ORAZIO |
arrives reading a letter, and, while reading, knocks at the [door of his own] house; at that |
|---|---|
PEDROLINO |
dressed in felt [probably a felt hat] and boots, telling Orazio that Flavio wants to go to the countryside. Orazio: that there are other things to be done; at that |
FLAVIO |
getting dressed in country clothes to go to the villa. Orazio says that one of them must go to Pisa and to Livorno right away, saying that he has received a letter from one of his friends in Venice, by which he is informed that in one month an Armenian merchant, named Hibrahim should arrive in Florence, bringing with him two slave brothers, ransomed in Persia from the hands of the Turks. |
Flaminio Scala, The Two Old Twins
So begins act 1 of the first scenario in Flaminio Scala’s collection of commedia dell’arte scenarios entitled Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (The Theatre of Representative Plots), 1611,1 probably the single most important document remaining to us from one of the most significant Western theatre movements. The collection provides a vital link to our understanding of commedia dell’arte at its height, 1570–1630, shows the commedia dell’arte to be full of the life of its times, and includes spirited works of art. With this book I elaborate upon these claims. I seek to dispel a number of common misconceptions: (1) the Scala scenarios are only minimally about social reality and more about an autonomous world created by previous theatre; (2) because the scenarios are limited to domestic encounter, they do not take up social and political issues; and (3) Scala was merely a rearranger of prior texts, a facilitator of performance, but not a creator. At the end of the sixteenth century in Italy the commedia dell’arte, known at the time by various names including commedia a soggetto or commedia all’improvviso,2 became far more important and influential than the Italian literary drama. Indeed, it was the most important theatrical movement in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Europe. Its performers spread rapidly throughout Europe, affecting both popular and literary theatre. It was more widely known than Elizabethan theatre and, in its time, more influential. Thereafter, although in decline, the form continued to be popular for another one hundred and fifty years. Throughout the centuries the commedia dell’arte has captured the imagination of playwrights, artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and film-makers.
Scala’s is the oldest collection of commedia dell’arte scenarios, and the only one to have been published in the seventeenth century. Moreover, Scala, as a successful actor-manager, provided us with a first-hand view of some of the best theatre of his time. The publication of his collection of fifty scenarios was, in the words of theatre historian Louise George Clubb, “an event of the first importance to theatre history.” Although the scenarios represent “the repertory of a company that never existed,” Clubb continues, “Scala’s compilation gives a fuller idea of the dynamics, tropes, and variety of improvised comedy than any other single text has done.”3 That text is central to our understanding of commedia dell’arte at the time.
The first modern edition of the Scala scenarios in Italian was carefully provided by Ferruccio Marotti only in 1976. A pioneering translation into English of the scenarios by Henry Salerno appeared in 1967, but, while it attracted the interest of actors and accordingly has gone through four editions, it was neither accurate nor literal enough to facilitate scholarly work.4 Studies of the scenarios have been few. Observing the paucity of attention directed to the Scala scenarios, Richard Andrews comments that one would “expect that scholars would be buzzing around this text like bees round a honeypot.”5 He himself provides considerable attention by making available his careful translation of thirty of the fifty scenarios in the Scala collection and by appending a commentary to each of them, the primary purpose of which is “to set each individual scenario in the context of existing theatrical expectations, and of resources of material already available to actors.”6 Andrews’s primary aim, in addition to making scholarly translations of many Scala scenarios available, is to establish the extent to which materials in the Scala scenarios were borrowed from earlier literary material, including scripted plays.7 Elsewhere he has commented that “it begins to look as though nothing which appears in Il teatro delle favole rappresentative was actually created by … [Scala] at all.” The “scenes are opportunities or invitations to the performers.” Scala was “a re-arranger, or a facilitator, rather than a creator.”8
My own effort, quite different from Andrews’s, is to see the comic scenarios in the collection in relationship to early modern life in Italy, to consider their value as works of art, and to establish the extent to which their performance can be reconstructed. I shall have a great deal to say about the context, common to all the arts in the period in which Scala worked, in which “borrowing” from earlier material needs to be understood. I argue that Scala’s claim to creation – he calls it “invention” – is fitting.9
In addition to Andrews’s work on the scenarios (2008), two other extended studies of the Scala scenarios exist. In 1995 Tim Fitzpatrick argued, in a pioneering and painstaking work, that the Scala scenarios “are quintessentially practical documents, admirably suited and structured to serve the purposes for which they were originally written, containing nothing superfluous (in the sense of moving to readerly and literary constructions), and manifesting pragmatic features which reflect dramaturgical solutions for performance.” To establish this, Fitzpatrick broke down Scala’s “notational practices” into linguistic schemas and subschemas.10 In 2005, apparently without awareness of Fitzpatrick’s work, Quirino Galli provided a similar diagrammatic linguistic study, also partitioning the scenarios into performance units, to establish that the value of the Scala scenarios resides in their prescriptive efficacy, whose goal is the theatrical performance.11 Despite their work and perhaps because it is schematic, the scenarios have continued to be described as they have long been described, “as skeletal.”12
They are, after all, decidedly not play scripts. Indeed, to overcome the dismissal of the Scala scenarios as secondary sources recollected from their performance for the benefit of readers, and to argue instead that they could be reliably read as performance guides, both Fitzpatrick and Galli evidently felt the need to assert that the Scala scenarios, in Fitzpatrick’s words, “are quintessentially practical not literary constructions.”13
Andrews decries the amount of time that has been spent on the argument about whether Scala was trying to create a genre of recreational literature or rather blueprints for performance, and notes that those who have written on the subject are often less in disagreement with each other than they claim.14 Robert Henke, who briefly but eloquently champions Scala,15 takes the perspective of Scala and his famous actor friend Francesco Andreini, both of whom, in their prefaces to Scala’s collection, affirm that Scala was writing for both readers and performers. He reconciles the seemingly opposing views quite simply, explaining that, while the book by the actor and capocomico (theatre manager), Il teatro delle favole rappresentative is “undoubtedly a product of literary memorialization,” it “contains both internal and external signs that render it a fairly reliable source for knowledge about performance practice.”16 It is, after all, hard to imagine what Scala might have been doing in any accommodations for publication (and we know that there were some) other than representing commedia dell’arte, and his scenarios in particular, in the most favourable light possible.
It may well be that precisely because Scala wrote with an eye to an audience of readers as well as performers that his scenarios serve as such valuable guides to commedia dell’arte in its golden age. Uniquely, Scala’s scenarios provide an “Argument,” a description of the action and/or what preceded it. And, indispensably, his scenarios specify actions and their attendant emotions. Other contemporary scenario collections, Corsini and Correr, for instance, often rely on a mere short-hand for actors, like they “have their scene of reciprocal jealousy,” they ”play their various antics,” and Zanni “replies with his trick of ‘Didn’t I tell you I didn’t believe it?’,” making attempted reconstruction of their performance difficult.17
To establish the value of examination of the Scala scenarios, rather than offer a schematic and diagrammatic analysis I provide something of a literary study of them. I begin with literary theorist Mark Edmondson’s passionate argument that the first job of a critic and teacher is to “befriend” the text (that is, to frame a reading of it that would meet with the author’s approval); to analyse it sympathetically; to treat its words with care, caution, and due respect; and, further, “to develop a vision of what the world is and how to live that rises from the author’s work.”18 That is precisely my intention in this book.
My process is closest to that of Roberto Tessari, who in a remarkable twenty-seven pages describes Scala’s scenarios as a poetry not of words but of gesture, in which dialogue, the sole “gesture” of the characters in the Italian written drama, becomes one gesture among many.19 While Scala rarely provides dialogue, he does provide, instead, descriptions of actions, intentions, emotions, and prop use. Through examining these, like Tessari but in more detail, I strive to establish that many of the scenarios are artfully constructed, various, and full of invention. Unlike Tessari, I further show that to appreciate the interest the scenarios had for their contemporary audience, it is necessary to read them in light of information about early modern Italian society and the tensions within it.
As the majority of commedia dell’arte scenarios and of Scala’s scenarios are comic, it has been assumed that they are not serious. Ludovico Zorzi perceived a “lack of ethical and social import” in the commedia dell’arte.20Similarly, Andrews remarks that the dramatic tradition meant that the scenarios were “limited largely to what we would call domestic encounter.”21 Social historian Guido Ruggiero makes clear, however, the extent to which the distinction between domestic and everything else is misleading.
Marriage [was] at the heart of social and political institutions, … [its] layers of signification crucially colored perceptions not only of love and sexuality, but also of social order, stability, and organization. And significantly it appears that as this discourse of civic morality became more and more of a given in … [the period in which Scala was working], it helped to formulate yet stricter gender stereotypes and increased pressure to restrict and place women firmly in a disciplined domestic space.
The family was the building block of a civic and moral society, and “control of the family was the central issue, both in the moral and the political spheres.”22
I show in detail that an understanding of the social context in which the scenarios were written informs them at every point, not only with respect to the matter of marriage and familial relationships but also with respect to relationships between friends, between masters and servants, and with outsiders. All were causes for anxiety within the culture. What was at stake, argues cultural historian John Jeffries Martin, was the fundamental question of how the relation between the “social and conforming self” (one’s correspondence to one’s well-understood place in the social hierarchy) and “the internal dimensions of experience … should be understood or, where there was conflict between them, resolved.”23 Martin sees the question of the relationship between the social and conforming self and the interior self as a “recurring, if not the dominant theme of Renaissance theatre.”24 This question repeatedly manifests itself in the social relationships in Scala’s scenarios. Commedia dell’arte audiences would have regarded the issues taken up by the scenarios as serious. As Scala claimed, the scenarios reflect not just a prior theatrical tradition but “human behavior in all its vagaries and contradictions.”25 In their social and cultural remoteness from us it has been too easy to regard the scenarios as only reflections of theatrical traditions.
We know very little about Scala himself that might inform us about the status of the scenarios. In 1614, at the age 62, following the invitation of Don Giovanni de’ Medici, Scala became capocomico of the prestigious theatre troupe, the Confidenti. He held this position until Don Giovanni died in 1621. Scala’s correspondence concerning theatre business from his time as manager of the Confidenti is extant and now in print.26 In 1619 Scala published a play entitled Il finto marito based on one of his scenarios.27 Another play from 1601 is attributed to him. Several months before his own death at age seventy-three Scala sold his perfume shop in Venice (which had evidently provided him with a supplementary income for some time) and became perfumer to the Duke of Mantua.
Even less is known of Scala’s life in the years prior to 1611, when he published his scenario collection. One can infer from several documents that he had served as manager for the well-regarded Desiosi and Uniti troupes and had played the lover Flavio and, probably later, the senex, the Frenchman Claudione. Although the troupes with which he worked in the main travelled a circuit of northern Italian cities, from 1600 to 1601 there is record of his having toured in France with the Accesi. It is as capocomico that Scala would have composed and collected the scenarios in his collection.
In his preface to the collection Scala’s friend, the distinguished actor Francesco Andreini, tells us that Scala’s scenarios “in all time and places gave him very great honor,” but there is no direct evidence of this.28 It is reasonable to believe that Scala was invited to assume the position as head of the Confidenti on the basis of that reputation. Near the very end of Le due commedia in commedia (act 5, scene 10) by Giovanni Battista Andreini (son of Francesco) a character, the French pastry chef, reveals that he is really the character Flaminio Scala, who will, he says, make a play that will shine like the sun; it will be about the events he has just seen in the play that he is in. Perhaps this framing of his own play is merely Giovanni Andreini’s tribute to his family’s old friend Scala, who died the following year, in 1624. However, for the joke to have effectively served the ending of his own play, Andreini had to have assumed the audience’s familiarity with Scala’s work and their high regard for it.
Apart from his own letter to readers prefacing his scenario collection and his two prologues to Il finto marito, Scala provides no information about his intention or process in composing the scenarios. In the preface to the scenario collection Scala tells us that he had not thought to publish the scenarios until various enthusiasts urged him to do so. He readily accepted this idea, he says, so that others could not claim the scenarios as theirs. In publishing the scenarios, a genre with no other named authors and in which no one had previously published, Scala was evidently also attempting to raise both the status of commedia dell’arte and his own as a creator of scenarios and to claim himself as an author. The first of the two prologues to Il finto marito tells us about the regard in which he held the scenarios, not least because, ironically, it serves as a prologue to his fully scripted play. It is a defence of improvised performance and of his earlier publication of scenarios including the scenario on which Il finto marito is based. In it Scala emphasizes the centrality of scenarios to drama and performance: “plays properly and in essence consist in actions and only incidentally in narrations,” that is, in the words spoken.29 Further, in an argument akin to that of natural philosophers, newly emphasizing empiricism rather than reliance on authority,30 Scala affirms the quality of the scenario plots, implying that they are even superior to those of the earlier scripted, that is literary, commedia erudita, because they had resulted from “learning by doing” rather than from merely “observing the rules and imitating as much as possible.” “Experience produces art,” Scala writes. “The only rules and precepts are those of good practice and good dramatists … it being the case that rules are always taken from usage and not usage from rules.”31
At the end of his preface to the scenario collection Scala promised a second volume of scenarios “quite soon,” but for reasons unknown it never appeared. Perhaps the first volume did not garner the reading public he sought. It had no other successors.
Scala wrote in Tuscan, the vernacular model for Italian literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the language of Bembo, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Remaining scenarios in other dialects also exist, the monumental Casamarciano collection in Neapolitan, for instance. Assuming that Scala aspired to publish another fifty scenarios, scholars note that that would have brought Scala’s total number of scenarios up to the number of fables provided by Boccaccio in his Decameron. Fabulists regularly aspired to provide the number of fables that Boccaccio had provided and quite regularly fell short.32 Indication that Scala was inspired in his effort by Boccaccio is his numbering of the scenarios by days. Unlike those of Boccaccio, however, and more akin to those of Matteo Bandello, Scala’s days are set in no narrative framework and are not ordered by topic. In designating his scenarios not just by titles but by days, Scala probably intended for the work of Boccaccio to lend status to his own and to give credence to his plots or fables as acceptably literary.33 The scenarios were not plays but also were not in any familiar literary genre. Scala, additionally, may have been advertising the large number of wares that he could provide. A troupe with an extended stay in one place might quickly exhaust its repertoire.
For readers and performers, Scala, as I said, added an Argument to each of the scenarios, describing what had happened to some of the central characters before the scenario starts. The Arguments vary in length from a brief paragraph to, in Marotti’s modern edition, two single-spaced pages, the length to a large extent dependent upon the amount of back-story that the reader needed to have or the actors needed to supply piecemeal, often at points specifically designated in the scenarios, making some scenarios considerably more narration heavy than others. Occasionally the Argument simply duplicates information to be found in the scenario, as if once Scala had committed to the idea of providing an Argument, he had to provide one whether or not it was necessary. It is not known what, if any, of the Argument Scala intended for inclusion in the evidently customary spoken prologue.34 In a few instances there are minor inconsistencies between the Argument and the scenario. While the style of the scenarios is as repetitive and inelegant as directions for actors would naturally be, the Arguments, with their long compound sentences and adventures spun out over extended periods of time, reveal greater literary aspiration. However, the effort expended on them appears to have been erratic, and they are not even always self-consistent.
The Arguments are followed by a list of characters, grouped by households, with the relationships of the characters specified: “an old man,” “his servant,” “his son,” et cetera, along with the guise in which they may at first appear: “Fabrizio, his servant, later revealed as his daughter Isabella,” for instance. When Pantalone is in the scenario, as he is in all but one of them, his household is listed first. It is often specified that he is a merchant. Graziano or Doctor is the second most commonly listed householder, but he also can be listed otherwise: as a mountebank, a friend, or alone. Characters with no house on stage, for instance some young men or the Capitano, are listed after the households. Occasionally Scala forgets to list characters appearing in the scenario, usually but not always minor ones. Copy-editing, at the time, was often not what we might wish, and the means of printing did not help.
To give continuity to the whole and to borrow the fame of various actors, and perhaps also to make it easier for contemporary readers to imagine the scenarios in performance and in their best performance, Scala changed the names of characters in his scenarios (apart from those of Pantalone and Graziano or Dottore, which were fixed by convention) to the names used by famous actors for their roles. Alongside the cast list appears a prop list that is not always complete. Important props like jewels, weapons, and lanterns are sometimes not listed, perhaps because, although they were not the usual accoutrement of the character, they were always ready to hand.
Andrews notes that, in the 1611 edition of the Scala scenarios he examined, the first few scenarios have the name of the city in which the action is set, squeezed on to the probably already typeset page seemingly as an afterthought. Surprisingly, for all the scenarios, the time of day is similarly squeezed in.35 That Scala at first omitted the city, which rarely had any bearing on the action and may have been changed in performance to the name of the city in which the scenario was being performed, is understandable, but whether it was day or night, when the characters could not readily have seen one another in the unlit street, would have profoundly affected the way in which the actors were to behave.
Following the city designation are the three acts of scenarios, as opposed to the five acts of fully scripted plays. Each of the unnumbered scenes lists each of the entering characters beside it, although some of the information provided within the scenes appears too late for actors to have taken instruction from it and seems to have been added as an afterthought for readers. If the character is disguised, Scala often refers to that character by the sex in which he or she is disguised, as if he were recalling the action rather than aiding readers. Pronoun referents are sometimes difficult to follow.
How many changes Scala made in the scenarios themselves to accommodate his reading audience or the players in his ideal troupe we cannot know. It is clear that he made such changes, not only because no single troupe existed with the character names that Scala employed but also because his revisions to employ these character names were not thoroughgoing. In Day 15, for instance, entitled The Troubled Isabella, Isabella never appears, but a Flavia does. Changes to accommodate the particular audience, the conditions of presentation, and the actors must have been usual all along. Influential audience members, like Hamlet in Shakespeare’s eponymous play, had special interests and requests, cities had particular prohibitions, performance conditions varied, and troupe membership was not stable. New troupe members and different troupes had different strengths and skills, and these may have suggested scenario revisions or even new scenarios. Actors themselves would have provided scenario revisions. In that sense, the debate about whether the scenarios were written, a priori, for actors to perform, or a posteriori, in retrospect is misleading.36 The scenarios were likely always in process not only before their publication but thereafter. Whether any of them were written especially for the collection, we cannot know; it is easy to believe that the ones requiring large casts may have been. In addition, there is no indication of the order in which they were written. On the whole, those towards the end of the collection show more forceful women and are more various in their stories and in a wider range of moods than those at the beginning, perhaps suggesting that they were written later than many of the ones appearing earlier in the collection.
Commedia dell’arte performers became famous for their comedy, but they worked in a variety of genres and performed scripted as well as improvised plays. To unify and limit my work, I restrict my examination of Scala’s scenarios to his forty comic ones, rather than also take into consideration the ten scenarios in other genres that are included at the end of his collection: tragedy, pastoral, and what Scala called “mixed,” “royal,” and “heroic.” My focus on the comedies more readily allows me to show their relationship to the social context than do the more fanciful and sometimes experimental works in other genres at the end of the collection, one beginning, for instance, “A bear and a lion come out of the wood fighting.” Dorinda having saved the bear from the lion, “The bear caresses Dorinda.” Scala also experimented within the comedies themselves with commedia grave, for instance.
Scala’s comic compositions most often include but are not necessarily restricted to the characters present in a usual troupe: two each of middling-elite37 old men, young men (when that seems more appropriate I refer to them as youths),38 young females and lower-class male servants, perhaps one female servant, and a captain, the latter often pretending to nobility.39 It is very common for a work on commedia dell’arte to begin with detailed descriptions of these various characters, the “masks.” While it is useful to read the Scala scenarios with the composite descriptions of character masks in mind, it is also necessary to see the extent to which it is essential to infer characters from the scenarios. As Ferdinando Taviani observed some while ago, commedia dell’arte actors had “characteristics worked out, but not character which varied from play to play.”40 Scala was describing not fixed characters but characters’ behaviours, reasons for them, and feelings about them, and these in relationships. Within a range of possibilities, guided by ideas of verisimilitude and proper decorum but, significantly, also calling that decorum into question, each of the characters serves a variety of functions and has various relationships. Actors would have brought their distinctive costume; their distinctive facial mask (if comic and male);41 their usual hand prop; speeches and speech mannerisms in the appropriate regional dialect or foreign accent; as well as class, sex, and character-appropriate gestures and movement that made them readily identifiable. Beyond that, to a considerable extent, Scala’s plots define the characters. Accordingly, in attending to the scenarios, I have found it more useful to show the characters as functions of the plot and to describe their interactions. Without an understanding of these, it is easy to see the characters merely as pure manifestations of the theatre rather than of life.
My concentration on interactions rather than on masks makes clearer what the interest of these scenarios was for their audiences. The scenarios reflect the strains in personal relationships, and the repeated presence of these in the scenarios is an expression of their importance in real life. The strains were long-standing, but Martin, along with other recent scholars, believes that they were exacerbated at the time because the traditional idea of the self as communal and defined by one’s social role was being challenged by newly “conflicting social roles and tensions – between men and women, masters and servants, parents and children, … and so on.”42 Observing Aristotle’s influential assertion that drama was to be about the actions of men (interactions, really), in the second chapter I look at Scala’s representations of relationships between (1) citizens and society, (2) fathers and sons, (3) female lovers, wives and widows and men, (4) lovers, (5) friends, (6) citizens and servants, and (7) outsiders, examining the tensions within these relationships, and the links to these relationships and the tensions in them in actual life. As evidence of these tensions, Stefano Guazzo’s third book of La civil conversazione, 1574, presents a discussion on the nature of the proper interactions “between husband and wife, father and son, brother and brother, and master and the servants.”43 La civil conversazione went through fifty editions in Italian, Latin, French, English, and German within fifty years of its first publication in 1574.44 Scala humorously reflects some of the ways in which, in their individual lives, people acted within and against the rules, customs, and norms set out in this and similar books of the period on household management.
In the third chapter I establish the appropriateness of Scala’s fixed street setting and suggest, in so far as possible, how it may have been represented. Traditional as the use of a street setting was, it was also uniquely appropriate to Italian life, to concepts like honour, and to activities like gossip, name calling, and violence. I take up the effect that the street setting had upon representations of women. I show the ways in which the setting is of a piece with the world the scenarios represent and how, accordingly, it contributes to the vitality and excitement the scenarios would have had for their contemporary audiences. Thus, with chapters 2 and 3, I show that the scenarios reflected life and took up matters of central interest to their audience.
In the fourth chapter I examine Scala’s aesthetics. Scala adhered to the accepted guidelines for comedy, and, moreover, he borrowed “theatregrams,” that is modules of structure, characters, situations, actions or words, and thematic patterns45 from the earlier written comedy. I argue that such borrowing, far from diminishing Scala as a creator, was regarded as essential to creation. I further show how the historically important concepts of copiousness and variety enable us to appreciate Scala’s craftsmanship.
Finally, in the second part of the book, in each of four chapters, I provide a detailed scenario reconstruction, respectively, for Scala’s Day 6, The Jealous Old Man (Il vecchio geloso), Day 21, The Fake Sorcerer (Il finto negromante), Day 25, The Jealous Isabella (La gelosa Isabella), and Day 36, Isabella [the] Astrologer (Isabella astróloga). Through a careful reading of these scenarios scene by scene I am best able to establish how particular aspects of social history inform them throughout and to demonstrate Scala’s skilfulness in composition. The painstaking tracking of obscure references, as I suggested in the preface, has often been richly rewarding. Through reading about uroscopy and the state of medicine at the time I came to understand how in Day 2146 both the prescription of medication by a doctor before he even sees his patient, and the nature of the examination he would conduct when he does see her, would have made sense to a contemporary audience. Conversely, reading about seemingly familiar topics, like honour, marriage, and friendship, in the context of early modern Italy gave me a far better understanding of what was at stake in the actions in the scenarios. Reading about duels, disguises, and ghosts in historical context gave me an appreciation of them as being considerably more than overused theatrical devices.
The reconstructions are attempts to see Scala’s scenarios whole, to demonstrate in detail the extent to which they reflect life, to show their integrity, and to elaborate on the rich performance information they provide. I show how much we can retrieve about the staging, character dynamics, and actions, and the interest of this kind of theatre for its contemporary audience. From the scenarios we can begin to see the extent to which the success of commedia dell’arte performance under Scala’s supervision would have depended on them. Each quite different scenario I have selected provides a very detailed res or gist of its performance. Francesco Andreini, in his preface to the Scala collection, claimed that with its publication Scala had, in fact, provided “plays” with all but the dialogue.47 The present book defends that proposition.
Every effort has been made to read no more into a scenario than a critic ordinarily reads into a play. Each reconstruction, however, is premised on the assumption with which one begins when reading a play: that it is good. My purpose, as I said, is to befriend the scenarios. By no means are all of them good. We would not expect forty good plays from any playwright, and we would recognize that even in good plays there are weaknesses. I refrain from providing a list of my favourite scenarios because to do so would simply re-inscribe our or my values rather than call attention to what we can learn by applying the aesthetic and social values of the period. I confess, however, to having chosen for reconstruction some of the many scenarios that I like. They are deliberately from different parts of Scala’s collection and reveal various aspects of his art.
Through my various approaches I hope to establish the great value of Scala’s scenarios in telling us about commedia dell’arte at its height and about the form’s appeal for its contemporary audiences. By detailing the skill with which many of them are crafted, I show that they are not just formulaic iterations of a theatrical tradition but resourceful inventions. Through my reconstructions I demonstrate the considerable extent to which the scenarios’ performance can be recovered.
A spate of recent scenario publications makes a sizeable number of the seven hundred and fifty known extant scenarios available for scholarship for the first time in other than their manuscript form.48 A complete edition of fifty-one anonymous scenarios was published in 1996 as Gli scenario correr: La commedia dell’arte a Venezia. La Commedia dell’Arte, edited and introduced by Cesare Molinari, 1999, includes a selection of scenarios from the Correr and Magliabecchiana manuscript collections and from Scala’s publication. In 2001 Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas Heck provided a bilingual edition of the 176 legible scenarios in the anonymous Casamariano collection. In 2007 Annamaria Testaverde made available in Italian some scenarios from that collection as well as Scala’s, but from a number of other collections as well.49
I mean for my work to suggest contexts in which other extant scenarios – many now readily available for the first time, either in Italian or in reliable translations – can be studied and to provide possible methods for going about such study.