(It.).
A type of Italian theatre that flourished in the 16th and early 17th centuries, so called because it was performed by professional actors and actresses who formed regularly constituted companies. The genre is characterized by a combination of improvisation and stereotypical elements, such as a standardized plot line (the scenario or canovaccio) and masks or fixed character roles. Commedia dell'arte plays usually have both masked and unmasked characters, including two or more pairs of lovers (innamorati), a swaggering military man, a female servant, two or more comic servants (zanni), and two old men. The masked characters often exhibit stereotypical traits associated with various regions of Italy and other European countries; examples include the Dottor Bolognese, Arlecchino of Bergamo, Beltrame of Milan, Pantalone of Venice, the hook-nosed Pulcinella of Naples and Captain Matamoros of Spain. The unmasked characters include all female roles (although actresses sometimes wore veils or non-stylized half-masks) and, typically, the innamorati and any other representatives of the nobility.
Commedia dell'arte plots tend to reinforce social mores regarding marriage and procreation, while deprecating what must have been fairly common but ‘aberrant’ behaviour involving love and sexual desire. Standard jokes (lazzi) poke fun at romantic liaisons between young women and old men, at sodomitic practices and gluttony, at the lust of old men and old women, and at the potential embarrassments of unwanted pregnancy. Humour is often expressed physically, with pronounced movements and dances, acrobatics, conspicuous phallic representations and cross-dressing. While commedia dell'arte companies from the mid-16th century on included actresses, a clear distinction must be drawn between the sex of character roles and the sex of the actors who played them, for both men and women appeared in transvestite costume, and many stock jokes were based on gender reversals or differences in sex or sexuality. As a result, the scenarios and dialogues use a highly developed equivocal language, referring to both heterosexual and homosexual practices, and to their potential implications and consequences.
Commedia dell'arte troupes, typically itinerant, also exploited the vogue for humanistic scholarship and imitated the practice of Italian academies in adopting symbolic names, such as the Compagnia dei Gelosi (the Jealous), Accesi (the Ignited) or Fedeli (the Faithful). Individual performers were often known by their stage names. Virginia Ramponi Andreini, for example, the prima donna innamorata of the Compagnia dei Fedeli, was called ‘La Florinda’ after the character she portrayed in her husband G.B. Andreini's tragedy of the same name; Tristano Martinelli was known throughout Europe as ‘Arlecchino’, and the actor-musician Giovanni Gabrielli was more commonly referred to as ‘Sivello’.
Music was a regular feature of commedia dell'arte performances, and many comedians were known for their abilities to sing and play various instruments. The climax of an entertainment was often marked by musical performance, as it was in Isabella Andreini's Pazzia d'Isabella (1589) and in G.B. Andreini's La Florinda (1603). A tree filled with musical instruments was a standard icon, and a performer like Francesco Andreini would indicate his retirement from the stage by ‘hanging up his pipe’ on its verdant branches. One of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of a commedia dell'arte performance outlines the standard practice for including music in plays. Massimo Troiano, writing in 1568 of the festivities organized by Orlande de Lassus at the court of Munich for the wedding of Wilhelm V and Renata of Lorraine (Die Müncher Fürstenhochzeit von 1568, ed. H. Leuchtmann, Munich, 1980), related that, in the course of an improvised comedy, Lassus enacted the character of Pantalone di Bisognosi and sang two stanzas of the villanella Chi passa per questa strada to lute accompaniment. The singers of the court chapel performed madrigals between the acts of the play, including one between the prologue and first act, and the entertainment ended with a staged dance. The music performed within the texts of plays tends towards the repertories of the villanella, barzelletta and scherzo.
Commedia dell'arte players performed a wide variety of theatrical genres, including pastorals, tragedies and drammi per musica, and many of the prima donnas were considered great singers. Accounts of Virginia Ramponi Andreini's music-making, for example, in the leading role in the first performance of Monteverdi's Arianna and in his Ballo delle ingrate (both 1608), in G.C. Monteverdi's Il rapimento di Proserpina (1611), in the Trasformazione di Millefonte (1609) and in her husband's sacred drama La Maddalena (1617), set to music by Monteverdi, Mutio Effrem, Salamone Rossi and Alessandro Ghivizzani, attest the broad compass of her talents in particular and of the commedia dell'arte repertory in general. Other comedians, such as Giovanni Gabrielli and his son Francesco (‘Scapino’), carried with them vast collections of musical instruments, as noted by Claudio Monteverdi and G.B. Doni, among others. The ‘Aria di Scapino’ was perhaps the most famous of Francesco Gabrielli's canzonettas, some of which survive in his publications Villanelle di Scapino (1624) and the Infermità, testamento, e morte di Francesco Gabrielli detto Scapino (1638). Music from the commedia dell'arte stage also appears in the popular song anthologies printed in the early years of the 17th century, including the Arie di diversi (1634) of Alessandro Vincenti and the multi-volume Raccolta di bellissime canzonette musicali (c1618–25) of Remigio Romano; such songs were often published with alfabeto notation and a verbal instruction that they be performed to the accompaniment of a chitarrone or Spanish guitar.
Commedia dell'arte themes and characters were popular models for later musical comedies, comic operas, ballets and circuses. Stock characters (Arlecchino, Scaramuccia, the soubrette etc.), or characters developed from them, are introduced in, for example, Orazio Vecchi's L'Amfiparnaso, Pergolesi's La serva padrona, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte, Busoni's Arlecchino, Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, Stravinsky's Petrushka and Pulcinella, and Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. Commedia dell'arte characters are also referred to in the the titles of instrumental pieces by Schumann (Carnaval), Milhaud (Scaramouche) and others. Modern actors and acting troupes who model their performances on commedia dell'arte themes and practices include Dario Fo and the Cirque du Soleil.
See also Intermezzo (ii) and Madrigal comedy.
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ANNE MacNEIL