The Commedia dell’Arte (Paperback)

What were the origins of commedia dell'arte and how did it evolve as a dramatic form over the next two centuries? How did its relationship to the ruling ideology of the day change during the Enlightenment? What is its legacy today?

These are just some of the questions addressed in this authoritative overview of the dramatic, ideological and aesthetic form of commedia dell'arte. The book's three sections examine the changing role of performers and playwrights, improvisatory scenarios and scripted performance, and its function as a vehicle for social criticism, to offer readers a clear understanding of commedia dell'arte's evolution in Renaissance Italy. This study throws new light on the role of women performers; its changing ideological discourse, which included social reform and, later, conservatism and the alienation of ethnic minorities in complicity with its audience; and its later adaptation into hybrid forms including grotesque dance and the giullarata typified by the work of Dario Fo.

In a commedia dell'arte play, the agents of the dramatic action are stock characters identified by costume, dialect, style of movement, dramatic function and social class, and they are, among other things, vehicles of the troupe's social criticism. A major product of the new entertainment industry of the Renaissance, commedia dell'arte rose quickly to a position of dominance in the European comic theatre. By the middle of the 18th century, it started to practice more genteel forms of humour and to mutate into other genres, such as the Harlequinade, grotesque dance and scripted comedy, becoming in the process an artistic accomplice of the counter-Enlightenment.