, and that these fellows
promptly pushed off into deep water, as if with the intention of pulling
off to the brig again for a fresh consignment of passengers.
The two men who had awaited our advent at the pier accompanied
us on our march, and I saw them look at us keenly, and heard them
asking innumerable questions in a very surprised tone of voice,
evidently pumping our captors as to our identity and nationality.
Miguel was the one who principally took upon himself to answer
these queries.
On quitting the rude pier we struck off by an upward gradient on a
broad but roughly-constructed path leading through a grove of palm
trees. The atmosphere here was hot and close, although the sun had
set, and mosquitoes and other insects seemed to swarm in myriads
and caused us much annoyance. The shades of evening were
gathering fast, and the pirates stepped out briskly as if afraid of
being benighted. They were, of course, well armed, and kept a
watchful eye on us, having orders, no doubt, to shoot us dead should
we make the slightest attempt to escape.
I fancied that both Mr. Triggs and my coxswain looked less
anxious than they had done on board the brig. They were marching
just in front of me, and now and again I caught a hasty glimpse of
their faces.
To our great relief, we soon emerged from the palm-grove, and
found ourselves on a small open savannah of natural turf. On the
right hand it sloped away rather abruptly to a sheet of water which
was either a long narrow lake, or the upper strip of the salt water
lagoon that we had just quitted. Its dark waters were only visible here
and there through vistas in the trees that studded the savannah, but I
could see that they swarmed with waterfowl. I found myself
wondering whether the pirates’ brig could be towed through the
outlying cayos into the outer and deeper waters of the lagoon. As the
island seemed to possess no harbour, the brig would otherwise have
to remain in the open roadstead, and run the risk of being perceived
by passing vessels.
The track we were following wound up over the upper slopes of
the savannah, and had evidently been trodden by many feet from
time to time. On our left hand, at the distance of about a hundred
yards, was a belt of somewhat stunted jungle; and beyond the upper
boundary was a precipitous escarpment of rocks and boulders,
amidst which clumps of brushwood and tussocks of long coarse
grass seemed to find soil enough to flourish in. Above these, again,
were other gentle slopes, clothed with trees, terminating in a long,
level, arid-looking ridge destitute of any vegetation, which was
doubtless the backbone of the island.
As we toiled up over the savannah, we came upon the first signs
of a human habitation which we had seen. This was a long low
dwelling with mud walls, and a roof of the flimsiest description
thatched with dried grass. Around the building were a few banana,
bread-fruit, and guava trees; and in front was a large patch of
cultivated ground containing yams and sweet potatoes, which was
being lazily hoed by two sleek-looking and nearly nude negroes. In
the doorway of the house a stout negress, arrayed in a flaring cotton
dress, was seated, nursing a pickaninny, and singing softly to herself
the refrain of some African cradle-song. I noticed the start of
astonishment this black trio gave when their eyes fell upon us. The
negroes ceased working, and leaning upon their hoes stared at us
as if their great rolling black orbs were going to drop out of their
sockets; and the negress, starting to her feet, and placing her baby
in a sort of rude hammock, which was slung under a couple of fruit
trees, waddled toward us with her arms akimbo, and her full-moon
face expressive of the greatest astonishment.
The scene changed in a twinkling, for Miguel and some of his
choice companions attacked these black dependants of theirs with
what was, I am sure, a torrent of invective. The hoers resumed their
work without a word of remonstrance; and the negress, evidently
terrified at the threats hurled at her, fairly turned tail, and attempted
to run in the direction of the hammock in which she had deposited
her pickaninny. Any pace but that of a slow walk, however, was
evidently foreign to this good lady’s habits, and in her confusion she
caught her foot in the root of a tree, and went sprawling on the
ground in a very helpless sort of fashion; for it was evident that she
could not get up again without assistance, and was very much in the
predicament of a turned turtle on the beach. The pickaninny set up a
roar at this critical moment, and I could hear its “mammy” gasping
and spluttering like a stranded fish.
Bearing away sharp to the left, we entered the belt of jungle of
which I spoke before. Here the light was sombre, and, but for the fact
that the trees had been felled along the route, would have been
difficult to traverse.
In about ten minutes we emerged from the belt, and found
ourselves in a singularly arid, barren-looking stretch of country,
which had, I fancied, a volcanic appearance. The island was
certainly larger than I had expected, and appeared to be of
somewhat remarkable formation. Boulders of peculiar shape were
scattered about in all directions, and ridges of scarred and fissured
rock, running up towards the central ridge, broke up the slopes of the
hills into numerous shallow stony ravines, one or two of the latter
conveying streams of water in the direction of the sea.
A small lake of remarkably transparent emerald-green water lay
beneath us, and on its surface was a canoe containing two dark
figures, evidently men engaged in fishing. Miguel gave them a yell
that might have awakened the dead, but we did not pause in our
march for an instant. There came a responsive shout from the lake,
whereupon I saw that the canoe was being paddled to the shore.
The path was now narrower and more stony, but the pirates did
not diminish their pace. The way was tortuous, winding amongst
huge cliff-like rocks, and around the brows of desolate boulder-
strewn hills. Suddenly we arrived upon the verge of what looked like
the large crater of an extinct volcano. Its edges were fringed with
sparse vegetation, but within all was arid and desolate in the
extreme, and the brown, bare, thirsty-looking soil was strewn with
blocks of lava and igneous rocks, where lizards probably held high
revelry whenever they felt in a “jinky” humour.
I jumped two or three feet off the ground!
The old greybeard, who was walking close to my side, had pulled
out a bugle, on which he blew an ear-piercing and mighty blast.
The way the notes echoed and re-echoed in apparently endless
reverberations amid the rocky cliffs of the crater sounded almost
uncanny, at length dying away like the faint mutterings of some evil
spirits lurking in the shadowy ravines.
A couple of vultures soared over our heads, and I fancied I heard
in the distance the mournful howl of a jackal.
The evening air seemed unusually chilly after the sweltering heat
of the day, and in spite of our brisk walk I felt a cold shivering fit
come over me.
As if in response to the bugle blast, half a dozen villanous-looking
fellows came rushing along the path to meet their compatriots. They
eyed us with a broad stare of astonishment, and then fell to
questioning our captors eagerly.
The track now led us down over the lip of the crater, and in a
moment we found ourselves on a sort of terrace strewn with
boulders, and apparently blasted out of the volcanic detritus
deposited centuries before amid frightful convulsions of nature.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN THE CRATER CAVE.
I T was a weird spot, and in the gathering darkness had a

depressing effect upon one’s spirits. Here there might have been
enormous catacombs, where the dead of untold ages had been
brought from other lands to be entombed; and if so, what troops of
uneasy ghosts might be found wandering about the yawning chasms
of the gloomy crater after nightfall!
For was there not the dusky entrance yonder to some land of
hidden rock-tombs?
Before it stood two small brass cannon, their polished mouths
gleaming with a menacing look through the semi-darkness. Beside
these weapons of war stood, neatly arranged, piles of shot.
It flashed across me immediately that the pirates had here some
cave dwellings; perhaps their headquarters, where they kept their
looted cargoes.
I was not long kept in suspense, for our captors hurried us through
the dark entrance which I had noticed in the cliffs as resembling the
gloomy portals to some dreary abode of the dead.
We found ourselves in a beautiful little grotto, low in the roof, but
almost circular in shape. The atmosphere reeked with the strong
fumes of tobacco. On one side several cases, bales of goods, and
barrels were piled, the one on top of the other, and on one of the
latter stood a lighted ship’s lantern, which thoroughly illuminated the
little cavern.
I was enabled to take only a very hurried survey of our new
surroundings, for the pirates hustled us through a very narrow
passage opening from the rear of the cave into another of about the
same dimensions, but irregular in shape, and exceedingly dark and
gloomy in appearance, there being no natural orifices in the roof to
admit light or air. It was in fact a subterranean dungeon, for such in
my present depression of spirits I felt it to be.
One of the pirates struck a match and lit a lantern that he had
brought with him from the outer cave. This he placed in the centre of
the sandy floor. Another individual had brought in a bundle or two of
dried grass, and this he proceeded to strew upon the ground at the
farther end of the little cavern. Upon this Miguel motioned us to take
our seats, a gesture with which we at once complied. All the pirates
now retired to the outer cave, with the exception of the old greybeard
and Miguel, who stood eyeing us for some time without uttering a
word.
Mr. Triggs broke the unpleasant silence.
“It is time, I think, that we should demand some explanation of
your conduct,” he said, speaking slowly, and addressing the mule-
driver. “We should like to know for what reason we have been taken
prisoners, and what is going to be done with us.”
The greybeard evidently did not understand English, for he looked
in a puzzled way at Miguel and addressed some question to him.
The two men conferred together for some minutes, and it was
evident that they disagreed upon some knotty point. At length Miguel
turned to us in rather a sulky manner, and addressing the gunner
said,—
“Ze Captain-General in Havana have gotten in one prison two
mans zat pelong to our ship; and if he shall kill zem, we shall kill you
for ze return complimont, as you shall spik in ze Inglees. We should
have much like better to catch ze Spanish orficer; but Inglees or
Spanish, it can make vaire leetle deference to us.”
“But it makes a deal of difference to us, my fine fellow,” said Mr.
Triggs, with a considerable amount of indignation in his tone; “and I
should like to know how and when you are going to let the Captain-
General know that you have taken us prisoners?”
One of his malevolent smiles flitted across Miguel’s features, and
he shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. Then, slipping his arm
through the greybeard’s, the two quitted the cave without
vouchsafing us another word.
“I wonder whether that fellow is a consummate liar or not,”
whispered the gunner, turning to me.
“I shouldn’t wonder if he was speaking the truth for once,” I
answered in the same low tone. “I think the old greybeard persuaded
him to tell us how matters stand.”
“Not a bad old codger, I’m thinking, that there ancient,” chimed in
Ned; “but I’m dashed if I think Miguel could speak the truth if he tried
for a month of Sundays!”
“You think what he told us was a made-up yarn then?” I asked my
coxswain.
“Yes, sir, I do, and for this here reason. Do you suppose as these
bloomin’ pirates would go and run their heads into a noose just
because a couple of their pals are in chokey? Why, they’d bring a
hornets’ nest about their ears in the shake of a pig’s whisker if they
tried on any such little game! Mighty foolish they’d look, I take it,
strung up in a row like a lot of Yarmouth herrin’s!”
Mr. Triggs looked thoughtful and rather troubled. He was not a
man of much imagination, and was fairly puzzled by the perplexities
of the situation.
“How is your head, my boy?” he asked, turning abruptly to me.
“Much better, thank you, Mr. Triggs. There is still a swelling like a
walnut, but it doesn’t hurt me an atom.”
“Good. How’s your back, Ned?”
“Pretty tol-lollish, sir, thank’ee.”
“These are queer diggings the pirates have,” said I; “and I expect
they’ve more caves even than these two. They couldn’t stow away
very much loot here.”
“’Tis a place that can be very easily defended from an assault,”
remarked Ned. “I should say there was no path leading to the terrace
except the one we arrived by, and the beggars could sweep that in a
murderous manner with their two cannon.”
“True enough, true enough,” assented the gunner; “as far as I
could see ’twas all precipices below and aloft, and ’twould be
something of the nature of a forlorn hope to try to rush it.”
“Don’t you think it would be quite possible for the pirate chief to
communicate with the Spanish authorities, without betraying the
whereabouts of his island?” I asked Ned.
“Do you suppose as the Jack Spaniards don’t know of this here
settlement then?” demanded my coxswain in a surprised tone. “It
may be so, of course, but I shouldn’t be a bit taken aback if I was
told that they were all in the swim, and winked at it.”
I could tell by the expression of Mr. Triggs’s face that he didn’t
much believe in this theory of Ned’s; but at this moment some of our
captors entered with supper, and we relapsed into silence. The meal
consisted of a sort of kedgeree, made of fresh fish and boiled rice,
and would have been palatable enough if the cook had not used
garlic as a flavouring. We were all allowed to discuss our supper at
the same time, but four armed men took up their position as sentries
just within our cave-entrance, and looked quite capable of shooting
us at a moment’s notice.
From a subsequent uproar of shouting and talking in the outer
cavern, I gathered that the chief and some more of his followers had
arrived, and I was confirmed in this belief by hearing the deep baying
of the bloodhounds. None of these late arrivals, however, intruded
themselves upon us, which I attributed partly to the indisposition of
the chief.
The atmosphere of our cave grew very oppressive as evening
wore on, all the more that it was permeated with clouds of smoke
from strong tobacco; but in spite of all this I slept soundly, worn out
with fatigue and anxiety.
The next day, nothing occurred to break the monotony of our
captivity. We were not permitted to leave the cavern, and its gloom
and foul atmosphere were depressing. Nevertheless, our guards did
not prevent our talking, which was indeed a precious boon, but we
took especial care not to abuse the privilege. Every evening our
arms were bound, and four armed sentries were always on watch
day and night.
Every morning when I awoke, it was with a hope in my heart that
we should hear during the day the roar of the Rattler’s guns, or of
some war-vessel sent by the Spanish Government to demand our
release. Every evening I had to confess to bitter disappointment, for
no such warlike sounds had thundered forth.
Day after day passed in this manner, and we began to grow sick at
heart. Had Captain Graves and our shipmates deserted us in our
hour of need? No; we scouted the idea indignantly. They must have
utterly failed to trace us. There was no other explanation. Mr. Triggs
and I began to think too that Ned was right in his conjecture that
Miguel had been telling us falsehoods regarding the Captain-General
of Cuba. If there was any question of exchanging prisoners, why all
this delay?
After the first few days of our captivity had passed, we were
allowed to go out on the terrace for an hour every day about the time
of sunset. If this privilege had been withheld, we should soon have
become very ill, for the weather was extremely oppressive; and the
cool sea-breezes, which ought to have tempered the fierce heat
during the day, did not seem able to penetrate into the great hollow
of the volcanic crater. We badly wanted a change of clothing, but
there was no means of obtaining it. Occasionally, however, we were
allowed to perform our ablutions.
I think about a fortnight must have passed, when it came to our
knowledge through various channels that the chief and a good many
of his followers had gone off upon some expedition, whether on the
island or by sea we did not know. Miguel remained behind, and the
greybeard. This event caused much comment amongst us. I noticed
that Ned visibly brightened up.
“Ah, how I wish we could get a chance to give the swabs the slip!”
the latter whispered to me just after our arms had been bound that
evening. “It’s when their numbers are reduced like this that we could

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Commedia dell Arte Scenarios 1st

Edition Sergio Costola Olly Crick

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Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios g athers together a collection of scenarios from some

Sergio Costola is Associate Professor of Theatre at Southwestern University,

Edited by Sergio Costola in collaboration

ISBN: 978-0-367-60838-5 (hbk)

List of figures viii

Introduction: the dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte 3

1 Abagaro Frescobaldi, Codex II-1586 (Madrid,

2 Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (Venice, 1611) 96

3 Raccolta di scenari più scelti d’histrioni divisi in due volumi.

4 Basilio Locatelli, Della scena de Soggetti comici et tragici di

Zanni Puts on Airs (Le grandezze di Zanni)–Tragicomedy 174

5 Ciro Monarca, Dell’opere regie. Manuscript 4186 (Rome,

6 Anonymous Manuscript Correr. Manuscript 1040 (Venice,

7 Gibaldone [. . .] Manuscripts XI.AA.40 and 41. (Naples,

I.1 Scheme of a typical scenario 8

I.10 Image of Act Three of the scenario La Gran Pazzia d’Orlando.

This book offers a selection of newly translated commedia dell’arte scenarios

Bavaria, and Renata of Lorraine, which took place in Munich on 22 February

for a production of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, directed by

Goldoni captured Commedia as it was dying, diluted and disfigured, to

As Antoine Berman has noted in his “negative analytic” of translation, every

The secret of the commedia dell’arte

These were not theatrical representations performed by occasional actors,

As Laura Falavolti (1988) argues, “there is a dominant tendency nowadays to

routines) and acrobatics performed without regard to context, novelty

The birth of the commedia dell’arte

The companies and their composition

FIGURE I.1 Scheme of a typical scenario. Author’s reconstruction and translation of

The Gelosi (1568)

The Confidenti (1572)

The Uniti (1578)

The Desiosi (1581)

The Accesi (1590)

The Fedeli (1601)

These companies, unlike much of what Romantic historiography had made us

The trouble is that today everyone considers himself capable of plunging

Of special importance were also the commedia dell’arte performances abroad.

the constitutive factors of the commedia dell’arte cannot therefore be

Ferdinando Taviani, in a recent contribution regarding the ‘double’ character of

generic one. . . . They represent two completely opposite worlds, between

The stock characters of the commedia dell’arte

plays by Ludovico Ariosto. On 5 February 1496, when the Marquis of Mantua

FIGURE I.2 Parts and roles: Elizabethan theatre.

FIGURE I.3 Parts and roles: commedia dell’arte.

This, as Roberto Tessari (2000) argues, created a constant dialectic between

The scenarios of the commedia dell’arte

The repertories of the first generation of comedians

a Stefanelo Botarga, Zibaldone. Real Biblioteca, Madrid. Ms. II-1586; 23 sce-

The repertoires of the tradition

a well-established theatrical tradition, which developed among the profes-

a Ciro Monarca, Dell’opere regie. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome. Ms. 4186; 48

As Ludovico Zorzi (1990) notes, “the interpretation of this metawriting presents

A Comedy Within a Comedy