ABSTRACT
Various theories have been put forth about why the characters spoke in distinctly different dialects and about how the actors, much less the audience members, in Italy, and in all the countries to which commedia dell’arte troupes traveled, understood the characters. A significant part of the answer must lie in expression through voice and gesture.
Sources for the study of voice in commedia dell’arte are, not surprisingly, few. We can, however, make good inferences from the sources we have, namely Quintilian’s writing about oratory in 95 CE, widely studied in the Latin grammar schools of the Renaissance and a groundbreaking book on the origins of seventeenth-century opera in the sound of the commedia dell’arte written by Emily Wilbourne in 2016. While Wilbourne’s intention was to explain the origins of opera, her work serves, also, as evidence of the sound of the voice in commedia dell’arte.
Sources for the study of gesture are more numerous and varied: iconography from the period, information on gesture in Shakespeare’s plays, books on gesture from the period, books on dance and its etiquette from the period, again Quintilian on oratory, and, most importantly, the scenarios, particularly those of Flaminio Scala, 1611.
