SOURCE: Henke, Robert. “Toward Reconstructing the Audiences of the Commedia dell'Arte.” Essays in Theatre 15, no. 2 (1997): 207-22.

[In the following essay, Henke describes the relationship between actors of the commedia dell'arte and the audiences for which they performed.]

During its “golden age” of 1565-1620, the professional Italian theater that has come to be known as the commedia dell'arte performed before a much wider range of audiences than attended the nonprofessional, scripted theater of the contemporary commedia erudita. The latter theater, performed in the courts and the academies, could largely count on its audience as a “reliable presence,” and the aristocratic spectators were a social and cultural reflection of the dilettante actors.¹ The early humanist theater developed between 1480-1520 in the courts and academies of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Rome under the sway of Ariosto and others anticipated the eighteenth-century notion of the theater audience as arbiter and judge.² Ariosto produced his Plautine plays for a courtly audience with an imperfect knowledge of the classical dramatic genres tragedy and comedy (obscured as they had been by medieval misconceptions), but acted under the assumption that there was a public of like-minded humanist principles who, if rightly instructed, would confirm his humanist experiments. Although the commedia erudita of Ariosto, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, and others was a much more innovative theater than has commonly been supposed,³ its courtly and academic audiences tended to mirror back to the playwright and performer their own humanist sophistication and cultural assumptions. For the commedia dell'arte, on the other hand, the audience was an unstable, unpredictable quantity, and became a critical issue both of theoretical speculation and practical survival. This essay attempts to reconstruct the audience of the commedia dell'arte during its classical period: both the actual audience—as much as the limited documentation allows—and the idea of the audience as articulated in attacks and defenses of the theater.

In Florence, Venice, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Milan, Turin, Naples, other Italian cities, and Paris, the new professional actors adapted their improvisatory pieces (and sometimes scripted drama) to the diverse audience climates of the piazza, the street, indoor halls or stanze that could range from an inn room to a palace hall, and the court. The social makeup of commedia audiences could thus be as diverse as that of the actors themselves,⁴ from the plebeian groundlings of the piazza, to the stanze crowds that mixed an aristocratic, bourgeois, and artisan clientele, to the courtly audience that patronized prestigious troupes like the Gelosi, the Confidenti, and the Accesi.⁵ Survival in a highly competitive environment required both entrepreneurial and aesthetic skill on the part of the comici: the advance booking of court and stanze engagements (often facilitated through courtly patrons such as Vincenzo I Gonzaga of Mantua and Don Giovanni dei Medici of Florence), and a capacity to gauge their diverse audiences to a degree not required in the amateur court and academic theater. The generic and stylistic virtuosity of the commedia dell'arte from 1565-1620, which performed tragedy, pastoral, romance, and intermedi as well as comedy, resulted in large part from market pressures, from the need to appeal to a wide spectrum of audience tastes. Successful commedia troupes could adroitly move up and down the social scale; they could perform sophisticated scripted plays like Tasso's Aminta or Guarini's Il pastor fido, but also could also adapt themselves on occasion to the piazza, where the ease of securing a venue might offset the difficulty in collecting money.⁶ Compared to the amateur theater of the court and the academy, and even compared to the contemporary English professional theater, which enjoyed the geographical center of London (and in the case of Shakespeare's company, the very ownership of a theater), the itinerant commedia dell'arte had to be much more aware of its audiences, skillfully negotiating the tastes and temperaments of a diverse clientele.

By the 1570s, the commedia dell'arte had achieved such a measure of success in northern Italy that it could be considered an emerging cultural institution in its own right. In particular, its ubiquitous popularity—its powerful effect on audiences of the piazza and the halls—drew the concerned attention of the Counter-Reformation church, led by the imposing figure of San Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan from 1565 to 1584. The Council of Trent, which began in the year (1545) that is conventionally used to indicate the “beginning” of the commedia dell'arte, did not explicitly refer to theater in its doctrinal publications and it was left for Borromeo and other church figures to forge a systematic critique of the theater, one based both on Tridentine doctrine and on late Roman attacks on the theater mounted by Tertullian and, with more sophistication, by St. Augustine.⁷ Spain dominated much of the Italian peninsula after the 1559 peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, and Spanish Jesuit theologians, some of whose works were translated into Italian, played a major role in sustaining and developing Borromeo's antitheatrical position. The antitheatrical critiques of the Italian and Spanish ecclesiasts were motivated by a renewed call for pastoral intervention in the lives of the faithful, a call that also spurred the renewal of sanctioned forms of “theatrical” performance: preaching, processions, and public rituals. The commedia dell'arte was perceived as diabolical competition, an “antichurch” only too successful in moving its audiences' hearts and minds. At the heart of the issue was the commedia's perceived effect on its audiences, and there emerges from the antitheatrical tracts an implicit theory of the audience and a “negative poetics” of actor-audience communication. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the more literate and ambitious of the commedia actors took up the pen in the defense of their arte. More interesting than the outright moral defenses of the theater, which repeatedly gloss Aquinas's brief defense of the stage and are of a mostly anecdotal nature, is a new poetics of audience response most cogently articulated by Pier Maria Cecchini and Flaminio Scala. The idea of the audience, then, became a charged issue in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Much of the documentary evidence relevant toward reconstructing the actual commedia dell'arte audience refers to entertainment of the piazza and the more popular stanze. We unfortunately lack detailed accounts of audience responses to the court and stanze performances of the prestigious troupes, and the eyewitness reports that we do have, such as that of Massimo Troiano da Napoli, dwell on external details like plot and costume to a greater extent than we might wish.⁸ The lively extant reports of actor-audience interaction in the piazzas and the stanze, however, are relevant to this study for two reasons. First, despite the court success of troupes like the Gelosi and Confidenti, recently brought into sharp relief by the recent archival work led by Siro Ferrone, piazza entertainment must have been a numerically significant phenomenon, especially when one considers the fact that historical documents usually do not record the kind of socially marginal performance that we know characterized the production of uncanonized comici.⁹ Secondly, it was the popular and not the courtly audience that was of concern to the post-Tridentine authorities, who were more concerned to maintain receptive, uncorrupted audiences for their preaching (executed on the piazza as well as in the church) and religious rituals than they were to monitor court taste. There was indeed a connection between the commedia dell'arte and the lowly piazza entertainers, not only because the early sixteenth-century piazza charlatans anticipated the professional comedy in their frankly mercenary use of spectacle,¹⁰ but also because later charlatan troupes appropriated commedia masks and plots, drawing cultural capital from the commedia's success.¹¹ The strenuous efforts of Isabella Andreini, Pier Maria Cecchini, and Nicolò Barbieri to distance their elevated art from piazza fare actually corroborates the link between the “low” and “high” theaters; their zeal betrays their anxiety that there was a connection.¹² The pre-Parisian commedia dell'arte preceded the establishment of fixed performance venues and the corresponding institutionalization of theater, and the constantly shifting, centrifugal crowds of the piazza are only the most salient image of the elusiveness of the audience in this liminal historical phase of the commedia.

In his 1585 La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, e nobili ed ignobili, Tommaso Garzoni, a polygraph friar from Romagna, includes a vigorous account of piazza performers and their audiences. The world depicted by Garzoni is one of fierce competition for the attention of an amorphous and ambulatory audience; the heroic task of the little performer lies in constituting an audience, in luring people into the performance circle by whatever means necessary: fascination, enticement, sexual titillation, abject pity, pathos, acrobatic bravado, and sometimes the sheer power of the human voice. The performers are keenly aware of the adjacent competition, but admirably industrious and confident to prevail. As Garzoni's eyes scan the seemingly innumerable foci of attention in the piazza, the reader of his text continually sees the audience forming and dissolving. In one part of the square “Burratino … calls for an audience at the top of his voice; the people draw near, the mob shoves forward, the gentlemen place themselves in front” (323r).¹³ Elsewhere, the Jew presumably converted to the Christian faith (a rival preacher, from Borromeo's point of view, doubly pernicious for being Jewish and a dissembler) “cries so loudly and implores the audience at the top of his voice stammering ‘alle goi, alle goi, badanai, badanai’ in order to form a circle, and then gives a sermon on his conversion” (324r-324v). Despite their subjection to what must have been a cacophony of competing voices and a centrifugal blur of competing sights, Garzoni's audiences are described as utterly mesmerized, when they are not altogether indifferent. The charlatan, handling his snakes to show that his oil or teriaca renders one immune to their venom, “terrifies the people with the awful sight of such beasts,” and “with the sight of such monsters horrifies the mob, who tremble, stick their hands into their purses, and purchase the grace of St. Paul reduced to a trinket” (324r). A goat-handler from Parma displaying his charge's acrobatic virtuosity “transforms into cows and billygoats those who enter into the circle of his audience” (324r). In his 1611 Coryate's Crudities, Thomas Coryate, an English traveler to Italy in 1608, somewhat abashedly describes the powerful effect that Venetian mountebanks active in the Piazza San Marco had over him and crowds numbering up to a thousand people who did “flocke together about one of their stages” (1: 411). As extemporaneous, “natural Orators … they did often strike great admiration into strangers that never heard them before,” including Coryate himself, who views their snake handling with a fascinated mixture of attraction and repulsion (1: 411).

The iconographical evidence corroborates the verbal accounts of Garzoni and Coryate in regard to both actors and audiences. Giacomo Franco's 1609 engraving of mountebanks in Piazza San Marco, part of a collection on Venetian public life characterized by a documentary concern for detail, depicts three groups of actors mounted on trestle stages who compete for various audiences.¹⁴ One group consists of a snake-handling mountebank and his assistant, a man dressed as a courtesan cantimbanca, and two actors deploying the masks of the commedia dell'arte. Their jostling but engaged audience is diverse in nationality if not in gender. If Franco's simultaneous depiction of medicinal, musical, and comedic entertainment may reflect iconographical convention rather than actual practice, it does point to a distinguishing characteristic of theatrical entertainment considered especially powerful and dangerous by the antitheatricalists: theater employs various means to work on all the senses at once.

If the security of a rented hall often exempted the commedia dell'arte from the concourse of piazza performance, evidence suggests that many troupes used the piazza to hawk their theatrical wares and lure them into the stanze. Antonio Grazzini's 1552 carnival song “Canto di Zanni e di Magnifici,” invites the outdoor public to come to their hall performance, advertising with the vigor worthy of a mountebank the superiority of their adroit farce to the “gloomy,” scripted commedia erudita.¹⁵ The speaker addresses the women in the outdoor audience, who in this early stage of Florentine professional theater were not allowed into the stanze, and entreats them to invite the players into their homes. That the barker promises the ladies, not crude farce, but “sweetness and skill,” indicates that even these early commedia performers were adept at adjusting their repertoire and style to the audience at hand. Even Flaminio Scala's 1618 prologue to his scripted play Il finto marito, to which we will have occasion to return, imagines an outdoor locus for advance publicity, as well as outright commedia performance.¹⁶ The prologue consists of a dialogue between the “forestiero,” a partisan of the scripted theater, and the “comico,” who promotes the comico's (Scala's) improvised style of production, and begins as the Forestiero stumbles across the set of an imminent commedia performance. Although we might expect this self-legitimating text written by one of the most successful comici to represent a dignified, courtly venue for the commedia, in fact the imagined audience is a rough-and-ready crowd typical of outdoor performance. Parallel to the Forestiero's neoclassical critiques of the improvising actors is his social objection to the rabble (crowded immediately before him) who push and struggle with “tanti urtoni” (so many shoves). From the forestiero's initial confusion—he mistakes the place of the audience for the place of the actors—to the comico's ultimate success in transforming his interlocuteur into an audience member himself, the dialogue concerns the constitution of the audience in a manner reminiscent of Garzoni. Such was the challenge faced by both forgotten and enshrined commedia dell'arte actors.

Of course, the stanze were much more profitable venues than the piazza simply because it is much easier to collect money indoors than outdoors. The controlled environment of the stanze, where one could monitor lighting and to a lesser extent, sound, also lent commedia players more aesthetic sovereignty over their product.¹⁷ Less discussed than the rise of public theaters in Shakespeare's London is the exactly contemporary expansion of public theaters in Italian cities: in Venice, the two public theaters in the San Cassiano area owned and rented to commedia players from the 1580s on by the Venetian patricians Alvise Michiel and Ettore Tron; in Naples, the Stanza della Commedia di S. Giorgio dei Genovesi (active from 1592 on) and the San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, inaugurated in 1618 by Cecchini's troupe; in Milan from 1598 on and pace Borromeo's legacy, the Teatro delle Commedie, which was located in a small court inside the Palazzo Ducale; and in Florence from 1576 on (the same year when the carpenter-entrepreneur James Burbage constructed “The Theatre” in London), the Teatro di Baldracca or “Stanzone delle Commedie.”

The social makeup of stanze audiences widely varied; it can be generally claimed that the halls mixed spectators from aristocratic and bourgeois classes and at least the more prosperous among the artisan classes. Again, there may be a tendency to exaggerate the upscale nature of stanze audiences. The Teatro di Baldracca, whose importance has recently been excavated in a series of articles by Annamaria Evangelista, gave onto one of the most popular and ill-famed quarters of Florence, teeming with workshops, inns (where the traveling comici stayed), and prostitute houses; there is no reason to suppose that those living in the area did not attend performances at the nearby theater. According to documentary evidence, this primarily artisan and petit bourgeois audience seems to have liberally participated in the theatrical event with whistles, catcalls, and impromptu responses to the actors. Three letters written in October and November 1618 from Flaminio Scala to his patron Don Giovanni dei Medici give a good picture of the Baldracca public.¹⁸ A November 3 letter reports that “here there is continual chaos and noise in the theater; one person kneels in front of a daughter, another hangs on her mother's neck, one entertains her son, some conduct lotteries, of which there have already been two or three, and those people are unwilling to pay at the door” (Burattelli, et al. 507). An October 20 letter complains of the “continual din of the Florentine youth” in attendance (Burattelli, et al. 505). In a letter dated November 25, 1618, we learn that the stage sometimes became so crowded with rowdy spectators that Scala, as he puts it, had to “request the people to leave the stage clear” (Burattelli, et al. 513). The 1643-44 diary of Giovanni Poggi-Cellesi records that in the Baldracca, when a certain Belisario performed, “he abjectly asked someone to give his stick back, and someone in the hall cried out ‘give him back his stick’.”¹⁹ Garzoni also provides testimony that the stanze audiences were often much closer to those of the piazza than those of the court. According to him, although luminaries like Isabella Andreini and Victoria Piissimi have maintained high classical standards of comedic art, one has only to look at the kind of fare regularly offered in the stanze to witness the social and aesthetic decline of comedy. As in Grazzini's “Canto di Zanni e di Magnifici” and Scala's prologue, the players aggressively canvass the rough piazza crowd with an invitation “to a comedy or a tragedy or a pastoral in a palace room or an inn.” Such generic virtuosity appears to successfully entice the popular crowd “by nature eager for novelties and curiosities” (320v). The stanza performance described by Garzoni, like its audience, appears to resemble that of the piazza: on a rough stage is a “scene crudely depicted in charcoal”; a “charlatan” delivers the prologue; and the actors are hapless hack-artists (320v).

The Teatro di Baldracca actually served two very different audiences, and provides a fascinating liminal case of the commedia and its audiences. Located on the east side of the Uffizi in a building controlled by granducal administration and used as a Customs office, the Baldracca was the social and aesthetic obverse of the Teatro Mediceo, which gave onto the splendid Piazzale degli Uffizi and featured entertainment for the granducal court, on occasion performed by the commedia dell'arte itself. But the Granduke and his familiars could reach the Teatro di Baldracca by a secret passageway, and watch the “commedia degli Zanni” from behind a grate in a special stanzino without being seen by the popular audience below.²⁰ A kind of deus absconditus, the Granduca thus could view theater of a lower decorum than that normally appropriate for his sovereign person, and could observe the audience itself. On occasion, following his secret observance of the comici, the Granduke invited them for private performances: another demonstration of the commedia's protean adaptability to different audiences, even within the same architectural complex.

The new actresses' effect on their audiences became of salient interest for both the theater's attackers and its defenders, and this is reflected in relatively plentiful contemporary documentation. Ferdinando Taviani has argued that the actresses grafted onto the previously male and artisanal stock of the commedia dell'arte in the 1560s should be seen in the context of the notorious Venetian and Roman courtesans of the first half of the sixteenth century, who were partially suppressed by post-Tridentine austerities (Taviani and Schino 335-39). If the new actresses were not actually former courtesans, proposes Taviani, they served a very similar cultural function: both figures inhabited the margins of the courts, were the objects of both idolatrous fascination and moral rebuke, and were gifted in music (both instrumental and vocal) and improvised poetry of a Petrarchan stamp. If, as I have argued, the generic and stylistic versatility of the commedia dell'arte broadened its audience, the widening of the audience was largely due to the actress because she lent the professional theater an aulic, lyrical dimension that it had formally lacked.

Contemporary accounts suggest that the actress's effect on her audience was similar, or at least perceived as similar, to that of the courtesan. Of the courtesan Tulla of Aragon, G.B. Giraldi Cinthio notes the overwhelming power of her eyes, which were “furtive in their movements, and had such a lively power that it seemed that they shot flames in others' hearts.” In 1580 Montaigne admired Roman prostitutes' powers of theatrical deception, for even those with modest looks could appear “more beautiful than they really were” by cleverly framing themselves in their windows, so that he was “often amazed by their power to attract our looks.”²¹ Now the female tumbling girls, charlatans, and players mentioned by Garzoni and Coryate might appeal only to the crowd's basest instincts; Garzoni mentions a female acrobat who “whetted a strange desire in the mob with her lascivious graces” (323r-323v). The April and May 1616 Avvisi of Florence document the charlatan Compagnia dell'Orvietano that featured the cantimbanca La Vettoria, who “sings, dances, and leaps every day in the piazza,” and created such a stir that she had to be accompanied home by four policemen every night.²² But even this piazza entertainer exercised a hold on her public reminiscent of the courtesan in her “refinement” and in her capacity to work through multiple sensory channels. La Vettoria, according to the Avvisi, “made many people flock to her with her dangerous leaping, her divine dancing, her sweet singing, and her beautiful regard, so that her sweetness melted and lulled each person, who sighed and exclaimed ‘O my heart, what is this?’”²³ Strikingly similar to this piazza account (and, as we shall see, to the antitheatricalists' understanding of the actress's effect on her audience) is the actor Adriano Valerini's mythologizing funeral oration of the commedia actress Vincenza Armani, a bravado rhetorical piece motivated both by grief and by a desire to legitimate the commedia and its new actresses, already under post-Tridentine attack. Valerini's 1570 oration was written just three years after, in the stanze of Mantua, the two companies of Armani and a certain “Flaminia” vied for large and avid popular audiences, resembling “university professors who compete to see who will get the largest number of students” (D'Ancona 2:449). For Valerini, Armani's acting was so powerful that she induced mirror responses of feeling and sense in her public. As she expressed fear and passion, “she rendered our hearts now fearful and now passionate” (Marotti and Romei 36). When, in a sensual pastoral scene, she approached a fountain in order to extinguish her thirst, “she induced the same thirst in her audience” (Marotti and Romei 36). And when she drank, “the spectators each bowed their heads [to drink], accompanying her movements as if they had become the shadow of her body” (Marotti and Romei 36). In particular, Valerini singles out her generic virtuosity in comedy and tragedy as well as in pastoral—her capacity to adapt her decorum to different genres and audiences—and a musical skill so powerful that it delighted “every sense” of her audience, filling them with “unspeakable sweetness” (Marotti and Romei 33). Like the courtesan, the actress “enraptures” (“rapisce”) her audiences.

The antitheatricalists were quick to point out the sexual, even violent nature of this exchange. Copiously collected by Ferdinando Taviani in La fascinazione del teatro, the antitheatrical documents of Borromeo and other Italian and Spanish churchmen leave an indirect, if hyperbolic and reactionary testimony of the commedia dell'arte's effect on its audiences. The new theater was threatening to Borromeo because the techniques it used to reach its audience were similar to those that he, unlike Protestant churchmen, wanted to enlist for the post-Tridentine church. Milan was to become not only the City of God, but the Theater of God as well, the site of grand religious festivals and processions whose purity did not take the form, as it did for the Protestants, of iconoclastic austerity. Borromeo was known to criticize preachers who relied too much on verbal subtleties; such niceties were fine for intellectuals, but would fail to reach the crowds of the piazza, street, and church. In order to enlist the common man's attention, the church needed to be big and bold, and communicate through all of the senses, or certainly through sight, hearing, and smell (incense). The central paradigm of the actor-audience relationship became, for the antitheatricalists, the actress-audience exchange, because the new actress (whom of course the churchmen associated very readily with the courtesan) had an especially powerful sensual hold on her public.

Borromeo and his followers based their opposition to the theater on late Roman, especially Augustinian foundations. A passage in the sixth book of Augustine's Confessions provided the antitheatricalists a locus classicus for the theater's perverse use of the sense of sight. For Augustine, as for his post-Tridentine admirers, the discussion relies on the neo-Platonic belief that sight was the most noble of all the senses and also the most vulnerable and dangerous. A recovering theatergoer studying law in Rome, Augustine's friend Alypius is met by certain acquaintances who drag him against his will to view sword plays in the amphitheater. He swears to resist ocular temptation, but overcome by curiosity he “opened his eyes, and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul, than [the wounded sword player] was in his body” (Confessions VI.viii).²⁴ The antitheatricalists thus construe the theatrical gaze as a kind of enslaved fixation.²⁵ Visual representation exerts a more powerful, even tyrannous effect than verbal narration because visual simulacra are literally taken into the viewer's soul. The eye is an “invisible hand” that transmits secretly consummated pleasure to the other senses. As Borromeo argues, because the elements of theater “are more hidden, they make a greater impression on men's souls (Taviani 22). Visual exchange could then be conceived as a kind of consumption, with the actress-audience exchange providing the salient example, so that Gaime Alberto in 1629 describes a spectator “carefully taking apart with the eyes all the deeds, gestures, gait, and carriage of women who amount to prostitutes” (Taviani 237).²⁶

Although sight was considered the most dangerous sensual conduit, the antitheatricalists considered theater even more pernicious than painting or music because as “total art” it worked on several senses of the audience at once—just as Borromeo wished for his totalizing, theocratic “theater.” In a remark typical of other Spanish and Italian antitheatricalists, the Jesuit Juan de Pineda argues that “if one object can so move a single sentiment, what might many objects accomplish that are designed for all the senses … where there is no lack of vain beauty for the eye, lascivious songs and sounds for the ear, dirty words for the tongue, laughter and cackling for the mouth, applause for the hands, jumping for the feet, and vain delight for the heart?” (Taviani 121).²⁷ In de Pineda's “negative poetics” of audience response, the actor seduces the audience through ocular, aural, and tactile delights, the more powerful and less easy to control for their sensual variety. Here the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the ultimate effect of such demonic synaesthesia is a non so che of “energeia” (“liveliness”), “vaghezza” (“pleasure”), and a “dolcezza” (sweetness) similar to that invoked in Valerini's encomium of Vincenza Armani.

Just as Augustine conceived the identity of each theatrical spectator to be fused into a mesmerized collectivity in a perversion of the church “body,” the actors' (and especially actresses') activation of sensual responses in their audience rendered the actor-audience collectivity one body, in the view of the post-Tridentine critics.²⁸ The comparison of the theater's effect to that of fire and the plague, pervasive in the antitheatrical literature, powerfully depicts a totalizing effect that, in a godly form, Borromeo might wish for the church. But this is of course implicit in Valerini's account of Armani's capacity to induce mirror feelings, gestures, and actions in her audience.

In a 1621 treatise the Italian theologian Francesco Maria del Monaco eloquently depicts the audience as a full collaborator in the theatrical event, an active participant in a two-way system of communication. To begin with, the mere presence of an audience confers authority on the theatrical spectacle in Del Monaco's view. Certainly the financial support that the audience gives the professional players renders it an active participant in a more palpable way than in the amateur theater. And auditors reinforce the speech of the actors, especially with their smiles, laughter, and applause (Taviani 211). Theatrical semiosis then works both ways, with the various audible and visual signs of the audience signifying support to the actors. The perverse and hidden exchanges between the actors and the audience render the surveillance of the audience an extremely important task. The antitheatricalists themselves become a meta-audience, similar to the Granduca in the Baldracca, the supreme representative of which is God himself. Construing the entire performer-audience collectivity as a system rich in verbal and nonverbal signs, Del Monaco shifts his eye from the stage to the reflecting audience: “Behold the voices of the spectators, look at their faces and their eyes, examine their words, interpret their sighs, their signs, and you will recognize with me how many evil deeds they commit” (Taviani 209). Del Monaco here reads the audience for the pernicious transmission of theatrical energeia from the actors, scanning various nonverbal signs that comprise a text legible by the skilled interpreter.

Less voluminous and less anxious about the audience than the antitheatrical works, and often following a doggedly conventional moral argument (the depiction of vice in comedy induces us to avoid it), the comici's early seventeeth-century publications are perhaps less rich in suggesting an implicit audience than the often wildly imaginative post-Tridentine tirades. The comici's accounts are often more realistic, however. Nicolò Barbieri's audience is far from the entranced collectivity of the antitheatricalists, and bespeaks the practical experience of one who, like Scala in performances at the Baldracca, had to cope with the vicissitudes of public attention. In his 1634 Supplica, Barbieri writes,

If I am not wrong, the reasons people attend plays are the following: many are curious to see how good the actors are, and many are inclined to any new attraction; this one goes out of boredom, because he does not know what to do with himself; many go to hear original turns of phrase and fine discourses, and others to hear the comic roles; an individual thinking of becoming a player himself may go to learn, someone else for the conversation of his friends; another in the hope of cadging from an acquaintance; yet another to avoid an hour gambling, another to banish dull spirits, another to observe behaviour, or not to seem miserly or ignorant, another out of habit, and another because he sees that others go.

(Richards and Richards 99-100)²⁹

Still, in several respects the implicit audience in the comici's writings is strikingly similar to that of the antitheatricalists. This is partially due to the fact that defenders and attackers of the theater inhabited more adjacent cultural realms in Italy than in England. Like the comici, the antitheatricalists were still affected by late humanism; like the antitheatricalists, the comici were, overall, pious post-Tridentine Catholics. And as was implicit in Valerini's 1570 praise of Armani's generic, stylistic, and sensory virtuosity, the early seventeenth-century commedia actor-writers emphasize the sensory multiplicity and emotional power of theater, thus sharing the antitheatricalists' implicit theory of theatrical communication. In Cecchini's 1616 and 1628 treatises, the ideal actor does not only appeal to the moral faculty, but also appeals to the irrational sensibilities of his audience. Cecchini recounts hearing an orator in Rome who “ravished the hearts of the audience so that every word made a lovely impression (“impressura”) in the soul” (Frutti 15). Here is the notion, already observed in the antitheatricalists' writings, that the elements of theater (here words) are almost physically “impressed,” or implanted in the audience. But rather than privileging the verbal text, Cecchini argues that all of the actors' faculties must work together in a well-balanced and harmonious fashion. In a curious reversal of the material and the immaterial, he construes gesture as the animating “spirit” to the otherwise incomprehensible “body” of speech. Between the familiar lines of conventional moral argumentation and neoclassical dramaturgy one may detect in Cecchini's treatises the concept of theater as a total, multisensual art.

Scala's implicit audience is both more innovative and closer to that of the antitheatricalists than Cecchini's, and reflects new and sophisticated accounts of nonverbal signs written contemporaneously with the 1618 Il finto marito prologue mentioned above. In Il cannocchiale aristotelico, E. Tesauro argues thus:

Words are signs without movement; signs are words without noise. The eyes speak with the eyes, and they have laughter and crying for their words. The eyebrows speak in arching and folding; the mouth speaks, now sneering, now sighing; by nodding or shaking the head speaks; the feet speak, now dancing with joy, now beating the ground in anger; the arms speak, now extended and supplicating, now raised and exulting; the hands can say everything that the tongue knows to say and art to do; all the fingers are letters; all the body is a page always ready to receive new characters and then to erase them. In fact one wonders how the soul can keep any thought hidden, having as many spies around it as it has members.³⁰

The Comico, or player in Scala's prologue similarly (if less exhaustively) argues for a nonverbal model of communication; he argues that “each single gesture, well timed and moving will carry a greater effect than all the philosophy of Aristotle, or all the rhetoric of Demosthenes and Cicero.” That gestural language persuades more than merely verbal communication is proved, argues the Comico, by lovers, who use tears, looks, and kisses to move one another where mere language would fail. For Scala's player, “the senses are more readily moved by sensible than by abstract things.” As Roberto Tessari argues, this is to propose forms of theatrical communion “not verbally mediated between the gesture of the actor and the sensible body of the spectator,” the model for which is erotic (53). With gestures and visual signs directly activating sensual response, theater moves its audience like a lover: precisely the point of the antitheatricalists.

In some ways the commedia dell'arte was the victim of its own success. The comici's self-legitimating praise of the actress for her multifarious power over the audience, a power corroborated by less interested documentary testimony such as that describing the piazza performer La Vettoria, squared only too well with the antitheatricalists' view of the actress-audience exchange, one they believed to be representative of the actor-audience relationship in general. Of course, in reconstructing the commedia audiences the implicit idea of the audience as formulated in the antitheatricalists' and apologists' writings must be combined with both the documentary evidence of the comici's audiences, partial as it is, and a historical and social reconstruction of those who viewed—and heard and even smelled and touched—commedia dell'arte performances.

Notes

1. I take the phrase from Herbert Blau, who argues that the postmodern theater audience is not a “reliable presence” (1). For the argument that the relationship between actor and audience in the humanist theater is reflective, as opposed to one of difference such as obtained in the commedia dell'arte, see Ferrone xvii-xxi.

2. Blau ascribes a judicial function to the eighteenth-century audience (4).

3. See Clubb 1-89.

4. As Ferdinando Taviani has argued, the “golden age” of the commedia dell'arte fused the male, farcical, artisanal line that characterized its 1545-1565 period, as indicated in the 1545 contract of Ser Maphio's fraternal company, and the largely female, lyrical, courtly line introduced by the inclusion of actresses in the 1560s (Taviani and Schino 338-39). (For a copy of the contract, see Richards and Richards 44-46.) Despite the courtly success of luminaries like Isabella Andreini, a few actors were illiterate and even the successful Pier Maria Cecchini and Flaminio Scala maintained bourgeois businesses for economic security (silk and perfumery respectively).

5. Although I am aware of no systematic study of commedia dell'arte audiences, Richards and Richards's documentary study does include some very useful pages (80-104). My study is very indebted to their superb book, both for its sensible critical commentary and for its introduction to the primary documentation.

6. Andrews argues that the commedia learned to adjust its decorum to aristocratic audiences (200).

7. The best study of late Roman antitheatricality may be found in Barish (39-59). 1545 has become an (admittedly arbitrary) beginning date for the commedia dell'arte by virtue of the Ser Maphio contract mentioned above.

8. Massimo Troiano da Napoli, Master of Music at Castle Trausnitz in Bavaria, gives a lively account of an improvised comedy performed in 1568 by amateurs in the castle in the style of the commedia dell'arte. Raucous laughter and admiration at the fine costumes are the two most salient audience responses in Troiano's account. See Richards and Richards (48-52).

9. The letters of G. B. Andreini, Nicolò Barbieri, Pier Maria Cecchini, Silvio Fiorillo, Tristano Martinelli, and Flaminio Scala have recently been edited, under the direction of Ferrone, by Burattelli, Landolfi, and Zinanni.

10. This argument has been made most forcefully by Tessari (31-47).

11. In Giacomo Franco's engraving of “Istrioni e ciarlatani in Piazza San Marco, Venetia,” two of the five performers in a charlatan troupe don commedia dell'arte masks. Both the English travelers Fynes Moryson and Thomas Coryate report that the charlatan performers are like commedia dell'arte actors. See Moryson, who reports that the charlatans utter “pleasant discourse like Comedies” (2: 465) and Coryate, who says that some charlatans wear “visards being disguised like fooles in a play” (1: 410).

12. Barbieri actually admits having apprenticed with the saltimbanque Monferrino. See Barbieri 126.

13. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Italian are my own.

14. For the context of Franco's pictorial production, see Zorzi 172-73.

15. The carnival song is collected by Singleton (127-28) and is also translated by Richards and Richards (52-54). Fynes Moryson's report of courtesans and torchbearers entering freely into the Florentine public theater (i.e., the Baldracca, to be discussed below) indicates that women were later admitted into the Florentine stanze performances, if in an exceptional capacity (1: 168).

16. The prologue is included in Marotti's edition of Scala's 1611 Il teatro della favola rappresentativa (1: cix-cxv).

17. A point made by Richards and Richards (90).

18. These letters are indicated in Evangelista (“Le compagnie” 57-58), who however omits most of the interesting November 3 excerpt.

19. Quoted by Evangelista, “Il teatro” (80). See the Diari di corte in forma di appunti di Giovanni Poggi-Cellesi gentiluomo di camera di Ferdinando II, 1643-44, located in the Archivio di Stato Firenze, Miscellanea Medicea, f.320, ins.3.

20. See the articles of Evangelista.

21. For both the Giraldi Cinthio and the Montaigne citations (the former from the introduction of the seventh novella of the Ecatommiti, the latter from the Journal de voyage en Italie par la Suisse et l'Allemagne in 1580 et 1581), I quote from Pieri (200).

22. Located in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo Principato, 5140, c.452.

23. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo Principato, 5140, c. 466v.

24. See, for example, Guglielmo Baldesano's 1592 use of this anecdote in Taviani 104.

25. Taviani's felicitous word for this phenomenon, which provides the title of his anthology, is fascination.

26. Alberto's Predica contro l'abuso delle comedie was translated into Italian by Alessandro Adimari in 1648.

27. Pineda's Discorso del danno che cagionano le comedie lascive was translated into Italian in 1599 by the Florentine friar Giulio Zanchini. In Taviani's words, the treatise “constitutes perhaps the first work entirely dedicated to the polemic against theater that was published in Italy after the Council of Trent” (119).

28. For Augustine in this regard, see Barish 58-59.

29. The translation is that of Richards and Richards.

30. I quote from Raimondi (50). See also L'arte dei cenni con la quale formandosi favella visibile si trata della muta eloquenza, a five-hundred-page anatomy of nonverbal communication written in 1616 by the sometime playwright Giovanni Bonifacio. I am indebted to Pieri (219) for the link between these treatises and Scala.

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