ABSTRACT
While there are those who seek United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognition for commedia dell’arte as a continuing intangible cultural heritage, others argue, more persuasively, that while commedia dell’arte has undoubtedly had great transnational culture and historical impact, it ceased to exist in the eighteenth century and does not accord with UNESCO’s emphasis on regionality, particularity, and community. Other problems with attempts to argue for the continuity of commedia dell’arte from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century are the embeddedness of its material in the culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the limits on information about its performance, and its dependence on a rhetorical tradition and taste for rhetoric no longer existent today.
Examination of several important present-day performance groups that make no claim to performing traditional commedia dell’arte show how important their acknowledged inspiration by commedia dell’arte has been for them: the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, and the Théâtre du Soleil. A group in Chicago, the Improvised Shakespeare Company, acknowledging no relationship to commedia dell’arte, may yet capture something of its spirit.
