This book began as the result of a class I was teaching on acting period plays. First, as is customarily recommended in commedia dell’arte acting manuals, I introduced my students to the characters of commedia dell’arte. Having collected various masks similar in style to those of characters in the commedia dell’arte, I had the students playing the typically masked or made-up characters – the old men, the male servants, and the captain – wear these masks as they worked through a number of the lazzi or gags collected in Mel Gordon’s book of lazzi. I suggested to the students that they might wish to use these lazzi in the scenario that I had randomly selected for them to perform from Henry Salerno’s readily available translation of the Flaminio Scala collection. It was Day 5, Flavio Betrayed. Had I known at the time that the translation was somewhat unreliable, it would not have concerned me much because I had read that commedia dell’arte scenarios were “skeletal” and that the scenario merely provided a pretext for the entertainment.
While the students had a good time and laughed a lot at their doings in working on the scenario, I became increasingly uneasy. During the following summer I spent a week meticulously working through that Scala scenario, scene by scene, while sitting on the floor and moving miniature plastic cowboys and Indians around in lieu of the scenario’s characters. I discovered not only instructions for action, as Tim Fitzpatrick had described, but also character motivations in a very artfully designed plot. Whether the intricacy of the plot had been worked out by the actors, by Scala, or both I could not say, but it became clear that in performance it could not be, as I had read it was, radically different in the hands of different players. Subsequently I worked through a couple of other Scala scenarios, carefully translated, with the same mindfulness. The process was similarly revelatory. In many cases I could not understand much of what was going on in the scenarios or the significance of it, and so I began to read extensively in cultural history. My work, by means of reading and personal queries, was a treasure hunt with serendipitous finds even up to the very end. When I thought I was all but finished, for instance, I came across Deborah Shuger’s essay on Renaissance mirrors, a piece that indirectly sheds light on the otherwise incomprehensible scene of recognition that concludes Scala’s scenario Day 16, The Mirror. Near that time, I also fortuitously learned that musicologists Lucia Marchi and her husband, Robert Kendrick, knew the meaning of singing in the Roman style that is specified in Scala’s scenario Day 6, The Jealous Old Man.
The result of my labyrinthine process is the present book, which combines close reading and cultural history to redefine many of the Scala scenarios as carefully crafted works of art that are rich in cultural history. Early in my process, I conducted a class for graduate students, in which, working with reliable translations of the scenarios, they tried to provide reconstructions, as I had done – without knowing any cultural history. I studied with Antonio Fava, a noted commedia dell’arte performer and mask maker. I directed one of the Scala scenarios with University of Illinois at Chicago students as performers. The latter activities served to convince me that, although I had written about commedia dell’arte performance elsewhere, my focus in this book would not be the performance but the scenarios, which continue to be given too short shrift.
While I intend my work to be of use to performers as well as scholars, I do not intend it to be proscriptive. Actors now frequently use improvisation to free themselves from a text. I show the extent to which Scala’s actors were dependent on a text and further that the full impact of the scenarios relied on the audience’s familiarity with the culture in which the scenarios are imbedded. That culture not only gave significance to the scenarios but also meant that actors, like all those who were part of the early modern rhetorical tradition, had at their command a large amount of memorized material. Actors today do not. In addition, the performances depended on a variety of very diverse dialects and on a kind of verbal exuberance, including long speeches and flowery language not popular today.
I am grateful to University of Toronto Press’s editor Ron Schoeffel who began this book’s process through the press and whose unexpected death on 4 July (after he had, just a few days earlier, cheerfully and affably wished me a happy fourth of July) shocked and saddened me. Suzanne Rancourt, executive editor for scholarly publishing, proceeded with efficiency and grace despite the fact that she had to suddenly assume many of Schoeffel’s responsibilities in addition to her own. The anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press provided painstaking and invaluable suggestions. Maria Carrig usefully critiqued parts of the manuscript and cheered me on. Nancy Cirillo quickly answered all kinds of questions that seemed to me urgent at the time. Brepols granted me permission to publish, as chapter 3, my essay in Viator 41, 1 (2010), “Life in the Street in the Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios of Flaminio Scala.” Taylor and Francis granted me permission to publish in revised form, as chapter 6 of this book, the essay that originally appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly 29, 4 (2009) as “Il finto negromante. The Vitality of a Commedia Dell’Arte Scenario by Flaminio Scala.” The University of Illinois at Chicago Library supplemented its own collection by tirelessly providing me with innumerable books shipped from near and far.