ABSTRACT
To lovers of soccer and Renaissance drama, the recent flow of Italian football players into British Premiere League may seem to have renewed the controversial encounter between refined acting and vigorous carriage already ignited by the arrival of the Commedia dell' Arte in England. Although any direct influence on Elizabethan drama may be soundly dismissed, the relevance of the Commedia dell' Arte to our appreciation of the figure of the modem actor and of the acting job itself is hardly questioned. 1 However, it has been a zany sort of survival. In fact, the Commedia dell' Arte has not still recovered from its mythical reduction to a grotesque bunch of masks, replete with a set of conventional speeches.
