SOURCE: Scott, Virginia P. “The Jeu and the Rôle: Analysis of the Appeals of the Italian Comedy in France in the Time of Arlequin-Dominique.” In Western Popular Theatre, edited by David Mayer and Kenneth Richards, pp. 1-27. London: Methuen, 1977.

[In the following essay, Scott discusses the development of the commedia dell'arte in France, particularly in the late seventeenth century.]

Popular entertainments are generally so classified because of their appeal and availability to a large audience drawn from all classes and conditions of society. However, the assertion that the Italian Comedy in Paris in the last half of the seventeenth century was available to all classes cannot be supported. The cheapest place, in the parterre,¹ cost 15 sous,² a day's wages for many artisans in 1688³. Economic necessity dictates that the audience of the Comédie-Italienne was drawn from the middle class and the nobility. Can we then regard this form of entertainment as popular theatre?

Yes, if we classify theatrical activities by how they appeal rather than to whom they appeal, by their strategies rather than their spectators.

The purpose of this paper is to defend the assertion that the Italian comedies performed in France by the company known as the ancien théâtre italien between 1660 and 1688 can best be understood and accounted for by analysis of their audience appeals; that popular theatre yields to such structural analysis; and that the Italian comedies are most profitably classified as popular theatre.

Conventional dramatic theory does not seem to provide critics with the golden key needed to unlock the strategic mysteries of the Comédie-Italienne. Conventional dramatic theory, particularly that devised in seventeenth-century France, is highly prescriptive. It says that a play must do certain kinds of things, that in order to do them it must contain certain elements arranged in certain ways. Since the Italian comedies did not do those things, did not have those elements, and were not arranged in those ways, they were destined to critical condemnation.

Neoclassical comic theory regards the reform of manners as the proper function of comedy. Critics of the period were only too clear about the inability of the Italian comedians to discharge their duty. Saint-Evremond admitted that the comics were inimitable, but declared that ‘buffoonery can only divert an honest man for a few moments’⁴. Chappuzeau reported that ‘one only goes to see them for pure diversion’⁵.

Later critics have taken several positions. The establishment view is that since the Italian comedies cannot be accounted for within the bounds of Boileau's ruling (I like an author that reforms the age, / And keeps the right decorum of the stage. / That always pleases by just reason's rule;⁶) they need not be accounted for at all. A typical example of this critical posture is a statement found in a rather recent work on theatre audiences in eighteenth-century Paris. ‘The only theatre audience is the audience of the Théâtre-Français, which finds itself without direct competition (the Italians, the Opèra-Comique, the fair theatres are not properly theatre).’⁷

This critical stance was, of course, of no use to those scholars who wished to study the Comédie-Italienne in spite of its violation of the norms. Unfortunately many of them have chosen positions which have led to assertions that do not account for the structures and strategies of the genre. For instance, Jules Guillemot, writing in the Revue contemporaine, accepted the validity of the neoclassical principles of comedy and solved the resulting dilemma by asserting that the Italians produced ‘joyful satire’ and corrected manners and morals with seemly neoclassic zeal⁸. This claim led him to classify even the most conventional and scatalogical doctor routines as satire.

Gustave Attinger, whose chapters on the Comédie-Italienne have the most carefully reasoned argument I have encountered, fell into still another trap. He did not apply the neoclassical norms, to be sure; rather, he constructed his own normative definition of the Italian commedia dell' arte and then demonstrated the deviations of the Italian comedy in France, concluding that it was a sort of messy transition between commedia and comic opera⁹.

Guillemot asserted that the Italian comedy was something it was not and Attinger regretted that it was not something else. Neither of these stances attracted me.

My principal assumption was that audiences were diverted by the performances of the Comédie-Italienne. I looked for the sources of that diversion. My intention was to identify and chart the appeals of the form, describe its structures, and discover its strategies of claiming attention and evoking response. This approach owes much to the theories of Kenneth Burke and other New Rhetoricians who are ‘more concerned’, as Burke says, ‘with how effects are produced than with what effects should be produced’¹⁰.

The findings of my study form the body of this report. Before I relate those findings, however, I wish to identify the sources which I used and justify the limit which I imposed on my inquiry.

I restricted my curiosity to the period of the career of Domenico Biancolelli, dit Dominique, who performed the rôle of Arlequin at the Comédie-Italienne from 1660 to 1688. I had two reasons for imposing that restriction. First, Dominique was the principal draw and the rôle of Arlequin came to dominate the productions during his tenure. Second, Dominique's zibaldone, or actor's aide-mémoire, is in existence.

I had intended, or hoped, to work directly from the Dominique zibaldone which describes in great detail his physical and verbal action in seventy-three productions. The primary document available is an holograph manuscript in the hand of Thomas-Simon Gueullette, an amateur of the Italians in the eighteenth century¹¹. This manuscript is said to be a translation into French of a document in Biancolelli's own hand which passed to Gueullette on the death of Biancolelli's son, Pierre-François. The Gueullette manuscript is held by the Bibliothèque de l'Opèra and has not been edited and published, although many scholars refer to it. I would have used it, but scholarship via overseas post also sets limits.

Fortunately, the Dominique zibaldone was the primary source of Claude and François Parfaict's Histoire de l'ancien théâtre italien¹². This work contains thirty-eight production descriptions, most of them slightly revised versions of the Gueullette manuscript. The major revision appears to be a change in voice from first to third person. I have been able to compare only one full example from the two documents; Dominique's Le Festin de Pierre has been published in a collection of versions of Don Juan¹³. My judgment, based upon that comparison and the comparison of several fragments as well, is that the differences between Gueullette's version and the Parfaicts' version are not so great as to preclude use of the latter.

Along with the Parfaict volume, I have used material from the Gherardi collection of scenes and scripts written in French by French playwrights for the Italians¹⁴. I have used only the material which precedes the death of Dominique in 1688. I have looked at and rejected various other possible sources, some useless, some spurious, some unrelated to the period under study¹⁵.

I had some problems using both the Parfaict and the Gherardi. In spite of a scholarly tendency to refer to Dominique's descriptions as canevas, they are nothing of the kind. The entire document is from the point of view of the Arlequin and describes only his scenes. For example, the Festin de Pierre begins:

In the first scene I enter with the King who speaks to me about the debauchery of Don Juan. I say to him: ‘you must have patience, Sire. When young men get a little older they change their ways; we must hope that will happen to Don Juan.’ The King orders me to tell him some story to amuse him. I take a bench and I sit down beside him; then I tell him the story of Queen Joan.¹⁶

The Parfaicts changed the point of view and attempted to divide the descriptions into acts in order to give the impression that the full play was being recorded. If this impression stands, one tends to conclude that the Italian comedy was totally without structure and that Arlequin was the undisputed central character of every play.

Fortunately, Gherardi's Le théâtre italien corrects any such misimpression. Although many of the early ‘plays’ in that collection consist merely of the few scenes in French which had been interpolated into the Italian plays, four of the twelve which were first performed in the time of Dominique are relatively complete. Thus, the Gherardi plays give us a good idea of the structure of the Italian comedy and the Dominique zibaldone gives us specific, detailed information about the performances.

Of course, the Italian comedies changed over twenty-eight years, and one cannot use the information indiscriminately. Still, in most cases, the Arlequin scenes, especially those dated 1668 to 1674, fit well enough into the structural patterns perceptible in the Gherardi plays of 1682-8.

A brief survey of the evolution of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris will help to establish a frame of reference for the remainder of this report. In the beginning—when the Locatelli-Fiorilli troupe began to play in Paris in 1653—the commedia dell' arte was entertainment for an Italianate court. The early productions were Italian in form and language with the traditional love plots and improvised dialogue. The company, as permanently established in 1660, was a conventional commedia dell' arte troupe with a Pantalon, a Docteur, a Capitaine, two amoureux, two amoureuse, a soubrette and a first and second zanni¹⁷. Its only eccentricity was Tiberio Fiorilli as Scaramouche, a rôle which defies categorization.

With the death of Mazarin and the diminishing of the Italian influence, the company had to appeal to a wider range of taste. Around 1668 the entertainments begin to change. Travesti plots become common, spectacle and machines become more important, and the zanni take focus from the old men and the lovers. In 1680 the troupe took sole possession of the Hôtel de Bourgogne after years of sharing various theatres with French companies. It began to experiment with playing in French and in 1684 received official permission to do so over the opposition of the Théâtre-Francais. In the next year the Italians began occasionally to perform plays which were largely in French, had been written by a playwright, and were memorized rather than improvised.

The most obvious changes are not necessarily the most material to a study of structure and appeals. The change to French was undoubtedly suggested by the need to increase audiences in order to support a full production schedule at the company's very own theatre. The change to memorization was very likely related to the change to French. I find it improbable that all the members of the company could have improvised with facility in a language other than Italian. Three major actors, in the rôles of Aurelio, Pierrot and Pasquariel, had been in France for less than five years.

The change to French is not, by itself, indicative of any change in structure. Memorization was not a radical departure from the highly formal improvisation of the late seventeenth century. Dominique's zibaldone strongly suggests that the performer of the Comédie-Italienne went on stage knowing exactly what he was going to do and most of what he was going to say. Increased use of spectacle severely limited any departures from the agreed-upon sequence of scenes.

One result of the changes just discussed—the employment of a playwright—would seem on the surface to be most significant, but even that innovation was less a novelty than might at first appear likely. The plays described by Dominique were also the products of playwrights after 1667; Mario-Antonio Romagnesi, who entered the company in that year, added the duties of resident playwright to his responsibilities as premier amoureux: Biancolelli himself, and Lolli, the Docteur, are also named as writers by the Parfaicts. One cannot estimate precisely the extent to which this sort of playwriting meant fully-composed scripts. However, Dominique's descriptions do include some segments of dialogue. The plays were not absolutely fixed; new material was added for new members of the company. However, we have no real proof that the plays of the Gherardi collection were fixed. Judging by their structures, they very probably were not.

The change to written plays in French did affect the performances which became less physical and more verbal; that development is clear in the Gherardi plays. But so long as such performers as Biancolelli, Fiorilli and Romagnesi led the company, the strategies of appeal did not change significantly.

Those strategies developed gradually as the company adapted to its audiences, capitalized on what was popular and disencumbered itself of what was not. Instead of the traditional lovers' plot/zanni's sub-plot, the audience was offered a mélange of magicians, exotic desert islands, parodies of recent productions at the Théâtre-Français and the Opéra, and—above all—comic love stories of their old favourite, Arlequin, and their new favourite, Colombine. The company added more spectacle, more buffoonery, more local references, and some song and dance. The troupe itself, by 1688, had changed its composition. It included the Docteur (who had neither died nor retired), two amoureux and two amoureuse (one of each pretty long in the tooth and rarely used), two soubrettes, six zanni, and Scaramouche.

As the entertainments changed, they became less and less like conventional plays and less and less like commedia dell' arte plays. They became a unique thing, la comédie-italienne, in full flight from the rationalism of Boileau and Saint-Evremond.

I would like to begin my analysis of the Italian comedy with a detailed summary of the action of one of the nearly-complete plays from the Gherardi collection. I have chosen to describe Colombine avocat pour et contre¹⁸ because it is the earliest of the four available (1685), because it is the most complete, offering not only the French scenes but synopses of the Italian improvised scenes, and because it is, in my judgment and in Attinger's¹⁹, the most like the Italian comedies described by Dominique.

Colombine avocat begins with a scene in Italian dialogue between Isabelle and Cinthio, her lover, in which we discover that her father is planning to marry her to someone else. Even those who did not understand Italian could follow the central point of the scene since the Marquis de Sbrufadelli is mentioned several times. Sbrufadelli is the patronym which Dominique always used for Arlequin. Marquis de Sbrufadelli means the Arlequin will be en travesti as a pseudo-nobleman and that his comic routines will be full of the familiar and popular mockery of the aristocracy and the commoners who try to imitate their manners.

Scene two introduces Arlequin with Scaramouche as his valet. We discover that Arlequin is going to desert his fiancée, Colombine, in order to marry Isabelle and her fat dowry. The scene is in French. It gives necessary plot information and also cues several comic events to come.

Scene three is a traditional scene of the dressing of Arlequin by three gagistes as the tailor, the shoemaker and the hatter. It is partly written, partly improvised. Several similar scenes are recorded by Dominique²⁰.

Colombine and Pasquariel, en travesti espagnole, are introduced in scene four. The scene is written in Italian and establishes that they are looking for Arlequin.

Scene five is between Arlequin and Pasquariel, now speaking a Spanish jargon. The action consists of Pasquariel doing the rhodomontades of the Capitaine and Arlequin doing lazzi of cowardice. Scene five also sets up scene six, the first of six scenes in which Arlequin encounters Colombine en travesti. Colombine speaks Spanish and Arlequin answers as if he understood. The scene ends when Colombine reveals herself and denounces Arlequin who is frightened into a new set of lazzi.

Scene seven is a comic routine with Scaramouche and Cinthio as straight man.

Scene eight begins a sequence with a scene in Italian dialogue between Isabelle and the Docteur, her father, in which he insists that she marry Arlequin. In scene nine Isabelle and Arlequin do a traditional routine with Arlequin making a fool of himself at civil conversation. Scene ten introduces Colombine en travesti as a maid, applying to Isabelle for employment. Arlequin tries to seduce Colombine who then reveals herself and denounces him again. The scene and the act end with Arlequin, Scaramouche and Pasquariel doing a lazzi of the sack.

Act Two, scene one is a solo for Pasquariel, now en travesti as a tavern keeper. He explains that he is going to play so many tricks on Arlequin that the latter will die of fright. He then sets up a later episode: ‘I know that Arlequin is looking for a mooress to buy for Isabelle. I have warned Colombine to be prepared.’

In scene two Pasquariel sets up Arlequin. Colombine appears in scene three as a Gascon tavern hostess, providing an opportunity for some favourite dialect humour. She once again reveals herself. Scene four is a brief episode in Italian dialogue. The Docteur refuses Cinthio's offer for Isabelle (and Colombine has time to change her costume). Scene five begins the moorish travesti, the most extended of all, and also includes a divertisement. In scene six Cinthio interrupts and menaces Arlequin. Colombine saves him, but then reveals herself and denounces him as usual.

The next scene, seven, consists entirely of Scaramouche doing his famous lazzi of taking fright. In scene eight Pasquariel tricks Arlequin with masks of Colombine and the devil which he makes appear in a mirror and a painting. This scene also includes an extended routine with Pasquariel as ‘the paralytic painter of the Invalides’.

Scenes nine and ten are improvised, probably in Italian, and complete the Isabelle-Cinthio plot. Isabelle has discovered Arlequin's promise of marriage to Colombine and has possession of the marriage contract he has signed. The Docteur swears to have Arlequin hanged. Cinthio announces that his uncle is the judge and that if the Docteur will permit Isabelle to marry him, he will speak to his uncle about Arlequin. The Docteur agrees.

In scene eleven Pasquariel, who has been eavesdropping, warns Arlequin that the Docteur has discovered all, but assures him that a certain professor can save him. Scene twelve is a traditional pedant routine with Colombine en travesti as the professor. The scene ends with the usual revelation and denunciation.

Act Three begins with Scaramouche disguised as a woman, afraid that he has been named in the warrant issued for his master. Arlequin, meeting him, assumes he is a whore. Scaramouche reveals himself and the two plan to escape. They are caught in scene two by the Docteur with several officers of the law. Arlequin hides under Scaramouche's skirt, but gives himself away by talking. In scene three Pasquariel and Colombine scheme to save Arlequin.

Scene four is an improvised scene in which Pierrot tries to make love to Scaramouche, still dressed as a woman.

Scene five is a Night Scene with Pasquariel doing the lazzi of the ladder and trying to rescue Arlequin from jail. Scene six is a comic routine between the Docteur and Pierrot.

Scene seven is the dénouement. Arlequin is brought before the judge and Colombine accuses him. However, she exits and returns en travesti as an avocat. Her pleading saves him and when she reveals herself for the last time he agrees that ‘heaven has made us for each other’.

Some facts of the play: it has twenty-nine scenes, five improvised and twenty-four written out in dialogue. There are three scenes in Italian, three in mixed French and Italian, three in mixed French and jargon (Spanish, Gascon and Italian), one in pantomime, seventeen in French, and two which are not identified by language but which are probably in Italian because they are part of the Italianate plot and they are improvised. The play presents no problems for a French-speaking audience.

I have divided the scenes into four categories: Italianate plot, set-ups, jeu de travesti de Colombine, isolated jeu of the zanni.

‘Jeu’ is a term chosen by Gueullette in translating Dominique and is applied to segments of the theatrical event which appear to be comic routines with complete structures. A jeu is not the same thing as a lazzi, necessarily, although an extended lazzi may make up a jeu. A lazzi need not have a complete comic structure; a jeu must. The notion of the jeu is important to my argument; thus, I am going to digress for a moment and cite an example of a jeu which contains several lazzi:

Arlequin appears at the opening of the scene. He is in a bathtub, waving his arms as if he were swimming, calling for help, saying that he is drowning. Octave assures him that he runs no risk. ‘I don't trust what you say,’ answers Arlequin, ‘for I have often heard of men who are so unlucky they drown in their own spit.’ He adds that he is bored and wishes someone would give him a fishing pole so that he could amuse himself fishing for carp. Finally he asks Octave why he is so dressed up. ‘It is’, says Octave, ‘to do you honor and cut a fine figure.’ ‘But I want to cut a fine figure, too,’ replies Arlequin, ‘so please show me how.’ Octave, after having described several examples of fine manners, adds: ‘you have to treat your mistress to some little trinket now and then, a pretty dress or a pearl necklace, or some magnificent bauble for her hair.’ ‘But,’ says Arlequin, ‘if I give her all those beautiful things, she'll be cutting the fine figure, not me.’ The bath house keeper and his assistants are called to take Monsieur from his bath. They wrap him in a towel and ask him how he found the bath. ‘A little damp,’ he answers. They put him on the bed and close the curtains. Arlequin leaps to the foot of the bed, calling them traitors and assassins. They ask why he is in such a rage. ‘Pigs,’ he answers, ‘I spend all my money in order to cut a fine figure, and you close the curtains.’ Then a brazier and some curling irons are brought and the assistants begin to create his coiffeur. One of them, instead of pinching the curl paper with his iron, pretends to want to pinch an ear. ‘Wretch,’ cries Arlequin, ‘you have burned my ear.’ Another assistant comes at him with a hot iron. Arlequin does the lazzi of the dwarf; they do the lazzi of pulling off the curl papers by force; he cries louder and saves himself from their hands. They run after him, combing him in full flight, and present him with a bottle of scent. He does the lazzi of pouring it on their feet. They put powdered chypre on his hair and cover his face with it. Finally, they present him with a basin for washing his hands. He sees a little cake of soap which he puts in his mouth. ‘You're joking, Monsieur,’ says a bath attendant, ‘that's for washing your hands.’ ‘Oh,’ answers Arlequin, ‘I thought it was a bit of cheese for my lunch.’ The valets take off his dressing gown and dress him as a Baron. Arlequin hears a sudden noise and runs in fright. He falls, fully clothed, into the bathtub.²¹

In English we would call this jeu an act or a routine or a turn. It bears no relationship to any other episode in the play and it could be inserted into any other play using Arlequin en travesti as a nobleman. A very similar jeu occurs in Act 1, scene 3 of Colombine avocat.

Analysis of the function of each scene in Colombine avocat demonstrates why an understanding of the concept of the jeu is essential in comprehending the structure of the piece as a whole. The play contains six brief scenes which embody the Italianate plot. It has five scenes which set up later events. It has seven long scenes of jeux de travesti de Colombine, each self-contained but connected by the fact of Colombine's being en travesti and by the repetition of Colombine's revelation and Arlequin's increasing terror. Finally, the play has eleven scenes of isolated jeux de zanni which have very little connection with either the Italianate plot or the Colombine-Arlequin jeux.

A mechanical but quite useful way of determining the principal element of a play is to estimate what takes up the largest share of the always limited time of representation. A nineteenth-century well-made play, for instance, uses vast amounts of time for exposition, point of attack, complication, and dénouement, leading us to the conclusion that plot is the major appeal. A twentieth-century drame devotes its time to the exposition and development of character. Colombine avocat spends its time of representation on the jeux.

The Italianate plot of Isabelle and Cinthio, which would have served as the central structural device in the commedia dell' arte, is here reduced to a token. Their story has so little appeal that it ends in Act Two and its resolution is not represented.

The love story of Arlequin and Colombine is also relatively unimportant as plot. Actual plot elements are dealt with quickly; the only significant piece of plot information to be found between the exposition and the dénouement is Colombine's action to save Arlequin from Cinthio in Act Two, scene six. This arouses audience expectation that Colombine will save Arlequin in the end.

Colombine avocat certainly has plots, but since they take up little time of the representation they cannot be held to be very important elements of structure or primary appeals to the audience. I am tempted to quote from the Goon Show: ‘So much for the tatty plot’²².

The central structural element of the play, in my opinion, is the repeated jeu de travesti of Colombine. We could call this a plot, but to do so would be stretching the term. The travesti scenes provide no forward movement and no complication. Five times Colombine tricks Arlequin and frightens him; the sixth time the jeu is reversed and she saves him and marries him.

The audience is held not by ‘what's going to happen next as a result of what has just happened,’ but by ‘how are they going to top this?’ The travestis are chosen for the comic opportunities they provide. Colombine as a Spaniard gives rise to a jeu of non-sequitur as Arlequin attempts to converse with her as if he understood Spanish. Colombine as a lady's maid leads to a scene of seduction; Colombine as a Gascon tavern hostess makes a place for dialect humour; Colombine as a Mooress provides opportunities for verbal misunderstandings and ethnic jokes; Colombine as a professor gives occasion for the always-popular parody of learning. The final travesti not only brings about the resolution but also gives Colombine the chance to do the discours.

This central jeu de travesti is supported by several others. Pasquariel appears as a Spanish capitano, an innkeeper, a Turkish slaver, and a paralytic painter; Scaramouche disguises himself as a woman; Arlequin is en travesti throughout as a marquis.

Travesti is a monumentally useful comic device, especially when played by the masks. The mask or rôle is a series of conventional, carefully established behaviours. The audience member, familiar with the rôle, perceives the comic contrast between disguise and reality. The cowardly Arlequin pretending to be an aristocratic swordsman, the elderly and crotchety Scaramouche dressed as a fille de joie, the superb acrobat Pasquariel hobbling in as a paralytic—these are comic because of the inevitability that the rôle will reveal its true characteristics.

Colombine avocat is, then, constructed around the repetition of the Colombine travestis and held together by the focal comic device of travesti. Still, the play contains several scenes which are not plot scenes and are not part of the travesti pattern. How are we to account for Scaramouche's pantomime lazzi of taking fright, Pasquariel's Night Scene with the lazzi of the ladder, the scene of the dressing of Arlequin, the lazzi of the sack, and so forth.

I account for them with the following proposition: the principal appeal of the comédie italienne was the performer. The jeux, which were not structurally integrated, were star turns—well-known and eagerly-anticipated routines done by favourite performers. Such men as Biancolelli and Fiorilli were famous men in the Paris of their day. Their careers were long and notable, and they were court and public favourites. When one of these men, or one of the other special favourites, was announced the audience came to see him do the expected jeux.

In Colombine avocat Scaramouche is only minimally integrated. Fiorilli was nearly eighty and played rarely by 1685. His style, which was physical rather than verbal, was not easily adapted to the new comédie italienne in French. The audience came to see Scaramouche with expectations based upon forty-five years of experience of his jeux. No one cared that Scaramouche doing the lazzi of the sack was not integrated into the structural patterns of the piece. But if Scaramouche had not done several of the anticipated jeux, the audience would have cared. It would have felt cheated.

The jeux were often determinants of the dramatic structure. When a featured performer did certain kinds of routines particularly well, the play had to offer him frequent opportunities to do them. Biancolelli was a magnificent acrobat before he got fat. The early plays described in his zibaldone offer many chances for acrobatics and two of them, Les Quatres Arlequins and Les Deux Arlequins, have extensive jeux based on the contrast between Arlequin Dominique and his shadow, Arlequin Butord, whose clumsy imitations drive the real Arlequin into frenzied exhibitions of leaps and somersaults.

Dominique was apparently also very good at imbroglio, a sort of verbal muddle which occurs when Arlequin means to say one thing and actually says another. These often appear in scenes of courting, especially with the amoureuse, Eularia. It was worth constructing the play to include such a scene in order to make a chance for Arlequin to get off an imbroglio like: ‘Your cheeks … used to be as pink as a freshly-smacked baby's bottom’²³, or ‘your teeth are as white as coral’²⁴.

No doubt exists in my mind that the performers and their jeux were at the heart of the popularity of the Italians. The next question, logically, is what were the specific appeals which led to that popularity?

The jeu is principally an opportunity for a performer to exhibit his physical and verbal skills. By skill I mean more than just acrobatics or gimmicks like Flautin's ability to mimic several instruments with his voice. I mean a degree of control of voice and body which leads to a perfection of action.

Great physical skill is pleasurable in and of itself. The acting teacher, Robert Benedetti, calls this the pleasure of kinetic experience. Speaking of the Asian actor, Benedetti remarks:

Sad … that our theatre so rarely provides kinetic and kinesthetic experiences of such potency. Our culture's enormous hunger for such experience is unfortunately satisfied more by Monday Night Football than by the Stage, despite the fact that audiences respond vigorously to any indication that actors are capable of doing more than behaving.²⁵

Skill underlies a number of other appeals. First is the appeal of control. Control permits comic response to potentially threatening situations. Skilled performers do not get hurt when they fight or fall from ladders. If there were any danger that they might, the routines would not be funny. Control also permits comedy when apparent clumsiness is based upon absolute proficiency. An example of this occurs in Les trois Voleurs découverts:

Arlequin enters with a sack on his head, looking like a sort of Capuchin monk. Trivelin appears at the window at the agreed-upon signal and asks if he has the sack. ‘Yes,’ says Arlequin. ‘Open it wider,’ continues his comrade. ‘I can't open it any more,’ replies Arlequin. ‘Idiot,’ says Trivelin to him, ‘I'm talking about the sack's mouth, not yours.’ Arlequin opens the sack, but he holds the opening to the rear for fear of being bitten. After all these lazzi he presents the opening of the sack. Trivelin throws down the packages he has made; each time Arlequin catches one he falls to the ground. Trivelin throws Bologna sausages; Arlequin catches them in his hat and breeches. He sees a baby coming and catches it and puts it in the sack as well.²⁶

If there were any doubt that Arlequin would catch the baby the comedy would fail. If Arlequin were to miss a packet or a Bologna sausage after all his pretended difficulty in catching them the comedy would also fail since the opposition of appearance and reality would collapse.

A second appeal based upon skill was the ability of everyone in the company to communicate information physically, even when masked. For nearly twenty-five years these performers played in Italian to a French audience. Would that audience have supported them if the course of events on the stage had been unintelligible? The result of the language barrier was the development of great proficiency in pantomime.

Pantomime has its own appeal; the audience must actively participate in the event and must interpret the action of the performer. If the pantomime is clear and accurate, the audience will grasp the meaning of the action and derive pleasure from its own accomplishment. Of course, after twenty-five years, some of the pantomime must have been conventional signing. Yet even signing makes an appeal. The initiates who understand it feel superior to the uninitiates who don't (a response which may help to explain the continued support by the Japanese upper class of the Noh play).

The Italians used little pure pantomime; physical action supported and was supported by dialogue. Some notion of the physical action can be reconstructed from the dialogue.

The jeu between Arlequin and Trivelin cited above was not conducted in silence, but its comic points could be made by the action even if the dialogue were incomprehensible. Arlequin enters with a sack on his head and gives a signal. Trivelin appears and speaks softly. Arlequin holds up the sack. Trivelin speaks again. Arlequin opens his mouth. Trivelin speaks impatiently. Arlequin answers with his mouth held wide open. Trivelin yells. Arlequin closes his mouth and opens the mouth of the sack. The rest of the jeu is comic action.

Some scenes were conducted primarily in pantomime, among them many of the Night Scenes. The gimmick which defined a Night Scene was that the performers behaved as if the stage were dark even though it was brightly lit. The Night Scene was very popular because it gave ample opportunities for jeux, including many in which several characters are on stage, each unknown to the others. A good example of a Night Scene with a preponderance of pantomime is to be found in Les Deux Arlequins.

He [Arlequin] re-enters after a bit with a ladder which he says he had to borrow from the hangman. Arlequin first does all the turns and lazzi of the ladder. Following which he places it against the window of the house, mounts it, and somersaults inside. Darkness causes him to mistake the street door for the door to another room. He comes out and, believing himself to be in a room which he finds extremely large, complains that someone has forgotten to furnish it with chairs. In looking for a way out, he bumps into his ladder. ‘Oh, oh,’ he says, ‘here is my ladder come to look for me in the house.’ He does some new turns with the ladder. Trivelin arrives unexpectedly with another ladder; the two valets, without perceiving each other, raise their ladders one against the other and perform different lazzi together. Finally Arlequin tries to climb up, but he puts his foot on his comrade's shoulder, is scared, and persuades himself that the hangman has come to take back his ladder. He calls for help, a light is brought, Arlequin recognizes Trivelin, beats him up, and runs away.²⁷

Scaramouche was a master of pantomime who played enfarinée rather than in mask, thus revealing his eyes and facial expressions. Unfortunately, the available evidence does not permit much reconstruction of the action of Scaramouche since Dominique only described his own and Gherardi published few plays in which Scaramouche appeared.

The performers were not only skilled physically, they were also great verbal comedians doing plays filled with bon mots, puns, non-sequiturs, and long verbal routines. Opinion varies on the extent to which the audiences of the 1660's and '70's understood them. Had the majority of the audience been fluent in Italian, however, the pressure to play in French should not have occurred. Also, the verbal comedy shows evidence of adaptation to a French-speaking audience. The plays are full of verbal episodes which gain comic effect from their patterns as well as their meanings.

Patter, monosyllable and jargon are to be found in many of the plays. All of these rely on patterns of sound. A good example of monosyllable is described in Le Festin de Pierre. Arlequin, starving as usual, is invited by Don Juan to sit down at the dinner table and tell him all about a pretty young widow:

Arlequin obeys joyfully … he begins by taking off his hat, which is getting in his way, and putting it on Don Juan's head. Don Juan throws it into a corner of the stage and asks several questions about the young widow. Arlequin, not wanting to lose any time from his food, answers in monosyllables. ‘How tall is she?’ says Don Juan. ‘Short,’ answers Arlequin. ‘What's her name?’ ‘Anne.’ ‘Has she a father and mother?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You say that she loves me?’ ‘Lots.’ ‘Where did I see her first?’ ‘Dancing’ …²⁸

Throughout this Arlequin is stuffing food in his mouth as fast as he can. Monosyllable is comic, especially in contrast to Arlequin's usual verbal diarrhoea.

Jargon is often found in the jeux de travesti. In the moorish travesti of Colombine avocat we find several examples, among them the following. Colombine is speaking mostly in Italian with some jargon Turkish.

COLOMBINE:
Mi Patrona chiamara Hallimoroid.
ARLEQUIN:
He has hemorroids?(29)

In Les trois feints Turcs Trivelin is a master of jargon Turkish, but Arlequin can only come up with ‘got morghen mayer’³⁰. Jargon was such a common device that the word gained usage as a verb. At the end of the scene just mentioned, ‘they entered into the Doctor's house, still jargoning’.

An example of patter comes from Le Chevalier du Soleil. This is the familiar routine with one character trying to say something and the other continually interrupting. The example was written in French, but is similar to patter scenes described by Dominique. The Médecin is Arlequin who has just completed a long tirade making the quick volleys of the patter doubly welcome.

MéDECIN:
[ending his tirade] In short, I make such cruel war on the infirmities of men that when I come across some chronic disease which obstinately resists my treatment, I kill the patient and cure the malady.
DOCTEUR:
The cure is admirable.
MéDECIN:
None better.
DOCTEUR:
Well, I have given you all the time you wanted for your discourse; now it's my turn to talk.
MéDECIN:
All right.
DOCTEUR:
Let's begin with medicine.
MéDECIN:
Willingly
DOCTEUR:
Medicine is …
MéDECIN:
I'm listening.
DOCTEUR:
Medicine, I tell you, is …
MéDECIN:
I'm always willing to learn something new.
DOCTEUR:
Will you give me the time to say …
MéDECIN:
The time is nearly four o'clock.
DOCTEUR:
I was saying to you that …
MéDECIN:
Please, let's control ourselves.
DOCTEUR:
Again?
MéDECIN:
Oh, I won't say anything else.(31)

But, of course, he does.

Much of the verbal comedy was undoubtedly lost to the members of the audience who did not know Italian. The puns, the one-liners, the non-sequiturs would all have been impossible. But the structure of the jeu was nearly always perceptible through physical action, and the performances were so rich in so many varieties of comedy that the inability of some audience members to follow some verbal sallies was not much of a liability.

So far I have described jeux which were designed primarily to exhibit performers' skills. Another group of jeux were comic because of subject matter. Certain sorts of human behaviours and conditions were obviously held to be innately funny. Breaking wind was funny; so was defecation. Cripples, freaks, foreigners and men of learning were amusing. The seventeenth century was neither prudish nor compassionate.

The most common of this sort of jeu was the extended bathroom joke. Scatology was more popular than obscenity, oddly enough, although perhaps they were united in that omnipresent stage property, the enema syringe, the custard pie of the Italian comedy.

Most of the scholars whose works I have consulted don't care for these ‘sordid drolleries’, as Attinger calls them³². Admittedly, it helps to be eleven years old to fully appreciate them. Much bathroom humour appears in Doctor routines. The grossest one I have encountered comes from Le Médecin volant:

ARLEQUIN:
… but I must see the urine of the invalid. Madame, do you know how to make pi-pi? I see perfectly that the illness of Madame comes from an obstruction. Therefore, she must take a little walk, say from here to Lyon.’ Eularia re-enters followed by Diamantine, her maid, carrying some urine in a glass and saying that her mistress is worse than ever. Arlequin brings the glass of urine to his nose and says, ‘If the meat is as tasty as the broth, I'd like to have a slice.’ He then drinks the urine and blows it into Pantalon's face.(33)

Some of the scatalogical jeux were very extended. In Le Collier de perles Arlequin steals a pearl necklace and swallows it. Retrieving the pearls accounts for most of Act Two and all of Act Three. The enema syringe is brought fully into play.

I suggest that the root of the comic response to this sort of thing is pleasure in another's loss of control. The response was not the prurient giggle of modern times but the hearty laugh of the Greek who found the involuntary functions of the body a perfect scream and adored watching those leather phalluses flip up and down. The enema makes defecation an entirely involuntary function, particularly ludicrous if the victim should be about to use the chaise-percée in which Arlequin is hiding. Scatology was so popular at the Comédie-Italienne that I believe the reason for the vast number of travestis en médecin was that such jeux gave the best opportunities for enemas.

Obscenity is scarcer. The plays themselves are not really lewd as far as the available evidence shows. They contain a good many double-entendres and some cuckold jokes, but very few jeux with purely sexual subject matter. My own opinion is that the written evidence is misleading and that the performances were, indeed, obscene. The iconography gives at least one clue to possible phallic comedy. Several engravings of both Dominique and his successor Evaristo Gherardi show Arlequin in profile with the slapstick held so that its handle, visible across the body, and with a rounded knob on the end, appears in precisely the position of the phallus³⁴. Perhaps the slapstick, like the enema syringe, did double duty. It certainly came into play when that other hysterical human habit, breaking wind, took place.

My guess is that the real obscenity was filtered out of the written evidence by Gherardi, who compiled his collection after the ascendency of the great prude, Mme de Maintenon, and by Gueullette and the Parfaicts working over the zibaldone of Dominique in the eighteenth century.

Other jeux with comic subject matter mocked human distortion; there were lazzi of giants and dwarfs, jeux of cripples and wounded soldiers. Many of these also exhibited the physical skills of the performers. Still other jeux focused on hicks (usually Gascons) and foreigners (often Germans). The Polish joke was alive and well and living in Paris.

The list of types of jeux is not endless, I suppose, but it is long. It must be since the jeu was what this form of entertainment was all about. The plays did not progress from event to event; they leapt from jeu to jeu. The exposition signalled not what could be expected to happen to the characters but what jeux could be expected to appear on the stage.

The performers, whose skills were so aptly displayed by the jeux, were also the source of another set of appeals—the appeals of the rôle. Each performer constructed his own rôle, partly from tradition and partly from his own abilities and in response to the tastes of his particular audience. By and large the performer retained his rôle throughout his career and the rôle retained its characteristics. The result of this condition was the establishment of what Kenneth Burke calls a conventional form, the appeal of form as form³⁵. This appeal is based upon categorical expectancy; anticipation is anterior to experience.

The rôle is not dramatic character but a form. It consists of a set of behaviours demonstrating fixed responses to stimulae. The form of Dominique's Arlequin was as invariable as the form of an Italian sonnet or James Bond thriller.

Arlequin-Dominique was a coward, a glutton and a naïf. If he was threatened he hid or ran; if food was available he stuffed himself; if the misperception of reality was possible he misperceived it. The audience, after twenty-eight years of experience of the rôle, anticipated everything. It could instantly predict Arlequin's behaviour in any situation and, perhaps most appealing, it was always ahead of him.

Arlequin's naïveté was his dominant characteristic. It went beyond the dictionary definition of simpleness and artlessness. Arlequin was unable to perceive reality accurately, especially cause and effect both in action and in language. The following jeu de naïveté shows why Arlequin's schemes always fail. He is unable to perceive and correct the logical fallacies in his behaviour.

Arlequin enters in the first scene. He has a sword and a leather collar and says that he is returning from the army where he served at Porto Longone. He ends a scene of fantasy saying that he hasn't a sou and that he is resolved to ask charity from the passers-by. Cinthio happens by. Arlequin raises his hat and says: ‘Sir, how about a little donation for a poor mute who is deprived of the use of speech.’ Cinthio answers, smiling: ‘Are you the mute, my friend?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ continues Arlequin. ‘But how can you be mute,’ replies Cinthio, ‘when you have just answered my question?’ ‘Sir,’ answers Arlequin, ‘if I hadn't answered your question you would have thought me very badly brought up.’ … Arlequin then realizes his blunder and adds: ‘You are right, sir, I made a mistake. I meant to say that I am deaf.’ ‘Deaf,’ answers Cinthio. ‘Nonsense!’ ‘Oh, I assure you, sir,’ answers Arlequin, ‘I can't even hear the noise of a cannon.’ ‘But you can hear me,’ answers Cinthio, ‘when I speak to you. Could you hear if someone called to you and offered you some money?’ ‘Oh, yes sir,’ answers Arlequin. Cinthio's laughter makes Arlequin aware of his stupidity and he excuses himself by saying: ‘Ah, sir, I don't know what I'm saying; I am so lightheaded from lack of food. I meant to say to you that I am blind; a cannon shot in the Italian war carried off both my eyes.’ Cinthio, wanting to unmask this scoundrel, pokes his fingers at Arlequin's eyes, but Arlequin backs away and fends him off. ‘You can see everything,’ says Cinthio. ‘You lie like a pig.’ ‘Pardon me, sir,’ answers Arlequin, ‘I am usually blind, but whenever someone tries to hurt me I can see.’ Cinthio laughs again. ‘Oh, sir,’ continues Arlequin, ‘I swear I don't know what I'm saying. I wanted to tell you that I am crippled in the arm and the leg.’ Cinthio, going through with it to the end, backs away from Arlequin doing the lazzi of offering money. Arlequin reaches out his hand and runs after Cinthio. Cinthio returns and gives Arlequin a kick saying: ‘You are a fraud!’ ‘Yes, sir,’ says Arlequin, ‘you're absolutely right. That's just what I wanted to say to you, but I couldn't think of the word. I am a fraud. I am a poor soldier who has just returned from Porto Longone …’³⁶

The appeals of the rôle are quite clear in this jeu. Audience anticipation is anterior to the event throughout. Everyone knows from the moment that Arlequin announces he is mute that he will continue to imbroil himself in ridiculous statements which are observably untrue. The audience also anticipates that the jeu will be cleverly developed and concluded with a good kicker. One of the disadvantages of conventional form is that the audience has a clear set of critical criteria based upon long experience.

The appeals of conventional form are more complex than one example can demonstrate, but the basic principle holds throughout all the variations. Expectations are anterior to the event and based upon learning or previous experience. That anyone studied the comédie italienne is unlikely; the reliance on conventional form in this case indicates an audience of some constancy. The expectations are fulfilled. On those occasions when a rôle appears to be violating a fixed characteristic, one can be certain that as the jeu develops the anticipated behaviour will eventually occur.

Granted that most dramatic form involves the audience in a gradually increasing ability to anticipate character behaviour, usually that ability is based upon the experience of the event itself. The advantage of the rôle is that no time need be spent providing the audience with the information needed to predict behaviour. The Italian comedy is absolutely without character exposition. Like most highly conventional forms, it is also relatively unintelligible to the uninitiated.

Familiarity does not breed contempt as far as popular entertainment is concerned. Familiarity breeds a pleasurable ability to predict and a relaxed assurance that favourite events are going to occur sooner or later. When the set-up begins, the audience leans forward in happy anticipation. It knows what's coming and, thanks to the skill of the performers, it knows that the routine is going to be just as funny as it was the last time. The situation is precisely that which obtained with the old Jack Benny radio programmes; at some point in each programme we heard the jeu of the Maxwell car or the jeu of the underground bank vault. These jeux were inextricably tied to the rôle of Jack Benny and if they did not occur, we were disappointed.

Another way to define rôle is that a rôle is a clown persona. Thus, part of the appeal of the rôle is the appeal of the clown. My contention that the performers of the Comédie-Italienne were clowns is based upon the extensive appearance in the evidence of one principal form of clowning which I am going to call bully-patsy. The tradition of the first and second zanni is a bully-patsy tradition. First zanni is a clever, lazy bully; second zanni is a dumb but willing patsy. First zanni thinks up illegal and immoral things for second zanni to do. Second zanni gets into horrible trouble but (and this is a key appeal) in the end first zanni is left holding the bag. The pattern is like a symbolic daydream arising from human dominance games. The little guy comes out all right in the end, and the big bully gets put in his place. It is all very reassuring. In the Trivelin-Arlequin jeu de volant which I cited above, one might expect that Arlequin, who is catching the stolen merchandise, will be the one who is caught, but in fact Trivelin gets greedy and grabs the sack away so he is the one to be arrested.

First zanni was not the only bully of the commedia dell' arte. Pantalon and Capitaine were also bullies and losers. The bully-patsy tradition continued even though the company was without a first zanni of sufficient skill to play with Dominique from the death of Locatelli in 1671 to the arrival of Constantini (Mezzetin) in 1682. The plays of that period lack traditional first and second zanni jeux, but Arlequin remains the patsy, everybody's patsy.

Dominique had no choice but to create an Arlequin who was a patsy since Locatelli as Trivelin, a first zanni, preceded him in the company. But Arlequin could be a bully. This duality was very apparent in the performances of the Italians since Trivelin actually was an Arlequin, flat cap, black mask, patches, batte and all.

This adds an interesting complexity to the patsy-bully clowning of the two zanni. On several occasions the potential duality of Arlequin formed the basis of a jeu, as in the following scene from Les Deux Arlequins. Trivelin is the Balourd.

In the third act Arlequin appears on the stage with a bottle in his hand. He perceives Arlequin Balourd who holds a bottle just like it. He runs; the Balourd follows him. He raises the bottle; the other does the same. Arlequin, astonished, thinks he is seeing his shadow. ‘I am going to make him break that bottle,’ he says aside. He turns a somersault holding his bottle in his hand. The Balourd puts his down and does the somersault clumsily. Arlequin, still trying to make the other break his bottle, executes several perilous leaps; the Balourd imitates him, heavily. Finally Arlequin gives the other a blow on the back with his bat; the Balourd returns one to Arlequin's stomach. ‘Ohime,’ cries Arlequin. ‘I am dead.’ … The true Arlequin, tired of this badinage, says to the other: ‘Stop mocking me or I'll clip you one.’ The Balourd repeats the same words and, adding action to the threat, gives him a slap. ‘Here's a rogue who's a man of his word,’ says Arlequin and begins to cry. ‘You're not Arlequin,’ he continues, ‘you're too bold. You must be the Devil.’ ‘Yes, I'm the Devil,’ answers the other. Arlequin, extremely frightened, runs to Diamantine's door and pounds on it. The Balourd, who is hidden behind him, takes Diamantine's hand when she appears and goes into the house with her, making the sign of the horns. ‘Ohime,’ cries Arlequin, ‘the Devil has cuckolded me.’³⁷

When Arlequin tries to bully, Trivelin turns the tables on him with that classical torment, exact mimicry of everything the victim says or does. The evidence does not, in this case, tell us if Arlequin eventually triumphs and reaps the just reward of the patsy. Normally he does even if his reward is only escaping his due punishment for some idiotic fourberie.

The appeal of bully-patsy is only one of clowning's many appeals. Clowns display rôles rather than impersonate characters; they are free to comment on the behaviour of their rôles. This performer-persona relationship has a distancing effect. The performer stands between the audience and the action giving the audience permission to laugh at the extravagances of human behaviour being displayed. The comic take is probably the most important device by which the clown grants this permission. It seems to say: ‘You and I would never do anything as dumb as that.’ The audience remains relaxed, never asked to perceive its own behaviour as consubstantial to the action of the rôle. Rather, it shares judgmental status with the performer. When a behaviour was mocked within an Italian comedy the intent was not corrective.

Clowning has still other advantages besides its distancing effect. Clown personae inhabit the ideal moral universe as envisioned by a child, a world of ‘serves him right’ and ‘me first’. The most grotesque and eccentric behaviour is permissible because clowns only display human behaviour, they do not represent it. The hero is the zanni-patsy who observes none of the restrictions society enforces on human beings. He defecates in public, passes wind, gobbles his food and yells for more, bashes everyone in sight with his noisy slapstick when he's feeling brave but runs away in tears from bigger people, loud noises, and ghosts. He pretends to be all sorts of wonderful things he isn't—marquises, barons, princes, even the Emperor of the Moon. He laughs at the halt and the blind. He has marvellous ideas for playing all sorts of wicked tricks on other people and though he always gets caught he never gets punished. The people who pick on him always get into trouble.

Perhaps the best way to account for the appeal of Dominique's Arlequin-Clown to that predominantly male audience of the seventeenth century is to suggest that he was the memory of a lost paradise, the world-as-it-ought-to-be of any small boy.

This discussion of two of the principal sets of appeals of the Italian comedy—the appeals of the jeux and the appeals of the rôle—does not account for the many other appeals which the Italian comedians provided for their audiences. Limits of time and space make a full charting impossible. My study, although not exhaustive, has led me to certain conclusions.

First, the comédie italienne was a form of popular theatre. Its function was to divert, relax and reassure its audience. Its appeals were centred in the performer, his skill, his rôle, and his status as a clown. Its structures were conventional, from the structure of the one-liner to the full articulation of the play. The principal structural device, the jeu, achieved that status because it best suited the exhibition of the performer. The Italian comedy offered no surprises but faithfully kept its promises. Like most forms of popular theatre it changed as audience tastes changed. If the audience wanted Dominique, it got Dominique. If it wanted French, it got French. If it wanted spectacle, and the Théâtre-Français was offering too many chambres à quatres portes, the Italians were only too happy to specialize in spectacle.

The basic appeals, however, did not change. They were constant throughout the twenty-eight years I have studied, and I am tempted to suggest that they may be constant throughout the history of popular comedy.

Popular theatre is not an easy, trivial or inferior form of the literary theatre. It is a thing in itself and should be studied as such. Critical methodologies based on theories designed to account for the literary theatre will not make the popular theatre accessible to us. Popular theatre of the seventeenth century in France was not a thing of plot, character, thought and language. Decorum and verisimilitude, the Siamese twins of neoclassicism, had nothing to do with it.

The popular theatrical entertainment is an event designed to divert, offering highly-skilled performers the opportunity to display themselves. It elicits a high degree of audience involvement because its structural strategies depend upon a high degree of anterior expectancy. It is difficult to reconstruct and account for.

The process of doing so is easier if we cut loose from prescriptive theory. There exists a portrait which Duchartre identifies as Dominique, although the subject of the portrait is clearly costumed as a Docteur. Oreglia identifies him as Giuseppe Biancolelli³⁸. Whoever he is, what we see is a big, fat man with a little, cynical smile on his face. He is clearly giving us the finger. May his spirit prevail among those who study the popular theatre.

Notes

1. See glossary for this and other unfamiliar terms.

2. J. N. DuTralage, Nôtes et documents sur l'histoire des théâtres du Paris au xvii^e siècle (Paris, 1880), 62.

3. John Laurence Carr, Life in France Under Louis XIV (New York, Capricorn Books, 1966), 142.

4. Charles de Saint-Evremond, ‘De la comédie italienne’, Oeuvres (Amsterdam, 1739), III, 268-9.

5. Samuel Chappuzeau, Le théâtre français … (Paris, 1674), t. I, ch. xxi.

6. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, The Art of Poetry, trans. Sir William Soames in Barrett H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama (New York, Crown Publishers, 1947), 162.

7. Maurice Descotes, Le Public du théâtre et son histoire (Paris, 1964), 7.

8. Jules Guillemot, ‘La comédie dans la vaudeville: le théâtre italien’, Revue Contemporaine, 2nd series, 51 (May 1866), 92-119.

9. Gustave Attinger, L'esprit de la commedia dell' arte dans le théâtre français (Neuchatel, 1950), 167-212.

10. Kenneth Burke, ‘Lexicon Rhetoricae’, Counter-Statement (Los Altos, Calif., Hermes Publications, 1953), 123.

11. Thomas-Simon Gueullette, Traduction du scénario de Joseph Dominique Biancolelli …, Bibliothèque de l'Opèra, Rés. 625 (1-2). The manuscript has been microfilmed and is available from the Service Photographique of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

12. François and Claude Parfaict, L'histoire de l'ancien théâtre italien depuis son origine en france jusqu'à sa suppression en l'année 1697 (Paris, 1753).

13. G. Gendarme de Bévotte, Le Festin de pierre avant Molière (Paris, 1907), 335-53.

14. Evaristo Gherardi, Le théâtre italien (Paris, 1700).

15. As, for instance: [Cotolendi], Arliquiniana (Paris, 1694); Angelo Constantini, The Birth, Life and Death of Scaramouche, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London, 1924). Both of these are highly suspect.

16. Gendarme de Bévotte, 339-40.

17. Information about the first appearances of individual performers and the composition of the company at various points in time is taken from the Parfaicts, 1-130. This information was compiled by T.-S. Gueullette and published by the Parfaicts as a refutation of Du Gerard's Tables alphabétique et chronologique des piéces représentées sur l'ancien théâtre italien … (Paris, 1750).

18. Monsieur D*** [Nolant de Fatouville], Colombine avocat pour et contre, in Gherardi, I, 327-420.

19. Attinger, 192.

20. See esp. Le Baron de Fœneste, Parfaict, 422-4.

21. Ibid.

22. Spike Milligan, ‘The House of Teeth’, The Goon Show Scripts (New York, 1972), 185.

23. Monsieur D*** [Nolant de Fatouville], La Matrône d'Ephèse, Gherardi, I, 22.

24. Le Baron de Fœneste, Parfaict, 433.

25. Robert L. Benedetti, ‘What we Need to Learn from the Asian Actor’, ETJ (December 1973), 463-7.

26. Parfaict, 165.

27. Ibid., 244-5.

28. Ibid., 276-7.

29. Gherardi, I, 372.

30. Parfaict, 229.

31. Monsieur D*** [Nolant de Fatouville], Arlequin Chevalier du Soleil, Gherardi, I, 264-5.

32. Attinger, 188.

33. Parfaict, 220.

34. See Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy (New York, Dover, 1966, rpt. of London: Harrap, 1929): engravings of Biancolelli, 130, Locatelli, 158, Gherardi, 104 and 106-7. See also Giacomo Oreglia, The Commedia dell' Arte, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (New York, Hill & Wang Drama Books, 1968): sixteenth-century engraving, p.13, but note revised carriage of the batte in an eighteenth-century lithograph, pp. 46-7.

35. Burke, 126-7 and 204-12.

36. Parfaict, La Fille desobéissante, 145-7.

37. Parfaict, 242-3.

38. Duchartre, 153; Oreglia, 88.

Glossary

amoureuse: female lover.

amoureux: male lover.

ancien théâtre italien: the old Italian company as opposed to the nouveau théâtre italien, a troupe led by Luigi Riccoboni, which was invited to establish itself in Paris in 1716.

balourd: numskull, dunce.

batte: a slapstick.

canevas: sogetto or scenario, outline of the action.

Capitaine: a braggart soldier; a mask.

chaise-percée: close stool or commode.

chambre à quatres portes: conventional scenery for neoclassical comedy in the seventeenth century.

Comédie-Italienne: the Italian Theatre in Paris.

comédie italienne: the genre of Italian comedy.

commedia dell'arte: literally, the professional theatre. A form which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century. Best known for its use of masks, continuing characters, and improvisation.

discours: long set speech with rhetorical and stylistic flourishes.

dit: under the name of, known as.

divertisement: interlude with music and dance.

Docteur: a pedantic old man, usually a lawyer in France; a mask.

drame: a serious play.

enfarinée: in white face: from farine, flour.

fille de joie: prostitute.

fourberie: piece of trickery, deceit.

gagiste: minor comic; hireling not sharer.

Hôtel de Bourgogne: Parisian theatre built in 1548 and used by various companies until 1783.

jeu: a discrete comic unit with a complete structure—a beginning, middle and end. A routine or turn.

lazzi: verbal or physical comic bit.

médecin: physician.

Opèra-Comique: The Comic Opera.

Pantalon: an irascible old man; a mask.

parterre: the pit.

premier amoureux: more important of the two actors playing male lovers.

rhodomontades: vainglorious brags or boasts, as rodomontade.

rôle: usually a dramatic character. In this study the term refers to a continuing character played by an actor throughout his career.

soubrette: female servant; love interest for zanni.

Théâtre-Français: the company usually known today as the Comédie-Française.

travesti: disguise, also implying parody or burlesque.

zanni: lead comic; a mask.

zibaldone: record of his performances kept by an improvisatory actor for his own use.