Commedia dell'Arte

Since 1992, I have been a member of I Sebastiani, a commedia dell'arte troupe that has 8 to 12 performances a year, mostly within the Society for Creative Anachronism.

What is Commedia dell'Arte? It is a form of improvisational comedy, which began in Italy during the 16th century and spread out from there. The performers (not actors) have a scenario in outline form. A professional (i.e., doing it for a living) troupe would have a week or so to improvise an entire performance from stage directions like "Pedrolino and Oratio enter and do something funny" or, our own personal favorite, "Everyone comes on stage and everything is resolved happily".

To clear up a few misconceptions about commedia: since it's improvised and comedy, people seem to think it's easy. Actually, these two features make it by far the hardest form of Western theater.

• The performers write the dialog, which means that they have to have the wit and imagination of a playwright.
• Since it's improvised, there are no "cues" and the timing requirements are ever so much greater than in regular theater.
• Since it's comedy, the timing requirements are unforgiving. An actor can be semi-tragic, and people will still feel; if the actor is semi-funny, no one will laugh at all.

Characters are stock, but usually include:

Pantalone

Pantalone is a merchant of Venice (of whom we'll have more to say later). He's rich, he's greedy, and he's miserly.

Gratiano

Gratiano is a pedant, usually a lawyer. Because Pantalone and Gratiano are old male characters, they are referred to as the "vecchi", which is Italian for old male characters.

Pedrolino and Arlecchino

These are the servants of the old men. Collectively they are known as zanni.

In addition, most plays include amarosi (the lovers), Capitano (a blustering Spanish Captain who's afraid of his own shadow), villains, and others.

Commedia, despite being an Italian art form, has had a great influence on English. Let's start off with a few of the basics:

• The word "pants" comes from Pantalone (via pantaloons, the type of dress that Pantalone wore on stage; before Commedia they were called Venetian breeches).
• The word "zany" comes from, you guessed it, the two zanni. This should give you a good idea of how they act on stage.
• Harlequin is the French version of Arlecchino.

Now for the big influences. I'll just explicitly mention one, from Scenarios of the Commedia dell'Arte, a translation of Flaminio la Scala's collection of scenario (published in 1611) (taken from the argument, or introduction to the play): There lived in Florence two gentlemen called Pantalone and Gratiano. They were of old and noble families, and bore a long hatred for each other ... Oratio [Pantalone's son] had fallen in love with Isabella, daughter of his enemy [Gratiano] ... [Isabella] took, with the help of a physician, a potion which would put her into a death-like sleep ... Recognize it? Sure. Except while Shakespeare turned it into a tragedy, this was actually the setup for a comedy. In point of fact, many of Shakespeare's plays (Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest to name two) share so many points of similarity with commedia scenarios that it seems pretty likely that Shakespeare had to have seen them, or at least known about them.

So, think you can be a commedia dell'arte performer? Try this scenario on for size.

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