[In the following essay, Firth compares the literary comedy of Renaissance Italy with the popular commedia dell'arte, suggesting that the latter is characterized by a strong focus on the skill of the actor.]

In the fifth century bc Epicharmus of Syracuse, writing on Italian soil the earliest recorded comic pieces, made up a play about the currently fashionable philosophy of Heraclitus. All is flux, Heraclitus is said to have said, life is a continual becoming, nobody is the same man today as he was yesterday. In Epicharmus' play, a debtor refuses to pay his debts. ‘Why should I pay,’ he asks, ‘since yesterday when I contracted the debt I was one man, and today I am another?’ His creditor sets about him with a stick. When taken to court and accused of violent assault, the creditor's defence is that he too has become another man since yesterday; it is yesterday's man who should be sent to prison. This ancient joke is remarkable in that it contains in a prophetic germ two themes, neither of them intrinsically humorous, which were destined in a later age to become inextricably linked with the whole Italian comic tradition: one, the preoccupation with the concept of identity; and two, the insistence upon wit or intellectual virtue as the ultimate human value. Here in embryo is the astute reply dear to Boccaccio. Here is identity as a source of fun; ‘let's pretend to be somebody else’ is, after all, the impulse at the heart of most Renaissance erudite comedy. Here is Arlecchino scoring off the learned Doctor from Bologna. Here is Goldoni's pragmatism, and here, too, is the philosophical question of the nature of identity from which springs the whole dark comedy of Pirandello.

Intellectualism in one form or another stamps the Italian comedy. The vernacular erudite drama of the sixteenth century was a far more living and complex thing than is often supposed, but it was created in a spirit of emulation and calculation which inhibited its development to an extent we can only guess at. However, this very intellectualism did make a vital contribution, here, at the birth of the modern genre. Renaissance man was in every sphere obsessed with his search for ideal forms; it was the age of recipes and recommendations for perfection: in town planning, architecture, education, domestic mores, courtly manners, statecraft, and in art and literature as well. Comedy to a literal formula seems a contradiction in spiritual terms, and yet it is to this search by European and predominantly Italian scholars for an ideal comic idiom that the tradition of modern literary comedy owes its being.

The history of the formulation of the recipe is a long one in which theory and experiment alternate. Perhaps it begins with Petrarch, who is supposed to have written at least one Latin comedy and perhaps more in about 1330, which he destroyed years later on rereading his efforts in the light of his study of Terence. Throughout the fifteenth century humanists wrote Latin plays as an academic pastime drawing on various traditions for their inspiration, on medieval popular and religious themes, on novellistic sources and on classical models, with results that were diverting if heterogeneous. But towards the end of the century Plautus and Terence were tightening their grip. They were becoming widely known. In 1433 Donatus' fourth-century commentary on Terence had been rediscovered, and in most cases it accompanied the editions of Terence that were printed from 1471 onwards. Plautus had made his big impact in 1428 with the unearthing by Nicholas Cusanus of those twelve of his twenty comedies which had remained unknown during the dark ages. Plautus and Terence were used generally by those learning to converse in Latin, and during the last thirty years of the century there were many performances of the old Roman plays given by scholars, courtiers and even by church groups. Performances of translations were put on as well, at the court of Ferrara, for instance, where the theatre became an instrument for furthering political prestige. A revival of the theatre went hand in hand with the passionate cult of definitions, so that while German, French and Italian scholars with latinized names were writing learned commentaries on Terence and analyses of the nature of comedy in general, Italian courtiers and amateur players were performing their own original vernacular plays, based on the old models and emerging as approximate illustrations for the work of the theorists.

In the second half of the century the commentators developed a new approach, for now they had Aristotle to hand, and a living theatre of their own to give immediacy to their subject. (Aristotle's Poetics only became well known in Italy after Robortello and Maggi brought out their commentaries in 1548 and 1550; Horace's Ars poetica they had always had.) The Renaissance critics, however, did not refer to their own contemporary theatre; they were in search of timeless laws; their task was to establish the ideal purpose and principles of comedy, and their concern was with, for instance, the question of invention versus imitation, the relation between rhetoric and poetry, the definition of the ridiculous, and the function in comedy of plot, character, sentiment and diction. In broad terms the Terentian commentators of the first half of the century seem to have done the spadework for the great prescriptive essays of Robortello, Castelvetro and Scaliger which achieved European renown during the second half. Questions of comic function, form and style had mostly been settled already and in detail; it only remained for the later critics to adopt and adapt an Aristotelian approach to a well-examined subject. What chiefly matters in all this is that rigid rules were laid down, the freedom of the medieval theatre was lost, and comediography became a science.

The structural rules are familiar, and the codifiers seem to echo each other over most matters. Fit subjects for comedy are ‘low, trifling matters’, ‘disturbances’, ‘actions that occur in the ordinary life of citizens’. Characters and plots must be fictitious, but verisimilitude must be the guiding principle in their creation. Characters must be consistent. Plots may be simple or complex but must follow a strict routine of engagement, complication and resolution within five acts. Certain time-honoured devices—Aristotle's peripeteia (reversal of fortune) and agnition (discovery)—may bring about the final happy outcome. The recommended time limit for the action is sometimes twelve hours, sometimes twenty-four, but unity of place is insisted on. Diction, whether the play is in prose or verse, must be colloquial. The theorists agreed, too, in their insistence on that unconvincing notion, the moral and didactic purpose of comedy. The question of the possibility of a comic catharsis was in particular explored by these followers of Aristotle, in their dedicated pursuit of comic parallels to concepts born of tragedy.

But for all their sophistication the academic theoreticians still had the sense and simplicity to consider the risible to be the distinguishing mark of comedy. Castelvetro and Maggi examine the phenomenon of laughter at length; Scaliger, the most liberal of them all, finds in it the touchstone of all comedy. His contribution lay largely in his questioning of the necessity for slavish imitation of Terence. ‘There was not just one manner of comedy,’ he maintained, ‘for so long as comedies won laughter they needed nothing else.’

Space has been given to these law-givers because, however much one may find their approach contrary to the spirit of comic and poetic invention, their achievement was the definition of a genre. From the sixteenth century onwards a comic dramatist in Europe knew what he was doing, whether striving for classical perfection by adherence to the norm, or striking off on his own to prove its invalidity.

The Renaissance vernacular comedies are built in practice roughly upon the Terentian model. They are also endlessly imitative and repetitive; they are too long; they are more or less devoid of psychological interest or emotional depth, they are complicated on the surface and hollow at the core. They provide us with a puzzle. In the nineteenth century they were dismissed as arid, unoriginal and cold. Yet their vast numbers can only persuade us that people must have enjoyed them. It strikes us now that the nineteenth-century reader would of course be the last person to enjoy one of these comedies. The sixteenth-century Italian theatre draws its spirit from Boccaccio. Its wordliness is not fortuitous; it is a proclamation of faith in the fun to be had on ‘this side’, in the possibilities of a finite world where man himself is the ultimate measure. The trickster-protagonist of this theatre plays with his humanity, his identity, his wits and his instincts, untroubled by intimations of immortality or by any further self-awareness than that of knowing himself to be a fine fellow.

The liberating breeze of humanistic philosophy blows through these plays and occasionally unites with the afflatus of an individual genius to produce a masterpiece. Certainly something more was needed than the ancient formula, even when infused with the modern spirit. The relative failure of Ariosto is perhaps typical of what happened when court poets wrote comedy to prescription for the prestige of princes. His plays are good, amusing, readable even now, but, as his prologues show, he was inhibited by fear of comparison with his ancient models, and nowhere in his comedies do we find the brilliance inexhaustibly let loose in the Orlando furioso. He has the distinction of having written the first noteworthy comedy in the vernacular, La Cassaria (The Comedy of the Chest, 1508), and his other plays, I Suppositi (The Counterfeits, 1509, translated by George Gascoigne in 1572 as The Supposes), Il Negromante (The Necromancer, 1520), La Lena (1529) and La Scolastica (The Academic Comedy, unfinished), serve as excellent examples of the genre they represent.

The typical comedies of the period were not brilliant. The student in search of a masterpiece of the time can only consider pieces which differ in some essential way from the ‘typical’ output of Ariosto, Bibbiena, Aretino, Caro, Cecchi, Della Porta, and others. Three plays stand out and none of them is representative of the mainstream. La Mandragola (The Mandrake, 1518) by Niccolò Machiavelli has brilliance, certainly, structured as it is upon the rare principles of necessity, economy and purpose. A quite different quality lifts the anonymous La Venexiana (The Venetian Comedy, rediscovered in 1928, original date uncertain) out of its century, the near-naturalism of its honest, sensual love scenes. Il Candelaio (1582) by Giordano Bruno is an unwieldy giant of a play which soars above its peers in yet other respects, in its vigour and vehemence, and in its fierce mixture of unremitting obscenity and clowning on the one hand and of disdainful detachment and self-mockery on the other.

La Mandragola must undoubtedly have its place in this chapter, and to balance the picture we should do well to place beside it a play chosen for contrasting and complementary features. Pietro Aretino's La Cortigiana (The Comedy of the Court, 1525) is as sprawling as La Mandragola is streamlined, and will serve to give us some idea of the scope of the Italian erudite comedy in its heyday.

Machiavelli's Mandrake surely transcends its genre by reason of its ambiguity and its depth, qualities absent almost by definition from other comedies of the time. To the reader accustomed to the shifting focuses of modern drama, one feature of Renaissance comedy in general stands out: the singleness of its perspective. There is, usually, only one layer of meaning to perceive: the top layer. The necessity for consistency of character is one of the most significant tenets of sixteenth-century comic theory. When Bruno's pedant Manfurio, in Il Candelaio, is robbed, he shrieks out in Latin. In a modern play he would be unmasked by the experience and show another self. But as it is we laugh not at any contradiction within his personality but only at the extremism of his pedantry. When hypocrisy itself is depicted in the Renaissance theatre, it is transparent, excessive and instantly recognizable. The singleness of perspective, moreover, can be said to extend to the temporal dimension. The critic Nino Borsellino has pointed out that Renaissance comedy depicts a situation rather than a condition, a merely momentary subversion of the natural order. And perhaps this momentary quality is of the essence of comedy, the loss of it accounting for the blurring of genres wherever it occurs, whether in Molière, in Chekhov or in the theatre today.

While it fulfils all the formal requirements of classical comedy, La Mandragola has been characterized as tragedy and as satire; one critic speaks of it as a work weighed down with religious sadness; it is a commonplace to call it cynical, and to see in it the dramatic expression of the philosophy behind The Prince. It is a play that differs from other works of its time in that the reader's understanding of it depends upon his own view of life. It is ambiguous, too, in that it is multi-layered, and herein lies its depth. In this instance we are not looking simply at the surface of life. The characters let us glimpse into their deeper, hidden, more uncertain selves. This plot is no ‘momentary subversion’, nor are the characters defined solely by their function within it. The power of the play lies in its demonstration of the capacity of the human psyche, which we see performing gymnastic feats of persuasion and adaptation, of circumvention and self-deception. It is not only a comedy of manners about the depravity of contemporary Florence; what we recognize in its dark vision are durable truths about humanity itself.

The story is based on a beffa, a clever practical joke, partly drawn in this instance from Boccaccio's story of Catella and Ricciardo Minutolo (Decameron, III. 6). The beffa is a basic pattern which lies at the core of the Italian humorous tradition, originating in stories and plays well before Boccaccio's time and still flourishing today in the popular media, very much its timeless self, for example, in the plays of Eduardo and Peppino de Filippo. Studies have been made of the beffa, about whether and why it makes us laugh, about whether and in what way it is cruel, and about the essential difference between those stories where the emphasis is on the beffatore, the joker, and those where it is on the beffato, the dupe. There is also a whole category of Renaissance stories, and plays too, in which the beffatore becomes the beffato, which follow the classic pattern of deception followed by disaster, followed in turn by a greater deception, which serves as a ‘remedy’. However, whereas in these plays the beffa is often an end in itself, executed gratuitously because the gull is stupid and is there to be tricked, in Machiavelli's play it is an action which arises of necessity from a given network of relationships.

Callimaco is a spirited and resourceful young man in love with Lucrezia, the conscientious wife of Nicia, a doctor of laws who is coarse-grained by nature, complacent and self-absorbed. Nicia has sweated to achieve his education, is rich, has a beautiful wife, and now all he wants is a son. His clever friend Ligurio, with no money and no professional status, is riled by Nicia's unworthiness and stupidity. Nothing is going to stop Callimaco, who has come all the way from Paris to conquer Lucrezia. Ligurio is delighted to sell his services in any scheme which will make a bigger fool of Nicia. Maliciously he brings his superior intelligence to the famous plot, whereby Lucrezia is to take a potion, believing it to be a distillation of mandragora, a fertility drug with the unfortunate reputed side-effect of poisoning the first man who sleeps with the taker. The plan is for Callimaco, disguised as a vagrant, to be dragged in off the streets to suffer the effects of the poison, and he is tucked up in bed with Lucrezia by the solicitous and unknowing husband himself. Lucrezia has been persuaded to submit to all this by Frate Timoteo, a jobbing casuist with a smooth and saintly exterior, whose motives are venal, though there is a marked suggestion too that he derives vicarious fleshly pleasure from such adventures, as he does from the confidences of his penitents.

The motives in this play are never arbitrary, although the so-called corruption of Lucrezia is a puzzle to some. Callimaco has one night in which to reveal all to her: his love, the plot, her own sensuality, the possibilities of an affair with him, and indeed in one night she is won over. Suspect perhaps is the fact that she expresses her ‘conversion’ to him the next morning in terms which come almost verbatim from Boccaccio, but Machiavelli may have lifted them because he found them convincing. They are certainly delivered with a firm and rational determination—according to Callimaco who reports them. Might he have touched the story up a little? The play raises questions to the end.

Pietro Aretino's La Cortigiana (The Comedy of the Court, 1525), again, formally fulfils the classical requirements (if we allow it its double plot), but this is a heterogeneous, episodic and untidy play, consisting of 106 scenes and a busy shifting cast which seems even more populous than its actual twenty-four. It is a vindication of the defence of the vitality of the Renaissance literary theatre on the grounds that it is a speculum vitae, and indeed Aretino's observation of the life of his times is spontaneous and effervescent. This technique of presenting his subject as a series of swift, unrelated sketches has been described as ‘documentary’, but the word does not suggest the high colour of his work.

We are given a vivid, highly spiced picture of popular life. A whole scene is devoted to an account of the disgusting conditions in which servants were expected to eat. We see the peremptory procedures of the street police; Alvigia, the pious witch-cum-procuress, gives us a practical inventory of the tools of her trade, and a convincing glimpse of her own practical attitude towards it. Another character describes lyrically the warmth and cheer, the sounds and smells, of a tavern. We are presented with a gallery of Roman citizens, priests and pedlars, rogues, servants, courtiers and policemen who rush about, chase each other, meet and separate at a rate which suggests that this very speed was an essential feature of the comedy. Occasionally there is leisure for a reasoned conversation between disenchanted courtiers on the theme of the greed and corruption prevalent at the papal court.

Again, the beffa lies at the heart of the play, this time a series of beffe played by clever people in response to the vertiginous attraction exercised upon them by the stupidity of their gulls. The equation of wit with virtue is part of the ethic of the Italian comedy from Boccaccio's day to our own. Even Pirandello, in a light moment, could write a play like Liolà, which shows the extent to which this view of a certain kind of cleverness has penetrated Italian tradition. It has been pointed out that whereas the Anglo-Saxons look back for an archetype of virtue to King Arthur, dupe and Christian, the ancient hero of Magna Graecia has always been Odysseus of many wiles. His legacy is handed down to us through the intriguing servants of Roman comedy, through characters in the Renaissance as diverse as Ligurio in La Mandragola and the ebullient Rosso of La Cortigiana, through Arlecchino and Brighella—first in the commedia dell'arte and later in Goldoni and Gozzi—through the tricksters of the various dialect theatres down to the Pulcinella-like figures made famous by the de Filippo brothers in Naples in this century.

The two chief victims of the gratuitous beffe in La Cortigiana are the vain courtier Parabolano, who is tricked into bed with a baker's wife whom he takes to be the noble and remotely adored Livia, and Maco, the simpleton from Siena. Maco is a trusting provincial whose aspirations to become a courtier make him easy game for the painter Andrea and his friends, who almost boil him alive as they recast him in the ‘mould’ of a courtier.

Various other tricks are used to keep the action moving and all have this in common: that in every case the notion of identity is used as a plaything. The first beffa occurs in Act I and will serve as well as another to illustrate the features of the device. Parabolano the fop gives his servant Rosso two tasks: he is to buy some lampreys and deliver them to Messer Maco of Siena, and he is to take Parabolano's coat home for him while he goes for a stroll. Now it is not in the nature of the Italian beffatore to stand in the street with another man's coat and money and not to see in these objects potential instruments for a deception. Simple robbery does not tempt him; the beffa requires art. Rosso dons the silk coat and swaggers up to a fishseller from Florence, declaring himself to be the Pope's own household caterer. He orders ten lampreys, offers the man papal patronage and tells him he will be paid by the sacristan at St Peter's. In the sacristan's ear he whispers that the fishseller is half-mad and his wife possessed of ten devils. The astonished vendor is seized by the priests and tied to a pillar to be thrashed, while Rosso makes off with both the lampreys (five of which he keeps) and the money for their purchase. At the end of the play, when all is sorted out and beffatori and beffati are reconciled, Parabolano's words seem to sum up the code which lies behind the trick:

FISHERMAN.
And what about me? Am I going to get my lamprey money back?
PARABOLANO.
You'll have to forgive Rosso, won't you, Fisherman, seeing as you've been such a feeble little Florentine as to let yourself be tricked by him?

This is in no sense a Romantic Christian reconcilement, nor yet a parody of such a thing. Nor is there any classical idea of correction or retribution in this tradition where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are replaced by ‘quickwitted’ and ‘dull’.

A word about Fortune before we leave the Renaissance theatre. As love is the noble name given to the prosaic and acquisitive sensuality which gives positive motivation to its characters, so Fortune is the name they give to whatever negative circumstances stand in their way. The goddess Fortuna has to rear her head in every godless age, as a powerful external force antagonistic to man, fabricated in the absence of evil to provide him with a worthy adversary, whose defeat will prove to him his own resourcefulness and virtù. Theatrically she is a success; she replaces the villain. An earlier theatre embodied the powers of darkness in the figure of a devil; a later, or at any rate a more evolved, one will depict the flawed personality, but it is a feature of this theatre of the surface to attribute all reverses to adverse chance. Not that the amoralism of the age of Aretino and Machiavelli was in any sense ingenuous; but the accepted response to what other ages call ‘evil’, to abuse and corruption for example, was not a moral or emotional indignation, but an intellectual response which emerged as ridicule, irony or satire. In dramatic terms the corrupt man is Fortune's agent, and is only of interest to the Italian Renaissance hero insofar as he aids or obstructs him in the achievement of his practical ends.

Ultimately belief in Fortune is responsible for the redeeming spirit of this theatre, the spirit of resilience and optimism which accompanies the refusal to look beneath the surface. One phrase, with variations, seems to echo right across the century: ‘pensiamo al rimedio’, ‘let us think of a remedy’. That a ‘remedy’ is always there for the finding, that Fortune can always be outwitted, or indeed exploited as an ally, is the philosophy of every schemer and determined lover from Volpino and Fulcio, the cunning servants in Ariosto's first play La Cassaria with their frequent expostulations to the goddess, to the valet Panurgo in Della Porta's La Fantesca (The Servant-Girl, 1592), whose words to his master Essandro in Act I, Scene 5, might have been taken from almost any play of the century:

Master, remember that to despair will bring about the ruination of your hopes; and that to have recourse to tears rather than to remedies is the mark of a mean-spirited man who does not truly wish to see the fulfilment of his desires. … One must look Fortune boldly in the face. A good heart in misfortune is misfortune halved.

It is ironical to reflect that the age which devoted so much energy, scholarship, money and time to the definition and creation of a literary ‘premeditated’ comedy gave birth spontaneously to an illegitimate artisan comedy which was ultimately to usurp its sister's title. When people refer to the commedia or to the Italian comedy they are usually referring to the commedia dell'arte, the comedy of the trade. This theatre, first heard of round about the middle of the sixteenth century, was the creation of the actors, and in its incalculable influence was to constitute Italy's greatest contribution to the European comic tradition. Its origins have been much discussed. Some historians claim it to be directly linked with the Atellan fabulae of the third century bc, basing their claim upon the use of masks and of improvisation, and on the physical resemblance seen between certain type characters. Maccus, for example, white-robed, humped and hook-nosed, is held to be the direct ancestor of Pulcinella. Nobody claims an unrecorded and uninterrupted continuance of the Roman mime throughout the dark ages, however, and the facts of the emergence of the commedia remain a mystery. Its most obvious spiritual forebears are to be seen in the tumblers, minstrels and charlatans of the medieval carnival tradition. The commedia can be considered the very purest kind of theatre. Its basic material requirements are bare boards in the corner of any public square, masks, and a few traditional garments: the rest lies in the actors' skill.

There was a great deal of cross-fertilization during the second half of the sixteenth century between the premeditated erudite comedy and the improvised comedy, with the result that, while the private amateur theatre of the courts and academies grew less rigid and rarefied, the theatre of the professionals became acquainted with a vast fund of plots, devices, styles and conventions which it could transform with its own particular alchemy and reproduce infused with life and colour for the popular stage. Princes started by hiring professional actors for elaborate clowning where it was required or for spectacular acrobatic feats. Later they often employed whole companies, and these were frequently in demand by visiting ambassadors, requesting the loan of their services at foreign courts. The two traditions borrowed from each other extensively, but throughout they retained their differences. The erudite comedy was always dignified, avoided farce, did not wear masks and worked from a fully scripted text. The commedia was distinguished by the following features: its professional status; the use, within certain limits, of improvisation; the special function of the mask, or maschera, a word used to denote both the literal facial mask and the complex stock character it represented; the use of certain devices or lazzi; and lastly by its probably indefinable quintessential spirit.

It is fundamental to an understanding of the comici dell'arte to realize that they lived by their art, and that to do this they had to win the attention and the attendance of a wide audience. The bugbear to be avoided at all costs was any moment of boredom on the part of the audience, and to this end there had to be plenty to see: monsters, animals, fireworks, gods, acrobatics, magic, beffe of the most physical and farcical variety, mock fights with flour and soot as well as with cudgels and blunderbusses, madness and death both feigned and ‘real’, every conceivable variation on the theme of disguise, explicit obscenity, feats of eating, any trick of the trade that provided novelty. Where, in the seventeenth century, troupes had a stable theatre to act in, they developed complex stage machinery and the spectacular element could be exploited even further.

The basic framework for the commedia play was the scenario or canovaccio. There are still a thousand of these businesslike documents extant; they give the main outline of the action and contain instructions for exits and entrances, movements, recommended comic business and the content of speeches. A maestro or corago would run through the scenario with his troupe before a production, suggesting innovations and ensuring coordination of interpretation. The outline was then pinned up behind the scenes for reference. At the same time each actor had his zibaldone or commonplace book, containing stock speeches, jokes, songs, tirades, tricks and lazzi which he would know by heart and draw on as they were required. Within this system he was trained also to improvise. The commedia improvvisa in fact demanded a high degree of skill and a very disciplined approach from its actors. Andrea Perrucci, writing his treatise on the art of acting in both types of theatre, in 1699, stresses that in the improvised comedy it was not possible for an actor to walk straight into a part without preparation or instruction. And special techniques were required of the actors even when improvising. The lovers, for example, were portrayed as straight characters with the same dignified unmasked faces as in the literary drama. The actors who played them had to be well read, well spoken and competent to yearn and plead off the cuff with Tuscan eloquence. An ability to parody Petrarch, so much admired by the erudite audiences in their playwrights, was now required of every Flavio, Lelio and Isabella.

Highly specialized, too, was the art of acting in a mask. Unlike its counterpart in ancient Greece or in China and Japan, the commedia mask did not have a fixed expression, and the uncovered mouth allowed the actor a certain flexibility. But whatever emotion the face could not convey was conveyed by the body, and the Italian players, in France especially, developed mime to a fine art. Gherardi in his Théâtre italien (1694) gives a description of his friend Tiberio Fiorilli, the famous Scaramouche, keeping an audience laughing for a quarter of an hour with a wordless mime of fright.

But perhaps the skill above all others which distinguishes the commedia from other forms of theatrical expression is the ability required of the actor to assume a whole personality as he dons his mask. The masked comedy drew a great deal of its strength from the principle of familiarity, from the immediate recognition by the audience of the figure of Arlecchino, Tartaglia or Pantalone, regardless of the identity of the player. In effect, the appeal was similar to that exercised by Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, or the modern comic with his own television series. It is the pleasure of knowing and not knowing, of watching a predictable figure with familiar, even loved, idiosyncrasies, in an unpredictable or fantastic situation. It was probably this speciality of the commedia clown which was responsible for his life-span of 300 years, and for the spread of his fame over the whole of Western Europe. Hundreds of actors put on his persona as they put on his costume and won for him the kind of devotion that is accorded, through different channels, to a popular comedian today.

The maschera-persona was not a static finite phenomenon nor a simple one. K. M. Lea in her basic study Italian Popular Comedy stresses its composite and evolutionary nature:

As a mask represents a collection of individuals, so the idea of a mask emerges from a study of individual presentations. The mask of Pantalone is the abstract of the behaviour of innumerable Pantalones: anything that a Pantalone did or said is a potential, anything that he continued to do is an actual, formative influence towards the development of the mask. … We only want to know what Pantalone did on a certain occasion in order to enrich our idea of what he might do in the future.

It follows, she continues, that the quality of evidence is for once less important than the quantity, and unfortunately the brief glimpse at the masks that we can afford ourselves in this chapter is bound to be inadequate. Gone now, are the parasite and the procuress of erudite comedy; gone too are the clerics. The heavy father has become Pantalone, the Venetian merchant, and the cunning servant is replaced by the zanni figure, who gradually evolves in two directions and becomes distinguished as two characters: as Arlecchino the clowning credulous servant, and as Brighella his crafty colleague. Akin to Arlecchino is the Neapolitan Pulcinella with his nutcracker profile, baggy white costume and sugarloaf hat. The pedant has turned into the Doctor from Bologna, known as Baloardo or Balanzone, who is also the forebear of the famous stammering blue-spectacled Tartaglia. The miles gloriosus becomes the swaggering Capitan Spavento, now credited with Spanish origins. All except Pantalone had a number of alternative names. Arlecchino was basically the same character as Truffaldino and as Pedrolino (who became Pierrot in France); Brighella resembles Scapino at home, and Scapin and Mascarille in France. Scaramuccia emigrated early to France where he became the inimitable Scaramouche.

There is only space to look at one of these figures in any kind of detail. It is a temptation to choose the relatively coherent image of Pantalone, authoritarian, avaricious, often unbecomingly amorous, the symbol in his time of the gap between the generations. But to give a brief indication of the complex way a mask evolved we shall do better to take a look at Arlecchino. He begins his recorded history at the end of the sixteenth century as a ragged porter from Bergamo (his conjectured origins go back to the clown-devils of the early Middle Ages); he was refined and sophisticated during the heyday of the Italian players in France in the seventeenth century by the famous Harlequin Dominique (Domenico Biancolelli): here his motley patches became the regular pattern of brightly coloured diamonds that we know; he was lent pathos by Thomassin (Tommaso Vicentini) and poetic fantasy by Carlin (Carlo Bertinazzi). While he gained subtlety and grace in France in the eighteenth century in the paintings of Watteau and in the plays of Marivaux, he remained his old self in Italy where he was given a final burst of creative energy by the actor-manager Sacchi, who played the Truffaldino role, in traditionally farcical fashion, in the plays of Carlo Gozzi. Harlequin probably owes his longer survival in France to the romanticizing process. His melancholy air still hangs about him in paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, Georges Barbier and others, and in his traditional presentday role in mime and ballet.

The original Arlecchino was not romantic. He is first mentioned by name in 1584, by which time he has distinguished himself from Brighella; Brighella directs the plot, organizes the escapes, the assignations, the marriages and disguises, while Arlecchino gets it all wrong, muddles the messages, has everyone constantly on the brink of disaster. He compensates for his foolishness by a kind of acrobatic wit; he walks on his hands and on stilts, he can fall from great heights or produce a hump without padding. Gradually the clown takes over from the devil and the beggarly porter, but for all his simplicity, he retains something of his diabolical origin. He is ugly with a black half-mask, hairy cheeks and bushy eyebrows; he has a snub nose, tiny eye-holes and a carbuncle on his forehead. He is a tremendous impersonator and will appear in disguise as anything from an emperor to an astronaut. He sometimes suffers a sex change, is astonished to find himself a bride, or a goddess, or a mother surrounded by dozens of baby Harlequins. He is the most enigmatic of the masks, stupid and cunning, clumsy and graceful, sensual and innocent, quickly grieved and quickly comforted, a child and, according to some, the reincarnation of Mercury himself.

The lazzi could be verbal jokes, set pieces of business, set pieces of comic dialogue, or a mixture of the three. Riccoboni in his Histoire du théâtre italien (1727) calls them ‘inutilités’, useless because they did not further the plot. The word comes from the Tuscan lacci, ‘laces’ or ‘links’ (in fact interruptions) in the action. There are lazzi of fear, of mixed grief and joy, of fainting, of hiding, of sleepwalking, of servant tricking master, and so on, many of which are recorded in the still extant commonplace books; many of them depend for their humour on crudity, many more on play upon words.

The technique of the commedia players was to take a Roman plot, for instance—seven of the Locatelli collection of scenarios are adaptations of Latin comedies—pep it up with lazzi and tirades, rename the characters Pantalone and Coviello, and put it on the stage. With the theme of Plautus' Menaechmi they went to town, so that in the early scenarios we find twins everywhere; twin Pantaloons, twin captains, twin servants to twin masters, in one case sextuplets. From the Romans they learnt the importance of a well-constructed plot, and in turn they brought new life to the erudite material. A big change in balance was partly caused by the introduction of women to play the female parts. The most famous of these, Isabella Andreini, largely created the tender role of the inamorata; the cheeky servant girl, often called Colombina, was the female counterpart to the zany. The commedia audiences expected proposals, love scenes and lovers' quarrels now to take place on stage. Another change is that all the characters lose social status: duels become beatings and comic speeches become silly jokes; but as buffoonery and parody take over, life is infused into the old devices, and at first dignity is well lost. The possibilities of disguise take wing when Truffaldino appears as a parrot. Other borrowed devices—girls masquerading as boys, lovers hidden in chests, feigned death, old men in love, clowns turned princes, the simple processes of cuckolding and feasting—not always successful in a literary context, revive to find their true element in farce.

In the end it was probably excessive reliance upon farce which brought about the demise of the commedia in Italy. The admirable purity of this unpretentious genre is succinctly expressed by K. M. Lea:

We do not care about Pantalone and his mistress, we do not mind if Pulcinella and Colombina quarrel for ever; nor do we ask for probability in the ways they obtain or cheat each other; all that we want is to see them doing it again.

The drawback of the pleasure is that it brings diminishing returns. As the commedia continued into the eighteenth century, more lazzi and burle (something between a practical joke and a subplot) were introduced; there were longer musical interludes; obscenity was running riot; eventually most of the material appears to have been extraneous to any kind of plot. Imaginative resources were running low. Carlo Goldoni, in his introduction to the Pasquali edition of his works (1750), gives his own view of the degeneration of the improvised theatre, and while he condemns the use of masks and of improvisation anyway as being not conducive to verisimilitude, he attributes its impoverishment ultimately to its increasing reliance upon facile farcical effects in the struggle to win back its flagging audience.

It is difficult to say what sort of a service or disservice was done to the comici dell'arte by Goldoni. In a sense he prolonged their life by incorporating them into his plays, as Regnard and Marivaux did in France by rather different means, and yet by stripping them of their masks and making them learn their lines, by civilizing them and endowing them with bourgeois characteristics, it could be said that he extinguished their essential spark. Pantalone grows serious again; he acquires a kind of patriarchal dignity as, the embodiment of worldly common sense, he advises his children against all forms of impulsiveness and excess. Colombina has become Mirandolina with a household to run and servants of her own to see to. The comedies are played in theatres and for the most part are set in living rooms; the comics have in effect been dragged indoors and domesticated.

Venice, where Goldoni wrote, though formally an aristocracy, had its own instinct for democracy. The governing councils of nobles were subject to their own laws; sumptuary laws forbade ostentation, and, masked by the beaked domino, the servant was free to mix with his master in the gambling house, the theatre or the café. Consequently the egalitarian fever which seized European intellectuals in the eighteenth century found in Venice a society already immunized. So it cannot be said that Goldoni's motives in creating his bourgeois theatre were political, in the way that Steele's were, or Diderot's. His motive was simply to please; he wrote plays to fill the theatres and had a tradesman's instinct for knowing what people would like, for while abandoning the techniques of the commedia he was careful not to lose its audience. He needed no theories of comedy, merely seeking to bring about ‘il dilettevole solletico all'uman cuore’ (‘the delightful tickle at the human heart’). Indeed in his 1750 preface he writes, ‘I think that rather than the precepts of Horace or Aristotle, the Laws of the People are to be scrupulously observed.’

He deliberately set about a programme of theatrical reform. While he disliked Molière's emphasis on a central protagonist, his search was for a comedy which, like Molière's, should stem from character. His artistic manifesto is the play Il teatro comico (The Comic Theatre, 1750) which heralded the renowned season of the sixteen new comedies, all written and produced in under a year. In this play he makes a plea for naturalism, for ‘true and recognizable characters’, and for social criticism, not only for its moral value but on the grounds that it makes for good entertainment.

His secret was to foresee that it would delightfully tickle the heart of his emerging bourgeois public to recognize themselves—prejudice, materialism, social aspirations and all. He flattered their mercantile spirit, filled his plays with images of the dignity of honest trade and the fatuity of patrician idleness. Typical is his portrayal of Menego Cainello, the gondolier in La putta onorata (The Honest Girl, 1748) who declares with pride ‘We serve, it's true, but ours is a noble service and does not dirty our hands.’ It is a complimentary portrait on a small canvas, full of topicality and detail. The geographical position of Venice, her architecture, her values, her language, even her economic condition make themselves felt in these plays. We are in an enclosed pacific world where half of every day is devoted to pleasure, where no one's business is private, and where a man's property is the measure of his worth.

Goldoni confined himself to the surface of life, but to paint the surface with accuracy, warmth and humanity is to understand what lies beneath it. Goldoni's triumph is his reproduction of the domestic atmosphere. The daring of his realistic effects is astonishing; we have everything from a traffic jam of gondolas on stage to the performance of the most menial domestic tasks, but the real genius of this playwright lies in his ability to convey minutely the surface repercussions of clashes between the sexes, between the generations, between the strata of society, all observed within the context of the family setting. Personal tensions, money problems, social expectations and disappointments, these are his themes, and all of them illumined by his ‘inexhaustible hilarity’, to quote the critic Momigliano, that quality of sunny geniality which suffuses this finite world where the laws make sense and conformism is the ticket of entry.

Goldoni wrote more than 250 plays altogether. Among the best known are Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters, 1745), La bottega del caffé (The Coffee Shop, 1750), La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, 1753), I rusteghi (The Boors, 1760), La casa nova (The New House, 1761) and Il ventaglio (The Fan, 1764). Outstanding for their portrayal of local atmosphere are: La putta onorata, Le baruffe chiozzotte (The Squabbles at Chioggia, 1762) and Il campiello (The Little Square, 1756); and for humorous treatment of the aristocracy: La famiglia dell' antiquario (The Antiquary's family, 1749) and the Villeggiatura (Country Holiday) trilogy, 1761. For sheer lunacy one might choose L'impresario delle Smirne (The Impresario from Smyrna, 1760); and for poignancy, the last play he wrote before, finally defeated in his quarrel with Gozzi, he left to spend the rest of his years in France: Una delle ultime sere di carnovale (One of the Last Evenings of Carnival, 1762).

La casa nova is a typical comedy of the triumph of bourgeois values. Anzoletto, bullied by his social-climbing bride Cecilia, has moved into a magnificent apartment which he cannot afford. The whole havoc of house-moving is brought on to the stage; builders and decorators go about their business maddeningly slowly; a massive four-poster bed is assembled before us and taken down again. Motives are petty and emotions unheroic. The curiosity of the neighbours as, through windows, they watch the new people's furniture being carried in; the youthful condescension of Cecilia when she calls on them; the friction that arises between Cecilia and her unwanted sister-in-law; the compulsion of the parvenus to overspend: Goldoni shows that life is made up of such things. His delight in his craft is most evident, however, in the dénouement, when disaster is only averted by the intervention of Anzoletto's plain-speaking grocer uncle, who finally pays the bills and takes the couple, temporarily, into his own house.

Count Carlo Gozzi made a final bid to revive the old commedia. Famous for his quarrel with Goldoni, whose works he found trivial and coarse, and whom he virtually drove into exile in 1762, his positive contribution to the comic tradition is slight. His plays are fantastic magical fairy-tales. He purposely chose childish themes, in the first place to prove a malicious point in his polemic—that any nonsensical rubbish could fill a theatre. They are defiantly ill made, infused with mockery of others, but supremely of himself and of his chosen genre. As a foil to his exotic adventures of princesses and magicians he brings on the familiar commedia clowns, complete with Venetian dialect and full of topical quips. These scenes are the best; they exploit the perennial joke of the Yankee at the court of King Arthur or of the Cockney in the streets of Old Pompeii.

Gozzi was a rabid reactionary. His L'augellino belverde (The Beautiful Little Green Bird, 1765) is an attack on illuminism. Any hint of egalitarianism was anathema to him, yet he saw the popular commedia as the legacy of a glorious past, and his traditionalism was his avowed reason for preserving it. The years he spent writing for the Sacchi troupe were his happiest, and his account of them in his memoirs provides a lively insight into the theatrical mores of the time. But his use of the comici is too topical and satirical. Unfortunately all that lives on of Gozzi are his plots, and these are not his own. They were drawn from old sources, the Thousand and One Nights and the Pentameron of Basile. The Love of Three Oranges (1761) and Turandot (1762) survive as ballet and opera, but the plays themselves are now rarely performed.

Italy can be said to have made four major contributions to the comic tradition: in the formulation of its laws for all Europe in the sixteenth century; in the spontaneous generation of the commedia dell'arte; in the early ‘slice of life’ naturalism of Goldoni, and finally in the total reversal of comic values implied by the ambiguities of Pirandello. The nineteenth century added little. As the bourgeois element grew stronger, the purely comic vein was dissipated. It was the age of the pièce à thèse and of social realism, the most ‘serious’ century so far in Italy's history; the Risorgimento was no laughing matter. Ibsen enjoyed a vogue in Italy and had many imitators.

And so it remains for Pirandello to open up again the possibilities of comedy. Once the eternal certainties had been swept away by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein and the most disillusioning war of all time, Pirandello was to be responsible for the conception and propagation of a new theatre of reflection and uncertainty. Laughter provoked by art would never be the same again, would always be counterbalanced by a sense of menace. Notions of identity, masquerade and deception may still have comic possibilities, but they are now never free from philosophical implications, and the pretended occurrences on the stage evoke a real event in the auditorium—the posing of such questions as: Am I the man I was yesterday? Am I the sum of my past actions? Or am I only present in the constantly changing roles I play for other people, and in the series of distorted impressions they receive of me? Is there any truth in what I am?

Humour for Pirandello is the ‘sense of the contradiction of things’. He placed the principle of ambiguity and its accompanying hollow laughter so firmly on the stage that the principle of verifiable truth was thereafter more or less relegated to the realm of the commercial ‘well-made’ comedy, film or television piece. His influence, much of it indirect, is felt by many modern playwrights. He was after all the man who expounded fully and repeatedly in the theatres of Rome, Berlin and Paris the idea echoed many years after his death by Harold Pinter:

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.¹

It is one of countless echoes of an old theme, for there have been relativists in every age. Modern physics, says Bertrand Russell, is on the side of Heraclitus. So, indeed, is the modern theatre. It would be too neat to make out that the theatre has come full circle since the time of Epicharmus' existentialist litigant; better perhaps to conclude with the sober suggestion that there is nothing new under the comic sun.

Note

1. Programme note to The Room and The Dumb Waiter, quoted by J. R. Taylor, Anger and After (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 300.