[In the following essay, Anderson compares the practices of English and Italian actors to suggest that the similarities are more significant than the differences, arguing that the Italian actors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used more structure and predetermined scenarios than has generally been believed.]

Our players are not as the players beyond the sea, a sort of squirting baudie Comedians, that have Whores and common Curtizans to playe womens partes, and forbeare no immodest speech, or unchast action that may procure laughter, but our Sceane is more stately furnisht than ever it was in the time of Roscius, our representations honourable and full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun, a Whore and a Zanie, but of Emperours, Kings and Princes, whose true tragedies they do vaunt.¹

By the latter half of the sixteenth century the companies of professional actors performing what later came to be known as commedia dell'arte were not only well established in Italy but travelling widely throughout Europe. They visited Spain and France, Austria, Bavaria and the low countries, and there are clear though scanty references to the visits of troupes and individual performers to England. English travellers abroad had observed the Italian players, too, and there is clear evidence that the English had an idea of the distinctive nature of the Italian popular comedy.²

Most of the early accounts of Italian players visiting London refer to them as acrobats rather than polished actors (in 1573 Thomas Norton complained of ‘the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tombling of the Italian weomen’),³ and the words of Thomas Nashe quoted above suggest that he too is thinking of the rough end of the market. English travellers abroad, however, had an opportunity to observe some of the better-established companies, and in his Itinerary Fynes Moryson noted something which Nashe apparently⁴ overlooked: the use of improvisation by the actors:

In Florence they have a house where all the yeere long a Comedy was played by professional players once in the weeke and no more, and the partes of wemen were played by wemen, and the cheefe actours had not their parts fully penned, but spake much extempory or upon agreement between themselves, espetially the wemen, whose speeches were full of wantonness, though not grosse baudry (which the Italians like, but neede no such provocation) and their playes were of amorous matters, never of historyes, much less of tragedies, which the Italian nature too much affects to imitate and surpasse.⁵

Somewhat earlier (1582) Whetstone gives a fuller and rather different account of the improvisatory talents of a group of players which he witnessed ‘in a most noble Italian Gentleman's Pallace this Christmas twelve monthes past’:

Certayne comedians of Ravenna … who are not tide to a written devise, as our English Players are, but having a certayne groundes or principles of their owne, will, Extempore, make a pleasant showe of other men's fantasies: so that to try the quickness of the Gentlemen & Gentlewomens wittes, to give the Comedians a Theame Signior Philoxenus [the host of the occasion] demanded the meaning of certaine questions [i.e. of ‘such abstractions as Inconstancie, Dissimulation, Ignorance, Chastytie, and Beautie’ … Then] Signior Philoxenus stopped his digression & commaunded the Comedians to bethinke themselves of some action, that should lyvelie expresse the nature of Inconstancie, Dissimulation, Ignorance & the rest of the passions, before named: which charge being given, while the Actors were attiring themselves, for the Stage, Queen Aurelia, & her Attendaunts took their places, with such advantage, as every Gentleman, had lyberty, to devise with his Mistresse.⁶

Shakespeare certainly knew that one way of creating performance was through improvisation:

SNUG.
Have you the lion's part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.
QUINCE.
You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.

(MND, I.ii, 55-7)⁷

It has been argued, albeit inconclusively, that Polonius's words in praise of the players, ‘for the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men’ (Hamlet, II.ii, 381-2) refer to their aptitude in both scripted and extempore performance.⁸ There is no suggestion, however, that Shakespeare thought particularly highly of this method of composition. He admonishes the clowns to ‘speak no more than is set down for them’ (Hamlet, III.ii, 33) and when he sets his trap for Claudius it is one carefully premediated.

You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in't, could you not?

(II.ii, 512-4)

Chambers found it very doubtful that ‘complete plays were … sometimes given by the method of improvising dialogue on a concerted plot which was followed in the Italian commedia dell'arte’; more recently David Wiles has concluded likewise, arguing that the clowns rarely performed impromptu outside their own unscripted and sometimes improvised solo entertainments.⁹

Today the popular conception is of a clear distinction between scripted and improvised drama, with the Elizabethan theatre a supreme example of the first and commedia an example (possibly unique in mainstream European theatre history)¹⁰ of the second. It may come as some surprise, therefore, to find a major authority on the Italian theatre of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ferdinando Taviani, arguing that the importance of improvisation has been misunderstood and indeed exaggerated, and that ‘the difference between the Commedia dell'arte and the other modern European theatres is much less than is assumed in traditional scholarship’.¹¹

Throughout Europe, the sixteenth century was a turning point for the production of theatre, marked by the rise of the professional player or, to be more accurate, the rise of the professional company of players. Throughout the Middle Ages people had been able to scratch a living from their performance skills, as musicians, storytellers, acrobats, jugglers and indeed as occasional actors, but theirs was a precarious, marginalized existence.¹²

In a sense the history of the actor's profession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the history of its partial reclamation from this marginal position. Yet when the classical genres of comedy and, to a lesser extent tragedy, were revived in the Italian Renaissance, at first professional actors had little or nothing to do with it. Performances were given in schools and academies, and increasingly in costly productions at court. To quote Richard Andrews (writing about performance in the early part of the sixteenth century):

Letters from courtiers describing these dramatic evenings enthuse in great detail over the lavishness of the decoration, scenery and costumes, and the inventiveness or symbolic charm of the intermezzi. For them, it often seems, the success of the party was determined by the amount of money which had been spent. It is significant that while the actors and director (if there was one) of the comedies were all gentlemen amateurs, the scene-painters, costume designers, choreographers and musicians were all professional. The money was spent where the audience felt it mattered …

Surviving evidence tends to suggest … that the plays themselves (i.e. the earliest vernacular comedies) were not yet of enormous interest to their captive audience. We cannot tell how much of this was due to cautious or clumsy acting styles. We know nothing at all about how rehearsals and performances were conducted, nothing about levels of realism or stylization aimed at, and nothing about the physical appearance of actors in costume.¹³

As Andrews shows, the playscripts themselves did become more worthy of their audiences' attention as authors who included Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino and Angelo Beolco (Ruzante) contributed to the growing body of scripted comedies. These were, for the most part, eminent literary figures: we know that some, notably Ariosto and Beolco, had a strong interest in the staging of their comedies (indeed Beolco in his persona of Ruzante was perhaps the first of the Italian attori-autori, of whom Dario Fo is the most outstanding modern example). But none of them had any working relationship with a professional theatre company in the way that, later in the century, a Marlowe, a Shakespeare or a Jonson was to have in London.

The first evidence we have from Italy of a company of professional actors performing comedies comes from a contract drawn up in a solicitor's office in Padua in February 1545.¹⁴ This contract predates any visual evidence for what we should define as commedia performance, but it is clear that they are an itinerant company, banding together to present comedies to paying audiences over an extended, albeit strictly defined period: the fact that one horse suffices to keep them on the road indicates that stage properties and scenery were kept to a minimum. Their names suggest that they were artisans, not unlike the ‘rude mechanicals’ of A Midsummer Night's Dream; how much previous experience they may have had as performers or musicians is not known (but certainly some of the Venetian buffoni from earlier in the century were honest tradesmen between their festive appearances, just as many of the early liveried players in England must have performed other duties in their noble household). In every respect they are different from the courtly amateurs playing one or two times a year in a pre-appointed place in front of an elaborate perspective scene.

As Richards and Richards observe, ‘the nature of the comedies they gave, whether scripted, part-scripted or improvised, is not known’,¹⁵ but by any reckoning they must have been precursors of the commedia dell'arte. Andrews argues that ‘there is an intimate link between the new breed of professional actor, who appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, and the improvisation of comic scenarios … It is unlikely that improvisation method would have risen in any context … which was not professional and lower-class.’¹⁶

The actors' new-learnt technique enabled them to observe performances of commedia erudita and repeat them as well as their memories enabled, adapting them no doubt to the size and composition of their own company, or else to create their own comedies according to similar formulae. Andrews has explored in compelling detail the techniques which actors may have used to create stage dialogue without having to rely on a scripted text.¹⁷ However, this cannot be the whole story. First, there is evidence that the improvisation of comedies was not exclusively the province of unlettered professional actors. Our first account of a performance in the commedia style is in fact the work of a group of courtly amateurs who found themselves in the court of Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria at Castle Trausnitz in 1568.¹⁸

It contains a lengthy description of the evening's entertainment, and even allowing for some exaggeration in the author's account of the speed of its preparation and excellence of its performance, and conceding that Troiano and Orlando were professional musicians who may well have had some prior experience of the stage, it is evident that a group of courtiers were capable of preparing and reciting a three-act comedy with a complicated plot, elegant dialogue and lively action within a very limited period of time. We find other occasional references to courtly or academic improvisation of comedy;¹⁹ but it should not be forgotten that the extemporal composition of verses to a given theme was a recognized accomplishment of the Renaissance poet or courtier. We note for instance from Whetstone's account of the improvising players, quoted above, that Signor Philoxenus wanted to ‘try the quickness of the Gentlemen and Gentlewomens wittes’ and that while waiting for the actors to begin ‘every Gentleman, had lyberty, to devise with his Mistresse’. It is interesting in this connection to compare The Spanish Tragedy with Hamlet. Unlike Hamlet, who profits from the chance arrival of a group of travelling players and ‘sets down’ an additional speech for them, Hieronimo enlists the support of the nobles at court for the performance of his tragedy; although, he claims, ‘It was my chance to write a tragedy’ (IV.i. 77), the actors are handed ‘abstracts’ (140) and it is clear they were expected to extemporize their parts:

It was determined to have been acted,
By gentlemen and scholars too,
Such as could tell what to speak

(100-2).

As Hieronimo reminds the company

The Italian tragedians were so sharp of wit
That in one hour's meditation
They would perform anything in action

(163-5).²⁰

The Gentlewomen were as active in the exercise as the Gentlemen, and Taviani makes the suggestion that this kind of literary improvisation became part of the practice of the commedia players when women of the distinction of Isabella Andreini joined the companies: ‘It was with Isabella that the figure of the actress was separated, for the first time, from that of the “honesta meretrix”.²¹ Isabella Canali (1562-1604) married Francesco Andreini, leader of the famous Gelosi company, and became the most distinguished actress of her time. But she was also an accomplished poet, one of the few women to be admitted to a literary academy: ‘after her death, the story was often told of an evening at the home of Cardinal Aldobrandini, when Isabella won second place in a competition of poets, with only Torquato Tasso proving superior to her’.²² Citing other examples, Taviani claims that ‘the improvising actor is, par excellence, the Actress … Improvisation, at any rate as a mark of outstanding artistic virtuosity, entered the ambit of the professional theatre companies by an indirect route, by way of the academic exercises of poets, by way, that is to say, of the cultural thread introduced amongst the actors by women.’²³

If Taviani is correct in this, we must assume that few performers, male or female, reached the level of an Isabella in their extempore renderings of passion and character, and many may have used the technique in a more mechanical way; but as time went on the actor's need for a good knowledge of literature and literary devices was often referred to, and actors would keep their own libri generici (commonplace books) into which they would transcribe suitable passages for memorization and adaptation to their own performance requirements:

Players study and stock their memories with a wide variety of things like maxims, conceits, love-speeches, reprimands, and outbursts of desperation and madness, in order to have them ready when needed, and their studies accord with the nature of the characters they perform …

The actors of today are such that there is not a good book they have not read, a witty conceit they have not appropriated, a fine piece of description they have not imitated, a deep thought they have not made their own; they are always reading, always gathering beauties from books.²⁴

All this is a far cry from the unscripted performance texts created by illiterate actors suggested by Andrews. But the argument I am leading towards is that we need to see improvisation not as a single skill or technique, but as a whole variety of methods for creating performance which were not bound together, as they were in the English theatre, by the scripted playtext.

Andrews, in common with most scholars, believes that the primary impetus to the formation of professional companies of actors was a desire to exploit the commercial possibilities of commedia erudita by carrying it out of the confines of the court or the academy to a wider paying public, eager to experience this new form of entertainment. That must be true, but commedia dell'arte, according to the earliest evidence we can evince, possessed from the beginning some features which distinguish it from its scripted counterpart. The evidence that the origins of commedia dell'arte lie in the knockabout carnival clowning of masked figures representing the Venetian Magnifico (later to be named Pantalone) and his manservant Zanni (who in the 1570s was to join forces with Arlecchino) has been reinforced by the recent discoveries of M. A. Katritzky.²⁵ As commedia dell'arte developed, the clowning Zanni and Magnifici carried their skills into the larger companies with their more complex performance texts, rather as the Clowns were accommodated within the Elizabethan companies of players (one difference being, of course, that there was no censorious author to enjoin them to ‘speak no more than is set down for them’). If it is true that commedia dell'arte owes its development to the combination, in M. A. Katritzky's words, of ‘two distinct traditions, those of the buffoni or itinerant street entertainers, and the humanist academicians’,²⁶ then it can be seen that both traditions contributed a vital and different element to the improvisatory art of the professional comedians.

By the end of the sixteenth century a well-constituted ‘fraternal company’ of players in the Italian style would consist of a group of ten to twelve actors and actresses, led by someone like Flaminio Scala or Francesco Andreini who composed and controlled the scenarii. The fact that the performers had specialized roles (often involving different Italian dialects) meant that they also specialized in different kinds of improvisation to produce the performance text. Arlecchino, his fellow Zanni and his companion Franceschina were capable of quick repartee and physical acrobatics, no doubt frequently spiced with obscenity: the lovers (or pairs of lovers) drew elaborately on literary and rhetorical devices to express the ardour of their sentiments; the Dottore and the Capitano were also primarily verbal parts, the former with his Bolognese accent and his mangled Latin and the latter with his vaunting bravure.²⁷ On top of all that, many of the company, like their counterparts in the public playhouses of London, would also possess musical skills.

The sixteenth century was a period in which dramatic performance experienced, in Taviani's words, ‘un passagio dall'economia della festa all'economia di mercato’.²⁸ The contracts formally banding companies of actors into a ‘fraternal company’ marked a significant point in this development in Italy: in England a turning point was the Act for Restraining Vagabonds of 1572, requiring that all acting troupes should be licensed by a nobleman or a Justice of the Peace (and after an amendment to the Act in 1597, solely by noblemen). ‘The effect of the Act of 1572’, says Bradbrook, ‘was to define the actors’ status, restrict the number of licensed troupes, and so by a process of concentrating ability to foster the growth of professionalism, while at the same time it confirmed the old status of the lord and his men.²⁹

Italian companies continued to travel with their horse and strong-box from town to town across the Italian peninsula and indeed further afield: the straggling touring companies in England were greatly diminished by the Act and the players, protected by their liveries, strengthened and concentrated their resources in London. This led inevitably to the establishment of what we should now call building-based companies. ‘The creative leap was taken in the year 1576, when James Burbage of Leicester's Men opened the Theatre in Shoreditch—the most significant date in the history of English drama’.³⁰

London was not the only capital to witness the building of public theatres in the sixteenth century. The Hôtel de Bourgogne was built by the Confrérie de la Passion to house its performances in Paris in 1548; the first permanent corral theatre in Madrid was established on a site bought in 1579. The reason is not far to seek: the new entrepreneurs of the theatrical profession wanted to control the production and marketing of their performances, and a building for which admission could be charged and which was better than anything one's rivals could offer established the basis for a successful theatre company: differential prices for different parts of the house meant that, without losing popular appeal, one could also rely on the patronage of the richer and more influential classes of society. Different though the structure and economy of the theatre systems in these three countries undoubtedly were, they may have had more in common with each other than they did with the Italian theatre system dispersed across the numerous dukedoms, republics and other territories of the divided country. While the grander courts had their halls, sometimes set aside on a permanent or semi-permanent basis for the learned comedies and their spectacular intermedi, the itinerant professionals had to make do in much humbler surroundings.³¹ The Italian players were indeed able to hire premises in which to perform, thus establishing themselves on the first rung of the commercial ladder, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century something like an established touring circuit, embracing the major cities, was in existence; but the working conditions for the actors seem to have been very modest:

I was at one of their Play-houses where I saw a Comedie acted. The house is very beggarly and base in comparison of our stately Playhouses in England: neither can their actors compare with us for apparell, shewes and musicke …³²

And indeed, the price of admission to a theatre is often compared favourably to the cost of the two most comparable diversions, the gaming house or the brothel.³³

The Italian actors laboured under another severe disadvantage. Except for periods when the plague drove them out of the city to resume the life of touring players (greatly to their economic disadvantage) the London companies could perform more or less the whole year round. Fynes Moryson tells us that the ‘professed players’ performed in Florence ‘once in the weeke and no more’, and whether or not this was the general case the playing season in each of the major Italian cities was invariably limited.³⁴

Not surprisingly, given these conditions, the Italian players performed abroad as often as they could, and from quite early in the seventeenth century the best work of the Italian comedians was probably seen in Paris.³⁵ Performing before audiences who were not familiar with their native tongue can only have led the actors to emphasize the physical, spectacular and gestural aspects of their work: the subtleties of language or theme which might have emerged from a scripted play took second place to the virtuosity of the actors within the performance text. While the Italian actors abroad refined their characteristic mode of playing, the English companies who travelled to Germany and Eastern Europe were on the whole those who had not been successful on their own soil, and this led rather to a coarsening of the scripted performance text characteristic of English players. As Chambers puts it: ‘That in a land of alien speech, even more so that at home, the strict arts of comedy and tragedy had to be eked out with music and buffoonery and acrobatics goes without saying.’³⁶ A Frankfurt poem of 1597 celebrates the performance of some visiting English players in terms which amply illustrate the point:

For, know that those who paid their fee
To witness a bright comedy,
Or hear the tunes of fine musicians
Were more entranced by the additions
Of bawdy jests and comic strokes,
Of antics and salacious jokes,
And what with his tight-fitting hose
The well-bred tumbler did disclose.(37)

The economy of the English playhouse not only established more secure and lavishly financed companies than in Italy; it encouraged their long-term stability. The shareholders of the company (who may have included the owner of the theatre building), formed the nucleus of a company, supported by apprentices and hired men. T. W. Baldwin describes it as ‘an established business organisation, working under definitely established laws, and in accord with well-defined customs’. The travelling companies, from which the permanent London ones developed, ‘were more irregular and had more of makeshift in their organisations’.³⁸ The Italian companies, although there were long-standing partnerships, were more likely to resemble the makeshift travelling players, disbanding at the end of each annual season and reforming with different personnel the following year, perhaps taking on a new Dottore or losing an Arlecchino to a rival company.

The player in a London playhouse was at the pinnacle of his profession. Although that profession was not a new one, the market economy within which performance texts were now being offered to the public had created a period of major commercial expansion. One consequence of that expansion was a constant need for new material; conditions must have been very like those in Hollywood in the early years of the film industry, or, perhaps, the television companies of the early 1950s. Although he may not have been a very well-paid one,³⁹ the playwright was a vital element in the production process. Paradoxically, the actors in the Elizabethan theatre, who recited the lines they were given, had more control over the plays they performed than the players who created their own performance texts in the Italian theatre. The playwright wrote to the order of the shareholders (predominantly the senior actors in the company), who would usually meet to consider the outline of a play before he began work on it: one gets the impression that in the Italian theatre it was the actors who were the hired hands, putting their improvisatory skills to the service of a scenario over which they had little choice. To earn his living the playwright had to work hard, usually writing to tight deadlines at speed and often collaborating with others; he might be called upon to revise and rewrite as well as to produce new performance texts. Once written, the play would become the property of the shareholders: the ‘books’ of a company were one of its major assets, and it was usually reluctant to see them pass into the public domain in the form of printed playtexts (just as the Italian scenarii were jealously guarded by their owners). T. W. Baldwin sums up the relationship between the playtext and its performers in this economy:

An examination of these plays with assigned parts has shown us that each actor had a definite line, that there were five or six principal men actors and two or three apprentices, that each play was so written as to contain a representative of the line of each principal actor, thus typically containing eight major ‘lines’, five or six for men and two or three for apprentices. There was very evident understanding as to the duties of each class in the organization, the major parts for men being supplied by apprentices, and the minor parts by hired men. It is evident then that the division of labour was very definitely established, and that the play was regularly fitted to the company, not the company to the play.⁴⁰

Contemporary scholars might regard this account as a little overstated but I believe it is essentially correct and illustrates clearly how close to each other some of the underlying practices in the creation of performance texts in the Italian and English theatre systems were. The Italian scenario supplied a blueprint for a company, relying on stereotyped characters, doubtless taking account of the strengths and weaknesses of individual performers: the English playscript supplied it for a company of players each with their distinctive ‘lines’. The scenario and the playscript both created a series of scenes or units of action within a narrative structure: the playscript went one step further and composed the speeches and dialogue within those scenic units, while the scenario entrusted that element of the performance text to the extemporal skills of the actors.

When we consider the conditions of preparation for performance the similarities become clearer. Both systems devoted what to a modern actor must seem an astonishingly short period of time to rehearsing a new play. Elizabethan actors, with their parts transcribed onto rolls preceded by the briefest of cues, had little or no time to study the play as a whole: like the commedia players, they had to create character, moves and stage action, and interact with their playing partners, more or less spontaneously, relying on their training rather than a director's guidance. As an aide mémoire a ‘plot’ of the play would be posted up backstage, listing entrances and exits, properties required and major pieces of stage business such as dances, processions or fights; the Italian scenario would perform a similar function.

The question of why playwrights emerged to service the English professional theatre but not the Italian is addressed by Richards and Richards. They find no simple answer: ‘the reasons lie perhaps in very different sociocultural and linguistic conditions’.⁴¹ The relative poverty, instability and itinerant nature of the Italian companies would hardly make writing for them an attractive prospect; the use of distinctive dialects for different roles perhaps militated against single authorship of plays; a writer seeking patronage might be attracted to any one of a number of courts in Italy rather than gravitate to London as did the ‘University wits’, where the theatre beckoned as a potential source of income. Once he had secured patronage an Italian poet would be unlikely to lower his status by writing for the mercenary players; those professionals who did produce scripted comedies, like Flaminio Scala or Giovan Battista Andreini (son of Francesco and Isabella) were first and foremost theatre people anxious to elevate the dignity of their craft, not writers drawn in from outside.

I have emphasized some similarities in the production of performance texts in London and Italy; but there were differences as well. The English writers who scornfully declare that the Italian players produce nothing but bawdy comedies are of course exaggerating: most companies, like the players in Hamlet, could perform tragedy and pastoral drama and scripted or ‘premeditated’ comedies as well as improvised ones: most actors, although they would specialize in a commedia role, could perform other parts too. But comedy was the staple fare of an Italian company, while histories and tragedies were frequent on the Elizabethan stage.

Companies were put together in Italy so that they fitted the requirements of a typical comedia scenario: there had to be one Arlecchino (and only one), one Pantalone, and so on down the cast list:⁴² the principles binding the formation of an acting company in a London playhouse, although its members would be chosen to provide a variety of ‘lines’ or character types, clearly had more flexibility about it, and did not tie the dramatist to the rigid stereotyping which controlled the Italian scenarii—something particularly valuable in tragedy, perhaps, where historical or other sources would lend a distinctive colouring to many of the characters and indeed the cast list as a whole. Thus English tragedy was able to move away from the original Senecan formula into much richer and more varied fields.

Shakespeare, as we know, often drew on historical chronicles as narrative sources, shaping them to his dramatic needs—something which could scarcely be achieved in so coherent a fashion in a scenario to be delivered by a group of improvising actors. But more generally there is a subtlety in the political discourse of many histories and tragedies, a sustained thematic development carried forward in the language as well as the action, which would be difficult to manage without the controlling hand of a single playwright. But comedy too was a beneficiary: it is difficult to imagine the diversity of comic form exemplified by Shakespeare and Jonson, for instance, emerging from a theatrical system relying on scenarii for its performance texts.

There is another point which is worth considering. The Elizabethan companies were on the whole not a great deal larger than the commedia troupes, but a comparison of their performance texts with the scenarii shows that they often had more people on stage at once. Tim Fitzpatrick, who has analysed structures of action in the published scenarii of Flaminio Scala, has demonstrated that although the cast list of most comedies comprises between nine and twelve actors, the basic scene-unit rarely brings in more than three performers. Typically two actors will be involved in an argument, discussion or piece of action, and a third will be observing or over-hearing, or seeking to interrupt or intervene.⁴³ (This can be clearly seen, too, in the sixteenth-century engravings in the Recueil Fossard, while the one contemporary illustration of Shakespearian performance exhibits a carefully composed scene from Titus Andronicus with seven persons on stage.) Clearly extemporal delivery is something suited for monologues or dialogue, and Andrews's theory of ‘modular structure’ in the creation of improvised scenes shows very convincingly how two actors can work together without a script; but a more complex piece of action involving four or more performers is virtually unmanageable. You either need extended rehearsal or, as in the Elizabethan theatre, a script to clarify and control the actors' contributions.⁴⁴ Doubtless many playwrights used the availability of a large cast simply for dances, pageantry or battles: but a Shakespeare could create complex scenic units involving carefully structured patterns of dialogue and action (the scene where Lear divides up his kingdom is a clear example), and as Patrick Tucker has demonstrated, even a scene which seems muddled and indifferently structured on the page will prove vivid and interesting if we follow his ‘method’).⁴⁵

Finally, I want to return to the question of extemporal composition, a technique with which, as we have seen, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not unfamiliar. One of the features of the Elizabethan playwrights was the speed with which they produced performance texts: indeed the earliest playwrights in Spain, France and England were by and large prolific, their spontaneity marked proverbially by the tradition that Shakespeare never blotted a line. In William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 2 vols., 1944) T. W. Baldwin carries out an exhaustive study of the curriculum Shakespeare might have followed if, as is generally supposed, he attended the Grammar School at Stratford-on-Avon. (More recently, the theory has gained favour that during the ‘lost years’ before he moved to London Shakespeare may have worked for a few years as a schoolmaster, so that he may have taught as well as studied under his curriculum.)⁴⁶ The grammar school training followed the humanist precepts of Erasmus, and was based not upon the stimulus of the creative imagination, but upon the study of selected classics to be learnt, marked and emulated in a series of graduated exercises set by the master, to develop memory and the facility of composition. The key work is Erasmus's De Duplici Copia Verborum Ac Rerum, published in London in 1512.⁴⁷ A quite late but very telling exposition of the system is found in Hoole, New Discovery, 1660, setting out a programme of work for pupils in the fifth form of a grammar school, beginning with the copying of suitable passages from classical authors into ‘a large Common-place book’, so that ‘they may always have store of matter for invention ready at hand’, then having a theme propounded ‘not tying them to the words of any Authour, but giving them liberty to contract, or enlarge, or alter them as they please’ so that eventually they will have ‘gained a perfect way of making Themes of themselves’.⁴⁸

Sadly, we know all too little about the crucial processes whereby the players converted scenarii and playscripts into performance,⁴⁹ but the evidence suggests that the English and the Italian players had much in common. Actors in both systems needed ready skills and a prodigious memory: rehearsals were part of a rapid, highly specialized commercial operation whose product was performance texts. Barbieri's exemplary actor, forever reading and noting passages in his zibaldone, and the Stratford schoolboy copying authors into his commonplace book, shared a method of composition, universal at the time, of memory, exercise and imitation, leading to a readiness and copiousness of expression for every occasion. (Only when preparing this paper did I realize that ‘copious’ and ‘copy’ are the same word.) The Italian actor used his skill directly; in the English theatre, with its greater resources and consequent division of labour, creation of the text became the task of the hired playwright (or collaborating playwrights). Almost by accident, a by-product of the English system of producing performance texts for a paying public turned out to be the collected works of William Shakespeare.

Notes

1. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless, 1592, p. 27, quoted in Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 274f. A first draft of this paper was read to the Working Group on Historiography of the Theatre at the World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research, Moscow 1994, chaired by Ronald Vince. I am grateful to him and the members of the Working Group for their comments. I am also grateful to the following persons who have read and commented on the paper: Richard Andrews, Cobi Bordewijk, Andrew Grewar, M. A. Katritzky, Jennifer Lorch, Kathleen McKluskie, Claude Schumacher, Peter Thomson.

2. For a recent review of the evidence, see Andrew Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the actors of the commedia dell'arte’, in David D. George and Christopher J. Gossip, eds., Studies in the Commedia dell'Arte (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), pp. 13-47.

3. Quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), II.262.

4. Unless the word ‘squirting’ may be taken as a disparaging reference to the unpremeditated and (by implication) undisciplined delivery of the comedians' repartee.

5. Fynes Moryson, Itinerary, written in 1617; quoted in Kathleen M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia Dell'Arte. 1560-1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 vols, (Oxford: Russell & Russell, 1934), p. 343.

6. Quoted in Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, pp. 346ff.

7. See Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the actors …’, pp. 23ff.

8. See note ad loc in The London Shakespeare, ed., John Munro (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), V.444, and c.f. Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the actors …’, pp. 23ff.

9. See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, II.553, and David Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. viii and passim.

10. For an interesting recent account of non-Western improvised performance, apparently preparing their performance texts in a manner very similar to that of a commedia company, see Hélène Bouvier, ‘An Ethnographic Approach to Role-Playing in a Performance of Madurese Loddrok’. Theatre Research International XIX.1 (Spring 1994), 47-66 pp. 51ff.

11. Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte: La memoria dell compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982), p. 364.

12. For a classic description of ‘that vast body of nomad entertainers on whom so much of the gaiety of the Middle Ages depended’, see E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1903), I 24-5. Cf. Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 19.

13. Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 33, 34.

14. See Taviani and Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 184ff.; an English translation appears in Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 45-6.

15. Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, p. 45.

16. Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, pp. 170f.

17. See Richard Andrews, ‘Scripted theatre and the Commedia dell'Arte’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., The Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance (London Macmillan, 1991), 21-54.

18. Massimo Troiano, Discorsi delli trionfi, giostre, apparati … (Munich, 1568); an English translation is found in Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 48-52. The circumstances of this performance are discussed in M. A. Katritzky, ‘Orlando di Lasso and the commedia dell'arte’ (Kongressbericht, Symposium ‘Orlando di Lasso in der Musikgeschichte’, 4-6 July 1994, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Musikhistorische Kommission, Munich [forthcoming]).

19. Cf. Cesare Molinari, La Commedia dell'Arte (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), p. 65.

20. Precisely how Hieronimo's play was presented is not entirely clear. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901) regards the ‘several abstracts’ (IV.i.140) as ‘separate copies of the individual parts’, while Mulryne (London: A & C Black, 1989) observes that ‘apparently we should think of the play as unscripted: Hieronimo will sketch in the plot and on that basis the actors will improvise their own lines’ (IV.i.107).

21. Taviani, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte, p. 340.

22. Ibid., p. 341.

23. Ibid.

24. Nicolò Barbieri, La Supplica (1634), quoted from the translations of Richards and Richards The Commedia dell'Arte, p. 255, and Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell'Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963: reissued, 1986), pp. 32f.

25. Cf. M. A. Katritsky, ‘How did the Commedia dell'Arte cross the Alps to Bavaria?’, Theatre Research International, 16 (1991), 201-15, and ‘The Diaries of Prince Ferdinand of Bavaria: Commedia dell'Arte at the Wedding Festivals of Florence (1565) and Munich (1568)’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 143-171.

26. ‘Orlando di Lasso and the commedia dell'arte’

27. Cf. Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, pp. 169ff.

28. Taviani and Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte, p. 361.

29. Muriel Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player: A Study of Actor and Society in Shakespeare's England (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 37; on this topic see also Glynne Wichham, Early English Stages, Vol. II, Part I (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 100ff.

30. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player, pp. 17f. Evidence now available makes it clear that work carried out on a farmhouse called the Red Lion in 1567 anticipates many of the features of the later playhouse. Cf. Peter Thomson, Shakespeare's Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 56ff.

31. Siro Ferrone, Attori mercanti corsari: La Commedia dell'Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), draws attention to the similarities between the Italian, French and Spanish theatre systems, pp. 55ff.; and it may be, as more evidence for the extent of theatrical activity throughout England in the sixteenth century comes to light, the similarity between the theatre systems and the production of performance texts in England and Italy will appear greater (I am indebted to Kathleen McLuskie for this observation).

32. T. Coryat, Coryat's Crudities (London, 1611), quoted from the Glasgow (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905) edition, p. 386.

33. See my article ‘Making Room: Commedia and the Privatisation of the Theatre’, in Christopher Cairns, ed., The Commedia dell'Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 74-97. The proximity of the early playhouses to the brothels which often catered for the same patrons was a feature common to the property markets of London and Italy, as both Ferrone and Thomson make clear.

34. Cf. Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, p. 101.

35. Cf. Virginia Scott, The Commedia dell'Arte in Paris 1644-1697 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).

36. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, I.345.

37. Victorian translation of a Frankfurt poem of 1597, quoted by Jerzy Limon, Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 12-13, from A. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and Berlin: Asher & Co, 1865).

38. T. W. Baldwin, The Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearian Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), p. 45.

39. G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time 1590-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 88ff., argues that although playwrights were held in quite low social esteem, they were not badly paid in comparison with other writers.

40. Baldwin, Organisation and Personnel, p. 197.

41. Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 106f.

42. Cf. Ferrone, Attori mercanti corsari, pp. 106f.

43. Tim Fitzpatrick, Commedia dell'arte and Performance: the Scenarios of Flaminio Scala (Renaissance Drama Newsletter Supplement Five, Graduate School of Renaissance Studies, University of Warwick, Autumn 1985), pp. 25., and passim. This tendency was doubtless reinforced by the Horatian injunction ‘let not a fourth character strive to speak’ (A.P., 192), deriving from the three-actor rule of ancient drama, and often though not invariably observed by the authors of commedia erudita who provided the models for so many scenarii.

44. This fact will be familiar to anyone who has experimented in the creation of improvised performance texts in the commedia style. As early as 1860, Maurice Sand had noted that in improvised playing rehearsal was necessary for the ensemble scenes (Masques et Bouffons [Paris, 1860], p. 12).

45. I am referring here to my experience in attending a workshop given by the director, Patrick Tucker, who prepared a performance text for actors simulating what he understood to be the ‘rehearsal’ conditions of the Elizabethan stage: ‘Briefly, his rules are as follows: no rehearsal is needed, except for songs, dances and fights, and for those less than an hour is usually enough. Each actor is encouraged not to look at the play but only at his own cuescript (his own lines and three-word cues) which is specially prepared for him. The actors work from the First Folio, using all the clues Shakespeare gave to his own actors in their lines alone [mainly through punctuation], many of which are edited out of modern versions … (Programme notes to a production of Measure for Measure by the What You Will Theatre Company, March 1992). The scene presented in the workshop which I attended was Henry VI, Pt II, I, where after Henry's arrival there are eleven actors, plus extras, on stage. See also John Russell Brown, Free Shakespeare (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 47ff.

46. Cf. Thomson, Shakespeare's Professional Career, pp. 19f.

47. William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, I.75.

48. The passage is quoted at length in Baldwin, Organisation and Personnel, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943), II, pp. 291-2.

49. The most helpful recent accounts known to me are in Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre, pp. 52ff., and Thomson, Shakespeare's Professional Career, pp. 82ff.

General. Keeping up with the literature in two subjects, Elizabethan theatre and the commedia dell'arte, where so much contemporary work is being done, is not easy, but it seems to me that there is a significant difference between the current state of scholarship in the two areas. Very little new evidence has recently come to light (or indeed is now likely to) concerning the formation and organization of theatre companies and the creation of performance texts for the London playhouses, and contemporary scholars, although they often employ new methodological approaches, are mostly working from material published by Greg, Chambers and others in the early years of this century. In other words, T. W. Baldwin is just as likely to have got it right as anyone writing today. In Italy, however, the case is different: archives are scattered diffusely in collections around the country, and new documentary evidence is still coming to light. 1993, for instance, saw the publication of a body of correspondence written by leaders of the principal commedia dell'arte companies which, Siro Ferrone argues, substantially affects our understanding of how they worked. [Cf. Siro Ferrone, ed., Comici dell'Arte. Corrispondenze (G. B. Andreini, N. Barbieri, P. M. Cecchini, S. Fiorillo, T. Martinelli, F. Scala) a cura di C. Buratelli, D. Landolfi, A. Zinanni, 2 vols. (in the series ‘Storia dello Spettacolo. Fonti’, Florence, 1993). In this paper I have not been able to take account of this publication, except where Ferrone draws on it in Attori mercanti corsari, cf. n. 31. For commedia see Thomas F. Heck, Commedia dell'Arte: A guide to the Primary and Secondary Literature (New York and London, 1988). For the working conditions of playwrights and performers in the London playhouses the essential works are still Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton, 1971) and The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton, 1984).