Traditional commedia dell’arte characters are routinely seen in isolation from one another. The scenarios, however, show relationships between characters in a large variety of situations, and these relationships reflect, in theatrical form, actual interactions within society at the time. Early modern selfhood was experienced relationally. People were largely defined by their part in a nexus of relationships.1 In this chapter I therefore direct my attention to the nature of interactions between people in the society, the tensions within them and the representations of these in Scala’s scenarios. In the last half of the book I read characters primarily through the lens of cultural history and through their interactions.
Scala worked within the well-established theatrical tradition for comedy that restricted it to the imitation of private citizens. He represented the domestic concerns of these citizens, and even then, principally but not exclusively, the marrying off of their children satisfactorily. In this and the resulting interactions between professional men, and merchants (the middle elite),2 their families, and servants, and a few but various outsiders, including a captain, there was, however, plenty of real life. In the cultural gap between Scala and us, the social significance of the interactions he represents has too often been lost.
Speaking as a character called Player, Scala makes clear in the first of his prologues to his fully scripted play Il finto marito that he sees the commedia dell’arte as an art of imitation of nature, “verisimilar,” including in the imitation of various dialects. Yet another fourteen times in that prologue he repeats that commedia dell’arte is imitative, and in contexts that make clear he means imitative of nature.3 In the second prologue to the same play Scala again takes up that idea, telling us that his scenarios are “a mirror of life.” In this, Scala, like virtually every dramatist of th period, followed Donatus, or rather the fragment entitled “On Comedy and Tragedy” in which the author, purported at the time to be Donatus, claims to cite Cicero, defining comedy as “the imitation of life, the mirror of manners, and the image of truth.”4 But what can it possibly mean that commedia dell’arte characters and their behaviour mirror nature?
Domenico Bruni, in 1621, and Hamlet help to clarify the matter. In the prologue to his unwritten comedy Lo specchio (The Mirror) Bruni spells out the relationship between theatre and mirror: the mirror is the most “faithful counselor” and the most “severe censor” because it will honestly uncover every flaw. The mirror of comedy exceeds all others because “amongst all mirrors that are most profitable to man, I would dare to affirm that comedy may be the principal one … In this mirror everyone should gaze, since in it everyone will find material to regulate himself.”5 Most famously, Hamlet reminds the players that “the purpose of playing, whose end [and not just in comedy], both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III, 2). This is not what we would think a mirror actually reflects. Hamlet’s mirror interprets what it reveals and evaluates it in moral terms.
In Day 16, entitled The Mirror, Scala utilizes an actual mirror to provide his scene of recognition, but, like Hamlet’s metaphorical mirror, Scala’s mirror is not what we would think of as literally reflective. It shows not the image of those in front of it but the truth about the past behaviour of the mischievous servants. Deborah Shuger, in a revelatory essay on Renaissance mirrors, observes the following: “The majority of Renaissance mirrors – or rather, mirror metaphors – do reflect a face, but not the face of the person in front of the mirror. Typically, the person looking in the mirror sees an exemplary image, either positive or negative, the inward self but generic rather than individual.”6 It is thus that Scala can claim that his characters and their actions mirror human life. It is how in the second prologue he can logically argue, if only in the usual defence against antitheatricalism, that the goal of comedy is to help the audience by example, even in “seeing those who live badly.”7 We can learn from Pantalone’s failings.
Another way in which the verisimilitude of the early modern period may not fit our conceptions of it is that decorum required the characters to act and speak according to their nature, sex, age, fortune, nation or city, art or profession, and relations and associates. Characters were verisimilar if they were made to behave and speak according to these conditions.8 Thus, the imitation of nature in the early modern period did not mean then what it means now. With these caveats in mind, I turn now to the interactions between people in early modern Italy and to Scala’s representations of them.
In the main, the interactions that Scala shows have gone awry. Harmony and obedience – unlike fear, conflict, rage, tears, and deviousness – do not make interesting theatre. I am reminded of the first line in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” While Scala shows us those who lived up to the ideal – good citizens, sons and daughters, servants, friends, and captains – he shows us an enormous range of untrustworthy and foolish fathers and husbands, disloyal sons, wayward daughters, faithless friends and lovers, disobedient and surreptitious servants, and military captains who try to disrupt the plans of the others. It is primarily the problems in the relationships between members of these groups that gives Scala the variety of his actions and the range of characters’ behaviour.
Scala seems to have accepted Piccolomini’s elaboration on Aristotle’s idea that comedy ought to show people as worse than they appear in normal life: “that is to say, the old men more avaricious, the young men more dissolute, the servants more untrustworthy, the courtesans more deceitful.”9 But in so doing, and this is the important part, Scala also shows the actual tensions within the society, the dialectic between the conforming self and individual desire. In the seven major sections of this chapter that follow and in their subsections I examine the various relationships in real life that Scala makes use of in his scenarios. An understanding of these relationships and their tensions helps make clear to a modern reader the vitality of the interactions represented in Scala’s scenarios.
In early modern Italy the family was both the foundation of and the model for the structure of civic life. The republic was the family writ large; the ruling elite were regarded as the civic fathers. Just as the fathers of the families were to have control of their wives, offspring, and servants, so too were civic fathers to have unquestioned authority over everyone beneath them in the hierarchy.10 Patriarchal control was paramount in both the social and the political spheres.11 Challenges to fathers were potentially challenges to the political authority. To regard the scenarios as wholly apolitical because they attended to domestic situations is misleading. The contemporary audience would have understood problems within the family to be of considerable actual and symbolic societal significance. Increasingly, scholarship has come to attend to these fault lines in the patriarchal ideal, stylized to comic effect in Scala’s scenarios.
It was the responsibility of those with enough seriousness of purpose, dignity, and maturity – the citizens, the fathers – to preserve transgenerational continuity: the social order, goods, families, and family names. Citizens – the tax-paying males – constituted a small minority of the population. The vast majority of the population – females, boys, young men, and those of the lower classes – were presumed to lack the gravity, the dispassionate reason, and the controlled sexuality that were the necessary moral qualities of governors.12 All presented the possibility of discord and even social revolution. Women’s sexuality, uncontrolled, because women naturally lacked reason, could destroy the family honour and lineage; youths, regarded as yet lacking in adult reason, could dissipate the family fortune; and the lower classes, who naturally followed their baser instincts, could trick their betters in any number of ways, and such tendency towards social inversion hinted at social revolution.13 Women, youths, and servants all provided the possibility of disorder within the patriarchy.
The elders, if guided by passion, could themselves disrupt the social order. Social mastery was based on the presumed superiority of masculine rationality. The patriarchal ideal was one of controlled passion and moderation. The troublesome emotions of fear, anger, and sexual desire were to be repressed.14 Scala regularly shows patriarchs surrendering to these emotions. Frequently they abandon their rationality in pursuit of young well-to-do girls or lower-class women. Ian Moulton observes that “in a patriarchal culture in which social mastery is based on the putative superiority of masculine rationality … the surrender of the rational faculty to sensual pleasure – constitutes a larger social failure”15 It was the responsibility of the elders to keep the passions of the young in check, not to indulge in them themselves. In Day 12, fearing that his son is his rival in love for a young woman, the father plans to send the son away to school. In Day 28 two old men come to blows in their rivalry for a married lower-class woman. With such behaviour, old men weaken both their masculine vigour and the commonwealth. Thus, in Day 31 one patriarch reprimands another for keeping mistresses, especially because he is an old man. In Day 32 the potential threat to society is intensified by the possibility of incest: when Pantalone is found chasing after a girl he presumes to be a gypsy but who is actually his own daughter in disguise, he is told that his children run away and go mad because of his own sins.
Scala always mocks such self-degradation, and the old men get their comeuppance for it. Northrop Frye, speaking from the point of view of youth in comedy, rather than, as I have, from the point of view of the patriarchs, stated that “the fury with which these characters [with less youth and more money] are baited and exploded from the stage shows that they are father-surrogates, and even if they were not, they would still be usurpers, and their claim to possess the girl must be shown up as somehow fraudulent. They are, in short, impostors, and the extent to which they have real power implies some criticism of the society that allows them their power.”16 From either point of view, the old men’s behaviour in Scala is a source of social anxiety.
Scala makes clear the impropriety not only of the old men’s lust but also of their uncontrolled rage at what they see as the misbehaviour of their offspring and servants. This rage is always a source of humour and, as in Day 12, justification for the servant’s revenge. Both lust and rage diminish the dignity and authority of the citizens, particularly in the public displays necessitated by the scenarios’ fixed street setting.17
Central to the family was marriage. It was the means to institutionalize sex and to reproduce a paternal biological line in a nurturing and moral environment, while instilling in the offspring an internal discipline based on the all-important qualities of honour and reputation. Among the upper classes the right marriage could enhance individual status: “Tell me whom you marry and I’ll tell you who you are” runs an old Italian proverb.18 More than that, the right marriage affirmed and could elevate the social position of the whole family. Marriages of the well-to-do were a way to build alliances that would facilitate exchanges of material resources and promote social and economic advancement by establishing webs of familial alliances. Thus, the arrangement of the appropriate marriage was of great concern to the families involved, for which the concerted effort to elevate their honour and wealth was regarded as essential.19
Further, marriage lay at the heart of social and political institutions. Machiavelli cites an example of how in ancient Rome a woman without a father was advised by her guardian to marry a plebian and by her mother, a noble. A resulting great battle arose in the country. Machiavelli advises princes and governors of republics to learn that disputes arising from such incidents can injure and disgrace their state or republic and to head off such a “corruption of marriages” as was marriage to a plebeian.20 Marriage was a complex and unwieldy arrangement invested with layers of signification that crucially affected perceptions of love, sexuality, and, more largely, moral and social order, stability, and organization.21 Arranging a marriage for his young daughter that served the family honour and finances was a time-consuming and important fatherly obligation. “In our social life there is nothing more difficult,” wrote the historian and political thinker Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), “than marrying our daughters suitably.”22
While it was hoped that the bride and groom would be companionable,23 long-standing social norms were to condition the marriage partners to accept that familial rather than personal interest governed marriage decisions. The assent of the prospective partners was required, but it was not assumed that they would provide it.
Scala’s scenarios, whatever their most memorable aspects (theft, madness, threatened castration), are almost always structured around a marriage, following not only theatrical convention but also audience concerns. Marriage was the central institution in sixteenth-century Italian culture. In the Argument preceding each scenario Scala, often in the very first sentence, points to the class of persons involved in the main action: “In Genoa lived a well-born and wealthy young man;” “In Perugia lived a gentlewoman;” “In Venice lived an old merchant.” He thus makes very clear what is at stake in the dramatic actions represented. Everyone was very status conscious, and marriage was an important way of achieving or, at least, maintaining status. For the upper and middle classes, marriage was critical to their doing so.
In contradistinction to the marriages of the well-to-do arranged by the parents for the social and economic benefit of the families involved, Scala’s scenarios feature heterosexual love relationships arranged by young lovers with sole regard for their mutual satisfaction or sometimes the satisfaction of a friend. We see the determination of young people to marry those of their own choosing, often in conflict with the wishes of their fathers. Thus in Day 28 “there was in Pesaro a young man of modest fortune, who loved a girl who was daughter of a certain Pantalone, a rich merchant … However, … by pretending to be a magician and playing various and diverse tricks, he acquired the young woman in marriage.” After many travails, in the rushed endings of the scenarios, both the fathers and the young people are happy with the marriages effected. Upper-class marriage was intended to preserve and perpetuate the bloodline and to advance the family as a whole financially and socially; it was not designed to provide the couple with happiness. The scenarios represent an improbable reconciliation between love and marriage, between the assertion of individual identity and the reassertion of the communal one.
John Hale trenchantly comments that plays of the period do not end happily ever after with a reinstitution of the old order but rather that they had to end because what followed next would not in fact have been very happy.24 Laura Giannetti, in her examination of the commedia erudita, the written Italian comedy from the early sixteenth century, expanding on the comments made by both John Hale and Jackson L. Cope, points out that the ending of the written plays seems tacked on at the point where continuing the action might destroy the illusion of the couples’ living happily ever after.25 She comments that the marriages made are “not the sensible marriages arranged by the parents or fathers undistorted by youthful passions – in fact, they are often just the opposite.”26 The gap between what the patriarchs want and what results is considerable.
Scala’s scenarios, like the earlier written comedy, are consistent with social historians’ increasing perception of conflicts, inconsistencies, and ambiguities beyond and beneath the patriarchal ideal.27 During the course of the sixteenth century the unstable marriage had increasingly become a cause for concern.28 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, in an attempt to address the problems, there was a deluge of publications on marriage that idealized it and supplied advice about it. Trying to accommodate the desire for marriage based on physical attraction and emotional love, the manuals emphasized love and fidelity, albeit within the arranged marriage.29
The Protestant Reformation had tried to accommodate at least some of the difficulties within marriage by allowing divorce for adultery, wilful abandonment, chronic impotence, life-threatening hostility, or wilful deceit. To this the Catholic Council of Trent responded in 1563 that the bond of matrimony could not be dissolved for any reason, including abandonment, adultery, “irksome cohabitation,” or absences of one of the parties, and it inserted itself into the marriage process, with the result that clandestine marriages, made to avoid the arranged ones, were no longer recognized. Marriage required the presence of an authorized priest and two witnesses. Tridentine marital law placed the consent of children above the marital plans of parents30 but, in doing so, set itself against the hierarchical structure of early modern households. In the secular model of parent and child relations each family member had a natural, God-ordained place, with the father in control not only of the household until his death but also of its goods. In Venice, at least, the right of fathers to disinherit children who married without their consent made almost worthless the Tridentine principle of the free choice of a marriage partner.31
Neither popular guidebooks nor religious edicts seem to have quashed the conflicts. Joanne Ferraro shows that in court cases women petitioned for annulments, claiming that their parents had forced them into unwanted unions, and they demanded separations from abusive husbands. Her book Marriage Wars concludes that “what the marriage wars reveal is that individual desires … overrode the broader principles of state” but often not without a real fight.32 Scala, whose scenarios are filled with conflict between arranged marriages and the desire of young people to marry those of their own choosing, was speaking to an audience that was very concerned about the nature and quality of the institution of marriage.
The characters of the patriarchs in the scenarios, principally Graziano and Pantalone, reflect not only theatrical convention but also, more particularly, their relationship to society at the time. Scala uses the Doctor, whom he often calls Doctor Graziano, as his primary representative of “the liberal professions (law, medicine, the humanities) whose practitioners held university degrees.” In the social hierarchy, below those in the liberal professions were, in order, the international merchants, the retail shopkeepers and craftsmen, and, at the bottom, the salaried labourers and menials.33 Of those in the liberal professions, teachers below the university level were held in the lowest regard. Data from Venice shows that about 30 per cent of Latin masters served as private tutors to one, two, three, or a handful of students.34 In Day 31 Scala shows such a master, the pedant, a scoundrel, who gets no respect at all.35 Scala only rarely specifies the profession of his doctor. In Day 28 he is a lawyer. In Days 15, 32, 36, and 38, he is a medical doctor. In Days 8, 17, 20, and 37, in which someone else is called in as a physician, we can infer that he is not a medical doctor. In Day 2 he is a sham of a doctor, a mountebank.
In the commedia dell’arte the doctor’s dialect suggested that he came from or was educated in Bologna, home of the oldest continuing university in Western Europe. He is said to have employed a macaronic Latin, a free, comic Latin incorporating newly coined onomatopoeic words and Italian stems with Latin suffixes. Everywhere, students learned to write like Cicero, and Ciceronian style became the standard of the educated. It became such a severe and rigid standard, and students became so filled with the excesses of it, that Erasmus found it an easy target for his scorn.36 The learning, as it was applied, was mocked even by the learned as irrelevant, trivial, and pedantic, and the ideas, texts, and institutions that were the authorities of learning were similarly mocked.37 Not surprisingly, since Scala was concerned primarily with action, there are no indications of the doctor’s speech habits, except perhaps in Day 27, in which his speech is described as all higgledy-piggledy and senseless, and in Day 9, where he is described as stupid.38
In Scala the doctor is usually an object of laughter, we must assume, not only because he is a patriarch but also because he is educated. For men not belonging to the upper elites by birth, education, particularly in legal studies, was an important means of raising their social status and political influence. The demand for educated men was rising so rapidly that some descendants of the established elite tended to be squeezed out, although the middle elite seldom reached the highest professional posts. The resulting social mobility disrupted the presumed natural order and resulted in unease and resentment.39
The patriarch as merchant is represented by the character Pantalone. In Scala, he is a figure of fun because he is a patriarch and because of his role in society. In the early modern period, middle-elites could enhance their status through the professions or through their involvement in trade and finance, essential to business in all the major seaports, industrial centers, and market towns. The merchants and financiers engaged in business both at home and abroad. They had to be capable of handling large capital resources and of managing risk. By means of their wealth, the businessmen gained social status and political influence, thus, like the university educated, they also disrupted the supposed natural order. Historian Henry Kamen documents the good sense of a French merchant who died in 1597. He chose for his younger son to become a doctor of law and for the older son to remain in the business. That way, while one branch of the family directly sought position, the other would continue to accumulate wealth.40
By the time Scala was writing, the locus of power had shifted from the landed gentry, who for centuries had sought to hinder and discredit the merchant,41 to the cities and their businessmen and their production and trade, where as one priest observed, “Money is the vital heat.”42 The Church’s objection to usury of any kind, and its suspicion of merchants’ avarice and materialism, had been much ameliorated by the merchants’ use of the sacrament of confession and by the institution of purgatory, which allowed them to contract for divine favour with donations to welfare and to religious institutions, commemorative masses, and private chapels.43 Still, the notion persisted that business, particularly banking and money lending, was disreputable.44 In Scala the merchant is therefore frequently subject to practical jokes and derision. He is doubly vulnerable as both a patriarch and a merchant.
Scala often specifies that Pantalone is from Venice, a centre of commerce. The character of Pantalone is known to have spoken with a Venetian dialect. Nevertheless, excepting in two scenarios, Scala sets his comic scenario in a city other than Venice. In real life the merchant was frequently on the move to find better business opportunities.45 The prosperity of cities led to great population movements from the countryside to the city and then from one city to another in search of better opportunity. In his ceaseless quest for earnings as a means to enhance, if not his own honour, the honour of his children or his children’s children, the merchant travelled more widely and more frequently than any of those on the move in Europe except soldiers and perhaps pilgrims.46 He travelled and lived where business took him, leaving his extended kinship group for a house of his own with his nuclear family and a self-sufficient way of life.47 Nor did the merchant restrict his movement to Europe; business interests took Italian merchants to the whole of the Mediterranean basin. In Day 1 Scala makes this clear by telling us that the fathers are two rich merchants who were on their way to Egypt to trade.
The conduct of business required not only the merchant’s mobility but a great deal of correspondence.48 Although he likely had only an education in the vernacular schools, the merchant may well have been more literate than the noblemen and clergy whose status did not depend to the same extent on their ability to read and write.49 In Day 1 the young businessman, Flavio, receives a letter from Syria that initiates the action. One scenario, Day 23, is even entitled The Letter Carrier (Il portalettere). The marriage arranged for the daughter by the father in the scenarios, often to a man in another city, as in Day 7, makes clear that he had business correspondents in cities other than where he lived. Letters between men often play an important part in the scenarios. Like the ports of call mentioned, they bring the larger world into the scenarios, incite action or a change of direction in it, and reflect their importance in real life. The correspondence of the leading actor-managers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century is itself testament to the importance of letters in the conduct of business.50
The merchant understood the importance of not only amassing money through his hard work and professional outreach but also protecting the money that he had earned. He was well aware of the importance of frugality. “Thrift is a holy thing,” remarks Giannozzo in Alberti’sI libri della famiglia.51 The merchant knew the rapidity with which his savings could be lost to chance, to speculative business ventures, and to what Piero Camporesi describes as “the undergrowth of fraud, trickery, cunning, malice, and malpractice” from which there was no escape. Mistrust, which was only practical, ran high.52 Giulio Cesare Croce, 1629, summed up a common sentiment: “Don’t boast of having too many talents, /But always act the poor man, and the beggar/So that people won’t bump you off.”53 In Day 27 Scala tells us that the rich merchant, much envied for his wealth, was attacked and left for dead. Scala’s Pantalone seems to be named Pantalone de Bisognosi (of Need) on occasion because of his felt need to accumulate wealth and to protect himself. In the scenarios, suspicion and fear inform the personality of the merchant. He is all too ready to fall into fits of rage, suspecting his children and servants of malfeasance, financial and otherwise. Unfortunately, these underlings do take advantage of him and subject him to practical jokes that reaffirm his greatest fear, his vulnerability.
There are no clear indications in Scala for merchants’ set speeches on thrift, like speeches in, say, Moliere’s The Miser. Only in Day 7, when we are told that Pantalone buries his daughter at night because he is stingy and night burial is cheaper, is it explicit that the merchant is thrifty. In several other scenarios we can deduce that there were comments about his miserliness – in Day 39, act 2, scene 3, for instance – but the merchants’ calculating approach to life54 can be observed in the marriages they arrange for their children to compatriots of their own generation, who are unknown to the offspring involved. In scenarios, like Day 21, in which two old men between them negotiate marital arrangements for themselves and their daughters, the negotiations would inevitably have included financial considerations because, in reality, there were no marriages without them. In the scenarios they would have provided good comic material, and the actors would have known to provide it.
In Days 11, 16, 22, 26, 30, and 35, for their spendthrift escapades, the sons feel impelled to steal from their fathers or, as in Days 22 and 26, have a servant do so. The planning for these thefts includes the ready opportunity for the sons’ rationalizations and complaints about the fathers’ tight financial rein on them. At the fathers’ discovery of the thefts there is opportunity for the fathers’ speeches on the sons’ fiscal irresponsibility. The great fear of the well-to-do that they would succumb to their own moral weaknesses or to the trickery of their inferiors is amply explored.
A number of the well-to-do, unmarried, young men in Scala’s scenarios appear unfettered by any familial relationships. In reality, fathers died and some unmarried sons moved away, but, as in the scenarios, the majority of them resided with their fathers. A description of the actual relationship between fathers and sons shows how much the scenarios are representative of daily life.
The son remained under his father’s financial control at least until his marriage in his mid-twenties to early thirties.55 He was dependent upon the father for inheritance and reputation. With the exception of the time he might spend travelling for his father’s business (as in Days 8, 9, 19, 32, 34) or away at a university, receiving an expensive education (as in Days 11,13, 26), the son lived at home and, even when he married, he might continue to live in the father’s house. In the more and more urbanized Italy, however, those who were well to do, like those in Scala’s scenarios, increasingly lived apart from the kinship household and set up their own.56 The son, though, might well have continuing business dealings with his father and engage with him in public life. The son was to remain subordinate to his father, always addressing him in the polite form.57 According to the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino, 1455, the father was to be a “second God,” and the son a “mirror and image” of the father, whose commands he should fearfully and reverently obey.58 It is natural that in Day 1, Isabella, seeking Flavio as husband, tells him that she can provide him with the dearest thing he has in the world, not herself but his father.
The father’s emotional investment in his sons is well expressed by Lorenzo Alberti, the dying patriarch in I libri della famiglia: the young should not “imagine that any contentment or joy of the old surpasses that of seeing the young turn out well and worthy of love.”59 Virtuous children brought honour to the family and evidenced the diligence of the father in their upbringing. The fathers’ highest expectations were for the sons, through whom the family line was to be maintained.
The son’s obligation to his father was considerable. Lorenzo Alberti explains that young people ought to “refer every wish, thought, and plan of their own to their fathers and elders and to take counsel with them about everything … They should listen eagerly to them as to very wise and experienced men, and gladly submit to the guidance of men of judgment and age. Nor let the young be slow to help any of their elders in their old age and infirmity.”60
The family constituted a moral entity consisting of people and property to be defended at all costs. Its interests were to supersede personal desires or ambitions. Loyalty to the father and his house in defence of their honour was something for which the son was to risk his life. “Sons,” Torquato Tasso writes at the end of the sixteenth century, “are by nature defenses and fortresses for their fathers.”61 Thus in Day 36, when Flavio, the son of the Spanish regent of the high court in Naples, observes the Italian Orazio covertly courting his sister, he fights him seemingly to the death.
Most often in the scenarios, however, we see sons who do not live up to their father’s lofty expectations. It is not merely that bad sons are more dramatically interesting than good ones; young men from well-to-do families were, in fact, troublesome. This is not surprising, because they were put in a very difficult position. They were under their father’s control, had no economic autonomy, and were denied any role in civic society. They were youths or juveniles until their marriage. In their very long and powerless adolescence (adolescenza), which the influential humanist Matteo Palmieri described as continuing until age twenty-eight, their only tolerated expressions of power seem to have been in sexual activity (which was expected of them), violent street fights (which were an inconvenient and frightening constant of city life), and soldiering.62 The recognized outlets for their sexual activity were poor or immodest women, including other men’s wives, and young men.63 In Scala, young men are shown pursuing ostensibly sheltered and out-of-bounds, well-to-do young women (in virtually every scenario) and fighting (in scenarios too numerous to name). Examples of soldiering in the scenarios are present in Day 40, in which Flavio had gone off to fight in the Hungarian war, and in Day 19, when the Capitano is told that Flavio is dead, so that he will not take Flavio with him to war in Flanders. Scala thus represents youths’ activities both feared and actual.
The powerlessness of youths, necessary to keep the patriarchy intact, was conveniently justified by the patriarchy as natural.64 There was a societal expectation that sons would evade the civic and moral discipline of their elders. Giannozzo in I libri della famiglia observed, “They live a life of idleness, … waste their own resources, neither caring as much for their honor as they ought nor valuing moderation of any kind.”65 Some elders, having themselves been young once, viewed this profligacy with some tolerance and sympathy.66 Thus in Day 26, when Pantalone tries to blame the bad behaviour of his son on the influence of Graziano’s son, Graziano responds that his son is innocent and that anyway youth must follow its own course.67
In Scala’s scenarios most of the time, however, the fathers are far from accepting the sons’ bad behaviour. They lament the bad fortune that they have had with their children and, in utter exasperation, forgoing all semblance of calm reason and authority, lose their tempers at them or even resort to beating them, as in Day 35 when Pantalone’s son steals from him. In the main, in fact, elders viewed the self-indulgence and illicit behaviour of the youths with anxiety and feared that their families would be brought low, their fortunes dissipated, and their honour destroyed and that these events would lead to a general breakdown in society.68 The fathers, as Lorenzo Alberti says, were expected to exercise control so that the sons were not “depraved and corrupted by their own native inclinations.” Badly behaving sons reflected badly on the father. They were a result of “the negligence of those who did not restrain them.”69 Thus, the pedant in Day 31 can credibly blame Orazio’s failure to study on his father’s failure to maintain enough discipline in the household.
The clearest remedy for wayward sons, as Pedrolino tells Pantalone in Day 30, was to marry them off – to someone at least of the same social station. This remedy, however, could not be effected until the youths were of an appropriate age. With their marriage, males were expected to come of age socially and politically. The conclusion of the scenarios implies the abrupt character reversal that was evidently to take place in real life. Madeleine Doran, writing about the Elizabethan theatre, posits that “the belief that one passion drove out another combined with a tendency to view passions as detached from character – that is, a tendency to regard any man as subject, under proper stimulus, to any passion.” This tendency may explain the sudden repentance, quite apart from any theatrical reason.70 Doran’s additional idea that the “belief in the enormous persuasiveness of eloquent speech, especially if accompanied by expressive countenance and gesture,” serves to explain the swift repentances of the youths.71 The seemingly pat endings correspond to an actual pivotal moment in male lives. The characters may not develop but they do change. Just as, with marriage, young sheltered girls were expected to become wives, mothers, and household managers, so young men were to fully and responsibly enter into public life.
To compose a scenario in which a well-to-do female appears is to include her relationship to her guardian because these women had little and rare independence from them. “Women are born to be men’s subjects,” Torquato Tasso explains.72 Control of the woman’s body was a major patriarchal preoccupation. Women, and particularly their sexual behaviour, had to be strictly regulated to preserve the patriarchy. Discipline and control were particularly difficult to effect, it was thought, because the sexual appetites of women were more voracious than those of men and they were accordingly more prone to sin. Michael Rocke quotes a 1524 commentator: “The laws presume that all women are usually bad because they are so full of mischief and vices that are difficult to describe.”73 Consequently, the upper-class woman was under the supervision first of her father or other protector and then of her husband or, if she did not marry, of a convent to which she was sent.74 Thus in Day 2, act 1, Flaminia states that her father is the master of her body and soul. While a number of the Scala scenarios have young men who appear as free agents, only one upper-class woman, not identified as a widow, is shown without a supervising family or guardian member. In the scenario in which she appears (Day 15), Pantalone, to whom the woman is unrelated, asks Orazio’s father for permission for Orazio to marry her, as if, even though she is alone, she needs a patriarch to provide this.75 The woman’s honour and that of her family depended first upon her chastity and then upon her faithfulness in marriage, and families went to great lengths to protect these. Protection was critical to the purity of the male bloodline, the continuity of the family, and the certainty of legitimate inheritance.76 Chastity protected the honour of the men, their families, the patriarchal structure of society, and, as Margaret King dramatically puts it, “the world’s property.”77 The woman was the conduit through which these passed.78 “In a woman,” remarked Lodovico Dolce in 1553, “one does not look for profound eloquence or subtle intelligence … or anything else except chastity … because in a woman this is worth every other excellence.”79 Thus, unlike a son who was married in his late twenties or early thirties, a daughter was married off between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and sometimes shortly after she had reached puberty, in order to try to ensure her virginity and thus to safeguard the whole of the political, economic, and social order.80
To further ensure her chastity and faithfulness, the female was kept sheltered within the home throughout her life. She was to observe modestia, avoid pomp and ostentation in her gestures and deportment, hold her head still, and speak seldom.81 She was to refrain from listening to impudent words and from allowing her eyes to wander; she was to shun immoderate gestures and dress and avoid idleness, excessive refinements, dancing, and male company.82 She was to display no disordered passion, undue sadness or gaiety, impatience, or anger.83 She was to keep herself occupied with household management and with devotional literature, spinning, weaving, and needlework.84 She was to leave home for no destination other than church, and even then she was to be accompanied.85 Conveniently, the restriction of well-to-do women to the house was thought to suit their nature. Women are “almost all timid by nature, soft and slow,” and “therefore more useful when they sit still and watch over our things,” remarks Lionardo in Leon Battista Alberti’s Family in Renaissance Florence.86 Similarly, Paolo Caggio, in his family advice manual of 1552, describes women as weak “and of little spirit.”87 Since well-to-do women were not expected to have worldly dealings, and since learning could corrupt simple minds, their education was generally limited. While practically all sons of nobles and wealthy merchants and sons of professionals attended school, usually a Latin school, and (as Scala shows) sometimes university,88 girls’ education was generally much more limited and in the vernacular. Girls were rarely taught Latin on the rationale that they had no public role to play. If they were from a wealthy family they were schooled in a convent, otherwise by their mother. Their education was to be sufficient for them to manage social obligations and household affairs.89 In late sixteenth-century Venice, while 33 per cent of adult males, nobles, merchants, members of professions with high status and income (law, medicine, and some civil servants), master artisans of many kinds, and some petty shopkeepers could read, only 13 per cent of females could do so, these being primarily nuns and the wives and daughters of the wealthiest citizens.90 If they could read, they were to restrict their reading to saintly teachings.91 Girls were not to be applauded for writing “saucy rimes” and “love letters” but for writing what was necessary, honest, and appropriate to an “honorable woman.”92
The young age at which daughters were married off and the sheltered life they had lived reinforced the view that, inexperienced as they were, their own judgment in the matter of the choice of a mate would be too easily overwhelmed by passion and improper motivations. Thus, in Day 12, act 3, Flaminia, in a fit of pique at her rejection by the Capitano, whom she loves, decides to love Flavio. Such decisions are not a rational basis for marriage. Indeed, in most of his scenarios Scala shows young girls, as well as youths, overcome by jealousy, irrational suspicion, and sexual passion. Girls were considered to be by nature weak and irrational.93 “Unless you catch them when they’re young, their chastity is all undone,” pithily observed an old man in Alessandro Piccolomini’s play L’alessandro.94 Unlike youths, girls moved away from their natal family and, at a young age, to that of their spouse.95 Consequently the ties of a daughter to either parent were not as strong as those of a son. What is more, if the son had a wet nurse, she was likely to be in the home, whereas the daughter with a wet nurse may have been sent off to her until the age of two.96 She might subsequently be sent off to a convent for her education. As, Stanley Chojnacki observes, the relatively distant relationship between father and daughter helps to explain the coldness and apparent scheming with which fathers negotiated away their daughters.97 This, in part serves to explain how the daughter, as we see in Scala’s scenarios, might be paired with a considerably older man, sometimes in another city, whom she might not meet until her betrothal, and that perhaps very shortly before her marriage.98 The bride in real life, sometimes even described as merchandise (mercanzia), could be bargained away like other goods.99 She played an even less important role in marriage arrangements than did the groom.100 Even the most caring of fathers was under considerable pressure to forge financially and socially advantageous family alliances by means of marriage.101 It was quite natural that marriage and business relationships should go hand in hand.
In the main, Scala shows young girls resisting the arranged marriages, writing letters to secret loves, speaking to them at windows and in the street, enlisting the help of servants in their love affairs, travelling in disguise to pursue their loves, and feigning madness or even death to be with them and to avoid the marriages arranged for them. In Day 21 the daughters are pregnant by their lovers. None of these indulgences had a place in the serious business of arranged marriages. Some of them were greatly feared by fathers and necessitated the daughters’ being married off at a young age. Young women travelling in disguise to find their lovers, at least in the numbers they do in Scala’s scenarios, is a dramatic fiction, so far as I can tell, as is the feigned death induced by drugs (another kind of disguise).102
The girl’s requisite assent to the marriage arranged for her was not assured; fathers must have worried about getting it, and the girls must have fantasized about lovers, not about arranged marriages – especially with old men. In Day 4 Flaminia reads stories of love and chivalry. The danger of this was great. Erasmus cautions that “storytellers who corrupt innocent minds with their far from innocent tales must be kept away from young girls, for it is poison that they drip into those tender ears.”103 Despite the admonition that females confine their reading to religious matter, Paul Grendler points to the enormous popularity of chivalrous romances among both sexes.104 Scala and, in the last twenty-five years, critics have made clear that the relationship between precepts and women’s actual lives was in some cases more complicated and varied than such strictures allowed.
Although Scala always refers to the class of the lovers, he only rarely makes explicit reference to dowries. In real life dowries would inevitably have been a central part of the marital negotiation. “Second only to the girl’s formal assent,” remarks E.R. Chamberlin, “was the problem of the dowry.” Actually this was the first.105 The dowry was what Sharon Strocchia calls “the twin sister” of marriage.106 Fathers of males sought dowries as large as possible. Fathers of females sought to pay out as little as possible.107 As a powerful determinant of who might marry whom, the dowry penetrated deep into the social system. Almost unavoidably, the subject would have arisen in the dialogue.
In the tradition of Roman drama and the commedia erudita, Scala’s scenarios contain few upper-class wives. Scala includes them in only five of the comic scenarios. In real life, the love of the good wife for her husband was expressed in her obedience to him. It was revealed in the moderation she demonstrated in every aspect of her behaviour, including her downward gaze, her gait, speech, and dress.108 She took care of the house and children109 and provided no drama. The interactions between such self-effacing wives and their husbands presented no tensions in the society and thus were not a good topic for Scala’s comedy. Scala shows only one unequivocally good wife, in a minor role in Day 7: she grieves along with her husband at her daughter’s supposed death.
The upper-class wives in the remaining four scenarios play larger roles and their interactions with their husbands are memorable. Scala clearly intended for the wives to garner audience sympathy, despite the fact that they are not altogether good. In Day 17 a wife who has waited for her husband’s return for six years, knowing nothing of his whereabouts, does not continue to wait patiently but rather sets her sights on another man – until her husband returns. In Day 31 the wife seriously considers becoming unfaithful to her whoring husband, but then, turns her energies to cleverly devising a means to expose the adulterous intentions towards her of a deceitful pedant. In Day 39 two wives, whose foolish husbands are infatuated with an actress, acquire secret lovers, at least until the husbands promise to reform themselves and take charge of their marriages.
Scala presents more widows than wives. Because most of them in the scenarios remarry, they, unlike wives, allow for the expansion of Scala’s central topic: marrying. Often the widows, like unmarried girls and wives, are under the close supervision of a guardian, most often, a brother or the father. In Day 1, for instance, one of the widows, Flaminia, is unable to spend time at widow Isabella’s house without her father’s permission and he arranges a marriage for her. The more interesting widows, occasionally living alone, in Days 1, 22 and 35, tend to exhibit greater maturity and independence than inexperienced unmarried girls. Scala’s representation of widows, then, not only gives him more range in plotting in the representation of marriageable women but also is in accordance with a growing literature showing that widowhood gave women their best chance for social and economic autonomy.110
Given the age disparity between upper-class males and females at the time of marriage, many women, if they did not die in childbirth, became widows while they were still of child-bearing age.111 Even discounting the high infant mortality rate, life expectancy was considerably lower than it is now. In Venice between 1610 and 1620, for instance, only 30 per cent of the population lived beyond the age of thirty-nine.112 When a marriage had lasted some years and had produced children, the husband probably hoped that upon his death the wife would remain in his household to look after the children, who legally belonged to him. He generally specified in his will that she be generously supported from his resources – provided that she lived chastely and did not reclaim her dowry.113 She was excluded by primogeniture from the actual inheritance of her husband’s property.
During the lifetime of her husband a woman had no access to her dowry. It was given to the man to “support the burdens of matrimony.”114 At her husband’s death a woman did have the right to reclaim her dowry if she left the husband’s household, including the children.115 The mother gained custody of the children only if the husband had so specified in his will. If she did reclaim her dowry, she deprived her sons by that marriage of what would have become part of their eventual inheritance (although even with the period’s continuing dowry inflation the dowry never came close to what was left to a male child as part of the father’s estate).116 If she was under forty and therefore had a chance of remarrying, there was strong pressure from her natal family for her to reclaim her dowry and, with the aid of it, forge a new marriage alliance.117 If she did so, she was portrayed as a dutiful daughter by her kin and as a “cruel mother” by her husband’s family.118 Both widows and widowers who could, often remarried.119
The widows in Scala are of a mind to remarry and their efforts to do so show them as remarkably unconstrained and resourceful. After the death of their husbands, dowry inflation did, in fact, allow some upper class women real financial independence and some modicum of authority.120 In Day 1 the widowed Isabella passes herself off as a magician and proves instrumental in arranging her own marriage and that of the other widow, Flaminia. In Day 12, when old Pantalone desires the widow Isabella, and plans to send his rival in love, his son, Orazio away to university, Isabella poisons Orazio so that he is unable to leave and promises Pantalone to cure him only on condition that Orazio marry whomever she chooses – namely herself. Further, she stipulates that Flaminia, Pantalone’s daughter marry her brother Flavio. In Day 4 the widow functions as a trickster and, although she is under the supervision of her brother, she announces that, as a widow, she will marry whom she pleases. She takes Flavio into her house, where their union is consummated, effectively marrying them, assuming honour was to be preserved. In the rather grim Day 40 Orazio had promised to marry the widow Isabella. But then, he behaves treacherously and deceitfully, both towards her and towards another woman. Isabella assumes the authority to make him go off to live in solitude, unfit for life among human beings, and she marries another.
In two of the scenarios Scala shows widows living on their own, evidently with custody of marriage-age children. Caroline Castiglione has recently provided limited evidence from Tuscany to suggest that the courts had, in actuality, begun granting widows the right to live on their own, managing the upbringing of the children in houses of their own.121 The stereotype of the cruel mother was gradually being replaced at the end of the sixteenth century by that of the “cruel uncle,” the brother of the deceased husband with whom the children were ordinarily left.122 The widows with children in Scala’s Days 16 and 22 are no more successful at trying to arrange marriages for their offspring than are the old men in other scenarios.
In contrast to the conflicts surrounding the arranged marriages of the well-to-do – the centrepiece of most but by no means all of Scala’s comic scenarios – Scala usually simply throws in marriages between servants at the end of the scenarios to add to the festivities and to the sense of the scenarios’ completeness. On his own volition Pedrolino or, not as often, the generally less resourceful Arlecchino chooses to marry Franceschina or another servant. Occasionally the comparatively liberated Franceschina is even allowed to choose between them. Scala makes no to-do about the matter.
There is indication in the scenarios that Scala’s servant marriages may sometimes have been preceded by the partner’s considerable sex play on stage.123 Among the lower classes premarital sexual intercourse was common as long as relations were based on intent to marry or at least to create a stable bond.124 Members of the lower classes were less likely to be involved in arranged marriages. When they were financially able to establish their own households, usually in their mid to late twenties, they selected their own mates, hoping to have found a dependable worker, rather than the right family with which to form alliances.125 At marriage, lower-class females tended to be older and have had more life experiences than had those from well-to-do families. There were no marriages at any class level without dowries.126 Those from the lower classes had to save up their earnings and, in addition, given their small salaries, rely on the help of their employer and others.127
Some lower-class women had sexual experiences prior to marriage if for no other reason than that, when servants and other women of modest means had to go about in the street in the course of their daily business, they were subject to sexual assault.128 Even within the houses servants were exposed to sexual molestation by employers and social superiors.129 If they were thus assaulted or tricked into sexual acts, the courts provided no satisfaction for their grievances in these matters. Purity of the lower-class line and their non-existent patrimony were not a concern to the courts. “Women were commonly differentiated between those leading ‘honest’ and those leading ‘indecent’ lives, with virgins, wives and widows in the former category, and servants, slaves and prostitutes in the latter.”130
Scala does not take the honour of the lower classes very seriously either. In the scenarios any lower-class woman, or any woman disguised as such, is subject to sexual assault, always to comic effect. The humour in fondling women who are presumed to be lower class follows from the fact that they are not, in fact, lower class. In Day 26, when Pedrolino tries to rape Flaminia disguised as a gypsy, Orazio and Graziano laugh. The intended rape is funny in the context of the times because, if Flaminia, an upper-class virgin, were raped, particularly by a lower-class man, serious consequences would follow. In Day 15, when Franceschina laughs, knowing from first-hand experience that her employer is impotent, we realize that he had attempted to have intercourse with her. We are not to wonder whether she willingly participated in such attempt; our response is only to be amused at the master’s sexual inadequacy and her disclosure of it. At least in Day 4 Pantalone, this time evidently potent, having stolen the maidenhead of Franceschina, does what was required by canon law but not enforced in the case of servants: he provides a dowry.131 He does more than that; he promises money for a first male child. Thus, he publicly acknowledges his responsibility and the woman’s “honesty,” despite her class. He was, as Pedrolino remarks, charitable in doing so.132 His marriage to a lower-class woman like Franceschina, as any lower-class woman was expected to know, was out of the question.133
Scala regularly substitutes servants, female or male, married or unmarried, for upper-class girls in bed-tricks, again to everyone else’s amusement. The important point is that in the bed-trick the well-to-do lecherous old man falls victim to a practical joke. In Day 6, when Pasquella, a lower-class married woman, is used in a bed-trick, it is a laughing matter. The societal anxiety that surrounded upper-class female sex outside marriage did not surround that of lower-class women.134 The adulterous upper-class wife threatened the political and social order and was accordingly punished by the courts, but, as Pedrolino observes in Day 3, lawyers did not bother with cases against lower-class whores and cuckolds, and Scala treats instances of them as jokes that are no more serious than the intended rapes and deceits that get lower-class women into bed.135 In the scenarios lower-class female sexual adultery is a source of humour. In Day 3 the matter of the unfaithful lower-class wife is resolved by her husband’s being duped into believing that he was not cuckolded. He is forced to beg forgiveness from his adulterous wife for having even thought that she had been unfaithful.
With the exception of one marriage that proceeds without demurral in a little-developed third act, Scala’s scenarios never show obedient and silent upper-class girls and youths who merely assent to the marriages arranged for them. We see two marriages that had been arranged at the onset in Days 14 and 23, which after many complications and tribulations come about by other means. In mere assent there is no conflict, no societal tension, no comic potential. Excepting those I describe in the fifth section of this chapter, the youths and the girls in the scenarios marry for love. In representing the conflict between love and marriage, Scala takes on a very important societal issue.
Love was a topic of considerable contemporary interest. In Italy a great many discussions, novelle, and treatises were devoted to it. Records show that the Academy of the Apatisti, founded in 1631, one of many academies of the period that, in addition to being a social organization, was devoted to orations upon solemn occasions, lectures, critical essays, the reading of poetical compositions, et cetera, had among the topics for serious debate “Which is the greater passion, love or hate? Which prevails more in love, pleasure or sorrow? Which is the more vehement anger or love? Is love the result of choice or destiny? Does love end in pleasure or sadness? Whether the flame of love is kindled more by the sight of the beloved’s smiles or tears. Whether it is preferable to see the beloved without being able to speak to her, or to speak to her without being able to see her. Whether it is better for a jealous lover to conceal his passion or to disclose it.”136 Questions for discussion of love elsewhere included: “Which love is the greater and more ardent, that of a man for a woman or a woman for a man? Who suffers more, the courtier whose lady has died or the courtier who loves a lady who does not love him?”137 The terms of these debates and the discussions, which were strongly influenced by the idea of medieval courtly love, may seem strange to us, but they infuse Scala’s scenarios and provide the actor with possible topics for speeches on love. And Pietro Bembo’s rhetorical question about the torments of love are reflected in Scala’s very plots: “Who does not know how many regrets, insults, alterations, griefs, and vengeful thoughts, and bonfires of disdain a thousand times consume and reconsume the lover before he gleans one satisfaction?”138
The lovers in the scenarios spoke Tuscan, the language of Petrarch’s sonnets, 1327–68. Their florid speech revealed not only their refinement but also their great love, it being widely believed, even into the second half of the eighteenth century, that figurative language occurred spontaneously to the mind in a state of emotion.139 Historian John Hale remarks that despite the influence of classical literature, writers of love lyrics rarely went back further than Petrarch for their model because of the technical virtuosity and beauty of Petrarch’s sound patterns and because the personal psychology of his verse better suited contemporary sensibilities than did the poetry of the classical pagan world.140 And in spite of the fact that young ladies were not to waste their time reading love poems, any more than stories of love and chivalry, Petrarch’s love lyrics were read throughout Italy by upper-class young men and literate women.141 Rosalind Kerr demonstrates that the celebrated actress Isabella Andreini directly imitated and even incorporated Petrarch’s love lyrics into her own.142 That the actors could speak this beautiful language was cause for admiration.
Petrarch’s love for Laura, however passionate, was from afar and chaste. The lovers in Scala are determined to consummate their relationship and get married, sometimes in that order. Following the consummation, if honour were to be preserved, their marriage was all but a fait accompli, necessitating the belated agreement of the fathers.
Even when the love relationship was with someone of the right social class, as it is in every Scala scenario, and even when it was also with someone of the appropriate economic status, as it is in all but Scala’s Days 9, 24, and 28 (where the financial inequality is overcome by other means), love matches were made without consideration of the family’s economic, social, and political strategies that sought to guarantee the status of the lineage over time and that provided the social fabric of daily life. Moreover, they circumvented patriarchal authority and, thus, ipso facto, threatened the larger societal discipline, order, and rationality.143
At the time, love was regarded as one of the most powerful forces.144 In Scala the word love is capitalized, as it is in Bembo’s Gli Asolani and in Petrarch. “The power Love has over us,” Bembo declared, “[is] a sufficient justification for making him a god.”145 The lovers in Scala’s scenarios are frequently given to rail against Love and Fortune as if both were external forces outside their control. Love was considered irrational and even dangerous. In Day 15, even after Pantalone and others had publicly warned two brothers against courting his daughter under her window, thus dishonouring him, the young men persisted in doing so and even openly scorned Pantalone. His honour so threatened, Pantalone consequently attempted to murder them.
In Scala’s scenarios the force of Love could be very spiteful. Love could lead people to betray both friends and lovers: in Day 29 the youth cannot help loving his best friend’s woman. Love could be fickle: in Day 13, in his love for Isabella, Orazio forgets his love for Flaminia; then his dormant love for Flaminia is aroused, and he forgets his love for Isabella. In Day 38, after Isabella, the Turk, has left her husband, country, and religion and murdered her husband and child in her love for Orazio, he promptly forgets her in favour of a renewed passion for an old love.146
Even with lovers suitably matched economically and socially, then, the resulting marriages in Scala seem to forebode problems. They often follow much suspicion, jealousy, and unpredictable transfers of affection. How serious a matter for concern these were in a society marked by persistent fears about trust147 is difficult to evaluate. It should be noted that at the time it was believed that jealousy increased love. Debates were actually held on the question of whether love could exist without jealousy.148 It was also thought that the suffering of the slighted lover, as in Days 29 and 38, could be persuasive in winning the beloved.149
The keen interest in love expressed by the upper classes was not assumed to be shared by the lower classes. Domenico Pietropaolo comments that “since the diffusion of the courtly love tradition in the late Middle Ages, the lower classes had been accustomed by their culture to the idea that they were not capable of feeling refined sentiments, that courtly love was not for them, and that they should be concerned more with satisfying practical needs and their bestial urges.”150 Whether that is so or not, one can say that the lower strata of the population were represented as incapable of such refined sentiments as courtly love. When, in Day 18, Pedrolino and Arlecchino cast lots to decide which of them will marry Franceschina, the procedure is fully understandable because servants were analogized to “brute animals” that could only “feel the power of love in some … minimal way.”151 In Scala’s scenarios, like Day 21, The Fake Sorcerer, while the lovers converse at length, a male servant is sometimes left on stage, evidently to mock them in asides and gestures as they do in some of the learned comedy. Undoubtedly this counterpoint provided the dramatic interest that the lovers’ long speeches alone might not. It also provided the supposed perspective of servants on the high-flown language and grand emotions for which the young often risked their lives, and, further, it reflected the practical concerns of the patriarchy about love relationships.
Girls confined to the house in Scala’s scenarios communicate from their windows to their lovers on the ground below. Such communication would have been a dangerous practice that jeopardized the honour of the house. As recklessly, the girls also communicate by means of letters delivered by servants, albeit faithful servants, who act as go-betweens.152 It was, in fact, partly to restrict such communication that the wives and daughters of most citizens could not read.153 In Day 4 we learn that Flaminia, who appears at the window with a book in hand, reads a great many stories of love and chivalry and is exchanging love letters with Flavio. Inappropriate reading was thought to lead to inappropriate behaviour.
Exchanges of gifts were a form of social interaction that had even more serious implications than did reading and writing about love and exchanging letters. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Venetian women considered handkerchiefs to be appropriate gifts for their future spouses. They were even given as part of the dowry. Handkerchiefs were used to clean away the blood after the first sexual contact and so carried an extremely intimate and specific sexual meaning. Accordingly, they were typically exchanged only after a long period of courtship and intimacy.154 “When Shakespeare had Othello kill his wife for a dropped handkerchief,” comments social historian Thomas Cohen, “the playwright made good Renaissance sense because such a gift was not a symbol but a sign, a pledge, with all the solidity the culture of the time invested in things given.”155 When Isabella, the wife of Pantalone, drops her handkerchief for the Capitano at the onset of Day 31, she reveals that she is so angry at and resentful of her husband that she is ready to pursue an adulterous relationship. This readiness provides suspense for the central plot of exposing the pedant to her husband, when she might, as he offers, conveniently have had sex with him right in her own house, her husband none the wiser. The dropped handkerchief makes clear that Isabella prefers loyalty to her husband to adultery with the loathsome pedant, not altogether because she is so honourable but because the pedant is so vile.156
While women were encouraged to engage in embroidery and thus would have had labour-intensive but inexpensive gifts like handkerchiefs on hand, men were in a position to provide gifts of monetary value like jewellery. The Capitano in Day 31 responds to the dropped handkerchief with the gift of a ring, ostensibly proving his emotional commitment. The gift was often given as the man’s public investment in an otherwise unequal exchange; the woman would give her chastity for the man’s promise of marriage backed up by something of monetary value.
Even more significant is the gift of the portrait in Day 39, after which the scenario is named and around which the drama is centred. Thomas Cohen provides an interesting historical analogue: “One evening from her balcony Maria Dusin witnessed Girolamo giving Regina his portrait. This act was far more than a simple transaction of a material object: it carried a greater meaning. Symbolically he was giving himself away.”157
A great many of the Scala scenarios, even when they are ostensibly about marrying, are about male friendship. Several scenarios have titles that make clear they are really about friendship: Day 5, Flavio Betrayed (Flavio tradito), Day 19, The Three Loyal Friends (Li trefidi amici), and Day 29, The Loyal Friend (Il fido amico). In Days 6 and 18, Flavio’s only role is that of faithful friend. In other scenarios also, the friend does everything to help, aiding his friend in his love pursuit and defending his honour, even in sword fights. In Day 38 Flavio is seriously wounded in the process of trying to get his friend Orazio to behave honourably. In Day 34 a friendship between men entails extending every hospitality to the offspring; Graziano lodges the daughter of an out-of-town friend, her two servants, and her tutor in his house and does “her every honour.” In Day 33, friendship entails assuming guardianship of a friend’s child when the friend leaves the city on business.
Male friendship was exalted to a degree that is hard for us to imagine today. According to Federico in the Book of the Courtier, friendship contains the best of life. The true friend is someone “whose love is constant and without deceit, and bound to endure in all intimacy until death.”158 Similarly, Leon Alberti asserts that “true friendships engage a kind of love more durable and more powerful than any other.”159 We cannot know how much the idealized male friendship, often described in the rhetoric of courtly love, actually reflected an erotic relationship. Even chance meetings in the street entailed the same elaborate, revived classical rhetoric.160
In any case, friendship bonds were very close, and the expectations for them very high. With one’s friends, Lorenzo Alberti declares, “you ought to share every thought, every possession, every gift of fortune.”161 Adovardo adds that friends are those “who spare no trouble for the sake of a friend, who offer to bear trouble, expense, and injury for his sake, and who never in any danger or difficulty forget the loyalty and duty they owe to him.”162
In a society where distrust ran high,163 friendships were based on trust. This trust meant that a friend could be counted on to assist another friend in all his enterprises and, further, to enlist all the members of the friendship circle or patronage network to assist and intercede on behalf of the friend. Friends and friends of friends were obliged to help one another as if they were brothers. Friendships, like business relationships, with which they were frequently intertwined, were based on the model of the family. In each, trust was essential. It served to protect the man’s all-important honour.164
In the patriarchal society, friendship was regarded as a male prerogative and pleasure. Women, considered imperfect and incapable of virtue, were incapable of ideal friendship.165 They had no role to play in the civic world that was the essential context of male friendships.166 Scala does occasionally show women aiding one another and even conspiring together; he does not show either the depths of friendship or the betrayal of it that he illustrates with his male characters. Males are shown making sacrifices for other men; females only for males. No plots are based on female friendship.
The standard for male friendship was so high that, not surprisingly, friends too often failed to meet it. Thus, the Florentine merchant Giovanni Morelli wisely counselled his heirs, “You should never trust anyone so much that he can destroy you.”167 In a number of the Scala scenarios the primary plot concerns serious betrayals of friendship resulting from a youth’s pursuit of his friend’s love interest.
At the end of almost all of the scenarios in which friendship has been betrayed, the friend comes round and is forgiven.168 As Madeleine Doran observes, a normally good man could be overcome by passion (as detached from character as the capitalization of the word love in the Scala scenarios suggests) and could as quickly repent, particularly when moved by persuasive speech.169 While such reconciliations between friends may seem to us merely plot convenience, they were, in the idealized view of friendship at the time, not impossible and were deeply moving. Both the extent to which friends might go to help one another and their failure to prove trustworthy would have been of considerable interest in a culture where friendship between males was a very important matter. When, in the end of a Scala scenario, one friend gives up his love interest in a woman so that his friend may have her instead, and the woman in the process is traded like so much goods, we may find it improbable and distasteful, but the sixteenth-century ideal of friendship required that male friendship take unquestionable precedence over heterosexual love and that accordingly in cases of conflict the latter would yield to the former. In Day 16 a widow plans to marry her daughter Flaminia to her stepson Orazio, a sound financial plan. But Orazio, knowing that his friend Flavio loves Flaminia, declines the plan, yields Flaminia to his friend, and agrees instead to marry Flavio’s sister, whom he does not know. In Day 29 Orazio abducts his love, Isabella, and hides her in the house of his best friend, Flavio. Flavio stays away from his house because he too loves Isabella and does not wish to betray his friend. In recognition of this loyalty and friendship Orazio gives Isabella to Flavio and takes Flavio’s sister, who loves him, for wife. In this case, at least, the seeming harshness of this trade-off of Isabella is mitigated by Orazio’s apparent neglect of her, the pity she feels for Flavio, and her gratitude towards him. No matter, she unquestioningly accepts the primacy of the male friendship. In Day 8 a similar regard for the importance of friendship, this time between two brothers, leads to several bewildering switches in intended spouses. In these scenarios, where the friendship is at stake, the male does not marry for love of a woman but out of friendship with a male.
Most moving in the scenarios would have been the instances where the friend is faithful despite the fact that he has every reason to harm his friend. Adovardo Alberti expresses the belief that, while the benefits received from someone who has no reason to harm you are great, the benefit from someone who has reason to harm you but chooses instead to be conciliatory and human is “a double gift and benefit.” “Who could possibly deny that one owes real gratitude to a person who could and perhaps should be harshly vindictive but prefers to be kind and generous …? He is doubly generous, first because he does not harm you, second because he gives you a gift and a reward … Whose character would be so egregiously treacherous as to fail to commend such a man to perpetual honor?”170 In Day 5, when Orazio falls in love with Flavio’s woman, Isabella, and, as Flavio discovers, does much to deceive and betray both him and Isabella, Flavio nonetheless comes to Orazio’s rescue when Orazio is beaten in a fight and almost killed. Orazio, much moved by Flavio’s great kindness, kneels before him, repents, and, blaming the forces of Love and Fortune, begs forgiveness for all he has done. This Flavio grants, as Orazio and Flavio admit their great love for one another. The great powers of Love and Fortune being overcome by male friendship provided the contemporary audience with a stirring conclusion to the scenario and the fulfilment of a hope.
The relationships between citizens and servants play a large part in Scala’s scenarios. They also played a significant part in early modern life. To judge by the period’s many treatises on household management, the relationships were often a tension-fraught aspect of citizens’ everyday experiences. The tensions, moreover, were seen to threaten the whole of society. They thus constituted obvious and essential material for Scala’s domestic comedies, and not only because they were traditionally an important part of comedy.
In Venice, from where figures are available for 1563, there were approximately two and a half servants for every citizen’s household. These households are represented in the scenarios, often with the same relative proportion of servants as borne out by the statistics. Two-thirds of household servants were, in fact, female, although, perhaps under the moralizing influence of the Church, the actual percentage gradually shifted towards the less sexually vulnerable male servants.171 The most frequently named servants in Scala’s scenarios, Pedrolino and Arlecchino, appear in virtually every comic scenario; Franceschina, the most frequently named female servant, appears in fewer.
It was not because of moral scruples that Scala represented more male servants. As I have shown, he does not take the sexual violation of lower-class women as more than a joke. It was presumed that male servants, like males in general, were by nature capable of taking more initiative than were women, and, like their forebears in Roman drama, they realistically could play a more active and visible role in the street.172 In sixteenth-century Italy the male servant was a mark of prestige for his master,173 and thus male servants were attached in greater proportion to households of wealth. The male servant was often closely associated with the master, whom he escorted about the city and whom he was expected to protect from danger and defend in quarrels. He was also dispatched to run errands.174 Scala shows him doing all these things. In several of the scenarios, like Days 21 and 29, Scala shows us a comically athletic Arlecchino. The athleticism befitted a male character; women were limited in movement because of the decorum required of them, which was reinforced by their dress.
The treatises on household management make clear that domestic service was a manifestation of the “natural” hierarchy and order that governed the social order. As Torquato Tasso explains, “some are by nature born to command and others to obey.” Servants, Tasso continues, “are not qualified to fulfill the duties of a citizen because their virtue is defective – they possess just enough virtue to make them able to obey, but no more.”175 Servants were to know their proper place in that hierarchy and not challenge their master or disobey him but rather perform their assigned tasks with alacrity and humility.176 Female servants, in particular, were to dress very plainly in common cloth dyed in drab colours – tan, black, or white – so as to remain in the background, subservient.177
Every treatise made clear that the servant’s primary good attribute was obedience.178 Not only was the obedience of the servant of use in itself, but also it affirmed the master’s importance and showed that he knew how to command, preferably without having to resort to beatings.179 “Servants,” Giannozzo Alberti explained, “are as obedient as masters are skilled in commanding.”180 Obedient servants, demonstrating their master’s skill in commanding, brought him honour.181
The best servants, ones who were not only obedient but also able to constantly adapt to whatever were the changing needs and whims of the employer and to meet them unobtrusively even in advance of their being expressed, were a great tribute to the master and an honour to the household. They could become indispensible to the running of the elite household. There might be long-lived affection between the families and the servants.182 In Day 27 Pedrolino, having heard of his master Pantalone’s death, raises Pantalone’s daughter as his own, all the while protecting her honour, that is, her chastity. Highly regarded servants might gain financial security and favours, and they might even be included in the will of the master.183 In Day 10 Pantalone honours Pedrolino, who has been a servant in his house for many years, with a wedding ceremony for him in his house, complete with musicians.
Scala shows many more servants who misbehave than those who are obedient. Good servants and slaves were traditionally less common in drama, presumably because they are less interesting. And in the sixteenth-century, unlike bad servants, they did not necessitate the manuals of the period on household management, the sheer number of which suggested the very real problems that existed.
The manuals reflect the underlying belief that servants were by nature untrustworthy and disloyal.184 “We have as many enemies as we have servants” ran a popular proverb.185 In the natural hierarchy servants were deficient in both intelligence and wit, close to the animal kingdom and subject to vice. They were analogized to asses – known for their stubbornness186 – or, if not asses, dogs. According to the frequently reprinted writer Stefano Guazzo, 1574, “servants have three faults common to dogs: gluttony, barking, i.e., telling all their master’s secrets, and biting, i.e., backbiting their masters. They are also proud and lying, and faithless.”187 The equally widely reprinted Tommaso Garzoni, in 1586, provided a somewhat more generous assessment of haughty and disloyal servants, analogizing them not to dogs but to the lowliest of humans, “‘the scum of laziness’ capable of ‘vile kinds of trickery,’ ‘unfaithful like the Moors, thieves like Gypsies, assassins like the Arabs, traitors like the Parthians’ – people who ‘were created from nothing’ and deserve nothing but discipline and labour.”188 This distrust and contempt, conveyed to the servants, only served to undermine the trustworthiness that their masters so desperately sought from them.189 Even though ideally the head of the house was capable of exercising self-control, Pantalone’s frequent desperate rages when faced with his servants’ behaviour would have been fully understandable to Scala’s audience.
Servants were shown as a threat to the honour of the household. The mere presence of servants in a house, it is true, enhanced the master’s status: the more servants, the more status and honour. Their honour, however – and honour was, as I said, a serious concern at all levels of society – was often at odds with that of their masters.
Acts of disobedience and disrespect on the part of servants were more than a part of the struggle of everyday life. Because the household was the polity writ small, they could, by implication, threaten the whole of society.190 To have evil servants, the philosopher Fabio Glissenti remarked in 1596, is to suffer “a damaging imperialism, a wretched subjugation, and an ignominious condition.”191 What was represented on the stage in Pedrolino’s rampant disobedience and Arlecchino’s laziness was a matter for humour precisely because, in stylized form, the characters’ behaviour expressed vital societal concerns. Servants were seen to represent a threat to the larger society, which the authorities sometimes made quite explicit. When the censors convicted one Francesco Zambat of Gambarare of refusing orders from the wife of a Giulio Valier and of wounding Valier’s son, they noted that he had acted “in disrespect of the law and of the ordinances concerning servants, as well as in disrespect for the nobility of this city.”192 Similarly, in the prologue to an ordinance of 1595 the censors referred to the “insolence and tyranny that male and female servants exercise in the households and against their masters.”193 There was significant societal concern about servants gaining the upper hand in the household.194 Even when a servant merely offered his advice, as Pedrolino does so impertinently, for instance, in Day 21 he might thereby suggest that the master had no right to command or expect obedience.195 Masters needed to be vigilant in their control.
The point of view of the servants was, not surprisingly, quite different from that of the masters. Even those regularly employed faced grinding poverty.196 The position of the servant, always dependent upon the fortunes and whims of the master, was precarious. He or she might be praised as loyal and obedient one day and berated unjustly for bad faith and ingratitude the next day.197 In Day 24 Pedrolino is falsely accused by his master, Pantalone, of pimping for Pantalone’s daughter. Unreasonable demands were placed upon servants: in Day 10 Pantalone tells Pedrolino that if he does not make Pantalone’s daughter, Flaminia, take Orazio for husband, Pedrolino will never get his intended, a servant of Pantalone’s brother, for wife. In Day 28 Pantalone tells Pedrolino that if he wants to stay in his employ, he must get Franceschina for him to bed and he must beat the Capitano. In Day 30 Pantalone, believing that a servant impregnated his daughter, says that he would like to poison all of his servants. More common than the threat of being murdered was the more realistic threat of being replaced.198 In Day 33 an enraged Pantalone says he will drive Pedrolino, whom he has falsely accused, from the house. Similarly, in Day 11 the falsely accused Arlecchino is summarily fired. In the growing city populations, half those born in town never reached the age of twenty. The population was maintained and expanded through the constant influx of relocating rural people199 who were only too anxious to serve as replacement for those who might be let go from their jobs. As many as half the growing population in cities may have been people relocating, many from destitute farming regions.200
The acts of disobedience by the servants that so incensed their masters, however, might bring sympathy, even honour and dignity from their peers.201 Pedrolino’s request for Pantalone’s pardon at the end of Day 26 for all the tricks he has played, which he then enumerates, serves not only to allow the audience to relive the play but also, in effect, to allow Pedrolino to boast about his many outrageous covert acts. Glissenti claimed that he would rather be subject to the whims of the sea or fortune than have his fate in the hands of servants because they could destroy one’s reputation by recounting “the sorrows, the insidious acts, the shameless deeds, the robberies they have perpetrated on their masters, winning praise for themselves in these ribald deeds as if they were honorable and beautiful ones” (his emphasis).202 In Scala the insidious acts, shameless tricks, and robberies might also bring gratitude from the offspring whom they enabled to steal, or for whom they themselves stole, and in whose love affairs the servants often assisted, often going to great lengths. Most notably, in Day 9 Isabella’s nurse feigns death and leaves town, only to return disguised as a gentleman who “marries” Isabella in order to fend off her marriage to the man her father had intended for her and to enable her to marry her true love, Orazio, upon his return. To what extent servants and youths conspired against the masters in real life I do not know. That fear on the part of the fathers, and hope on the part of the youths, if that is all it was, was not altogether unrealistic, although, as in Day 9, the conspiracy is obviously far fetched. Most boys and girls first began their time in service during their early teens and sometimes when they were as young as eight. They may literally have grown up with the sons and daughters of their employers.203 And to the extent that they were both subordinates, the servants and offspring were kindred spirits.
Masters could take some comfort in the fact that the servants’ acts of disobedience, like their acts of obedience, served to affirm the social hierarchy by demonstrating the servants’ animal-like inferiority and the masters’ own rightful place above the servants. In addition, as in the ending of so many Scala scenarios, the servants’ confession of bad behaviour provided opportunity for the masters to demonstrate magnanimity in their forgiveness.204 Thus, both obedient and disobedient servants served to justify the status quo. At the same time, the topsy-turvy world of the Scala scenarios, in which the servants are in control, was consistent with the anxiety expressed at the time by the elite about the security of their own social position and the ordering of society generally.205 Conversely, it served as wish-fulfilment for those lower in the social order. Their behaviour would have found an interested audience.
Starving peasants from the impoverished Alpine valleys above Bergamo in Lombardy made their way to Venice in hopes of finding employment. It is no surprise that the first known comic servants, paired with Venetian masters, spoke a Bergamasque dialect. However, Venice, the probable origin of commedia dell’arte, was not alone in seeing a large influx of emigrants from the countryside.206 Those employed as servants were the lucky ones, but the competition among unskilled labourers meant that they were not well paid. Francesco Guicciardini advised that, lest they “leave you or annoy you when they get their fill, it is better to be tightfisted with them. Feed their hopes, but give them only just enough to keep them from despair.”207 Their perpetual hunger is reflected in Scala’s scenarios.
In Day 1 the servant Pedrolino bemoans the cancellation of a trip to the villa where he could have had a “good feed,” the nature of which he likely details for us. In Day 11 the porters eat the confections intended for a wedding party. In Day 12, to disastrous effect, Pedrolino eats the candy he has stolen. Hungry servants even steal from their fellows: in Day 31 Pedrolino receives a dish of macaroni but gets to eat little of it because Arlecchino and another servant, Burattino, suddenly appear and proceed to eat from it as well.
The tricks (beffa) that the servants play upon masters in many of the scenarios, their manipulation, lies, and deceits, have some basis in reality. More than that, the tricks represent the fears of the citizens and the happy fantasies of the lower class. They are also of a piece with the Italians’ love of a practical joke and of the victim’s humiliation.208 Andrews observes that even in popular Italian comic performance today there is an almost “mystical search for the perfect sucker, to whom everyone can feel derisively superior.”209
Servants from Bergamo developed a reputation, even beyond Italy, as being resourceful and ingenious. The many literary parodies of them suggest that they were resented for their relative success210 and admired. The craft, craftiness, and cool nonchalance of Pedrolino are very like that of the admired courtier who manipulated the reality in which he found himself, with linguistic prowess and social dexterity. We admire the derring-do of the trickster servant, particularly knowing that servants were very lucky to have jobs at all.
There is much dislocation and uprootedness in Scala’s scenarios. Drama is often motivated by the stranger or long-lost relative who has come to town. Scala’s characters, as we learn in the Argument preceding each scenario, have often travelled, sometimes extensively, to get to the fixed setting of the scenario. In the course of the scenario the characters would have to have provided the information about their journeys – their relocation in search of family members, fortune, or education or because of capture or self-imposed exile. In several of Scala’s scenarios the majority of the characters arrive from elsewhere. But the stranger come to town and the long-lost relative are not merely a matter of dramatic convenience. Once again, albeit in an artificial form, the scenarios reflect real life, and understanding the extent to which they do so with respect to outsiders heightens our appreciation of them.
Many people were on the move in Europe at this time – artisans, merchants, students, and exiles. Students could be virtually anywhere because all European university courses were conducted in Latin.211 The increasing prosperity of the towns meant that merchants might relocate from town to town ever in search of new business opportunities. The starving peasants came in from the countryside in hopes of employment. While the number of times that Scala sets family members and lovers off in search of loved ones, sometimes from city to city and for long periods of time, does not seem realistic, their travels do suggest the great movement of people that actually occurred in the period.212
A surprising number of people moved because they had been exiled. In faction-ridden Italian cities a large number of citizens, having fallen out of political favour, were sent into exile.213 According to the diarist Romolo Allegrini, in 1581, between 10 and 15 per cent of the men from Perugia were in exile or on the run.214 Exile was also a common punishment for serious criminal behaviour. To fill the endless need for manpower for war galleys, courts in the city-states that fought at sea might send even petty thieves and troublemakers to serve in the grueling jobs of oarsman. To escape that fate, men went into voluntary exile, sometimes with no foreseeable means of support but banditry.215 In Scala’s Day 15, Pantalone, having, as he supposes, killed two men to protect his honour and that of his daughter, abruptly left Venice for Rome, disguised as a beggar. In Day 27 he is in voluntary exile because of an enemy. Day 18 begins with Orazio having been banished.
In eight comic scenarios, including Day 36, Scala shows us men reappearing after long absences that resulted from their abduction by the “Turks,” the name used indiscriminately for all Muslims. Formerly insiders, these returning men function as the outsiders who upset the status quo.
In reality, coastal areas and ships in the Mediterranean were subject to “Turkish” pirate raids and abductions to an extent hard to imagine. Pirates and privateers came from the Ottoman East and from North Africa, where the Barbary States developed under indirect Ottoman authority, and their brutal attacks on Italian coastal areas and on ships in the Mediterranean were a continual threat from the Middle Ages onwards. Captivity was an ever-present fear up and down the Italian peninsula and islands. Indeed, after the battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which the Christian allies defeated the Ottoman fleet, the Barbary States probably became more threatening because the Ottoman ability to control them had diminished.216 Corsairing activity peaked between 1580 and 1640 but continued with lessening intensity throughout the eighteenth century.217 On land the frequent raids included looting, burning, capture, and murder. Those captured on land or sea who appeared to be well-to-do were offered for ransom.218 The rest served as slaves, the preponderance of them on galleys. Great tempests sometimes sank scores of galleys and drowned thousands of men.219 The harsh conditions for the slaves also contributed to their appalling mortality rates. Escape was rare. Robert Davis estimates that between 1530 and 1780, more than a million European Christians were enslaved by Muslims of the Barbary Coast, most of them sailors, merchants, and inhabitants of the coastal villages of Italy, Greece, and Mediterranean Spain and France.220 Scala’s friend, the celebrated actor Francesco Andreini, had been held by the “Turks” as a slave for several years. Fear of “Li Turchi” justifiably loomed large through the centuries. Historian Tommaso Astarita recounts that even in his childhood in Naples in the 1960s, “‘Li Turchi,’ the Turks [as a general reference to pirates], were still playfully mentioned as a scarecrow for unruly children.”221 Not surprisingly, Turks and enslavement by them figure in a number of Scala’s scenarios, as they did in romances.
In the Argument in Day 1 we learn that the rich twin traders who appear as slaves had been taken by pirates and had not been heard from for many years. In fact, it was often not known for long periods of time whether those captured were yet alive. Robert Davis documents someone enslaved who tried and failed for twenty-six years to get a letter through to his sister, informing her that he was still alive.222
Interestingly, the Turks actually shown on stage, as opposed to those described in the Arguments in the Scala scenarios are represented favourably. The Turk, turned Christian, in Day 2 marries Flaminia, daughter of Pantalone. Isabella, a Turk in Day 38, has also converted to Christianity and eventually marries Orazio. Also the Turkish girl in Day 36 had become Christian and eventually marries Flavio, the son of the noble Spanish regent of Naples. The sticking point in acceptance seems to have been religion, not foreign birth. There are records of both slaves and businessmen in Ottoman lands having become Muslim, and similarly of Muslims in Christian lands having converted to Christianity, and for the same reasons: their doing so seems to have conferred some advantage,223 and, in any case, religious assimilations especially of people living in foreign lands are familiar.
The most memorable outsider in Scala’s scenarios is the Capitano. In eight of the comic scenarios he is fully integrated into the community as a brother, son, friend, honourable suitor, or husband and householder, and the comic potential of his role is hardly or not at all evident. In the other twenty-eight of the thirty-six scenarios in which the Capitano appears, he is an outsider and a braggart warrior, a familiar comic figure from Roman drama. He is also drawn from real life.
During the sixteenth century the Spanish soldier was much in evidence in Spanish-occupied Italy, extending north from Naples and south from Milan. Half of Italy was under direct Spanish rule, and Spain’s influence was felt in most Italian city-states. Tuscany, Savoy, the Papacy, and Genoa, although formally independent, were in fact beholden to Spain.224 When and where it was sufficiently safe to do so (including in the drama), Italians made fun of the Spanish captains for their apparent vanity, euphuistic language, and elaborate ceremoniousness. The captain in the commedia dell’arte apparently often spoke with a Spanish accent. At times in Scala’s scenarios we can deduce that the Capitano is Spanish, and he may have been so in other scenarios as well. In Day 17 his brother comes from Spain. In Day 29 Pantalone, residing in Naples, wants his daughter to marry the Capitano, knowing the power of the Spaniards in Naples. In Day 38 the Capitano had been serving his king in Majorca, Spain’s largest island.
Most clearly, Scala’s comic captain represents the condottiere or captain of mercenary soldiers, many bands of whom were employed by the faction-ridden city-states in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although these condottieri had originally been from foreign countries, by the fifteenth century in Italy they were Italian. Some had become nobles by dint of their military prowess. Many were Italian nobles who, for various reasons, had not been able to succeed in their own land or who had been exiled from their city-state for having been part of some opposing faction.225 The principal states, complained Machiavelli, were not “armed with their own proper forces.”226 Even into the sixteenth century, Florence was wholly dependent on mercenaries. Humanists frequently reviled the hired condottieri and their bands of mercenaries.227 Francesco Guicciardini and Lodovico Alamanni, respectively, held them responsible for the “horrible calamity” and “the present state and shame of serfdom of Italy” that had resulted from the occupation of Italy, beginning with the French in 1494.228 Perhaps most influential in perpetuating a negative view of the condottieri was Machiavelli in The Prince. “The ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Charles, King of France, was allowed to seize Italy” without any effort whatsoever.229 Scala, working in the tradition of the humanists, shared in the vilification of the condottieri and would have found a responsive audience in doing so. Such widely disseminated contempt for mercenaries had a good deal of influence on articulate civilian attitudes.230 The condottieri, rightly or wrongly, lived on in infamy.231
The accusations levelled against them were many. Politician and orator Coluccio Salutati denounced mercenaries as “outcasts who had entered into perpetual conspiracy against peace and order.”232 Mercenaries and auxiliary armies “are disorganized, ambitious, undisciplined, and disloyal … among enemies cowardly; unfearing of God, unfaithful to man … In peacetime they plunder you; in wartime, your enemies do. The reason for all this is that there is no love or reason to hold them on the battlefield other than their meager pay, which is not enough to make them want to die for you … When war breaks out, they flee, they desert.”233
The condottieri worked on contract with individual city-states and sometimes even with a single individual, as in Scala’s Days 15 and 23. Many of the condottieri knew and were capable of nothing but war. They felt no allegiance to those who had hired them and had scant respect for the lives and property of civilians. They fought for the highest bidder, passing easily from one lord to another, and, because they held a monopoly on the military power in Italy, they were sometimes capable of dictating terms that made a few of them very wealthy landowners.
The band of men they hired, which could be only a very few or as many as three thousand, might be poorly trained.234 The contracting captain might exaggerate their number to his employer.235 The condottieri sought to avoid capture and death on the battlefield and only reluctantly endangered themselves or their enlisted men. They avoided hard work and winter campaigns whenever possible. They sought to avoid battle by out-manoeuvring their opponents and, when they did fight, had a reputation for grandiose, pointless, and nearly bloodless battles. They were quick to accept bribes to cease fighting and likewise to offer them to their opponents. They valued a prisoner more than a dead soldier.236 Sheltered from the rest of Europe by the Alps and the sea, the pseudo-chivalric condottieri retained armoured knights and medieval weapons long after the rest of Europe had converted to pikemen and musketeers.237
In some scenarios Scala’s Capitano can be specifically identified with the condottieri: in Day 11 he recruits soldiers; in Day 15 he offers his services as a killer; and in Day 40 the Capitano says that Flavio, in battle in Hungary, died beside him. In others his behaviour matches that for which the condottieri were criticized. He presents himself as a nobleman, part of the hereditary elite, who, unlike the merchants, had the right to bear heraldic arms.238 Domenico Sella explains that “in every Italian state the aristocracy included … [a group that] traced its origins to a distant and often mythical feudal past and insisted on the deeds of military valour of its ancestors and on some remote imperial investiture to legitimize its present position; it still cultivated knightly or martial virtues and many of its members pursued careers in the armies.”239 Scala’s Capitano is quick to take offence and threaten a fight, as was characteristic of his class, among whom to be bellicose, quarrelsome, prickly, touchy, and otherwise always ready to take offence and fight was regarded as a sign of social ascendance.240 Castiglione mocks such real life men as making “a show of being so fierce that they are always blustering and bragging, declaring that they are married to their cuirasses, and glowering with … haughty looks.”241 Typically, in Scala, the Capitano draws his sword to kill someone, only to suddenly depart with some ludicrous rationale for failing to fight.
Scala’s braggart Capitano always seems to be newly come to town, homeless, unemployed, and alone, except perhaps for his servant, Arlecchino. He is not a successful condottiere but rather down and out. At any given time there must have been a significant number of captains and mercenaries unemployed and present in the cities.242 Robert Davis comments that after 1559 there were thousands of mercenaries wandering around Italy and contributing to the spreading disorder and violence characteristic of city streets. Spavento, the stateless warrior, is perpetually in search of a woman, as many of the mercenaries must have been. He succeeds with none. Always threatening action, he effects nothing. He is made to appear the more foolish by his frequent sidekick, Arlecchino, who mocks him and at the same time urges him on to ever more elaborate boasts.243
Like the language of the Spanish captain, that of the Italian captain was a subject for derision. Michael Mallet remarks that because the later condottieri came from the noble and educated class of Italians, it is not surprising that, in accordance with the custom of the period, they frequently cited classical examples and drew classical parallels to their actions.244 Scala’s comic Capitano promotes himself as a great warrior who is always ready to fight, but his quick retreat at the least threat to his life is covered with elaborate excuses, including classical references. In Day 5 he excuses himself from combat, explaining that he never fights unless he has the permission of Mars.
Scala shows a great many other strangers, outsiders, and those not part of his upper-middle-class households: a dentist, a pimp, minstrels, mountebanks, card sharps, old bawds, rogues, pilgrims, gypsies, astrologers, magicians, thieves, fortune-tellers, beggars, and actors. In real life such figures, many impoverished, were a regular part of the street scene. Robert Henke makes clear that while commedia dell’arte inherited theatrical tropes of poverty, hunger, and degradation that were intended to be funny, representations of poverty also reflected actual conditions in sixteenth-century Europe.245 The transition from the relatively secure feudal structures to a market-based economy that was responsible for the rise of cities brought new forms not only of opportunity but also of poverty.246 By no means were all those leaving the countryside for the cities able to find regular employment. Moreover, in many years the food productivity and distribution were unable to keep pace with the increasing population.247 There were general food crises in much of Europe in the 1520s, 1549, 1555, 1590, and 1602, and everywhere there were local ones as well.248 As food became scarce, its price rose, making life increasingly hard for the poor. Of necessity many resorted to begging and street hustling. Thus, while Scala’s scenarios focus on middle-elite characters and their servants, these characters are often set in a context of poverty and hunger, even in the disguises they themselves adopt.249
Scala’s Day 15 opens with ten scenes consisting primarily of begging and eating, without the introduction of any substantive plot. What we would call lazzi, comic bits, in these instances concerning food and drink, are employed in Days 4, 12, and 21. In each of Days 31 and 15 there are two of them. Scala himself never used the term lazzi in his scenarios,250 and, with the exception of a couple of these hunger and poverty lazzi, all other lazzi are integrated into his scenarios just as are the innumerable other materials that he or his actors either made up or took from theatrical tradition. Even the few seemingly discrete hunger and poverty lazzi may not have seemed as discrete as they seem to us, because food scarcity was omnipresent in daily life. Hunger was the ever-present silent foe. Camporesi observes that “as far back as at least the second half the sixteenth century one gets the very bitter impression that, for two centuries and a half, hunger weighed upon the whole of Italy like a terrible nightmare.”251 Food deprivation and scarcity form the context in the scenarios in which must be seen representations of feasting and generous amounts of food, as in Days 6 and 26.
Hunger may also account for something in the traditional representations of Arlecchino, including his costume of hallucinatory colourful, stylized shreds and patches and perhaps even his clown-like behaviour. Camporesi believes that much of the population of Europe lived in some sort of drugged condition at the time, sometimes as a result of starvation or sometimes as a result of eating deteriorated or tainted food: bread made with mouldy, verminous flour that was accidentally or deliberately adulterated with hemp, darnel, or poppy seeds. The drugged condition might have alleviated the hunger and pain but may also have stimulated wild fantasies and sensual dreams.252 Camporesi cites Robert Garapon:
Many people, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were reduced to living mainly on beau language and feasting on names instead of tasting things. For them, these “succulent” enumerations were like a little compensation for everyday poverty. But let us note well; this compensation obtained by force of words is only possible if a certain intoxication first attenuated the feeling of distance which separated the dream from the reality … Each term in these enumerations, taken in isolation, is nothing but a desire or a lie; it is the magnificent abundance, the uninterrupted flow of words charged with captivating flavours that create the illusion.253
In Day 4 even the poor innkeeper, intending to eat a few mouthfuls of a trunk full of food meant for a customer, is distracted by two rogues, who eat everything in the trunk while engrossing him in a story about the life that people lead in the Land of Cockaigne, the place of plenty.
Poverty and hunger were concerns for everyone. The poor streamed into the towns “at times exhaustedly begging for bread, at other times violently and concertedly demanding it.”254 Their hunger often drove uprisings and lootings that were a source of worry for groups in power. In the unstable economy of early capitalism up to 50 or 60 per cent of the population could, in a crisis, be forced into poverty.255 The representation of poverty and hunger would have tapped into a deep anxiety even among the well-to-do.
Throughout this chapter I have argued that to appreciate the Scala scenarios in particular and commedia dell’arte scenarios in general, it is important to see them in their social context, particularly in the context of the patriarchy. The commedia dell’arte performances enjoyed enormous popularity, in part because they expressed the fears and fantasies of their audience. While Scala focused on the upper-middle-class urban family, thus abiding by the theatrical norm for comedy, he was also representing relationships of critical importance to the family and to the state. In chapters 5 to 8, in which I provide reconstructions of Scala’s scenarios, I show these character relationships in action. In the next chapter, extending my demonstration of the degree to which the scenarios represent life, I show the close relationship between characters’ actions and the setting.