SOURCE: Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards. “Antecedents” and “The Emergence of Professional Companies.” In Commedia dell'Arte: A Documentary History, pp. 11-19, 32-40. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, the critics give the early history of the commedia dell'arte, beginning with its limited connection to classical sources and its more likely origins in the popular entertainments of the Venetian Carnival.]

ANTECEDENTS

A number of very early comments on the commedia dell'arte, dating from the sixteenth century, assume a derivation at least from Roman times, but although they have the apparent advantage of being contemporaneous with the development of the drama itself, they nonetheless carry little real authority, since Renaissance writers were ever ready to find sanction for the interests and activities of their own age in supposed classical precedents. The precedents concerning the commedia dell'arte were rather tenous: certain general similarities perceived between the stage figures and comic business of the Italian Renaissance improvised drama and those of early Italian and Roman popular mime and comic entertainment.¹

Not least of the problems involved in seeking to establish such classical derivation is the sheer elusiveness of this early popular theatre. Next to nothing has survived in the way of play text fragments or written records of the activities of these entertainers, and most of our knowledge is drawn from scenes depicted in extant fourth-century Italian vase paintings; these last, while fascinating and suggestive, are fraught with interpretative difficulties. Farcical parody of Greek tragic drama evidently flourished in Magna Graecia, performed by comic actors called phlyakes. These parodies appear to have included the antics of slaves and old men, and were concerned with the adventures of braggart hero-figures like Herakles.² Devisers of Atellan farce took over elements of Doric theatre and parody of the myths of Attic drama in fashioning their own distinctive and local popular comedy which was widespread in Campania about the third century bc, and was the stock in trade of travelling mimes who set up their trestle stages in streets and market places.³ From Campania they appear to have migrated to Rome, their multiplicity of masks gradually coalescing into four characteristic masked types: Maccus, a gluttonous fool; Dossenus, a crafty hunchback; Bucco, a comic braggart; and Pappos, a ridiculous old man.

The temptation to link these four principal figures with what eighteenth-century and later commentators identified as the four principal masks of the commedia dell'arte—the two vecchi and the two zanni—has remained attractive to some modern scholars, and indeed a link with antique entertainment was made by late sixteenth-century observers, as the following indicates:

I would never number among plays those things peddled around by such miserable and mercenary creatures as call themselves Gianni of Bergamo, Francatrippa, Pantalone and similar buffoons, were we not able to liken them to Mimes, the Atellanae and the Planipedes of the ancients.⁴

This comment, however, merely perceives a general likeness, and significantly looks to classical precedent in order to give rather reluctant endorsement to the modern comedy. Luigi Riccoboni, in his Histoire du Théâtre Italien (1728), likewise remarked connections with early southern Italian farce and classical histriones, connections which seemed all the more plausible at the time he wrote as they appeared to be supported by recent archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum.⁵ Riccoboni was of course writing at the height of the neo-classical period, and was seeking too, in a sense, to give the weight of classical prestige to a theatre he himself still practised. His arguments were by no means jejune, and in discussing derivation he was alert to possible Renaissance as well as classical influences. Derivation from Roman comedy was assumed, too, by the highly influential nineteenth-century historian and recuperator of the commedia dell'arte, Maurice Sand, who probably followed Riccoboni in his Masques et Bouffons (1862), and the case has been given qualified support by several more recent commentators, including Allardyce Nicoll.⁶

Certainly some of the resemblances and correspondences identified between Atellan farce, later mime entertainment and the Italian improvised comedy are striking, and there are clearly similarities between them in costuming and masking. For those scholars disposed to make sharp distinctions between the literary and improvised drama, it has been tempting, too, to see the commedia erudita and the commedia dell'arte as the Renaissance equivalents of, respectively, the Roman literary togata and palliata, and the more plebeian entertainment provided by the atellanae and farsae.⁷ Unfortunately, however, the evidence for such similarities tends to be more general than particular, and the plausibility of the case is the more difficult to accept when so much concerning the characteristics of the Atellan popular theatre remains itself highly conjectural. Not least important in that regard is the problem of the possible connections between the work of such early entertainers and the later Latin scripted comedy. Readily available to at least some of the sixteenth-century professional players were of course the extant comedies of Plautus and Terence, which they could have encountered in printed texts or stage productions. The plays of Plautus in particular are decidedly performer-oriented, and provide numerous pointers to possibilities for actor improvisation on which the Renaissance professionals could, and quite certainly did, capitalize.

Difficulties are further compounded by certain similarities scholars have perceived between the figures of the improvised commedia dell'arte and those of the Turkish puppet theatre, the Karagöz, for which direct descent from classical times has similarly been claimed.⁸ Unfortunately the transmission of popular theatrical forms in the Near East is equally elusive. It may well be true that modes of both popular and more sophisticated performer entertainment migrated to Italy, and more particularly to Venice and its territories on the lower Adriatic, after the fall of Constantinople in 1543, and that the confluence of these and native Italian kinds helped to generate the improvised drama of the professionals. But the nature, extent and importance of the random and panic-induced cultural displacements from the old Roman empire in the East are virtually unchartable, and important sources of possible record in the Levant remain unexplored or inaccessible. So elusive are the tracks of classical popular theatre influence through the so-called Dark Ages, that modern scholarship on the commedia dell'arte has largely turned away from such enquiry. It cannot, though, simply be dismissed out of hand, and could well be re-opened in the future, although as yet no really persuasive, let alone unchallengeable, evidence has been adduced to establish a definite transmission of stage figures, costumes or comic strategies from the early Italian period, through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and on the whole current scholarly opinion considers the case not proven.

Somewhat more plausible, although no less problematic, are those arguments which have sought to link features of the commedia dell'arte to certain figures and practices of the late medieval theatre. Quite certainly much from the medieval period fed into, and helped to shape, the later organized professional drama, but, just as with the antique materials, most of it was by its nature ephemeral, unrecorded and often unrecordable. Again, the sheer richness and variety of medieval theatre defeats such speculation. Many elements of streets and piazza entertainment were taken into the religious drama, particularly the Florentine Sacra rappresentazione, of which there is a substantial body of extant scripted record, and professional entertainers played an increasingly active part in the preparation and performance of these spectacles. That the example of the religious drama was felt in the emergence and early development of the teatro d'arte need not be doubted: the agile and scheming comic devils, opinionated elderly counsellors and pompous military men found in the religious plays have something in common with the figures of the improvised commedia dell'arte. Indeed it would be very surprising if such a widespread and preeminently theatrical form, which levied heavily on the popular and folkloric, had not exercised influence on the later professional theatre, just as it did, however indirectly, on the work of the early cinquecento playwrights. Some of the staging techniques too of the Sacre rappresentazioni may well have been exploited by the improvising comedians, as they were by the scenic designers and machinists who mounted literary drama in the Renaissance court theatres.⁹ That there was some influence, then, can be accepted. But again, as with the supposed classical indebtednesses, correspondences between the character lineaments, plot functions and costuming of certain of the stage figures in the religious and the improvised drama tend to be general, rather than so particular that they show a very clear line of direct derivation.

CARNIVAL AND POPULAR ENTERTAINERS

As will be clear from the above, much investigation into the possible origins of certain features of the improvised commedia dell'arte has looked more particularly to the example of popular entertainment, and has sought, too, folkloric roots. Many suggestive general correspondences are traceable between the figures, and the stage and staging techniques of the improvised drama, and those of the itinerant entertainers of Carnival, fairs and market-places. Their entertainment, like that of the later organized professional companies, appears to have spanned all social levels, and their performance places, too, ranged from the streets and piazze to the halls of the well-to-do. They likewise performed at weddings, birthday celebrations and formal banquets. These peripatetic entertainers included masked mimes, clowns, instrumentalists, singers, dancers, rope-dancers, jugglers and acrobats. At street level their activities constituted the theatrical entertainment dimension of popular culture, a field comparatively little examined by theatre historians, first because it has apparently left only few and scattered traces, and second because theatre history has traditionally been concerned much more with the theatrical concerns of what the anthropologist Robert Redfield has usefully called the ‘great’ tradition: the culture of the educated elite as opposed to the ‘little’ tradition, which was that of the mass of the people.¹⁰ The ‘little’ tradition of pre- or early modern Europe is elusive: much of it was taken for granted, it has left comparatively few written records, and such reports as have come down invariably see it from the point of view of the educated. Popular theatrical entertainment is even more elusive than other popular cultural forms, for theatre is by its nature ephemeral. Further, its practitioners were very diverse, some were amateur, some quasi-professional, some wholly committed to earning what living they could by exercising their entertainer skills. The presence of popular theatrical entertainers in medieval and early modern society was ubiquitous, yet it is signally difficult to get any secure purchase on the nature and extent of their activities and the influence they undoubtedly exercised on the work of the later organized professional players.

However, in the opinion of some scholars the contribution of these itinerant entertainers to the emergence of organized professional companies and to the gradual evolution of the improvised commedia dell'arte was crucial. We know that some performed short sketches and mimed playlets which were, in effect, quasi-dramatic shows involving one or more characters, sometimes supported by a musician or a singer who provided a comic or ironic commentary to the action.¹¹ Other popular entertainers were themselves, or worked in close association with, travelling mountebanks, who from fit-up trestle stages sold a variety of wares, including patent medicines and perfumes, in village squares, at fairs and markets, or in the larger towns during Carnival-time.¹² Colourful and garrulous, many of these charlatans were brilliant entertainers in their own right, some using not only performer skills, but stage decoration, ingenious devices and fire effects in their embryonic theatrical shows. The purpose of these shows was of course to draw audiences, the sale of the mountebank's goods punctuating or following the entertainment, indeed being inseparable from it in that even the sale's pitch was itself a show. Nor was mountebank entertainment confined to the streets; as more than one contemporary observer indicates, skilled performers could rise above trade in cheap wares to provide banquet entertainment of a high order in socially exclusive circles. A number of early commentators, particularly clerics, made little or no distinction between such mountebank performers and the lower denizens of the entertainment world, including itinerant actors: both exploited the attractions of female entertainers and trafficked in the arts of deception; both were classified by their critics as rogues and vagabonds whose activities were socially and morally reprehensible.

But notwithstanding the views of such moralists, mountebank entertainers seem to have been one thing, professional players banded into organized companies something else. Whether the latter evolved from the former, and if so how, when, and under what conditions, are matters much disputed. There may possibly be a link between these mountebank shows and what was perhaps, as Mario Apollonio has argued, the nucleus of the later, more fully developed improvised performances of the commedia dell'arte, the exchanges between Pantalone and Zanni.¹³ This is difficult to establish with confidence although some credence is lent to the possibility by late sixteenth-century engravings depicting comic and grotesque master—servant relationships, where the figures would appear to be the Magnifico, Pantalone, and the Capitano, both involved in antics with Zanni. But as so often with the extant visual materials, it is impossible to be sure that these engravings illustrate or reflect stage activity, their provenance is uncertain, and their dating only approximate.

Nowhere are the interpretative difficulties more evident than when we consider the connections between elements of the folk tradition and the masked figures of Carnival on the one hand, and on the other what have come to be seen as the characteristic masks of the improvised commedia dell'arte.¹⁴ Most historians of the improvised drama have assumed that the actors took their masks either from vestigial classical inspiration or from the folk tradition and the world of Carnival. But classical derivation, as we have remarked, is highly problematic, and no less so in this particular area, while none of the literary or visual evidence is conclusive. Carnival engravings certainly show that the actors' masks were popular festival guise, but none of the engravings seems indisputably to predate the formation of the commedia dell'arte troupes.¹⁵ Again, some popular literary materials, macaronic verse and the like, which certainly pre-date the companies, refer to figures analogous to the actors' masks, notably the Magnifico and the Zanni.¹⁶ But such literary traces are much less concrete than the visual evidence provided by engravings and paintings, and most of the correspondences they offer are general rather than particular. If primacy must thus be given to the iconographic evidence, this would seem to suggest that Carnival revellers took over the masks from the stage, for their visually engaging qualities and because the actors had already made them popular and familiar. It would be unreasonable of course to claim that the players conjured their masks out of the air: in devising them it is more than likely that they drew, consciously or unconsciously, on elements of the folk imagination. In their essential lineaments, however, in all that made them such a distinctive feature of the improvised commedia dell'arte, the masks seem to have been developed by the actors themselves. If this was indeed the case, then it underscores how complex were the inter-connections between popular materials and the improvised drama, and undermines even more the already less than persuasive arguments of those who, seeing the commedia dell'arte as a single artistic entity, would seek the origins of the improvised comedy and its stage figures in Atellan farce, Roman mime and medieval precedents.

.....

THE EMERGENCE OF PROFESSIONAL COMPANIES

BEGINNINGS

The emergence in the middle decades of the sixteenth century of the organized professional acting companies, and of the new dramaturgy they evolved, was the outcome of broad and far-ranging social changes. These changes are inevitably hard to pin down: they occurred gradually, at a different pace in different regions, and by no means had a uniform outcome; they were connected with the political and economic fortunes of individual states, the widespread reverberations of the Sack of Rome in 1527 by the troops of Charles V, the moral retrenchments and realignments which issued from the sessions of the Council of Trent (1545-63), and the cultural changes which came with the firm establishment by the 1550s of Spanish power in many parts of the peninsula.

By the early years of the century the aristocratic and neoplatonic culture of the High Renaissance was beginning to break up, and the initial impetus of Italian Humanism appeared to be spent. Many scholars have remarked an increasing mood of gloom and despondency in the literature of the early sixteenth century, most readily evident in the cynical view of human nature found in the writings of, say, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Aretino and Bruno. The seminal influence of classical example was still felt, but in much writing, too, it now tended to harden into rigid dogma and arid academicism. It was, further, gradually being overlain, where it was not actually displaced, by the very kinds of emphasis and enquiry Humanism had itself helped to generate: by the new premium set on individualism and special talent, and by new ‘arrangements of knowledge’, to use Foucault's phrase, which offered a unity that was man-centred. In the particular field of drama and theatre these were increasingly apparent in the location of dramatic action, notably that of comedy, in contemporary life, in the development of perspective stage settings replicating the familiar, and in the search for new theatre forms appropriate to the accommodation of the new coherences perceived in social and spatial relationships. Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico, completed in 1585, is a particularly striking instance of the extent to which change had taken place, for it can now be seen as essentially archaeological, a throw-back to the concerns of early Humanist enquiry, and not a pointer forward to what was to come.¹⁷ The formation of the acting companies and their elaboration of a new kind of drama that exploited pre-existent skills were attempts, however unconscious, to respond to these changed and changing conditions; attempts made, furthermore, by many who were forced to find new outlets for their talents to replace opportunities gradually being closed to them as Humanism retreated from the exclusive, but socially rather heterogeneous courts, to the more rarefied intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the academies.

Precisely how and why individuals came to band together in legally constituted acting companies in order to make their livings by the regular performance of plays is far from clear. But professionals seem to have been involved in one capacity or another in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century court theatricals, whether as advisers, stage-managers or performers. As vernacular scripted drama, particularly comedy, flourished, it accommodated to its Latin formal models much from popular entertainment: not just elements from the novelle, but the jests, tricks, satires, pasquinades and ‘business’ of the low tradition.¹⁸ The ability of comedy to root itself in immediate life, and to treat of the local and the seamy, gave it a directness and vitality which liberated it in part from slavish adherence to classical models. Some of Aretino's comedies for example, like La cortigiana (1525) and II marescalco (1527), or the anonymous La veniexiana (c1540), reveal the underlying influence of popular entertainment materials. Indeed the classical example of Plautus licensed the incorporation of such elements.

Opportunities for professional entertainers to exercise their skills were considerable, not least because distinctions between amateur and professional cannot always have been clear. Talent in an art or craft, particularly those allied to theatre, like architecture or literature, and perhaps, too, certain kinds of performance, was always for the culturally and socially aspirant a possible spring-board to patrician patronage or court notice and advancement. Unfortunately we know comparatively little of the early productions, from Pomponius Laetus's staging of Seneca's Hippolytus in Rome in 1486, through to the mountings of vernacular drama, like Ariosto's La Cassaria, done at Ferrara in 1508, and Bibbiena's La Calandria, given at Urbino in 1513. Such cultural activities were largely the preserve of the patrician cognoscenti, but there were opportunities too for artisans to contribute.¹⁹ Leone de' Sommi's Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche indicate that amateur performers were by no means indifferent to, or uninfluenced by the skills of professional performers, nor to the contributions to play production of artificers. A member of a prosperous Jewish family in Mantua, de' Sommi's varied activities included playwriting (in Hebrew), stage-management and play direction, and the third of his dialoghi, written some time between 1556 and 1565, is the first systematic account of acting, staging and direction in the Western theatre.²⁰ De' Sommi himself was neither a professional nor an artisan, and he is concerned almost wholly with the staging of the literary drama, but what he writes is a pointer to many of the attitudes and practices those on the cultural fringes of the courts were at this time taking into the nascent professional theatre.

In the court sphere professionals seem to have been centrally involved in the production and performance of intermezzi—comic and often spectacular interludes presented between the acts of scripted plays. In the course of the sixteenth century these became increasingly elaborate, their scenic effects devised by professional painters and machinists whose artisan skills tended to underscore an increasing awareness of the need for, and the value of, specialist expertise. As far as performance is concerned, the professional contribution was perhaps earliest most evident in the activities of buffoons. Productions of the literary drama were not usually isolated events, but formed part of a complex of festival activities which included balls and banquets. Solo buffoon entertainment was a feature of the latter, as, too, was the performance of plays, with intermezzi interspersed between the acts.²¹ In these intermezzi buffoons participated, sometimes as principal performers. As can be seen in the documents given above, Venetian buffoons like Zan Polo Lianpardi, Domenico Taiacalze and Cimador provided solo sketches, or acted along with other comedians and dancers. In fact it is in Venice and its adjacent territories, far more than elsewhere, that we find documentation which helps to chart the emergence of professional companies and the improvised drama.

VENETIAN THEATRICALS

Nowhere in Italy during the early decades of the sixteenth century was there such a rich coexistence of, and so many fruitful interconnections between, popular and aristocratic culture, as in Venice and the Venetian territories. Theatrical entertainment in particular was considerable and took a variety of forms, as the many entries in the Diarii of Marino Sanuto show.²² It took place, too, in a range of performance places, including the houses of the nobility and in hired rooms and halls, as well as on fit-up street stages, and Carnival in particular provided the occasion for it. In these many kinds of entertainment, and in the confluence of popular and elite traditions, may lie the beginnings of organized professional theatre. Those beginnings appear to be intricately connected with the highly original achievements of dramatists and actor-dramatists who devised dialect and multilingual comedy, the activities of amateur and semi-professional acting companies, and of individual performers the actual status of whose work, whether amateur or professional, remains problematic.

Of the several Paduan and Venetian dramatists and actor-dramatists who flourished in the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century, the most celebrated are the Paduan playwright and amateur actor Angelo Beolco (c1502-42), better known under his stage-name, Il Ruzante, and the Venetian, Andrea Calmo (c1510-71), likewise a performer as well as a writer. In the plays of both, the farcical comic tone, recourse to dialect, use of rustic characters and knock-about stage ‘business’, as well as the presence of certain specific character types, have all been seen to presage aspects of the professional improvised comedy. In their functions as actor, playwright and deviser of productions they have been taken by many, too, to provide the link between street and festival entertainers and the more extensive and regular activities of the professional acting companies.

Beolco took his stage-name from the characteristic type he introduced into many of his plays and performed himself, a boisterous, clumsy and garrulous Paduan villano (peasant) whose antics imbue the otherwise simple plots with an engaging comic brio.²³ His plays, of which La Moscheta, Il Parlamento and Bilora (all of the 1520s) are perhaps the best, were devised for performance by himself and his friends, often at Carnival-time and before audiences of mainly prosperous friends and associates. They are rich in rustic mood and colour, are at times bawdy and scatological, and treat of comic incidents in the lives of peasants, whose hard lives and domestic imbroglios are handled with insight and compassion. In them Ruzante may have provided opportunities for extensive pantomime and improvisation. He is a figure of major importance, the most impressive writer of rustic and dialect drama in the period, and one who tapped an authentic vein of popular life in a simple, natural style unusual to most drama of the time. He was not indifferent to the example of classical comedy, and indeed in his later plays, like La Fiorina, conspicuously applied classical form to his peasant material. But he avoided academic pedantry and any slavish imitation of the ancients, turning the vigour of Plautine farce to his own very distinctive purposes. His links with the later improvised comedy, at least as far as his plays are concerned, are at once real and tenuous. He was not its precursor in the sense sometimes argued that characters in his plays manifestly anticipate figures of the improvised commedia dell'arte. In that regard he offers little to those seeking to establish the origins of the individual masks. In other respects, however, he was very much a precursor. The example of his work may well have offered much that was instructive to the later comedians: ways of organizing a sequence of farcical incidents in a low comedy plot line, methods of exploiting regional dialect for comic purposes, and strategies for turning scripted dialogue to the service of an essentially performer-oriented drama. For Beolco, it seems, from both the records which have come down to us and the dramaturgy of the plays themselves, was as much a practitioner as he was a writer. The illegitimate son of a well-to-do father, Ruzante had the time and resources to develop his interest in stage performance. He organized companies, stage-managed and took the lead roles in his own plays.²⁴ There is no evidence however that he ever was, or aspired to be, a professional actor, nor even that he saw his theatrical work as of semi-professional status. He was a mere eighteen when he first formed an acting company with a group of friends, and for many years with like-minded dilettanti he performed his plays before bourgeois and patrician audiences, including those who gathered at the villa of his patron, a wealthy Venetian patrician, Luigi Cornaro.

Another, although admittedly lesser, practitioner of the commedia villanesca was Beolco's younger contemporary, Calmo, a Venetian gondolier who was perhaps more regularly an actor than Beolco, and possibly worked on a semi-professional basis. Where Beolco wrote primarily in the Paduan dialect, Calmo very deliberately employed a variety of dialects in order to define certain recognizable regional types. A prominent character in some of his plays is a Venetian vecchio, whom some scholars again have taken to foreshadow a figure of the improvised commedia dell'arte—the Venetian Magnifico—although it is not an identification that has won general acceptance. Inevitably, most of what we know of Calmo, just as of Beolco, concerns his scripted work, and even allowing that this admitted possibilities for the development of character and business through improvisation, little in the texts themselves, nor in those of other sixteenth-century comic dramatists like Strascino and Alione, manifestly anticipates the peculiar spirit, constituents and characteristics of the improvised commedia dell'arte.²⁵ In the plays of these dramatists, as in those of Beolco, we find, not the origins of the commedia dell'arte, but a pre-history which contributed in complex ways to the emergence of professional theatre.

THE EARLIEST COMPANIES

Where Beolco and Calmo must be considered of particular additional significance is in their performance work, for although the companies they played with were not established on a regular acting basis, their activities do seem to presage the formation of organized professional acting troupes. So, too, and perhaps even more so, does the work of Francesco Nobili, known as Cherea. Nobili was a gifted actor who had probably acquired considerable stage experience in Mantua and Ferrara before appearing in Venice about the year 1507. A year later we know that he acted there in Italian translations of antique plays, like Asinaria and Menaechmi, subsequently peforming in both private halls and public rooms, and helping to excite sufficient public interest in play productions to arouse Venetian government suspicion of this new-fangled and potentially disruptive mode of entertainment. Cherea seems to have acted quite frequently in Venice through to 1526, after which no more is heard about him save for a brief reference some years later to his being in Hungary. It is primarily from Sanuto's diary entries that we know something of Cherea's work; although these are tantalizingly brief, they seem to suggest that he was more than a dilettante. It is at least conceivable that the companies he led were the first Italian professional acting troupes. But then it is conceivable too that other groups of players whose activities in Venice (and indeed in Rome and elsewhere) have left faint traces in extant records, may have equal claim to be considered the first professionals.²⁶ Whatever troupe merits that accolade, we can say with certainty that by the middle decades of the sixteenth century the Italian professional companies were in being: the first extant contract made by a group of players at Padua in 1545 provides a convenient terminus a quo for their operations.

How, when and why the first troupes came together are elusive matters; so too is the provenance of the performers who made up those troupes. To judge from the kinds of patronage he enjoyed and the material he performed, Cherea moved in elite circles and was a man of some culture. On the other hand, the players who signed the Paduan contract were apparently of fairly low social and cultural status. But as professional theatre evolved it tended to bridge social gaps. In so far as it is possible to generalize from the scraps of evidence which have come down we would hazard that the early professional players were in the main drawn from two spheres, which on occasions, and to a varying extent, overlapped: on the one hand, and perhaps particularly in the 1540s and 1550s, the world of popular street and Carnival entertainment; and on the other, more possibly from the 1560s and 1570s onwards, the cultural fringes of courts which were no longer as hospitable to aspirant talent as they had been in their quattrocento heyday.

What seems additionally to have occurred in the early and middle decades of the cinquecento to give further impetus to this confluence of talents from the popular and courtly spheres was the development of a public taste for play performances at various social levels. Why, is again hard to calculate. Perhaps Humanist experiment had quite unwittingly opened a Pandora's box. What entertained academies and courts perhaps came quickly to be seen as desirable by many beyond the courts, and such theatrical activity, accomodated to more popular tastes, became self-generating: the more of it there was, the more a market appeared for it. Quite how sophisticated the taste was of this early public is a moot point. One Venetian observer sourly noted: ‘they wish to have on the stage nothing else but silly buffoons, an empty confusion of languages and little honest action.’²⁷ But an audience was there, and the temptation increased for some amateurs to capitalize on public interest by exercising their talents as a regular means of livelihood: the skilled amateur, given the right conditions, could be an incipient professional. Judging from the entries in Sanuto's Diarii something like that seems to have happened in Venice in the early decades of the sixteenth century. High and low culture came increasingly to interconnect, the distinction between amateur and professional became ever more blurred, opportunities opened up for the exploitation of entertainment as a business, and for the practice of acting as a career, not just on a solo performer basis, or through a random gathering of solo performer abilities (a musician, a rope dancer, a jester), but by the banding together of individuals in formally constituted acting companies. There would appear to be some connection too between the decline in the quality and vitality of cinquecento Humanist-inspired scripted drama by mid-century, and the emergence of professional acting companies performing both scripted drama and improvised plays, the plots and characters of which bear close resemblance to the materials of the Humanist drama but are pitched more broadly to meet professional needs and the disparate tastes of paying publics. The superior appeal at all levels of professional and regular over dilettante and occasional performance cannot be discounted. Altogether fortuitous, but symbolic of changing times, interests and attitudes, was the fact that 1565 in Venice saw the final performance of the amateur Compagnia della Calza, whose productions had been a feature of Venetian theatrical life for decades: the name of the company that acted Antigono was soon to be that of a commedia dell'arte troupe, the Accesi.²⁸

The introduction of actresses in the 1560s, the first record of which is the appearance in a troupe list in 1564 of a certain Lucrezia Senese, may have marked a new phase in the development of the professional companies: an elaboration perhaps of the romantic plot lines to balance the low comedy, and a calculated bid for greater commercial appeal. The arrival of the actresses seems to coincide with, or to be quite rapidly followed by, the presence in professional companies of actors better educated and more socially sophisticated than was customary among popular street and Carnival entertainers. Both appear to have been crucial to the quite rapid development of the companies and their ability to open up and exploit a burgeoning market for theatrical entertainment. The Italian philosopher and theatre historian, Benedetto Croce, argued persuasively that one of the central characteristics of these acting companies was their immersion in the market; that the kind of drama they evolved was the product of an embryonic industrial system and a mode of production that was a response to market pressures and possibilities.²⁹ More recently, a very perceptive historian, Ferdinando Taviani, has observed that this industry developed, in effect, as theatre passed from being a species of entertainment within the economy of the festa to being an entertainment organized according to the economic dictates of the market.³⁰ What marks off the professional companies from the performers who had preceded them, and serves to distinguish them as a wholly new theatrical formation, is the fact that they earned their living by acting plays. By virtue of that alone they were a definable social group with a particular, if variable, social position.³¹ Their activities were largely determined by the needs and possibilities of the market, and their status—economic, social and artistic—was conditional on the kind of place they were able to secure in it. Further, the sheer need for these professional companies to operate at different social levels, from the aristocracy of the courts, through less affluent private patrons, to the bourgeoisie and the broader populace drawn to performances in halls, rooms, streets or piazze, and to supply according to occasion and demand a wide variety of different kinds of theatrical entertainment, including comedies, tragi-comedies, pastorals, intermezzi and so on, impelled them to devise a species of production which could meet these different market opportunities and requirements without imposing impossible demands on their materials and resources—namely, the composition of their stock plays by improvisatory techniques. What emerged, then, in the middle decades of the sixteenth century was a professional theatre consisting of actors ultimately drawn from diverse social and educational backgrounds, who banded together to sell their product, plays in performance, wherever they could find paying audiences. They were the commedia mercenaria, and it is their economic motivation and their professionalism, that ultimately defines them.

Notes

1. For a good discussion of possible classical roots and their transmission see [Allardyoe] Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles, [London, 1931] p. 214ff. See also H. Reich, Der Mimus, Berlin, 1903, and [Kathleen M.] Lea [Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell' Arte, 1550-1620, Oxford, 1934] 4.

2. See M. Gigante, Rintone e il teatro in Magna Grecia, Naples, 1971.

3. See M. Bieber, The History of the Roman Theater, Princeton, 1961, p. 129ff.

4. Nicolò Rossi, Discorsi … Intorno alla Comedia, Vicenza, 1589.

5. [Luigi] Riccoboni, Histoire [du Theatre Italian depuis la decadence de la Comedie Latin, Paris, 1728], p. 23ff., remarks links with Atellan farce, and examines the differences between actors and buffoons; Winifred Smith, The Commedia dell'Arte, New York, 1912, refers to the archeological discoveries. See also V. De Amicis, 1882.

6. Maurice Sand, Masques et Bouffons, Paris, 1862; Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles and The World of Harlequin [Cambridge, 1963,]. For the possible survival of mimes in Byzantium, see G. la Piena, ‘The Byzantine Theatre’, Speculum, April, 1936.

7. Such arguments are advanced by [C.] Mic, La Commedia dell'Arte[, Paris, 1927].

8. For the relationship between Karagöz and the masks of the commedia dell'arte see M. And, A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey, Ankara, 1963, also arguments in Reich, Lea and Nicoll.

9. See N. Pirrotta and E. Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, Cambridge, 1982. The comic element is rarely found in Italian medieval theatre.

10. R. Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture, Chicago, 1956.

11. Vito Pandolfi, La Commedia dell'Arte. Storia e testi, 6 vols, Florence, 1957-61; P. Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano, Milan, 1955.

12. For accounts of Carnival in Italian towns see inter alia A. Ademollo, Il Carnevale di Roma, Rome, 1883; G. Renier-Michiel, Origini delle feste Veneziane, 1817; for more general studies: F. Jesi, La Festa, Turin, 1977, and J. Caro Baroja, El Carneval, Madrid, 1965. See also P. Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano.

13. Mario Apollonio, ‘Il duetto di Magnifico e Zanni’, 1971. See also Apollonio, Storiadella Commedia dell'Arte, p. 73ff. See also the Dialogue in Pandolfi, La commedia dell'arte, 1957, I, p. 174ff.

14. Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano.

15. See [C.] Molinari, La Commedia dell'Arte, [Milan, 1985,] p. 16ff and Povoledo, ‘Le bouffon’.

16. Pandolfi, La Commedia dell'Arte, vol. I.

17. Ferruccio Marotti has two very pertinent studies: Lo spettacolo dall' Umanesimo al Manierismo, Milan, 1974, which includes an anthology of writings, and Lo spazio scenico, Rome, 1974. For an account of the Renaissance revolution in ways of seeing, J. White, The Birth of Pictorial Space, London, 1957. See also Elena Povoledo, ‘L'architettura del teatro in Italia dall'età greca al Palladio’, in Bollettino del Centro di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, 1974, and L. Zorzi, Il teatro e la città, Turin, 1977.

18. See Pandolfi, La Commedia dell'Arte vol. I, for examples.

19. For accounts of the Humanist theatre see: F. Ruffini, Teatri prima del teatro, Rome, 1983; F. Doglio, Teatro in Europa, Milan, 1982; A. Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre, London, 1966, and J. Jacquot (ed.) Le lieu théâtrale à la Renaissance, Paris, 1963.

20. See Leone de' Sommi, Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche, ed. Ferruccio Marotti, Milan, 1968. Also in A. Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre London, 1927.

21. G. Padoan, La commedia Rinascimentale veneta, Vicenza, 1982.

22. I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, Venice, 1879-1903.

23. G. Calendoli, Ruzante, Venice, 1985; a good overview in English of Ruzante's work is F. Fido, ‘An Introduction to Ruzante’, in A. Dessen (ed.), Renaissance Drama, New Series, Illinois, 1973.

24. Calendoli, Ruzante, p. 9ff.

25. Vito Pandolfi, Il teatro del Rinascimento e la Commedia dell'Arte, Rome, 1969.

26. The Medici Popes in Rome were among those who encouraged the work of semi-professionals. For an account of theatre in Rome see F. Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento. Roma 1450-1550, Rome, 1984; for the Venetian theatre in the early to mid sixteenth century see Padoan, La commedia Rinascimentale veneta.

27. L. Dolce, Fabritia, Venice, 1549, cited by Elena Povoledo, ‘I Comici professionisti e la commedia dell'arte: caratteri, techniche, fortuna’, in G. Arnaldi and M. P. Stocchi (eds), Storia della Cultura Veneta, Venice, 1983, p. 388.

28. Padoan, La commedia Rinascimentale veneta, p. 215. The first recorded appearance of the commedia dell'arte Accesi is in 1590.

29. B. Croce, ‘Intorno alla Commedia dell'arte’, in Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte, Bari, 1957; [R.] Tessari, La Commedia dell'Arte nel Seicento [Florence, 1969], has a valuable discussion of the ‘industrial’ dimension of the players' output.

30. Taviani and Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte [Florence, 1982].

31. Their professional status is indicated by the fact that they were taxed, while charlatans were not: see C. Molinari, Pier Maria Cecchini [Ferrara, 1983].