ABSTRACT
Thomas Platter’s description of Zan Bragetta’s quack troupe, the subject of the previous chapter, offers compelling insights into ways in which medicine and performance could be combined on the stages of Italian quacks, and a comprehensive account of the medical retailing strategies of one particular troupe. It is less informative concerning the particulars of their stage repertoire, for the most part providing little more than broad indications. Some three dozen descriptions of lazzi, or professional stage business involving stock commedia dell’arte characters, in Hippolytus Guarinonius’s medical treatise Grewel, provide considerable detail concerning the actual stage business of quack troupes, confirming Thomas Platter’s indications that some based their repertoire on the commedia dell’arte. Twenty-three of these descriptions are listed under the term ‘Zani’, in Grewel’s index, of which five were pirated in another publication as early as 1615.1 Most were known to nineteenth-century literary historians, and Jürgen Bücking and Jean-Marie Valentin respectively acknowledged their cultural and theatrical significance, in the 1960s and 1980s.2 However, these 23 indexed lazzi by no means exhaust Grewel’s theatrical content. More recently identified passages on the theatre include 12 additional commedia dell’arte-related episodes, boosting its total known lazzi to 35.3 Twelve lazzi have been identified in the treatise’s fourth book, nine in each of the second and sixth books, five in the fifth book, and none in itsintroduction or in Books 1, 3 or 7.4 This chapter contextualizes an assessment of the theatre-historical significance of Guarinonius’s commedia
3 Here referred to as lazzi nos.1-35 (for English translations and bibliographic references to the printed and manuscript versions of Grewel, see Chapter 18, this volume). Eleven of the new lazzi were first published by the present author in 1999 (Katritzky, ‘Hippolytus Guarinonius’ descriptions’, 71-2, 104-23), and a twelfth by Alberto Martino in 2003 (Martino, ‘Fonti tedesche degli anni 1585-1615’, 684). See also Katritzky, ‘Comic stage routines’ and ‘Guarinonius’ lazzi’.
