Despite their appeal as social representations and imitations of life, the scenarios would also have appealed as self-defining artefacts with references to prior works of art, distinguishable parts, and qualities of style. In this chapter I explore some of the ways in which the scenarios are highly imitative of models and are artificial constructs. Scala called them favole (plots or fables).
I limit my examination of Scala’s artifice here to three concepts: imitation of the work of others, copiousness, and variety. In the first part of this chapter I make clear the meaning and significance, in the period in which Scala wrote, of the imitation of models, that is, of the works of others. In the second part I examine Scala’s copiousness, artfully knotted and unknotted, and in the third, the variety of which he was justly proud.1 Copiousness and variety are terms I take from the influential polymath Leon Battista Alberti, who, in 1436, claimed that pleasure in painting, as in music and food, comes primarily “from copiousness and variety of things.”2 I add theatre to Alberti’s list. Imitation of the work of others and copiousness, while they would have been greatly appreciated by Scala’s contemporary audience, have caused twenty-first-century critics to founder. Variety is lauded, but imitation of the work of others is derogated, and Scala’s copiousness has seemed too convoluted to attend to. The three concepts, which represent attributes much admired in the sixteenth century, do not allow me to say all that I might say, but they do provide me with a means of organizing many of my observations. I explore Scala’s art and artifice along with his representations of life in detailed reconstructions of four scenarios in the second half of this book.
The first concept, imitation of the work of others, is critical because, as Andrews has definitively demonstrated in his recent edition of thirty of Scala’s scenarios, the scenarios are closely related to and greatly indebted to the earlier written comedy (the commedia erudita) and the novella3 – and doubtless to earlier commedia dell’arte and other street performances lost to us.
The recognition of this indebtedness of scenarios to earlier material, beginning as early as 1935, while it is very important, has not served Scala or other commedia dell’arte scenarists very well.4 In the first part of this chapter I feel impelled, therefore, to make apparent the meaning and significance of the imitation of models in the early modern period and its importance to invention, focusing on Scala.
In the first prologue Scala wrote for his fully scripted play, I finto marito, he made clear that in addition to providing imitation that is “good and true to nature,” as I have argued that he did, he wanted to follow the “rules and precepts” of comedy that had been established by “good practice and good dramatists.”5 The use of these rules and precepts deliberately calls attention to the ways in which the works are highly artificial constructs. Scala evidently saw no inconsistency between the imitation of life and the imitation of models. Nor did some early modern theorists like Lodovico Dolce who maintained “that to imitate the greatest masters was only another way of imitating nature at its highest and most characteristic.”6 The unity of time and place, understood as an imitation of nature, is a well-known case in point. An argument might also be made that realism can be seen in the division of the multiple plots into protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe – replete with deceptions and misunderstandings, the frequently late point of attack, and the presence on stage of everyone for the final recognitions and reversals, usually resulting in the celebration of at least one wedding.7 The style known as Realism is itself a simulacrum of reality based on more or less fixed rules, which are themselves artefacts. At any rate, what disturbs critics is that Scala’s imitation of models extends further than rules and precepts to include not only characters but also bits of business and plot lines.
During the sixteenth century the imitation of models was central and pervasive. It was taught in the schools and widely practised in literature, the visual arts, music, politics, and philosophy. It was at the core of the period’s civilization, even defining conceptions of the self. Medievalist Mary Carruthers observes that the commonest way for a medieval author to depict himself was as a reader of an old book or a listener to an old story, which he was recalling by retelling.8 Similarly, Boccaccio depicts himself as recounting stories that were told by ladies and gentlemen, and Castiglione supposedly records four evenings of discussions among friends. Imitation did not at all have the negative connotation it has today. In every endeavour, observed Quintilian, in the first century CE, “it is a universal rule of life that we should wish to copy what we approve in others.”9
There was no inconsistency between imitation of models and invention. The word invention has the same root as the word inventory. An inventoried memory was essential to invention. Creative thought came from “remembered structures ‘located’ in one’s mind as patterns, edifices, grids, and – most basically – association-fabricated networks of ‘bits’ in one’s memory.”10 But, like the term imitatio, the term memoria needs to be understood in its historical context. Memoria verborum, the term for word-for-word commitment to memory that today we have come to think of as “memorization,” was required of early modern schoolboys. However, the memory of the advanced pupil was to produce a reactivation that was also a reformulation.11 “Memoria refers not to how something is communicated, but to what happens once one has received it, to the interactive process of familiarizing – or textualizing – which occurs between oneself and others’ words in memory.”12 Textus, meaning “texture,” or “weaving,” applied to the layers of text, commentary, and gloss that constitute a text.
The significant memory was of the gist of the material, its res. Memoria rerum was far more highly respected than memoria verborum because it compelled the person recollecting to actively shape the material for the occasion, consistent with the moral emphasis given to rhetoric by Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, and the traditions of monastic prayer. Reshaping was regarded as ethically more valuable. Memory remained central into the early modern period, despite the availability of books, because of the “identity of memory with creative thinking, learning (invention and recollection), and the ability to make judgments (prudence or wisdom).”13 If there could be such a thing as a person without a memory, that person would be without moral character and, in a basic sense, without humanity.
It is true that the ability to recite material perfectly and both forwards and backwards, and in all sorts of combinations, was a revered skill. The revered skill, however, lay not in the simple retention of even large amounts of material but rather in the ability to move the material about instantly, directly, and securely.14 The skill was admired because, as in the expression “I know the material backwards and forwards,” such memorization indicated that one had thoroughly absorbed the material, made it one’s own for use in one’s own oratory or writing.
The standard images of this process, of what Mary Carruthers usefully calls “memorative composition,” were of mellification and digestion.15 Epistle 84 of Seneca the Younger (the playwright), ca 4 BCE–65 CE, was frequently cited as a source for both images (themselves frequently reappearing in various formulations) and was itself ostensibly an imitation. Seneca, in an analogy to nature and without any indication of inconsistency, says that he is repeating what other men say and, at the same time, recommending composition by means of the imitation of nature:
We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in … [Like bees] we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. This is what we see nature doing in our own bodies without any labor on our part; the food we have eaten, as long as it retains its original quality and floats in our stomachs as an undiluted mass, is a burden; but it passes into tissue and blood only when it has been changed from its original form. So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power.16
This analogy was itself repeated in various ways countless times and was even to be found in innumerable visual representations of bees.
The concept of the Renaissance entailed the rediscovery and reuse of the ancients. In that concept, however, was an idea of history, an understanding that things had not always been the same. Borrowing from the ancients was necessarily not the same as simply reusing what had been discovered of them. Latin had been the native language of the Romans; it was not of the Italians. Scala wrote not in Latin but, like a number of recognized authors, in the vernacular language of Tuscany. Italians were not the same as Greeks and Romans. They were Christians. Their culture was different. There could be no intention of exact imitation. Nor was it desired. The process was to be one of mellification, turning nectar into honey.
If the material had not been processed, as bees process nectar into honey, that imitation was dishonourable. Simply copying what one had heard or read was not “authentic imitation.”17 Imitation was to be creative. Quintilian scorned orators who simply repeated the words of others as false imitation. Plagiarism was to be avoided because it made one appear ridiculous and shameful in public. It was a failure of invention because it was a failure of memory.18 Petrarch advised even against repeating oneself.19 In commedia dell’arte the Doctor is an object of fun, representing the pretensions of professional men. He has not digested his learning. He has failed to make what he learned his own.
In the long debate about whether one should imitate a single model or many models, Scala clearly favoured many: “good practice and good dramatists.” Again, Scala was not alone in his recommendation for eclectic imitation. Petrarch, for instance, reminded us of this in his iteration of the bee analogy: “We should write as the bees make sweetness, not storing up the flowers but turning them into honey, thus making one thing of many various ones, but different and better.”20
Thus, too, in Scala’s view, one took what worked from experience and from good dramatists and adapted it to the needs of a new scenario. Petrarch observed that “the bees would have no credit unless they transformed … [the nectar] into something different and better.”21 Scala claimed that he deserved such credit. In his first prologue to Il finto marito, speaking as “The Player,” he said, “Scala’s invention has always been inspired, and that counts for everything in comedy.”22 Accordingly, Scala thought to publish his work. It was invention but, like all invention at the time, it was (and was supposed to be) based on imitation. It was memorative composition. The writer and the audience shared a dialogue of textual allusions and transformations. In recognizing them, the audience could admire the work. Not to engage in that dialogue was the mark, in Mary Carruthers’s word, of a “dolt.”23 Not only did imitation have no negative connotations, but it was essential to this dialogue and to invention. No one was a self-contained entity.
Louise George Clubb’s term theatregram for the pervasive reuse of types of characters, of relationships between and among them, actions and speeches, and thematic design24– which term she first used in 1986 to make clear the means by which the drama of Italy influenced that of Shakespeare – was groundbreaking and invaluable. Earlier searches for direct sources of influence had provided no way to establish this self-evident relationship. The concept of theatregram has further served to set out a connection between improvised commedia dell’arte scenarios themselves and between scenarios and the earlier written commedia erudite. The term theatregram, far from Clubb’s intention,25 has sometimes been misleading in so far as it suggests not memorative composition but simply the recycling and reuse of old materials.26
Clubb’s insight into the manner of the transmission of characters, actions, and speeches from one medium to another and from one culture to another might be usefully contextualized by the term meme, which was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to extend, by analogy, evolutionary principles to account for the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.2 The term theatregram refers to a practice unique to theatre, whereas the term meme applies to all arts, reminding us that the adaptation of pre-existing material perhaps, above all in the early modern period, was not unique to theatre. Like theatregram, the term meme enables us to ascribe a source or sources where a direct source may not be evident. It further entails the idea of creative adaptation (and disappearance), whereas the concept of the reshuffleable suggests something fixed. Biologist François Jacob describes evolution as a tinkerer, and biochemist Steven Johnson conceives of the human body as bricolage, old parts (two eyes, one nose, one heart, four limbs, say) strung together to form something new (alligator, elephant, human).28 Biologist Stuart Kauffman calls these reuses “the adjacent possible.”29
Whatever the term, it must be clear that reuse can be creative and that the process of creative imitation can apply broadly to both life and art. In her 2010 book, Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff shows the extent to which some of the experimental poetry she champions relies on citation and appropriation and can be described as intertext, reproduction, copying, collage, pastiche, assemblage, or mosaic.30 She argues that while appropriation, citation, copying, and reproduction have been central to the visual arts for decades, “the Internet has made copyists, recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of us all … In this new arcade world, writing a poem is no easier than it ever was. Just different.” A quotation she provides from the poet Charles Bernstein humourously recalls the frequent restatements on composition made by Seneca above: “I love originality so much I keep copying it.”31 The scholar’s use of citations makes evident the extent to which academic writing itself is not free creation but imitation. This is not a paradox. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
What mattered for Scala in his invention was not the particular words the actors used but the res, the clearly marked, detailed route map for the actor comparable to what an orator might set for himself. Believing that “plays properly and in essence consist in actions, and only incidentally in narrations,” Scala left the actual words spoken by the actors, in Andreini’s phrase, to those “who were born just with skill in speaking.”32 Scala divided his scenarios into short scenes. In rhetoric, divisio refers to the division of a text into short segments, required for both memorization and composition and putting the segments together in an order, arranging them properly from one to two to three, and so on. Scala’s scenes are the divisions of a text into these short segments. Quintilian advised the orator to arm himself with “the order of cues for both the modus or ‘way’ and the finis or ‘goal’”33 This order of cues, taught to every orator, and provided by Scala in every scene, allows for digression and all sorts of extempore speaking, while keeping the orator or actor from losing his way by forgetting either how much he has left to cover or his chief points.
In his first prologue to Il finto marito, Scala emphasized that good precepts are those that follow from stage practice and not the other way around. When usage resulted only from rules rather than experience, as he suggested they did in many plays written by great men of letters, he said the plays often proved to be lifeless in performance.34 That the commedia dell’arte lasted for two hundred years and became popular all over Europe, while the written drama remained relatively unknown, must have borne some relationship to this truth.
While I would like to show with what effectiveness Scala used his various sources, I cannot do so, for even when we find a fully scripted play similar in important respects to one of his scenarios, as we do with Day 25, we do not know whether Scala was working directly from that source, Gl’ingannati, 1532, although it was frequently republished, or from intervening unwritten imitations of it. In my reconstructions I can only illustrate the skill with which much of Scala’s work is crafted, observing at the same time that none of it adheres to any known model. I am able to note a number of small very theatrical conventions or topoi that Scala evidently found effective in practice and used repeatedly, in effect borrowing from himself: the servant’s breathless or faked breathless entrance (hearkening back to the running slave in Roman drama); his entrance to announce that a character critical to the action cannot be found, immediately after which that character enters, thus delayed and heralded by the announcement; contagious weeping; one actor suddenly carrying another offstage; and the complication that arises unexpectedly just as the scenario is apparently about to reach its happy end.
The only one of these topoi that shows any need to suit a particular actor is the one that requires an actor who is capable of carrying another actor. I instance it here to show how Scala used one of his own theatrical conventions in his scenarios because it is the one that requires the least explanation of its context. Each of Scala’s several uses of it is the same in that it provides a surprising resolution to a scene and allows for a display of an actor’s strength and agility. With each use, however, the convention is also made new.
In Day 3, act 2, Pedrolino, Orazio, and Flavio deservedly throw the Capitano’s cape over his head and carry him off. But then, when Pedrolino tries to carry off the innocent Arlecchino, the Capitano’s servant, Arlecchino turns the tables and carries off Pedrolino. In Day 7, act 1, the carrying off results from the Capitano’s usual foolhardiness: he decides that the best course of action is to abduct a woman with her father present. In Day 18, act 2, the carrying off is the result of a joyful reunion of lovers, and because the youth carries his love into his house, the audience can infer that their relationship will then be sexually consummated. In Day 21 Arlecchino carries indoors each of the four revellers who have come out of the house and fallen down drunk, thus concluding act 2. In Day 25, act 3, Arlecchino saves Franceschina from a beating by carrying her out of the scene. In Day 32, act 1, the carrying off shows that Orazio has gone mad. In Day 34, act 1, Pedrolino defends himself from an attack by two violent women by carrying off his master who has just defended him and who perhaps serves as a shield. In addition to performing a different function in each scenario, each carrying off is integral to the larger action of the scenario.
With my account of the role of imitation, I have shown Scala’s use of the earlier written comedy in a different light than that in which earlier critics have presented it. Andrews describes the process of devising a commedia dell’arte scenario as a making do to fit circumstances. “Theatregrams large and small, taken from existing plays or scenarios, were cut, refashioned and adapted for the roles and talents of the company which was going to perform it. It is likely that some scenarios were originally versions of single written plays. These were then ruthlessly adapted to fit circumstances, and their sources became progressively less recognizable.” The process was one of continual “distortion” of the original source play or plays.35 Thus Scala’s claims to inspired invention in his scenarios, both in the first prologue to his written play Il finto marito and similarly in his letter to readers in his edition of scenarios, are ignored. Likewise ignored are the praise of the famous actor Francesco Andreini in his letter in Scala’s volume of scenarios to the same effect and the words, to the same effect, of Andreini’s son, a playwright and director.36 Testaverde reads Scala’s claim to invention simply in terms of his means, that is, publication of scenarios rather than of plays written out word for word.37 Of course, Scala borrowed, as did every writer of the period, including Shakespeare.38 Such borrowing was essential. Establishing the existence of it in Scala’s work is important. This having been done, notably by Andrews, we need to understand imitation as a constitutive element. We need to look closely at the works in themselves as Scala would have us look at them, as inventions.
I have written elsewhere about probable reasons for, the means of, and the interest in actor improvisation upon commedia dell’arte scenarios, using Flaminio Scala as a reference point.39 I only briefly say here, in a coda to this section, that the interest in the use of scenarios rather than fully scripted plays (ironically defended in the first prologue to Scala’s only written play) can be explained by other than the practical concerns, like poverty, or additional considerations that have been put forth – including censorship, the instability of the working groups, and the different dialects spoken in the different cities where acting troupes performed – important as these concerns may have been. Jeremy Lopez points out that the success of the drama is fuelled by its potential for failure: “The joy of the drama lies in the space for negotiation between success and failure.”40 When the drama is improvised, that sense of the potential for failure is enhanced. The outcome of improvisation is uncertain. The form seems open, the machinery of the plot fragile. The performance takes on the interest akin to that of a sporting event, especially because improvisation suggests that the performance is provided only for the audience at hand and is a one-time occurrence. The uncertainty specifically calls our attention to the improvising actor, not just to the material improvised. In that respect, the form is non-illusory. Other non-illusory conventions in the commedia dell’arte – disguises, night scenes, practical jokes – are of a piece with the intrigue and improvisation in contributing to our sense that the action might fail. Despite our awareness that the trickster and the lovers will prevail, the possibility that the performers and, consequently, the characters will not succeed adds to the excitement. Performers seem to have exaggerated the extent to which they were freely improvising to increase the excitement of the performance and to boast of their skills. In fact, their improvisation was, like Scala’s invention, honey made from the nectar of prior texts written or oral, their own or that of others.
Book 2 of Desederius Erasmus’s De copia or De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (On the Twofold Abundance of Words and Ideas), 1512, was reprinted about 160 times before the end of the century.41 Regularly taught in schools to boys from about the age of ten,42 it emphasized richness and amplification of style – plenitudinousness. The use of a copious style, including examples, comparisons, and contrasts, was a major strategy of composition. It was certainly Scala’s.
“There is no doubt,” confidently asserted Lodovico Castelvetro, “that it is more pleasurable to listen to a plot containing many and diverse actions than one which contains but a single one.”43 Scala apparently found this to be so. He intermixed several plots and their diverse actions. His multiple characters, usually a minimum of two old men, two youths, two young women, and two servants, made two plots, and a captain, frequently trying to intervene in one of them, often made another half plot.44 Sometimes there is even a full third plot.
The audience, when it watches a good scenario, is taken in by the wrenching twists and turns in the plots and, as are the characters, by the urgency of their actions. At their best, the effect of Scala’s comic scenarios is to set their readers into a panic lest the scenario collapse altogether. They force the audience to share in the character’s, scenarist’s, and, at least ostensibly, the actors’ peril before, at long last and beyond all expectation, bringing about the long-due conclusion, the very audacity and hazardousness of which adds to the astounding effect.45 We wonder how the scenarist and his characters will extricate themselves from all the complications and admire him and them for doing so.
At the same time, we, as audience, know, as the characters do not, that the scenario will follow the laws of comedy and end happily and that the characters will be true to form and, for the most part, self-consistent as Horace and Aristotle wished them to be.46 This double-consciousness makes the events that seem sad, exasperating, or frightening to the characters enjoyable for the spectators and, more important, for my argument here, adds to the copiousness of the audience’s perception of the work already provided by the complexity of the interwoven plots. The audience’s familiarity with the characters and with comic form allows them an additional frame of reference.
Audience familiarity with the form allowed Scala and the performers to play with audience expectations. We expect that the braggart Capitano, seemingly all set to fight, will come up with a reason to suddenly excuse himself from doing so, and, outside the frame, we look forward to learning how he will weasel out this time. Scala also turns audience expectations on their head. He does so in Day 10, for instance, which begins with the wedding ceremony of servants Pedrolino and Franceschina. Scenarios customarily culminate in weddings of upper-class youths and girls, with perhaps a marriage of the servants thrown in rather cursorily at the very last moment just for good measure. In this case, Pedrolino’s pending and interrupted wedding constitutes a major plot line, in the course of which Pedrolino, far from being the usual trickster who controls events, behaves very like a hapless upper-class lover; he is left only to despair at having lost his love, Franceschina, and, increasingly desperate to find her, decides that he wants to kill himself. At the last minute the plot line of Pedrolino’s wedding is resolved by a deus ex machina, generally frowned upon by theorists influential at the time unless it could be handled plausibly, as it is here with the arrival for the wedding of Franceschina’s father, Burattino.47 As it turns out, Burattino, like Pedrolino, is a peasant from Bergamo.48 More than that, in a scene no doubt full of rustic dialect and silliness, Pedrolino and Burattino discover that they are brothers. Only after Pedrolino again says that he wants to die because of his love for Franceschina does Burattino point out what the audience has already deduced, that Franceschina is Pedrolino’s niece and thus he cannot marry her. Pedrolino, not the shrewd man we have come to expect, is amazed to learn this. The consolation offered to Pedrolino by Burattino is that Franceschina is his niece. Once again, the older man does not get the girl. If the audience is familiar with the more conventional scenarios, in which, in the end, the upper-class senex is tricked by the servant and does not get the girl, the familiarity with these particulars about the structure of commedia dell’arte and its characters allows this scenario to resonate with those scenarios, adding to the effect of copiousness.
Even the audience member who is not familiar with the form of commedia dell’arte is placed both inside and outside the scenario. This double perspective adds to the experience of copiousness. Many scenes are set at night, during which time the characters cannot see, but the audience can. Scala sometimes states that a character speaks in metaphor or ambiguously, and the character whom he addresses does not understand. Two characters are to speak at cross purposes, each misunderstanding the other. In both cases the audience understands. Asides and eavesdropping, sometimes from a window, that is, not on the same level as the characters overheard, provide perspectives on the actions that are different from that of the speakers. In Day 3, Scala plays literally with point of view: Flaminia pretends to speak to Orazio but really speaks to Flavio standing behind him, whom Orazio cannot see but whom the audience can. Tricks (including bed tricks) and disguises (including fake madness, fake death, and cross-dressing that can lead a male character to fondle another male character, presuming him to be female or, perhaps even worse, disguises that lead a lower-class male character to fondle an upper-class woman, presuming her to be also lower class) all provide the audience with knowledge that the beguiled character does not have.49 Twins, whom Scala uses in only three scenarios, also provide the audience with double vision, inside the action and out. Two incompatible frames are also often provided when the audience is made aware of life taking place, indoors or elsewhere, that the characters onstage cannot know about. In Day 6, for instance, we see the old husband outside zealously guarding the door of the house, dancers dancing and musicians playing, but we know, as most of them do not, that, indoors, the young wife is having sex with her young lover. As Jeremy Lopez says of a Thomas Middleton play, “causing the audience to make adjustments to what it perceives and in what it perceives the characters to perceive, is what the scene, and in fact the play, is all about.”50
At the same time that the scenarios tell a story, their distinctly overt theatricalism – including the texts that reflect other texts, the use of masks, fixed characters, disguises, tricks and lazzi, which are sometimes, like Arlecchino’s ladder acrobatics, not necessarily tricks – calls attention to the artifice involved in telling us that story. Interludes performed between the acts, of course, and the act divisions make the audience very aware of the scenarios as scenarios while they are also aware of the stories they present. If the performance is preceded by a prologue and an epilogue, as are the plays of commedia ridiculosa, the fully scripted imitations of commedia dell’arte that are thought to have been written for amateur performance, these serve to heighten the audience’s sense of the performance as performance, regardless of their content. They encourage the audience to become aware of actor improvisation as distinct from character improvisation. An actor’s bravura performances, the representations of extreme emotions and sudden emotional changes, all call attention to the actor as performer and the scenario as scenario. Applause for such representations, and laughter, also make the audience aware of the presentational aspect of the performance. Moreover, this double awareness at performance increases the copiousness of the audience experience. If the roles were at times doubled, insofar as the actors were both effective and recognized in their added roles, as the characters were in their disguises, the audience’s appreciation of the actors’ skills would have added to the audience’s sense of copiousness and superiority.
The resonance of the experience is increased for the audience in so far as it is aware that the processes in which it engages are very like those in which the characters engage. The audience overhears, it watches, it recognizes, it sees disappearances and reappearances, and it sees both reality and appearance, disguise, transformation, actors becoming what they are not and engaging in acts not theirs by means of disguise, transformation, tricks, magic, or madness. The scenarios are replete with just these processes. Jeremy Lopez even suggests that because the dramatic effects are so “intricately bound up with bringing an audience around to an impossible point of view, comedies … tend to be built on narratives of conversion.”51
If a scenario is performed in a piazza, its set reduplicates that place and the activity in it, with its representations of comings and goings of various classes of people. The two irreconcilable frames or matrices are quite markedly distinguished and are present simultaneously: the theatre as theatre and the story represented. I have been at pains in earlier chapters to call attention to the ways in which the stories and characters also reflect real life. The audience is aware at the same time of that dimension, further adding to the scenarios’ copiousness.
As I argued in chapter 3, the city in which the scenario was actually being performed could easily have been substituted for that named. As Scala suggests, its particulars, including its women, could have been elaborated upon by the Capitano in his grandiose fashion, thus not only suggesting that the scenario had been written for the benefit of its present audience, including women, but also making the scenario self-reflexive. The viewer, necessarily aware both of the actual city sites and women and of the scenario, are kept very busy with any topicality and its use in the story. This audience activity would make the scenario seem more copious than it is on the page.
In certain scenarios Scala plays with the idea of self-reflexivity. Day 39 is about an actress, Vittoria who has come to town and of whom the men are enamoured, suggesting for the audience the actual Vittoria Piissimi, a famous commedia dell’arte actress. Day 2 has a stage with a charlatan, a singer, and an audience. These are scenarios, in part, about theatre. Day 6 has professional musicians and so many stories within the main plot that parallel it that Roberto Tessari refers to the effect as like that of “Chinese boxes.”52 In these ways as well, Scala multiplies the number of frames or matrices.
These incompatible matrices can be and frequently are a source of humour and greatly complicate our sense of the action. So do the malapropisms in which Doctor Graziano supposedly spoke, as well as the metaphorical language of the lovers, the sexual puns, and the variety of dialects with which the audience is obliged to deal. Mad Isabella’s probable reference to Queen Elizabeth in Day 38, sexual double entendres in Day 6, including the tale from Boccaccio, the singing in the style of Norcia (home of pig castrators), the father’s instruction to his daughter in how to manage the handle of a hoe, all increase the sense of copiousness. Various remaining contrasti (verbal conflicts) make clear that metaphors and similes were much favoured. They also increased the sense of doubleness.
Copiousness is further increased by compression. The great number of incidents in a scenario take place within at most twenty-four hours and in a single setting with the action continuous within each of the acts. The point of attack is characteristically late, usually a turning point in the story. It was understood that if the dramatist could contain his diverse actions within a narrow compass, he had, admirably, done something difficult.53 The late point of attack not only compressed the action but also required that the considerable backstory, which often took place over many years, and might be very complicated, needed to be supplied within the scenario, thus packing it even more. There is usually a necessity to resolve the conflict in a hurry: the girls are about to give birth; the groom for the arranged marriage that the girl does not want has just arrived in town; the girl who has feigned death must be rescued from the tomb by her lover. The characters’ out-of-breath or feigned out-of-breath entrances, occurring at times in acts 2 or 3, enhance the sense of the increasing importance of speed as the scenario proceeds. Strangely enough, so do the delays, which all increase intensity: the long love speeches made by the lovers when instead they ought to be taking action, the long speeches of the Capitano that interrupt the action, and the scenes preceding the entrance of a character who is essential to the action, in which it is announced that that character cannot be found. The many brief scenes with their entrances and exits enhance the sense of speed. So does the street setting. It rarely allows characters to sit. Characters entering together frequently arrive mid-conversation, not only providing a sense of offstage life but also allowing the characters to cut quickly to the information and action relevant to the plot.
What Scala would have asked us to admire in the scenarios is not simply the compressed complexity but also the way in which this complexity coheres through repetitions and contrasts. In the early modern period the finding of similitudes, like copiousness, was regarded as a sign of great wit.54 In the scenarios they effect what art historian Heinrich Wölfflin called “multiple unity,” a coordination of parts, that was at least as significant as, if not more significant than, subordination as a principle of organization in which each part is self-sufficient and equal to other parts.55 The repetitions and contrasts, in themselves, further add to the copiousness by providing resonance between the parts.
This coordination appears in the plotting, the characters, the use of props and costumes, the emotions, themes, and staging. Repetitions (parallels and contrasts) in the plotting, small and large, are everywhere. The most obvious of these are effected by the parallelism in characters, often from the two different houses represented onstage. With these characters a great many parallels and contrasts can be effected: two youths love one girl; one youth is faithful to his friend, the other is not; an old man and a young one love the same woman; a servant and an old man love the same woman; two women are rejected by the men they pursue; one servant is clever, the other is not; and one old man is of a generous youthful spirit, the other is not. The doubling, in addition to providing copiousness, also provides a sense of coherence that is represented literally by the multiple marriages at the end that often bring two familial houses together. The addition of characters, including a female servant and a captain, can provide relief from the parallelism or add to it: the Capitano loves a woman who does not love him but is loved by another whom he does not love; the two male servants love the same female servant, et cetera.
I can only begin to suggest the nature of some of the other numerous parallels and contrasts found in the actions of every scenario. Day 10 begins with plans for first one wedding and then, in the next scene, another. These scenes are immediately followed by three scenes, each with a person from out of town who has come with the intention of disrupting one of the weddings. In Day 30 Flaminia is pregnant; the father is revealed to be Cintio; Hortensia, Flavio’s sister, is pregnant; the father is revealed to be the Capitano. Day 14 begins with Orazio telling his servant how much he loves Flaminia. His servant responds with a speech about how many have come to grief because of Love.56 Next, the Capitano enters and tells his servant how much he too loves Flaminia. His servant urges him to pursue her, telling him of all the famous men of arms [like the Capitano himself] who have loved and served love. Not only are these contrasting scenes funny in themselves, but they establish the plot.
It has often been observed that jokes and storytelling depend upon the rule of three. Scala uses this pattern, as I have shown above in Day 10. He also uses it in considerably more complex ways. In three separate scenes in The Tutor, Day 31, act 1, Pedrolino’s mistress badly beats him and/or demoralizes him. Pedrolino, after several attempts at revenge, which have only made things worse for him, stands weeping in pain, his honour virtually destroyed. Arlecchino, servant of the Capitano, then enters with a plate of macaroni for Pedrolino, sent by the Capitano, evidently in lieu of the large sum of money he had promised him. Pedrolino, trying to salvage his honour, if only in front of Arlecchino, provides a noble rationale for his weeping that the audience will understand as mere face saving.57 In empathy for his supposed plight Arlecchino also begins to weep and to eat the macaroni. Then a third servant from the other house enters and proceeds to do likewise, until the macaroni has all gone. The three servants exit one by one, still weeping. Pedrolino, who failed to get even the whole plate of macaroni, much less his money, again with an ironic comment, exits first. Arlecchino exits last, licking the now empty plate.
This seemingly discrete food lazzo, one of Scala’s many scenes of contagious weeping, while not integral to the action, is emotionally and morally essential and establishes the pattern of three. In the end of the scenario these three downtrodden servants, previously bound by their hunger and tears (and by another lazzo in which Pedrolino and Arlecchino discover that they are from the same village),58 get their, albeit redirected, revenge and day of glory – dressed and armed as butchers sanctioned to castrate the evil-intentioned tutor. It would not do for the well-to-do family members whom the tutor has actually betrayed to engage in this unseemly behavior, but the servants can. And in the emotional and moral economy of the scenario the weeping lazzo justifies their doing so. (This moral economy also serves the tutor, who had evil intentions but was prevented from carrying them out. Consequently, the three servants end up only insulting him, beating him badly with sticks, and driving him away – satisfaction enough but resulting in no lasting harm.)
In Day 19 three loyal middle-elite friends struggle over the same middle-elite young woman; the struggle is resolved amicably. The last scene of the scenario visually parallels the plot of the whole scenario by showing and resolving a physical struggle between three servants for a serving woman. In Day 28 Pantalone, Graziano, and Pedrolino all love the married Franceschina. Cintio, Orazio, and the Capitano compete for the seemingly also unattainable Isabella.
Scala frequently, and in surprisingly various ways, greatly extends the pattern of repetitions with serial entrances or exits. Day 26 has both. Act 1 opens with Pantalone upbraiding his son Orazio for three things: chasing women, gambling, and leading a life of vice. Shortly afterwards, for various plausible reasons, a rather random assortment of people go in succession into the house of the now absent Pantalone; there his son, true to the father’s accusations, proceeds to have a party for them, including lavish quantities of food at Pantalone’s expense. When Pedrolino, servant in the house of Pantalone, hears Pantalone unexpectedly arriving home, the audience deduces that the partygoers need to vacate the house in a hurry. But how? The solution is a series of very brazen exits, recalling the sequential entrances into the house, but in which the dramatic interest is successively increased by the order of the exits. Flavio, son of Graziano and friend of Orazio, exits first, silently bows respectfully to Pantalone, and goes into the house of the absent Graziano. Pantalone senses nothing unusual in the friend’s departure. Next, the youth Fabrizio, unknown to Pantalone, does the same. Then Pedrolino does the same, only, for variety, Scala slightly breaks the pattern established by the previous two characters by having Pedrolino exit up the street. Pantalone may be wondering who sent Pedrolino on what errand. But not for long, because immediately thereafter Franceschina, who is unknown to Pantalone, comes out and for some reason that Pantalone cannot fathom has a large food chest on her head. She too silently bows and goes into Graziano’s house. Then a gypsy, of all things, comes out, silently bows, and goes into Graziano’s house. Pantalone’s own son does the same. By this time, the audience must think that this is the last of the exits, their having built to a climax with the previously upbraided son. They will have forgotten Fabrizio’s servant, Arlecchino, who exits last. Often, just before the resolution of Scala’s comedy, an unanticipated complication arises from some source, like the Capitano, that the audience may well have forgotten. This minor bump in the road towards the, then inevitable, happy resolution allows the audience to savour the comedy just a bit longer. So, too, the exit of the forgotten servant extends the lazzo beyond its seeming end and in a surprising way. He, too, silently bows and enters Graziano’s house where, we can imagine, the partying continues. The thoroughly confused and bamboozled Pantalone without a word, like the others, goes off up the street, bowing to unseen passersby or to the audience,59 and the act ends.
Very often the acts’ endings reflect back on their openings, giving the acts a sense of closure and completeness. In Day 27 the scenario opens with Pantalone who is delighted to have just received a letter confirming the match he had arranged between his son and Isabella. At the end of the act, on hearing that the girl is dead, Pantalone exits weeping. Parallels and contrasts provide coherence.
In Day 39 a lazzo, used primarily to indicate the passage of time while the husbands are at the theatre, is neatly made to cohere metaphorically with the central action. In the lazzo the servants who are gambling at cards literally lose even their pants. Meanwhile the wives within with their lovers are presumably losing their bloomers as well. When the husbands unexpectedly return home early from the theatre, the wives explain that they were merely whiling away the time playing cards with the men within serving as their protectors. This example and the weeping lazzo described above make clear how subtle and easy to overlook the relationship between lazzo and scenario can sometimes be and why the lazzi in Scala’s scenarios have been seen as discrete entities. The lazzi may well have been ones that Scala borrowed from elsewhere, but he carefully integrated them into his own work.
Act structures can parallel one another. In Day 10, act 2 begins with noise inside Pantalone’s house, and then Flaminia fleeing from within, followed by Isabella intent on killing her with a naked sword. Then from Graziano’s house Orazio comes out with a naked sword. In the next scene Pantalone appears with a pistol. Act 3 begins with noise in Pantalone’s house, and then Franceschina fleeing from within, pursued by Arlecchino with a naked weapon in hand. Pedrolino comes out of the house, holding a club, to rescue Franceschina. In the next scene Pantalone comes out armed.
Emotions may change quickly, providing emotional contrasts between scenes and within a single scene and character. Opposites, like repetitions, pattern the copiousness. In Day 14, act 3, Flavio grieves for the supposed death of Isabella. Then her father, the Doctor, believing his daughter Isabella to be dead, faints from grief, thereby appearing as if he himself were dead. Seeing this, Flavio grieves more. In the very next scene, after a series of recognitions and revelations, Isabella, the Doctor, and Flavio all rejoice. In Day 27 Pantalone’s son, hearing confirmation of his impending marriage to Isabella, whom he has never met, is very pleased. In the very same scene, hearing that Isabella is dead, he faints with grief. Such rapid and extreme emotional transformations and contrasts are frequent in the scenarios. Early moderns endorsed the view of both Cicero and Quintilian that in real life one could suddenly be overcome by a violent passion and that it could quickly change.60 In these instances, however, Scala may be portraying the characters as rather fatuous.
Acts are often tied together by these contrasting emotions that at the same time serve to remind the audience of what has gone before. Day 32, act 2, ends with Pedrolino exiting alone, laughing at the trick he has played on Flavio; act 3 begins with Flavio still frightened by the trick. Day 31, act 2, ends with Pantalone and Isabella very happy; act 3 begins with Orazio enraged. Not only are the emotions contrasting, but they also represent opposing perspectives on the same events or characters, the opening of one act reminding us of the action with which the previous one closed.
There are also repetitions and contrasts in what is said, insofar as the scenarios indicate that. In Day 9 from inside their respective houses first Pantalone calls for his servant Pedrolino, after which Graziano calls for his servant Arlecchino. Then the old men come out. Pantalone complains that Pedrolino is too interfering, Graziano that Arlecchino is too lazy. Pantalone congratulates the Doctor for having married off his daughter and says that he would like to find a husband for the girl who is his ward.
Props and costumes may be repeated, serving as a motif: Day 5, letters; Day 10, brandished weapons; Day 16, rings; Day 26, carpets; and Day 35, door bars and the contents of a dishpan and a chamber pot. In fact, some scenarios are named not after persons or activities but after the prop, or props, that serves to make everything in them cohere and constitute their most memorable feature: Day 16, The Mirror (Lo specchio); Day 26, The Alexandrian Carpets (Li tappeti Alessandrini); and Day 39, The Portrait (II ritratto). Day 7 presents a sequence of disguises in which each successive entering character puts on the clothing of the preceding character. Such disguising calls attention to the performance itself as artifice. In Day 15 Pantalone, Pedrolino, Capitano Spavento, Arlecchino, Flavio, and Flaminia, for various reasons, all enter dressed as beggars. In Day 25 Isabella is recognized in her disguise as a male; so when her identical twin brother comes to town, he is presumed to be Isabella in disguise. Twins are a kind of repetition.
As Joel Altman has pointed out for scripted plays, the intrigue in the scenarios sometimes serves as an examination of what might otherwise be a debate topic:61 which is more important, male friendship or love; which is more important, filial duty or love; should an old man take a young wife; is theatrical performance of value?62 In actions representing the various aspects of the questions in the scenarios, parallels and contrasts are provided.
Scala is also very attentive to visual patterning and rhythms to provide parallels and contrasts. In Day 28, act 1, Flaminia appears at her window and speaks to the Capitano below. Then Isabella appears at her window and speaks to the Capitano below. Later in the act the women appear at their windows in reverse order as silent observers. This is a simple visual pattern.
The use of the windows for rhythmical and even musical effect is most marked in Day 37, La caccia (The Hunt). The opening, musically structured like a canon, almost entirely comprises sequential entrances. At dawn each of four old men, Pantalone, Graziano, Claudione, and Burattino, in their separate houses come to their windows in sequence, sounding their hunting horns to signal their readiness for the hunt. After each of the four old men has appeared, each goes back in, apparently in the reverse order from that in which they appeared, Pantalone last. Then Isabella comes to her window in Pantalone’s house, speaking of dawn and of her lover. The probably florid language, “reproaching Aurora [the dawn] because she does not leave the arms of her old lover Titon,” also seems to be a farcical version of something like La caccia, a comic madrigal composed by Alessandro Striggio (1536–92), replete with the noises of horses, riders and the cries of animals, which begins, “Sprung from the icy arms of Titon, / dawn appears in the heavens in a shining chariot; / … Brave young men, valiant and strong/ … bound from out your downy beds, / for a powerful horn/ rings out …/It summons you to the hunt,” and ends with the conclusion of the hunt.63 As is made clear by the title to Lucia Marchi’s essay on the musical form La caccia (TheHunt), “Chasing Voices, Hunting Love: The Meaning of the Italian Caccia,” the none-too-hidden real object of the hunt in song and visual representations was usually sexual (see figure 4.1).64 Flaminia comes to her window on the other side of the stage in Burattino’s house and speaks of dawn. Then Pedrolino at his window opposite in Pantalone’s house comes to his window and speaks of dawn and his lover. After a love scene in the street with Pedrolino who has come from Pantalone’s house and Franceschina who has come from Burattino’s house opposite, and their exit into Pantalone’s house, Arlecchino comes out of Graziano’s house into the street and sounds his horn. Arlechinno thus ties together the hunters’ entrances at the windows with the ones that now follow from the doors, again following canon form. Graziano enters the street from the same house. Claudione enters the street from his house. Then Burattino enters the street from his house. Pantalone, like Franceschina and Pedrolino before them, breaks the sequence of one person entrances; he enters while beating Pedrolino and Franceschina. The whole sequence is carefully choreographed to provide both repetition and surprise. The second sequence of old men is like the first except that Pantalone, who begins the first, ends the second. Each sequence of one-person entrances, first from the windows and then from the doors, is broken by a multiple-person scene. Each sequence ends with entrances from opposite sides of the stage. Repetitions and contrasts in entrances are so marked that they are a, if not the, central aspect of the act. The old men, ludicrously taking up the aristocratic pastime of the hunt but with a cat and a rooster instead of a dog and a falcon, thematically frame and set the tone for the real object of the hunt – the romantic love intrigues that comprise the rest of the scenario. The opening is not “irrelevant padding” but a low comedy parallel to these intrigues.65
4.1. Giovanni Battista Castello, called “Il Bergamasco” (1509-69), Huntsman on Horseback Chasing a Stag in a Wood, Watched by a Maiden. By permission of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
The hunt itself used traditional instruments and formulaic signals like one for having spotted the prey and another to indicate the gathering around it.66 Those in the audience who were familiar with the musical references and the aristocratic hunt itself would have appreciated the parodic doubling with these as well.
Jeremy Lopez argues that in early modern English drama “each part of the play resonates with every other part creating a surfeit of coherence, or potential coherence. Playwrights construct plays that contain and interconnect a dizzying number of levels, to the point that the fundamental components of those levels – plot and characters – are in danger of collapsing under the sheer weight of potential significance.” These connections, he notes, call attention to the artificial relationships between performer and role, stage and audience.67 This observation, I have argued, can readily be extended to Scala’s scenarios. The internal connections and also the external references like those to earlier works visual, musical, and literary add to the sense of their copiousness. Copiousness does not provide and indeed may disrupt the unity provided by a developing linear action, but, as J.L. Styan has suggested, to insist on this in early modern drama may be to look for the wrong kind of unity.68
It is nevertheless the case that in the main the copiousness in Scala’s scenarios does cohere in unified actions. Having assembled or generated the various parts out of which the scenario was to be constructed, Scala arranged the material in a clear and coherent sequence that allowed each element to show to its best advantage; he marshalled the “discoveries,” as Cicero would have it for orations, “not merely in orderly fashion but with a discriminating eye for the exact weight” to be given to each part, and for the joining of parts.69 Quintilian observed that even a slight dislocation of the parts was deleterious.70 Merely assembling and rearranging parts of various plays did not suffice to make a scenario, certainly not a good one. The material used had to be skillfully manipulated. Dispositio (arrangement) was, after invention, the second most important of the five parts of oratory. In the detailed analysis of four of the scenarios that follows this chapter, I hope to show the extent to which Scala’s abundant actions are “artfully knotted and wonderfully unknotted.”71
In his preface to his collection of scenarios Scala said that it “contains such a variety of invention that it will be able to satisfy the appetites and tastes of many different intellects.” I believe that he referred not only to the invention within scenarios that I show through my reconstructions but also to the variety of scenarios. It is to the latter that I now turn my attention.
Erasmus claimed that “variety is so powerful in every sphere that there is absolutely nothing, however brilliant, which is not dimmed if not commended by variety … The mind is always looking round for some fresh object of interest. If it is offered a monotonous succession of similarities, it very soon wearies and turns its attention elsewhere … This disaster can easily be avoided by someone who has it at his fingertips to turn one idea into more shapes than Proteus himself is supposed to have turned into.”72
Writing about the various Italian Renaissance collections of novelle, Janet Smarr argues that they were intended, in the variety of both their forms and their characters, to create a world in small. That sense of completeness, she says, was symbolized by their authors’ frequent choice of large round numbers of tales: one hundred for Giovanni Boccaccio; fifty for the less ambitious Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Masuccio Salernitano, and Giambattista Basile; and three hundred for the tireless Franco Sacchetti.73 The range of situations in which the characters are employed in Scala’s comic scenarios suggests that he similarly set out to provide the variety of the world in small. While working within the given constraints, he was protean. I have already shown the range of societal, principally domestic, issues that Scala takes up through a considerable range of interactions between citizens and their offspring, with servants, between lovers and friends, with women, and with outsiders. From scenario to scenario Scala also varied plots, mood, character roles, even props and their use, and, to a limited extent, setting.
Often Scala’s scenarios begin with Pantalone, attesting to his importance in almost all of the scenarios. Less commonly, but often, the lead youth, Orazio, is given primary focus at the opening. Isabella, the lead female, can also begin scenarios. With these important characters Scala got the attention of the audience. However, he clearly abided by no formula in this matter. On occasion, Flavio, the Capitano, Franceschina, a group of musicians, or even a processions of slaves is given primary focus at the opening. Day 32 begins with scenes of extended exposition; Day 16 begins with a chase scene; Day 35 begins with Pantalone beating his son.
Scala frequently introduces all the major characters at least by name in the first act, except when a surprise, late introduction is central to the plotting. In Day 28, Flavio, whose magic is central to the plot resolution, is introduced only in the second act, and he does not present himself as a magician until very near the end of that act. Occasionally, at the end there appears a character functioning as a deus ex machina.
The major characters are initially motivated, sometimes before the scenario begins, by love or lust, honour and friendship, or loyalty. The obstacles to the resolution of an action may be the old men but can also be the protagonists themselves, friends, other lovers, or the failure to recognize the sought-after loved one or correctly understand his or her intentions. Sometimes people are just confused about what they want.
Most of the scenarios begin with a plot complication or with what soon turns into one, usually in the primary plot. But Scala sometimes delays the introduction of any plot complication for many scenes, at the extreme in Day 15 for twelve scenes and in Day 37 for almost the whole of the first act.
As we know, the plots are at least nominally structured around love relationships that usually result in ostensibly happy marriages. Scala played within this given convention. In Day 2 there are two intermarriages between Turks and Italians. For much of Day 9 Isabella has a fake husband who is actually her nursemaid. In Day 13 there is premarital sex that we can infer leads to three marriages, but there are no marriage celebrations within the scenario. In Day 30 two children are born out of wedlock prior to any marriages. In Days 17 and 40 the husbands who are presumed to be long dead return. Day 40 ends with a marriage, but that ending is insignificant compared to Orazio’s being sent off at the same time to live in solitude, unfit to live among humans.
Scala endlessly varied the complications in the love relationships. The lover has gone off – to seek his brother or his father or to fight in a war, or he has been abducted by Turks or called home from university. A widow pursues a youth who does not want her; two friends or brothers love the same woman; a man loves two women; the lover is presumed dead; the youth loves the daughter of the family’s enemy; the girl does not wish to marry at all or she suspects her lover of faithlessness. The husband is not attentive, has gone off and not returned, or is old and impotent.
Quite a number of marriage plots turn the tables on our expectations for them. Day 27 seems to entail the usual failure of the arranged marriage plan, but in the end it succeeds. In Day 29 a daughter predictably disappears in pursuit of her love, but then the scenario turns out to be about male bonding, and the daughter marries the faithful friend instead of the youth she had intended. Rather than with a plot in which a father arranges a marriage for a child in another city, Scala begins with a widow arranging a marriage between her daughter and a stepson living in the same house.
The most memorable part of the plotting may have little to do with the requisite loves and marriages, as is sometimes reflected in the scenarios’ titles: The Two Old Twins, Flavio Betrayed, The Tooth Puller, The Two Captains Who Look Alike, Flavio the Fake Sorcerer, The Pedant, The Fake Blind Man, The Hunt, The Madness of Isabella, The Proper Punishment.
Actions are most often both complicated and resolved by any number of misunderstandings including those resulting from misread intentions, mixed-up letters, speaking at cross-purposes, and mistaken identity, including twins being mistaken for one another, and people returning in unrecognizable form after long absences. Frequently the misunderstandings result from deliberate deceptions. Virtually every character engages in these in one scenario or another: old hags, young men, and those on the run or in pursuit of lovers. When he is not a sympathetic lover, the Capitano perpetually tries to misrepresent himself as something grander than he is. He is misrepresentation personified. Graziano can pretend to knowledge he does not have, and Pantalone can pretend to penury. People decide to disguise themselves, or are persuaded to disguise themselves, to both good and bad effect. Women travelling to see their loved ones can disguise themselves as pilgrims and be mistaken for whores. They can take a potion that allows them to seem dead; returning, they can be mistaken for ghosts.
Deliberate misunderstandings can result from tricks. These can be perpetrated by fake magic, fake ghosts, fake doctors, a fake husband. In the scenarios, tricks are primarily carried out by women, youths, and servants – those who are otherwise powerless. Pedrolino is Scala’s primary trickster. Through his facility in creating a fictitious reality to engage the credulity of the prospective victim, he sometimes gains enormous power and affects the lives of many people. His tricks are regularly designed to benefit the young, implausibly, never for his own financial gain.
Perhaps the most memorable of the tricks are the practical jokes. The lazzi or comic bits can be tricks that, while integral to the plots, generally do not affect them in any profound way. Practical jokes can also play a relatively insignificant role in the plot, in which case the distinction between the lazzo and the practical joke is not absolute – for instance when Pedrolino in Day 21 gets back at Arlecchino for a sleepless night by persuading him that an emetic is a sweet wine, which he then drinks. In this case, it serves Pedrolino as revenge, which is seen as part of human nature and necessary to uphold one’s honour.74
More important, the whole plot can hinge on a practical joke. In Day 12 Pedrolino gets back at his master, Pantalone, for having bitten him, by persuading five people, serially, to remark on his horribly bad breath; as a result, Pantalone has four perfectly good teeth pulled by a fake dentist. Robert Henke observes the curious mixture of pain and festivity that often characterizes the practical joke.75 The most satisfying tricks, in life and on stage, like this one, fit the offence.
In The Book of the Courtier Castiglione distinguished two kinds of practical jokes: (1) someone is clearly tricked in an adroit and amusing fashion, and (2) a net is spread and a little bait is offered so that the victim causes his own downfall – as in the examples of the emetic and the tooth-pulling.76 The tricks are frequently no less than the characters deserve, particularly the masters or the Capitano. In the moral economy of Day 12, Pantalone gets his comeuppance, not only for biting Pedrolino but also for competing with his son for a woman.77 We shall see in my reconstructions that Scala employs both kinds of tricks, even in the same scenario.
Tricks, like misunderstandings in general, can both complicate the action and lead to its resolution, as in Day 6 when, with Pedrolino’s help, Orazio arranges to sleep with Pantalone’s wife, Isabella, thus discovering that she is a virgin. On the basis of that revelation, her marriage can be annulled and she is free to marry Orazio.
In many cases, when the old men lust after young girls, the servants take it upon themselves to deliberately humiliate the old men publicly with bed tricks. In Day 9, after Pantalone arranges a marriage between his ward and another old man and further decides to first sleep with this ward himself, in a trick of ultimate and fitting humiliation Pedrolino gets Pantalone into bed with Arlecchino, an adult male. Such a trick, as Donald Beecher observes, instances the role of the trickster “as self-appointed social critic and illegitimate legislator, … a kind of culture hero.”78 The trick exposes self-deceptive, overbearing, and misguided behaviour for what it is and deliberately serves as corrective to it. No matter that Arlecchino is tricked, dishonoured, and perhaps raped in the process; he is a servant, collateral damage. Similarly, collateral damage is done in Day 38 when Pedrolino tells Pantalone that his son Flavio is dead, although he is not. The deception helps to quickly bring the confused and badly behaving Orazio to his senses, and as a result he properly marries the long-suffering Isabella. Pantalone is a wholly innocent victim of the deception, but he is quickly disabused, and the deception serves the morality of the scenario as a whole.
The tricks do not always lead to a resolution as they do in the examples above. In Day 26 Pedrolino uses tricks to sell his master’s household goods to support the spendthrift son. When the son wants yet more money to spend, Pedrolino points out that nothing remains to sell but the father. He then even thinks of a trick to manage that sale. The tricks are memorable, but the resolution requires Pedrolino’s sudden unconvincing change of heart and a deus ex machina.
Occasionally the tricks seem merely gratuitous. In such cases they give the impression of having been introduced merely to keep the plot from sagging or even in lieu of a strong plot. In Day 32, for instance, the plot consists of hardly more than tricks played by Pedrolino with the weak justification that he “wants to confuse everybody.”79 Perhaps in Day 3, again in the morality of the scenario as a whole, the fact that Pedrolino is cuckolded and deceived about that is punishment for the seemingly gratuitous and mean-spirited tricks he plays; the trickster is tricked. However, that might not be satisfaction enough for a modern audience who takes no pleasure in mean-spiritedness.
In all the scenarios the main characters are brought together onstage for the final recognitions and resolutions. The relationships, and with them the identities that are largely defined in terms of these relationships, are restored – those of fathers with sons and daughters, of lovers, of friends, and of masters and servants. The trickster, who has worked covertly, confesses/ takes pride in the central role that he has played in effecting the resolution. Most often, the recognitions are such that everything is made known to everybody, an important reason for massing everyone on stage. But there are exceptions to the general rule that everything is disclosed. In Day 6, Pedrolino’s trick on Graziano is apparently never exposed. At the end of Day 39 the husbands are none the wiser about their wives’ adulteries. In Day 21 the fathers remain unaware that their daughters are about to give birth. In Day 25 Fabrizio cannot be brought on stage because his role is doubled, and only the audience can possibly be privy to this metatheatrical information.
The recognitions that resolve the conflicts and confusion are usually followed logically enough by resolutions in the sought-after weddings, for which, conveniently, everyone is already on stage to celebrate. The end of Day 31 brings everyone on stage, not for a wedding but for the festive humiliation of the pedant. When the resolution is effected by Pedrolino’s tricks, he is inevitably forgiven. Perhaps we are to believe that no real harm was done; everything ends happily. However, Pedrolino’s remorse for what he has done and the subsequent pardon are as unrealistic and unpersuasive as the happily-ever-after marriages that are effected through the trickery. It may not have been only Quintilian’s insistence that the conclusion be as brief as possible, an idea “hammered into the heads of many schoolboys” that accounts for the rushed ending of so many early modern plays;80 it was also best not to dwell on the improbability of the resolution. At the end of Days 12 and 37 Pedrolino even has the temerity to forgive everyone else for the pranks he has played.
When concepts such as honour, the conflicting demands of love and friendship, and self-sacrifice complicate the love intrigue, the essentially spiritual basis of these issues calls on something less facile than tricksters to untangle them and achieve a happy resolution. Plots involving such concepts also tend to be more serious than those that are resolved by wit alone.
While we know nothing about the ordering of the scenarios in Scala’s collection, we do know that in the latter part of the sixteenth century there was increased interest in mixed dramatic genres. The comic scenarios, particularly in the latter part of Scala’s collection – with their powerful female roles, their exalted self-sacrifice and fidelity, their tragic potential, and some psychological complexity – are testament to Scala’s interest in diversification even within the comic genre.81 Day 29, like Day 27, is rather sombre, and the resolution is more troubled. Most noticeably in later scenarios (Isabella the Astrologer, The Madness of Isabella, The Proper Punishment), Scala experiments with commedia grave (serious comedy). As if to call attention to the variety, the commedia grave alternates with some of Scala’s most light-hearted scenarios. The variations in tone bear some correlation to the amount of exposition required by the scenarios. Exposition tends to slow down the action and may suggest motivations that are more complex than those present in the purely farcical scenarios.
Most scenarios are set during the day or primarily during the day. Almost all the comic scenarios end during the day, presumably a happier time than the night and a more natural time for clearing up misperceptions. Night could add variety to mood within and between scenarios. All of act 1 and most of act 2 of Day 29 are set at night. The scenario begins with Pantalone’s alarm that his daughter has run away. Orazio has secreted her in his friend Flavio’s house. In the dark she is stolen from the house, not by Orazio but by the undesirable Capitano who is mistaken for Orazio. Scala sets all of Day 7, The Woman Believed to Be Dead, except the resolution, at night. The very dark ending of Day 40, in which Isabella sends the treacherous Orazio off to live in solitude, is suitably set at night. But night was not always correlated with fear, death, and exile; it could also be a time of mischief and merriment. In Day 9, under cover of night and disguise, Pedrolino gets everyone, including himself, into bed with someone. Like character, which I discuss next, the time of day was part of Scala’s palette.
Scala generally employed the standard characters in each troupe to serve in the variety of interactions he devised. He would have envisioned and been able to utilize each character in a readily identifiable costume, with distinctive facial mask or make-up, speeches in the character’s distinctive dialect or foreign accent, and speech mannerisms, as well as class-, sex-, and character-appropriate gestures and movement, and perhaps with a signature hand prop: a stick, a sword, or a money bag. He would have been further guided by the particular strengths and weaknesses of the actors with whom he worked and by their inventions. He would have been expected to utilize most or all of a troupe’s actors in each scenario in some significant way. The actors would have wanted to display, and the audience would have wanted them to display, their particular skills in physical actions including in duelling, impersonations of other characters, acrobatics, lazzi, and speaking. They would also have wished for opportunities for the Capitano to display his bombast; the lovers, their arguments and love duets, jealousies, despairs, madness, grief, and shock; and the old men, their suspicion, rage, and lust. These skills and routines would have both limited the variety and inspired it. They allowed considerable range, which Scala explored. Ferdinando Taviani commented that “it is erroneous to say that the same character appeared over and over,” and, in that respect, the references to masks, the common term for all the characters including the unmasked innamorate and female servants, are misleading.82
Because the characters in commedia dell’arte have received far more attention than has any other aspect of the form, and because I think that for the most part they are most reliably deduced from the scenarios, I point to only two roles, those of Isabella and Burattino, to suggest the considerable range that each of the characters had. Isabella, an upper-class innamorata, could be vengefully jealous, a very undutiful daughter, an adulterous wife, a devoted lover, an astrologer, a witless girl, or a very smart plot manipulator. She could travel great distances; she could remain at home; she could feign madness or actually be mad. She could sing, dance, and convincingly disguise herself as a gypsy, a manservant, a gentleman, or a French-speaking widow. I have noted that Scala claimed he published scenarios that had already been performed, in part to keep them from being plagiarized. It seems unlikely, given the various troupes with which Scala worked and the changes of actors in troupes, that any single actress played all the roles to which he later gave the name Isabella. Moreover, unless we assume (contrary to what Scala tells us) that quite a number of the scenarios were written or largely rewritten for the collection, we cannot see the dramatic range of the character Isabella as evidence of Scala’s attempt to praise or make use of the skills of one particular actor, namely Isabella Andreini, whose character name he used.
The ordinarily lower-class character Burattino appears in only about half of the comic scenarios. He is never cunning, but he can be perceptive, as he is in Day 25, or foolish, as in Day 28. When an inn is required, Burattino is frequently its host. He can also be a servant, a beggar, a peasant, a postman, a patient father, and a clueless husband, and in Day 37 he ascends to the role of merchant. Each of the standard characters has as much range as have Isabella and Burattino.
In addition to the standard characters in the scenarios, from time to time Scala introduces old hags, musicians, hunters, a gardener, a pig castrator, policemen, postmen, rogues, porters, “Turks,” slaves (including white slaves of Christian masters), an Armenian, a hangman, a tutor, an actress, and a regent. While a few scenarios (Days 5, 6, 22, 23, and 38) are notable for entailing no disguises at all, characters could appear and actors could act in a great panoply of disguises including as other characters in the scenario, as females, as males, as dead, as mad, as French, as ghosts, pilgrims, gypsies, Turks, slaves, beggars, rogues, servants, notaries, physicians, dentists, magicians, and butchers.
That Scala’s characters, with few exceptions, remain self-consistent from the beginning of the scenario to its end83 has been taken to mean that within the twenty-four hours during which the action is to have taken place, there is no character development or growth. But this is not altogether true. Friends overtaken by passion do come to their senses. Jealousies are overcome. Fathers forgive their children. Old men recognize their foolishness. Often the changes are abrupt but they are profound. And the implication is that they will be lasting.
In chapter 3, I had much to say about the appropriateness of the fixed street setting to the representation of sixteenth-century Italian life. For purely artistic purposes, Scala provides some variations in both the setting and its use as well as in the props. Day 36 requires both a palace and a bordello. The set for Day 11, specifying a garden off to one side, suggests something of an experiment and harkens back to a medieval set with two locations in the single space (décor simultane). The distance between the houses seems, in imagination, variable, like the distance between actors, depending upon whether they are engaged in a single action or two actions set side by side at the same level, or providing asides. While the houses provide a definite locale and delineate the distinct households, in imagination the locale could represent different cities, and the designated locales offstage to which characters supposedly exit or from which they arrive facilitate the supposition of different settings.
The house doors provide opportunity for vigorous knocking, for surprise entrances, for hiding behind, and, as we have seen, for extended lazzi that sometimes involve many characters entering or exiting through them. They served as loci for female characters whose required decorum confined them to the house. There could be one functional window or as many as six. Windows were used for the appearance of a single person or, rarely, two people, mostly women. The person in the window was usually either secretly overhearing the action below or openly participating in it. Windows could evidently be at different heights, low enough for a woman in it to have her hand kissed by someone at street level, or to climb out of it, or to close its shutters in someone’s face. A window could be at such a height that it was visually interesting when something was thrown from it or it necessitated a ladder to climb up to it.
While in general the street setting and the speed of the action meant that there was no furniture on stage, items of furniture were added for special occasions and places: a chair for the supposedly wounded Capitano, a beautiful chair for the supposedly dead Isabella, a nice one for the patient of the fake dentist, a stool for a supposedly blind beggar, a regal chair for the Regent, a bench and two chairs for revelations in a mirror, benches and tables for a country party, and chairs and a table to establish a park.
I provide only a list of hand props. Relatively few in number in each scenario, collectively they indicate the range of actions in the scenarios and their visual appeal: various musical instruments, weapons of every sort (including a frying pan), flasks of wine, food, silver dishes, a packet of letters, a handkerchief, a uroscopy flask, luggage, shoes, lanterns, cords, jewels, playing cards, fake blood, bandage material, ladders, a hangman’s noose, a mirror, a money pouch, a bucket of water, hunting horns, hunting hounds, a live cock, a live monkey, a live cat, hunter’s poles with dead animals, eight barrels for water, iron chains for slaves, shoes, a charlatan’s wares, blacksmith’s tools, a hoe, and a small portrait of a woman.
In short, within the constraints of dramatic convention, including the domestic confine, Scala’s scenarios vary greatly in plot, tone, character, settings and their uses, and props. In my detailed analysis of four comic scenarios I establish that each, differing one from another, also provides carefully patterned variety within it. Scala was both imitative of models and inventive.
In each of the four chapters that follow, through detailed examination of a single scenario in each chapter I establish that this is the case. I also show the extent to which each of the scenarios imitates life.