Reviewed by:

• Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630 by Natalie Crohn Schmitt
• Robert Henke (bio)

Natalie Crohn Schmitt, who has already written a solid analysis of Flaminio Scala's published scenario collection entitled Befriending the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala: The Comic Scenarios (2014), provides in Performing Commedia dell' Arte a concise, useful, and informative study of the performance techniques of Italian professional theatre during its heyday of 1570-1630. The book divides into chapters titled "Improvisation: why, what, how"; "Acting Styles: dialects, voices, gestures"; and "The Uses of Masks" (the latter perhaps better titled "Characters and Genres"), in addition to a short historical introduction and a final "Coda" on twentieth and twenty-first century theatres drawing in part on the commedia dell'arte.

Schmitt is a generous scholar with a strong sense of the community of Anglo-American (less so Italian) scholars at her beck and call: she does not reinvent the wheel but uses other studies as springboards to her work, including recent ones such as Emily Wilbourne's beautiful 2016 book on opera and the "sound" of the commedia dell'arte. When attempting to reconstruct performance techniques such as improvisation, vocal delivery, and gestural comportment—techniques for which there often is scant documentation from the extant historical documents—she ingeniously and fruitfully looks at adjacent cultural areas.

Of particular note is her ample and inventive examination of the arts of oratory, as she practically convinces us that the first Renaissance acting treatise was, in effect, not that of the early seventeenth century actor-writer Pier Maria Cecchini, but rather Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria—obviously a classical text but continually reprinted and widely disseminated in the Renaissance. Quintilian's minute advice on the vocal delivery of a speech from Cicero's Pro Milone, his delineation of various vocal tones from the harsh to the sweet, and even his discussion of the rhetorical effects of tattered clothes and disheveled hair—all seem to have been read by the First Player of Hamlet. In a fascinating and informative section on the art of gesture in the commedia dell'arte, Schmitt shows Quintilian animating the relationship between the "word and the action." My only quibble with Schmitt's discussion of the Institutio oratoria is that, on page 31, she seems to undercut the application of the Roman writer to the Arte by only mentioning the commedia erudita and the professional actors' performance of scripted plays as sites where we can be assured that he was applied. Many of the Arte actors received a classical education and could have either read the text itself or absorbed it by osmosis, and the much of the beauty of Quintilian lies in its application to improvisation—wasn't that Schmitt's point?

A rounded cultural approach enriches Schmitt's discussion of improvisation in the Italian professional theater. She appositely quotes Stephen Greenblatt's [End Page 531] Renaissance Self-Fashioning on improvisation as an "opportunistic grasp of that which seems fixed and established" (7), which nicely applies to the Arte actors' canny use of "fixed" literary material. Schmitt profitably frames Arte improvisation in the general ambience of the Renaissance, whether in the court culture of "sprezzatura" represented by Castiglione, or in the performative worlds and demi-worlds of preachers, mountebanks, cantastorie, and piazza actors. Both the rhetorical arts of copiousness, which can be applied to both writing and improvised oral delivery, and in utramque partem composition (arguing both sides of a question) were effectively arts of improvisation. Particular interesting was her reference, following Julia Sutton's study of Italian dance manuals, to improvisation in Renaissance dance. Following Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory, Schmitt shows us how Renaissance memory itself was conceived of as a "compositional" art (14) lending to improvisational elaborations. All in all, Schmitt gives us a good picture of what Walter Ong dubbed "secondary orality": the oral methods of composition that mostly literate actors wrought on codified fragments of literary texts. And drawing from her own observations of improv in Chicago, Schmitt persuasively refutes the received idea that improvisation beyond two or three...

审核人：

• Natalie Crohn Schmitt表演 Commedia dell'Arte，1570-1630
• 罗伯特·亨克（生物）

娜塔莉·克罗恩·施密特 (Natalie Crohn Schmitt) 已经对 Flaminio Scala 已出版的场景集《与 Flaminio Scala 的 Commedia dell'Arte 交朋友：漫画场景》 (2014) 进行了可靠的分析，她在Performing Commedia dell' Arte中提供了一份简洁、有用且内容丰富的研究意大利专业剧院在 1570-1630 年的全盛时期的表演技巧。这本书分为标题为“即兴创作：为什么，什么，如何”的章节；《表演风格：方言、声音、手势》；和“面具的使用”（后者可能更好地命名为“角色和流派”），除了简短的历史介绍和 20 世纪和 21 世纪剧院的最后“尾声”，部分借鉴了艺术喜剧.

施密特是一位慷慨的学者，对英美（意大利较少）学者群体有着强烈的意识，她随时待命：她不会重新发明轮子，而是将其他研究作为她工作的跳板，包括最近的研究，如艾米丽Wilbourne 2016 年关于歌剧和喜剧“声音”的精美书籍。在尝试重构诸如即兴创作、发声和手势动作等表演技巧时——这些技巧在现存的历史文献中通常很少见——她巧妙而富有成效地审视了相邻的文化领域。

特别值得注意的是她对演讲艺术的充分而创造性的研究，因为她实际上让我们相信，第一部文艺复兴时期的表演论文实际上不是 17 世纪早期演员兼作家皮尔·玛丽亚·切奇尼的，而是昆蒂利安的Institutio Oratoria ——显然是经典文本，但在文艺复兴时期不断重印和广泛传播。Quintilian 对 Cicero 的Pro Milone演讲的声音表达的细微建议，他对从刺耳到甜美的各种声调的描述，甚至他对破烂衣服和蓬乱头发的修辞效果的讨论——所有这些似乎都被哈姆雷特的第一玩家. 在 commedia dell'arte 中关于手势艺术的引人入胜且内容丰富的部分中，Schmitt 展示了 Quintilian 动画化“词与动作”之间的关系。我对施密特关于Institutio oratoria的讨论的唯一质疑是，在第 31 页，她似乎削弱了罗马作家对艺术的应用，只提到了喜剧博学和专业演员的剧本表演作为我们可以放心，他被申请了。许多 Arte 演员接受过经典教育，可以阅读文本本身或通过渗透吸收它，而 Quintilian 的大部分美妙之处在于它对即兴创作的应用——这不是施密特的观点吗？

全面的文化方法丰富了施密特对意大利专业剧院即兴创作的讨论。她恰如其分地引用斯蒂芬格林布拉特的[完第 531 页] 文艺复兴时期的自我塑造关于即兴创作作为“对看似固定和既定的事物的机会主义把握”（7），这很好地适用于艺术演员对“固定”文学材料的巧妙使用。施密特在文艺复兴时期的总体氛围中构建了艺术即兴创作，无论是在以 Castiglione 为代表的“sprezzatura”宫廷文化中，还是在传教士、mountebanks、cantastorie和广场演员的表演世界和半世界中，施密特都是有利可图的。丰富的修辞艺术，可以应用于写作和即兴口头表达，作文（争论问题的双方）实际上是即兴创作的艺术。特别有趣的是，在 Julia Sutton 对意大利舞蹈手册的研究之后，她提到了文艺复兴时期舞蹈中的即兴创作。继玛丽·卡拉瑟斯的《记忆之书》之后，施密特向我们展示了文艺复兴时期的记忆本身是如何被认为是一种“组合”艺术（14），用于即兴创作。总而言之，施密特为我们描绘了Walter Ong所谓的“二次口语”的好图景：主要是有文化的演员在编纂的文学文本片段上进行的口语构图方法。根据她自己对芝加哥即兴表演的观察，施密特有说服力地驳斥了即兴表演超过两三个...