General. Keeping up with the literature in two subjects, Elizabethan theatre and the commedia dell'arte, where so much contemporary work is being done, is not easy, but it seems to me that there is a significant difference between the current state of scholarship in the two areas. Very little new evidence has recently come to light (or indeed is now likely to) concerning the formation and organization of theatre companies and the creation of performance texts for the London playhouses, and contemporary scholars, although they often employ new methodological approaches, are mostly working from material published by Greg, Chambers and others in the early years of this century. In other words, T. W. Baldwin is just as likely to have got it right as anyone writing today. In Italy, however, the case is different: archives are scattered diffusely in collections around the country, and new documentary evidence is still coming to light. 1993, for instance, saw the publication of a body of correspondence written by leaders of the principal commedia dell'arte companies which, Siro Ferrone argues, substantially affects our understanding of how they worked. [Cf. Siro Ferrone, ed., Comici dell'Arte. Corrispondenze (G. B. Andreini, N. Barbieri, P. M. Cecchini, S. Fiorillo, T. Martinelli, F. Scala) a cura di Buratelli, C., Landolfi, D., Zinanni, A., 2 vols. (in the series ‘Storia dello Spettacolo. Fonti’, Florence, 1993).Google Scholar In this paper I have not been able to take account of this publication, except where Ferrone draws on it in Attori mercanti corsari, cf. n. 31. For commedia see Heck, Thomas F., Commedia dell'Arte: A guide to the Primary and Secondary Literature (New York and London, 1988).Google Scholar For the working conditions of playwrights and performers in the London playhouses the essential works are still Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar and The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton, 1984).Google Scholar

1. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless, 1592, p. 27, quoted in Richards, Kenneth and Richards, Laura, The Commedia dell'Arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 274f.Google Scholar A first draft of this paper was read to the Working Group on Historiography of the Theatre at the World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research, Moscow 1994, chaired by Ronald Vince. I am grateful to him and the members of the Working Group for their comments. I am also grateful to the following persons who have read and commented on the paper: Richard Andrews, Cobi Bordewijk, Andrew Grewar, M.A. Katritzky, Jennifer Lorch, Kathleen McKluskie, Claude Schumacher, Peter Thomson.

2. For a recent review of the evidence, see Grewar, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare and the actors of the commedia dell'arte’, in David, D. George and Christopher, J. Gossip, eds., Studies in the Commedia dell'Arte (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), pp. 13–47.Google Scholar

3. Quoted in Chambers, E.K., The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 11.262.Google Scholar

4. Unless the word ‘squirting’ may be taken as a disparaging reference to the unpremeditated and (by implication) undisciplined delivery of the comedians’ repartee.

5. Fynes Moryson, Itinerary, written in 1617; quoted in Lea, Kathleen M., Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia Dell'Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 Vols, (Oxford: Russell & Russell, 1934), p. 343.Google Scholar

6. Quoted in Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, pp. 346ff.

7. See Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the actors …’, pp. 23ff.

8. See note ad loc in The London Shakespeare, ed., John, Munro (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958)Google Scholar, V.444, and c.f. Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the actors …’, pp. 23ff.

9. See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 11.553, and Wiles, David, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim.

10. For an interesting recent account of non-Western improvised performance, apparently preparing their performance texts in a manner very similar to that of a commedia company, see Bouvier, Hélène, ‘An Ethnographic Approach to Role-Playing in a Performance of Madurese Loddrok’. Theatre Research International XIX.1 (Spring 1994), 47–66 pp. 51ff.Google Scholar

11. Taviani, Ferdinando and Schino, Mirella, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte: La memoria dell compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982), p. 364.Google Scholar

12. For a classic description of ‘that vast body of nomad entertainers on whom so much of the gaiety of the Middle Ages depended’, see Chambers, E.K., The Medieval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903)Google Scholar, 1.24–5. Cf. Hattaway, Michael, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 19.Google Scholar

13. Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 33, 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. See Taviani and Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 184ff.; an English translation appears in Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 45–6.

15. Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, p. 45.

16. Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, pp. 170f.

17. See Andrews, Richard, ‘Scripted theatre and the Commedia dell'Arte’, in J.R., Mulryne and Margaret, Shewring, eds., The Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1991), 21–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Massimo Troiano, Discorsi delli trionfi, giostre, apparati… (Munich, 1568); an English translation is found in Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 48–52. The circumstances of this performance are discussed in Katritzky, M.A., ‘Orlando di Lasso and the commedia dell'arte’ (Kongressbericht, Symposium ‘Orlando di Lasso in der Musikgeschichte’, 4–6 July 1994, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Musikhistorische Kommission, Munich [forthcoming]).Google Scholar

19. Cf. Molinari, Cesare, La Commedia dell'Arte (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), p. 65.Google Scholar

20. Precisely how Hieronimo's play was presented is not entirely clear. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901) regards the ‘several abstracts’ (IV.i. 140) as ‘separate copies of the individual parts’, while Mulryne, (London: A & C Black, 1989)Google Scholar observes that ‘apparently we should think of the play as unscripted: Hieronimo will sketch in the plot and on that basis the actors will improvise their own lines’ (IV.i. 107).

21. Taviani, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte, p. 340.

22. Ibid., p. 341.

23. Ibid.

24. Nicolò Barbieri, La Supplica (1634), quoted from the translations of Richards and Richards The Commedia dell'Arte, p. 255, and Nicoll, Allardyce, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell'Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963: reissued, 1986), pp. 32f.Google Scholar

25. Cf. Katritsky, M.A., ‘How did the Commedia dell'Arte cross the Alps to Bavaria?’, Theatre Research International, 16 (1991), 201–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The Diaries of Prince Ferdinand of Bavaria: Commedia dell'Arte at the Wedding Festivals of Florence (1565) and Munich (1568)’, in J.R., Mulryne and Margaret, Shewring, eds., Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 143–171.Google Scholar

26. ‘Orlando di Lasso and the commedia dell'arte’.

27. Cf. Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, pp. 169ff.

28. Taviani and Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell'Arte, p. 361.

29. Bradbrook, Muriel, The Rise of the Common Player: A Study of Actor and Society in Shakespeare's England (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 37Google Scholar; on this topic see also Wichham, Glynne, Early English Stages, Vol. II, Part I (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 100ff.Google Scholar

30. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player, pp. 17f. Evidence now available makes it clear that work carried out on a farmhouse called the Red Lion in 1567 anticipates many of the features of the later playhouse. Cf. Thomson, Peter, Shakespeare's Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 56ff.Google Scholar

31. Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari: La Commedia dell'Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993)Google Scholar, draws attention to the similarities between the Italian, French and Spanish theatre systems, pp. 55ff.; and it may be, as more evidence for the extent of theatrical activity throughout England in the sixteenth century comes to light, the similarity between the theatre systems and the production of performance texts in England and Italy will appear greater (I am indebted to Kathleen McLuskie for this observation).

32. Coryat, T., Coryat's Crudities (London, 1611), quoted from the Glasgow (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905) edition, p. 386.Google Scholar

33. See my article ‘Making Room: Commedia and the Privatisation of the Theatre’, in Christopher, Cairns, ed., The Commedia dell'Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 74–97.Google Scholar The proximity of the early playhouses to the brothels which often catered for the same patrons was a feature common to the property markets of London and Italy, as both Ferrone and Thomson make clear.

34. Cf. Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, p. 101.

35. Cf. Scott, Virginia, The Commedia dell'Arte in Paris 1644–1697 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).Google Scholar

36. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1.345.

37. Victorian translation of a Frankfurt poem of 1597, quoted by Limon, Jerzy, Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 12–13Google Scholar, from A. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and Berlin: Asher & Co, 1865).

38. Baldwin, T.W., The Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearian Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), p. 45.Google Scholar

39. Bentley, G.E., The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 88ff.Google Scholar, argues that although playwrights were held in quite low social esteem, they were not badly paid in comparison with other writers.

40. Baldwin, Organisation and Personnel, p. 197.

41. Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte, pp. 106f.

42. Cf. Ferrone, Attori mercanti corsari, pp. 106f.

43. Fitzpatrick, Tim, Commedia dell'arte and Performance: the Scenarios of Flaminio Scala (Renaissance Drama Newsletter Supplement Five, Graduate School of Renaissance Studies, University of Warwick, Autumn 1985), pp. 25.Google Scholar, and passim. This tendency was doubtless reinforced by the Horatian injunction ‘let not a fourth character strive to speak’ (A.P., 192), deriving from the three-actor rule of ancient drama, and often though not invariably observed by the authors of commedia erudita who provided the models for so many scenarii.

44. This fact will be familiar to anyone who has experimented in the creation of improvised performance texts in the commedia style. As early as 1860, Maurice Sand had noted that in improvised playing rehearsal was necessary for the ensemble scenes (Masques et Bouffons [Paris, 1860], p. 12).

45. I am referring here to my experience in attending a workshop given by the director, Patrick Tucker, who prepared a performance text for actors simulating what he understood to be the ‘rehearsal’ conditions of the Elizabethan stage: ‘Briefly, his rules are as follows: no rehearsal is needed, except for songs, dances and fights, and for those less than an hour is usually enough. Each actor is encouraged not to look at the play but only at his own cuescript (his own lines and three-word cues) which is specially prepared for him. The actors work from the First Folio, using all the clues Shakespeare gave to his own actors in their lines alone [mainly through punctuation], many of which are edited out of modern versions … (Programme notes to a production of Measure for Measure by the What You Will Theatre Company, March 1992). The scene presented in the workshop which I attended was Henry VI, Pt II, I, where after Henry's arrival there are eleven actors, plus extras, on stage. See also John, Russell Brown, Free Shakespeare (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 47ff.Google Scholar

46. Cf. Thomson, Shakespeare's Professional Career, pp. 19f.

47. William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 1.75.

48. The passage is quoted at length in Baldwin, , Organisation and Personnel, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943), II, pp. 291–2.Google Scholar

49. The most helpful recent accounts known to me are in Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre, pp. 52ff., and Thomson, Shakespeare's Professional Career, pp. 82ff.