ABSTRACT
At its simplest, the commedia dell’arte is a type of improvised drama based around stock stage types, notably old masters and their young servants, and pairs of young lovers.2 Its definition, beset with challenges and controversy, is made more elusive by the fluidity of its boundaries, the complexity of its continuing interchanges with other cultural phenomena, and the unwillingness of its elite performers, the comici, to be associated with the lowly professionals by whom many of them were trained. These were charlatans and buffoni, professional comic or acrobatic mountebanks who performed solo or banded together in predominantly male duos or troupes to offer a repertoire relying heavily on mime, acrobatic dance and visual humour, important elements on the commedia stage. The descriptions of Platter, Cavendish and others confirm that, rather than being separated by a sharply defined boundary, the stagecraft of the comici and buffoni merged in a broadly overlapping, permeable zone, and that medical promotion could be undertaken on both sides of the nominal divide.3 From the start, the comici drew on and inspired other performing traditions, at every level. Their stock types borrow from mystery and mummers’ plays, carnival masks, street theatre and court entertainment, popular farces and commedia erudita. They have transcended the confines of the theatrical stage to play key roles in music, dance, art and literature, giving an even uneasier fit between the term ‘commedia dell’arte’, coined only in the eighteenth century, and its modern theatre-historical use. This latter describes a specific type of improvised play, based on the characteristically masked and costumed stock types and lazzi (transferable comic stage routines) that arose in the mixed-gender itinerant professional acting troupes of midsixteenth-century Italy.
