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The Venetian Commedia: Actors and Masques in the Development of the Commedia dell'Arte

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Anya Peterson Royce
Anya Peterson Royce
Affiliation:
Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Music, andDean of the Faculties at Indiana University
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Extract

The commedia dell'arte, which spanned three centuries from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth and nationalities as diverse as Italian, French, Austrian, Polish, and English, went through a number of metamorphoses before it attained the form we now associate with it. Very briefly, that form is based on stock characters (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Pedrolino or Pierrot, etc.), improvisation around standard plots, and the use of masks. In Italy, this kind of commedia was established by the end of the sixteenth century. In this paper, I would like to explore the developments that led to this form, concentrating especially on the convention of maschere (stock characters) as it appeared early in sixteenth century Venice and the Veneto. I concentrate on Venice because it is there that these maschere first developed and were then elaborated into the kind of characterization that becomes the defining feature of the commedia dell'arte.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 27 , Issue 1-2 , November 1986 , pp. 69 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1986

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References

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