Commedia dell'Arte Scenarios

Sergio Costola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000471489
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Commedia dell'Arte Scenarios gathers 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 brig to life one of the most foundational performance genres in world theatre.

PART I

An introduction to commedia dell’arte

INTRODUCTION

The dramaturgy of the commedia dell’arte

Sergio Costola

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100676-2

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 “confused multitude of pure epiphenomena” (149)¹ that, for convenience, have been grouped under this denomination. In addition, the commedia dell’arte, according 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 different 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 theatre, 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 organization of the Parisian theatres, which was based on the specialization and the monopoly of genres.

(Taviani and Schino 1982: 308)

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 denomination itself and also, although briefly, 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 formation 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 eighteenth century, and the phenomenon that began around the middle of the sixteenth century was called different names by different cultural environments: commedia all’improvviso, commedia degli Zanni, commedia delle maschere, commedia mercenaria, comédie italienne. ‘To be in art’ simply meant to exercise the acting profession, 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 phenomenon, allowing for the subsequent proliferation of myths around the commedia dell’arte. Even today, if we look at tertiary sources–especially in the English language–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

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 imitation 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 defending 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 hazardous enterprise, and flourished 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 create 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 preceded 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 represented at court since the early years of the sixteenth century (Ariosto, Machiavelli, 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 verbum but staged in a new way:

The actors read or listen to the director while reading the play, they memorize the main points and then they go ad lib, chasing the fragments of 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 canovacci 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 structure 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 contra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Notes on the translation
• Part I An introduction to commedia dell’arte
• Part II The collections of scenarios
• Bibliography
• Index