Bulletin of the Comediantes

THIS IMPORTANT NEW VOLUME BRINGS TOGETHER European and North American commedia dell’arte scholars in order to provide varied perspectives on the last three decades of research of this important art form. The volume focuses on the professional, improvisation-based theater that emerged in Italy in the 1540s and, in turn, influenced the early modern theater of Italy, Spain, England, and France, among many other countries. Commedia dell’arte’s innovations included its introduction of women as actors on stage; the use of half masks to signal character types; a reliance on a physical performance style; the incorporation of various dialects or languages within a single performance; the inclusion of a panoply of characters, each representing a distinctive region; and its use of improvisation rather than a fully scripted text. In many ways, commedia dell’arte influenced what European theater is and, therefore, its importance to contemporary theater is immense. For that reason, Commedia dell’Arte in Context is a welcome addition to a number of recently published books on commedia. One of the main contributions of the book is the inclusion of scholars working in English as well as those working in Italian, who may be less familiar to an English, monolingual reader. In addition, the book draws not only on noted theater scholars but also on literary scholars and musicologists, an important interdisciplinarity because the commedia dell’arte performers worked in many genres and performance styles.

Acknowledging the important contribution of Kenneth and Laura Richards’s The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History (Blackwell, 1990), which is still essential reading for any student of the commedia dell’arte, as well as the presence of the recently published and highly [End Page 135] comprehensive The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte (edited by Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick, Routledge, 2014), the editors of the volume under review chose a different approach, creating a nonchronological and more thematically based organization. As Vianello explains in the opening chapter: “The main purpose of this book is to retrace the history of the improvvisa in light of its legendary past, with special focus on the theatrical practices and theoretical deliberations in the century which has just ended” (1). The book, then, engages with the last several decades of materially and historically based scholarly research and does not include perspectives from theater practitioners, such as actors and directors (who make up a large number of contributors to The Routledge Companion). The editors lament their inability, for logistical reasons, to include images, which, considering the rich iconography of commedia dell’arte, is a loss. However, they compensate by investing in fluid and approachable translations into English of chapters that would otherwise have been inaccessible to an English readership. Notably, important scholars such as Ferdinando Taviani, Mirella Schino, Paolo Puppa, or Siro Ferrone—who normally publish in Italian—for the first time become accessible to English readers as well. This is important, as the book is intentionally oriented to experts and nonexperts alike. Thereby, the editors make it possible to use the book both in the undergraduate classroom and for scholarly purposes.

The volume’s thematic rather than chronological organization makes sense because the book intentionally highlights rather than surveys the study of commedia dell’arte. With the exception of the introductory essay, the rest of the chapters do not explicitly refer to one another, making the book as a whole less cohesive than it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, the arrangement of each part is evocative, and the individual contributions are rich in scholarly depth and expertise. As Vianello writes in the introduction, “Commedia dell’Arte: History, Myth, Reception”: “This work aims to provide a thorough—albeit not necessarily exhaustive—reconstruction of a phenomenon that has significantly affected world theatre” (1). In terms of overall structure, the book is divided into five parts: the first four parts explain the elements of the commedia dell’arte and detail historical developments from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries...