ABSTRACT
Although the improvisational commedia dell’arte flourished throughout Italy in the later Cinquecento, both in public venues and at courts that patronized its itinerant actors, most theater critics agree that it originated as a Venetian phenomenon. Among its principal popular sources were Calmo and Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzante), who, like the commedia dell’arte actors, employed farcical situations, casts of readily recognizable stock characters, and a multitude of corresponding dialects (including Venetian for the old, amorous merchant or lawyer).1 The number of actors in a particular traveling company could vary, but audiences could expect from the more established companies two sets of young lovers (the inamoratos), two zanni (servant clowns, often named Pedrolino and Arlecchino), and two old men (the Venetian Pantalone and Graziano, a Bolognese doctor), supplemented by other roles depending on the size of the company. The players improvised a great deal of their stage business but seemed normally to have worked from plot outlines, such as those published by Flamineo Scala of the Confidenti company, which served as “verbal shells” of the spectacle.2 These scenari (or canovacci) provide an argument, a roster of characters, and a fairly detailed sketch of the
1 Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 35-7; Vito Pandolfi, La commedia dell’arte: Storia e testo, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), p. 297. The earliest extant contract of a commedia dell’arte troupe dates to 1545. Composed in Padua, the document binds eight actors together as a formal company. Its reference to future court patronage as a distinct possibility suggests that patronage of professional acting companies had already been taking place for some time. See Richards and Richards, pp. 44-8. Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960), among others, warns against relying on too facile a distinction between scripted “regular comedy” and improvisational drama. Some commedia dell’arte troupes capably performed literary dramas for audiences who requested them. In addition, the plot ideas of many scenarios derive from canonical sources (p. 215).
