I began, in Mark Edmondton’s words, to befriend Scala’s scenarios. I read them as Scala said he wanted them to be read, as a mirror of life, making clear what that would have meant for him in the context of the ideas about representation in the period. I read them, as Scala’s close friend Francesco Andreini referred to them, as plays, in all but the words. I read them not merely as iterations of earlier literature, dramatic and otherwise, although they surely are that, but as we might read any literature, as independent works of art. I read them in their cultural context. In so doing, I showed that our distance from that period had left many of the cultural references in the scenarios either too easy to overlook because they had been lost to us or not given the same weight they had likely been given by their original audience. These cultural references in the scenarios I examined make clear that the scenarios are much more tightly constructed than has been supposed and that they take up the tensions in personal relationships in daily lives at the time. I hope to have made it difficult to continue to describe the scenarios, albeit not fully scripted, as skeletal or as merely full of all the tricks, devices, and plot elements of comedy found in the earlier plays. I have argued that the Scala scenarios are central to our understanding of commedia dell’arte in its golden age, are full of the life of their time, and bear close analysis in terms of their cultural context and the aesthetic principles they employ.
I encourage others to provide reconstructions of other Scala compositions and of other scenarios to be found in manuscript collections, many now published. Through such reconstructions I believe that, with respect to the Scala scenarios, they will become convinced that, just as the actors were not freely improvising their words but rather calling upon vast stores of memorized material in order to speak, so they were not improvising actions to anywhere near the extent that has been supposed. While then as now there was nothing to stop performers from using a scenario in any way they wished, the value of a Scala scenario – a combination of accretion and invention (like all art and, certainly, all art in the period in which Scala was working) – did not lie solely “in what a company was able to do with it.” The scenarios are, in many cases, carefully crafted, and on that account their performance could not be “radically different with different performers.” The evidence defies the well-worn, and still popular, premises with which I began to teach my acting class.