Supposes

The Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto is most famous for his verse epic Orlando Furioso. However, he also wrote plays, including the highly influential comedy I Suppositi, notable for a 1566 English translation by George Gascoygne called Supposes.

Ariosto's first comedy, La Cassaria (The Coffer), premiered in 1508 at the court of Cardinal Ippolito in Ferrara. It was a hit, and the next year Ariosto premiered I Suppositi at the palace of the duke. Both plays were originally in prose, though Ariosto later wrote verse versions of them.

Both plays are also examples of commedia erudita, the learned comedy of scholars, which differed from commedia dell'arte, which was produced by professionals. Commedia erudita looked to classical Roman drama for inspiration. I Suppositi borrows in part from Terence's comedy The Eunuch and even more from Plautus's play The Captives.

In the first act, we learn that the young scholar Erostrata has switched places with his servant Dulippo. (Gascoygne spells the names Erostrato and Dulypo.) This is similar to the way Philocrates switches places with his slave Tyndarus in The Captives, but in Ariosto's play the motive is different. The false Dulippo (really Erostrata) uses his servant disguise to sleep with the beautiful Polinesta (Polynesta in Gascoygne's spelling).

Polinesta's father Damon, who is similar to the parsimonious Pantalone in commedia dell'arte, wants to marry her off without having to pay a dowery. That's why he favors a match with the old doctor of law Cleandro (Cleander as Gascoygne has it). Cleandro is like the Dottore figure in commedia dell'arte, and similarly has some long, rambling monologues. In the first act, he says (in Gascoygne's translation):

It becometh not a man to praise him selfe; but, indeede, I may say, and say truely, that my knowledge hath stoode me in better steade at a pinche than coulde all the goodes in the worlde. I came out of Otranto when the Turkes wonne it, and first I came to Padua, after hither, where by reading, counseling, and pleading, within twentie years I have gathered and gayned as good as ten thousande ducats.

That incident in Otranto, which the Ottoman Turks seized in 1480, putting much of the population to the sword and enslaving the rest, will become important later. First, however, we get a plot where the false Erostrata convinces a gentleman traveling from Sienna to pretend to be his father. Things get complicated when the real Erostrata's father arrives from Sicily. If this sounds a lot like the subplot in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, now you know where the Bard picked up some of his ideas.

Of course, Ariosto was borrowing from others as well. The parasite character in I Suppositi, Pasifilo (or Pasyphilo according to Gascoygne), is based of Ergasilus from The Captives. Like Ergasilus, Pasifilo is always on the lookout for a free meal. When told he should supervise what is prepared for supper, he replies:

By the masse, if you should have studied this sevennight you could not have appointed me an office to please me better! You shall see what dishes I will devise.

Ariosto's borrowings from The Captives goes far beyond just the parasite character.  We learn that Cleandro's son was sold as a slave to Erostrata's father, just as Hegio's son was stolen and sold as a slave in Plautus's play. In the end, Erostrato married Polinesta (without Damon having to pay a dowery) and Cleandro is content having recovered a son and heir. All ends happily.

Ariosto went on to compose other comedies, including Il Negromante (The Necromancer) and La Lena (Lena). He left another play, I Studenti (The Students) unfinished at his death, though it was completed by his brother Gabriele. It is I Suppositi, however, that has had the most influence of his comedies, at least in the English-speaking world.

Commedia at the Met

Yesterday, I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I took photos of some of the ceramic figurines they have of characters from commedia dell'arte.

Commedia in the 18th century, when the figurines were produced, had grown to be more refined than the rough-and-tumble improvisations that originated in Italy. It had also spread to France and later across Europe, which is why some of the porcelain miniatures were manufactured in Germany.

One of the most famous stock characters in commedia, Isabella, was named for the actress who made the character type famous. Isabella Canali, whose married name was Andreini, helped lead the commedia troupe I Gelosi to become one of the most famous in the world in the 16th century. She frequently played sexy young widows who drove the plot by maneuvering to marry a young man she loved. Subsequent witty and wily heroines tended to bear the name Isabella, a lasting tribute to her talents.

Here's a photo I snapped of the Isabella figurine at the Met. It's accession number 1974.356.527 if you want to look it up on the Met's website, but unfortunately they just have a black-and-white image. Click on this one to enlarge it and get a sense of what the miniature looks like in full color. The violet tones make her costume stand out without being garish.

Harlequin's costume, on the other hand, is just garish. Originally known as Arlecchino in Italy, Harlequin was the most famous of the zanni. These were servant characters who engaged in slapstick antics. In fact, Harlequin generally carried a literal slapstick, a wooden bat that would make a slapping sound when it stopped just short of hitting someone. This allowed the actors to perform violent physical comedy without actually hurting one another.

This figurine is one of several with the accession number 1974.356.526. Harlequin's tight-fitting suit was originally covered with patches, but gradually these transformed into multi-colored diamonds or triangles. He also wore a black mask, which was not originally intended to be a form of racial impersonation, but multiple paintings from the 18th century (when Black servants became more common in France) depict as Harlequin models who are clearly of African descent.

Frequently paired with Harlequin was a female servant named Colombina or Colombine. She would often wear a dress that had the same pattern as Harlequin's outfit, and she was sometimes known as Harlequina, which is what the Met has named this figurine, accession number 50.211.251.

Colombine was not the only female servant character, but she was the most popular one, exchanging witty barbs with Harlequin in a sassy and sexy manner. Other times, commedia plays would introduce a country girl named Franceschina, whose coarse manners offset the more refined attitude of Colombine. Both of them were allowed more liberties with their humor than the respectable Isabella.

Isabella, Harlequin, and Colombine were all sympathetic characters, but commedia also needed some good villains, or at least blocking characters to get in the way of the lovers.

Sometimes this was Dottore, who was not necessarily a medical doctor, but might be a doctor of law or philosophy. Other times, this function was filled by Pantalone, later known as Pantaloon.

Pantalone was a greedy old man who frequently had an itch for Isabella. Originally he spoke with a Venetian accent and tried to disguise his age by wearing tight-fitting red breeches. In earlier commedia, he might try to snatch the heroine for himself, but later writers, like Carlo Goldoni, softened the character. In Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, Pantalone is far more human.

Here's the figurine the Met labeled as Pantaloon. (The accession number is the same as for Harlequin.) In this case, it's his cape-like coat that's red rather than his breeches.

If you're at the Met on Fifth Avenue, you can currently see all of these miniatures on view in Gallery 533. Even if they are not exact reproductions of the actors who strutted on the stage in the 18th century, they at least give us a good idea of what their costumes and physical mannerisms might have looked like.

The Bonds of Interest

When I was in Spain, I was surprised to see a monument to the dramatist Jacinto Benavente in Madrid's Retiro Park. How many people outside of Spain know his plays today?

Though Benavente is primarily considered a Realist, his most famous play is probably The Bonds of Interest, which utilizes characters and motifs from Italian commedia dell'arte.

As is typically the case in commedia, the lovers in the play, Leander and Silvia, are kind of boring. It's the supporting cast that provides the laughs. Leander's friend Crispin pretends to be his servant, a device that also appears in George Farquhar's The Beaux-Stratagem. Though both men are broke, Crispin makes it appear that Leander is massively wealthy and important.

After convincing an innkeeper to let them stay with him on credit, Crispin wins the friendship of a braggart captain and a poet who happens to be the stock character Harlequin. In Act II, we meet Harlequin's stock love interest, Columbine, whom the widow Sirena has "adopted" as her "niece" and hopes to use in her machinations to find a husband for Silvia. When Sirena runs out of money for an important party, Crispin arranges for Leander to pay for everything--again on credit.

Soon, everyone in town needs Leander to find a rich wife if they're ever going to get paid back for anything. That includes Pantaloon, who arranges for Leander to rent a luxurious house. The problem is that Leander has actually fallen in love with the wealthy Silvia, and feels guilty about deceiving her. Fortunately, all ends happily. Benavente literally gives Silvia the last word, as she gives a beautiful speech about how love manipulates us all.

The Bonds of Interest premiered on December 9th, 1907 at the Teatro Lara in Madrid. Benavente continued to write numerous plays, including the one-act His Widow's Husband, which premiered the next year. His 1913 play La Malquerida, sometimes translated as The Unloved Woman, has been adapted a number of times for television and film. Perhaps it's time for a revival of his work.

The Pantomime of Life

English Pantomime, which draws upon the tradition of commedia dell'arte, has had a lasting impact on British drama. Charles Dickens was a fan of the art form, and discussed it in an essay entitled "The Pantomime of Life."

The essay originally appeared in Bentley's Miscellany under the heading "Stray Chapters" and was published concurrently with Dickens's novel Oliver Twist. The author confessed "to a gentle sympathy with clowns and pantaloons--to an unqualified admiration of harlequins and columbines..."

Around the same time he wrote that, Dickens was editing the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, the most famous clown in the history of Pantomime. Pantaloon, by the way, was a British descendant of the Italian stock character Pantalone, and harlequins and columbines likewise developed from the Arlecchino and Colombina characters in commedia.

In the essay, Dickens posits that our delight in pantomime comes from the fact that they form "a mirror of life." Just as an audience laughs at a self-satisfied pantaloon falling down on the stage, the public in general enjoys watching the descent of any self-satisfied man of the world, and according to Dickens, "the more suddenly, and the nearer the zenith of his pride and riches, the better."

Even more common in life, the essay claims, is the clown, who takes lodgings he has no intention of paying for and obtains goods under false pretenses. "The best of the joke, too, is, that the very coal-merchant who is loudest in his complaints against the person who defrauded him," Dickens writes, "is the identical man who sat in the centre of the very first row of the pit last night and laughed the most boisterously at this very same thing."

The essay continues to compare the opening of a session of parliament to the raising of a theatrical curtain on a pantomime that is "particularly strong in clowns." Dickens's satire is always sharp, but it helps to have a good knowledge of the theatre to understand all of it.

A Clown for All Seasons

Joseph Grimaldi was one of the great clowns of the early nineteenth century. His life story would have been fascinating no matter who recorded it. As luck would have it, though, his memoirs were put together by the greatest English writer of his day: Charles Dickens.

In 1838, the publisher Richard Bentley came out with two volumes of Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi that had been "Edited by 'Boz'," with the Boz in question being none other than Dickens. The cover page is perhaps misleading, since "Boz" had already "edited" The Pickwick Papers and was currently at work "editing" both Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. In those cases, "edited" meant wrote from scratch. However, Grimaldi did leave a manuscript behind recalling his life story, so in this case, Dickens actually did just edit it (though he took a strong hand in the job).

A "clown" in Grimaldi's day was one of a number of stock characters on the British stage derived from commedia dell'arte, including "Harlequins, Pantaloons, and Columbines," as Dickens notes in his introductory chapter. These characters appeared together in the elaborate shows known as pantomimes that were staged every year around Christmas, often lasting until Easter. As a boy, Dickens had loved these shows, which is why when he was given a chance to edit Grimaldi's memoirs, he was "in a perfect fever" to undertake the job. Changing Grimaldi's first-person narrative into a third-person biography, Dickens was able to utilize the actor's personal recollections while combining them with his own writing style.

According to the account in the Memoirs, Grimaldi's father was a native of Genoa who became both a dentist and a dancing master in England, as well as playing the role of clown himself. His son, young Joe Grimaldi, was born in 1779, the same year the famous actor David Garrick had died. He made his debut on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane at the age of one year and eleven months. He also began to perform at Sadler's Wells in 1783, appearing in the "arduous character of a monkey." He would frequently appear onstage with his father, and on one occasion, his father was so angered, he beat the boy in earnest right in front of the audience. As the memoir relates, "This was all taken by the audience as a most capital joke; shouts of laughter and peals of applause shook the house."

The artist George Cruikshank provided illustrations for the Memoirs. One of these shows a famous incident where Joe was playing a monkey and his father was supposed to swing him around by a chain. According to the story: "One evening, when this feat was in the act of performance, the chain broke, and he was hurled a considerable distance into the pit, fortunately without sustaining the slightest injury; for he was flung by a miracle into the very arms of an old gentleman who was sitting gazing at the stage with intense interest."

Grimaldi's father died in 1788 and was buried in the churchyard of Exmouth Street Chapel. While he provided handsomely for his two children, the executor of his will, Joseph Hopwood, invested all of the family's money in his own business and subsequently went bankrupt. The family was left destitute, and it was up to young Joey to support the family as a child actor. The following year, his younger brother set sail as a cabin boy on a ship and disappeared.

As a teenager, Joey fell in love with Maria Hughes, who also happened to be the daughter of his employer at Sadler's Wells. On the very day that Grimaldi delivered his first love letter to her, there was a tremendous accident at the theatre, and a heavy platform fell on him, injuring his shoulder. The next day, Maria rushed to his bedside, much to the delight of Joey. Eventually, he obtained the consent of her parents, and the two were married at St. George's in Hanover Square.

In 1799, things couldn't have been going better for Grimaldi. He had a successful career, a wife he adored, and what was more, the couple was expecting a child. Unfortunately, it was not an easy pregnancy, and after many difficulties, Maria died, leaving Joey with neither child nor wife. Maria's body was buried in the Hughes family vault at St. James's Church, Clerkenwell. Two months later, the Christmas season demanded another pantomime, and Grimaldi had to once again go onstage and play the clown.

Eventually, Joey did remarry. After he injured his foot onstage, a certain actress identified in the Memoirs as "Miss Bristow" tended him in his illness, and the two ultimately wed, spending more than thirty years together before the lady died. This was Mary Bristow, who married Grimaldi on Christmas Eve, 1801, and within a year bore him a son, Joseph Samuel, known as J.S. In 1803, Grimaldi's family life was momentarily turned upside down when his brother mysteriously returned from a life at sea, though Joey had long given him up for dead. Strangely, however, the brother appeared for only one evening, and then vanished again forever.

During the early part of his career, Grimaldi performed at Drury Lane, as well as minor theatres like Sadler's Wells. In 1806, however, he gave up Drury Lane to appear at the rival patent house at Covent Garden. His first appearance at that theatre was not as a clown, but as Orson in the Romantic melodrama Valentine and Orson by Thomas Dibdin. Grimaldi frequently appeared in melodramas and other entertainments as well as pantomimes, though it was always as a clown that he was best remembered.

Two years after he joined the Covent Garden company, the theatre burned down, and the company had to perform in smaller venues until it could be rebuilt. When the new building opened in 1809, its manager (John Kemble) tried to raise ticket prices, which had remained fixed by tradition for many years. The result was a massive protest known as the O.P. Riots. The Memoirs describe the disturbances as "the great O.P. Row" and note that "noises made by the audience utterly overwhelmed every attempt that the actors could make to render themselves audible." A few audience members even "brought live pigs, which were pinched at the proper times, and added considerably to the effect of the performances."

Given the impossibility of performing dialogue in such an environment, Kemble asked Grimaldi to perform in a pantomime version of Don Juan. Grimaldi took the role of Scaramouch, as he typically did in Don Juan, and the first night he performed the piece, there was great applause when he entered and very little disturbance afterward. Kemble thought he had finally found a way to win over the audience, and asked Grimaldi to play the same role the next night. However, on the second night of Don Juan, the disturbances recommenced, and they did not let up until Kemble agreed to lower the prices.

In 1812, Joey was invited to dine with nobility at Berkeley Castle, and it was there that he first met Lord Byron, who had usually patronized Grimaldi's benefit performances at Covent Garden. Byron praised the famous clown in such lofty terms, that at first he thought the lord was being facetious. Later, Byron gave Grimaldi an engraved snuff box, which the actor cherished for the rest of his life.

Joey's son was getting older now, and eventually the elder Grimaldi took on the role of Don Juan while J.S. played Scaramouch. In 1823 Joey's health took a turn for the worse, and he was forced to stop performing. J.S. became the company's principle clown, which greatly pleased his father. Unfortunately, upon finding success, J.S. "abandoned himself to every species of wild debauchery and riot," according to the Memoirs.

After years of hard living, J.S. died. The coroner said that "his body was covered with a fearful inflammation" and he had been found in "furious madness, rising from his bed and dressing himself in stage costume to act snatches of the parts to which he had been most accustomed." Two years later, Grimaldi's wife Mary died as well.

The concluding chapter Dickens provided for the Memoirs recounts how Grimaldi himself passed away on May 31st, 1837. The cause of death was apparently natural, and the coroner's jury declared that he "had died by the visitation of God." He was buried at St. James's Chapel on Pentonville Hill. The graveyard where his body was laid to rest is now a public space known as Grimaldi Park.

Punch Drunk

This past weekend, people all over the world celebrated the 208th birthday of Charles Dickens. Here in the city, the Friends of Dickens New York held its annual Birthday Luncheon, inviting two professional puppeteers to give a presentation on the history of Punch and Judy.

Each year, the Friends of Dickens chooses a different novel to study, and this year we are reading The Old Curiosity Shop. The book tells the story of Little Nell and her wanderings through the countryside with her grandfather. At one point, they come upon two showmen who display a Punch and Judy show. Though the novel makes numerous allusions to the story of Punch, it never comes out and tells what that story is, since its original audience was already familiar with it and didn't need to be told.

In the 21st century, however, such puppet shows are far less familiar, so we were happy to welcome Gretchen Van Lente and Brendan T. Schweda to tell us a bit more about the Punch tradition. Gretchen is the Artistic Director of the puppetry company Drama of Works and wrote and starred in The Sid & Nancy Punch & Judy Show, which combines the story of Punch and Judy with that of the tragic tale of punk rocker Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. I first met her, though, when she designed the puppets for an adaptation I wrote of A Christmas Carol.

I had never met Brendan before, but he is a producer, performer, and author who started the Puppets Come Home! series to celebrate the history of puppetry in Coney Island and to welcome in the contemporary puppet community. In addition to being a Punch and Judy expert, he produces and hosts puppet shows with IBEX Puppetry and Coney Island USA. On Saturday, though, Brendan didn't just talk about puppetry, he briefly became a puppet, donning a giant Punch suit, complete with rubber mask!

The pair began by telling about the Punch character's origins in commedia dell'arte, the first recorded appearance of a Punch marionette in Covent Garden in the 17th century, and the famous engravings by George Cruikshank of hand puppets from a Punch and Judy show. Later, the puppet shows became beloved attractions at seaside resorts. Gretchen and Brendan showed slides of people watching these shows, including one slide of a Punch and Judy play at Coney Island at the beginning of the 20th century. We could almost smell the salt in the air!

Because Punch and Judy shows are a slapstick comedy (sometimes employing a literal slapstick wielded by Punch) they are easily adapted for a variety of purposes. Gretchen's The Sid & Nancy Punch & Judy Show is best seen live, but if you want to get a taste of it, there is video available. Instead of throwing the baby out the window, Punch/Sid throws the Sex Pistols out the window. Judy/Nancy beats him with a giant heroine needle, and he beats her back with his bass guitar. The aesthetic is pure punk rock.

A more traditional Punch and Judy show can be seen here. It still doesn't show us exactly what such a performance would have been like in Dickens's day, but it is a start. In any case, I was much obliged to Gretchen and Brendan for transporting us, at least for a little bit, back to an earlier era.

Toy Theatres from the Girard Collection

Last month, I was in New Mexico and happened to visit the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. They had on display a number of toy theatres collected by Alexander Girard.

This is one of the oldest toy theatres in the collection. It comes from England, perhaps the 1820s. The Orientalist stage costumes are fairly common in British toy theatres, but I can't identify which play this is supposed to be.

This French toy theatre really fascinated me, in part due to what's written on the proscenium. The theatre enshrines the names of four writers popular in the early 19th century: Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis (author of numerous moralizing dramas), Maria Edgeworth (most famous for novels like Castle Rackrent, but who also wrote plays for children), August von Kotzebue (a master of German melodrama whose plays are now mainly known for the music they inspired), and Vladislav Ozerov (a Russian dramatist whose tragedies were later overshadowed by the work of Alexander Pushkin).

Another French toy theatre caught by eye because the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique was one of the more popular houses for melodrama in the early 19th century. It was located along the Boulevard du Temple, and helped to give that street the nickname of the Boulevard of Crime. This was not because crimes were committed in the neighborhood. You were quite safe walking on the street. But if you happened to be one of the characters in a melodrama being performed along the Boulevard du Temple, you better look out! All sorts of dastardly villains might be after you.

Here we see a puppet booth portrayed in a toy theatre. The French equivalent of Mr. Punch was Guignol, a puppet who also came out of the commedia dell'arte tradition. At the end of a century, when a non-puppet theatre named itself the Grand Guignol, the name was a bit of a joke, since the tiny character of Guignol was anything but grand.

Toy theatres were also popular in Germany and Denmark. This one comes from Germany. I like the Fairy-Tale aesthetic. Could this be the story of Sleeping Beauty? Hard to tell. I'm glad I got a chance to see it, though!

The Tragical Comedy of Punch and Judy

I've written in the past about Mr. Punch, the puppet descendant of the commedia dell'arte character Punchinello. He first showed up in England in the 17th century, and a plaque outside of St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden marks the spot of the first recorded performance of a Punch puppet play, which was mentioned by Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1662.

At first, Punch appears to have been a marionette, but later versions tend to be hand puppets. We have records of puppet shows featuring Punch and his wife Judy throughout the eighteenth century. Colley Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke, was given a license in 1738 to run a puppet theatre at St. James's that was known as Punch's Theatre. Unfortunately, no scripts for Punch and Judy plays exist from this period.

That changed in 1827, when John Payne Collier published a script entitled The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy. The dialogue was allegedly related to Collier by the puppeteer Giovanni Piccini, but given that Collier was later outed as a forger of documents relating to William Shakespeare, everything he claimed has to be taken with a heavy portion of salt. He secured the noted artist George Cruikshank to illustrate the book, though, so the script at least has the advantage of being beautiful.

Collier's script begins with Punch getting into a fight with his neighbor, Scaramouch, another figure from the commedia tradition. Scaramouch's dog Toby bites Punch's nose, and after a fight between the two neighbors, Punch knocks Scaramouch's head clean off his shoulders. Judy then makes her first appearance, handing the couple's child over to Punch. After failing to appease the crying baby with a lullaby, Punch beats his child, then throws the baby out the "window" of the puppet stage's proscenium and into the audience.

As you might imagine, Judy is unimpressed. She beats Punch with a stick, but then he snatches the stick from her and beats her in turn. After at first appearing like he will relent, Punch beats Judy to death and knocks her body off the side of the stage, claiming, "To lose a wife is to get a fortune." He soon finds another woman, though: Pretty Polly. She's actually a character borrowed from John Gay's play The Beggar's Opera, and in Collier's script Punch sings an air from that play: "When the heart of a man is oppress'd with cares."

The second act opens with a special puppet with an extendable neck. Alluding to hanging, Punch tells him, "You may get it stretched for you, one of these days, by somebody else." The comment foreshadows an event later in the play, when after killing a doctor and a servant and beating a poor blind man, Punch is at last arrested for multiple murders. The hangman Jack Ketch tries to execute him, but Punch tricks Ketch into putting his own head in the noose, and Punch hangs him. Punch's final challenge comes when the devil himself comes for him, but Punch succeeds in even beating the devil.

A later Punch and Judy script appeared in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. The script Mayhew recorded also includes a clown named Joey (after Joseph Grimaldi) and a character named Jim Crow (who originated in minstrel shows). Another innovation in the script is bringing Judy back from the grave as a ghost. After being terrified by the ghost, Punch keels over, and a doctor comes on and asks Punch if he's dead. Punch responds that, yes, he is dead, and becomes quite upset when the doctor doesn't believe him.

Punch and Judy shows have continued to evolve over the years, though now in the 21st century, they might just be too violent for most people's taste. Even Mr. Punch himself might tell you that he's now dead. You probably shouldn't believe him, though.

The Servant of Two Masters

Last night, I saw a delightful college production of Carlo Goldoni's commedia dell'arte-inspired play The Servant of Two Masters.

Goldoni originally wrote the play for Antonio Sacco, an actor who specialized in Arlecchino-style roles, often appearing under the name Truffaldino, as he did in Goldoni's play.

Though Goldoni chaffed under what he considered to be the constraints of commedia, he included a number of the form's stock characters. The father of the young lover Clarice is Pantalone, the stingy old man. He, in turn, has engaged his daughter to the son of Dr. Lombardi, who is based on the Il Dottore character in commedia.

One of the most memorable characters in the play is the innkeeper Brighella, who is also based on a commedia type, though he is less violent than he usually is in commedia. Truffaldino, of course, must have his own love interest, and Goldoni gives him the servant Smeraldina, based on the Columbina of commedia.

Though The Servant of Two Masters is the most famous play Goldoni wrote for Sacco, it was not the only one. He had previously written Truffaldino's 32 Mishaps, and would go on to write Truffaldino's Son Lost and Found.

Goldoni's rival Carlo Gozzi also used Sacco in his Truffaldino character, most famously in The King Stag, which also includes Pantalone, Clarice, Smeraldina, and the Captain Spavento character from commedia, promoted to being a general this time.

Commedia characters are frequently portrayed in miniatures and prints, but it's also nice to see them where they belong: on the stage!

Kelton House Commedia

I recently got back from celebrating Christmas in Ohio, and while I didn't see any theatre in Columbus, I managed to stumble across some theatrical memorabilia.

While visiting the historic Kelton House, I was surprised to see in a bookcase the complete works of Hannah More. Today, More is rarely remembered, but her 1777 drama Percy (which opened the same year as The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan) was the most successful English verse tragedy of its era.

Even more exciting was a glass case filled with ceramic figurines of commedia dell'arte characters. Such porcelain miniatures of stage actors were popular during the nineteenth century. How they got to the house and whether or not they were collected by the Kelton family (which incidentally also ran a stop on the underground railroad) I don't know.

Next to the case of miniatures was a series of prints of commedia actors modeled off of the illustrations done by Jacques Callot. In the 1620s, Callot did a series of etchings he called Balli di Sfessania. These etchings give us an idea of how commedia performers dressed in the seventeenth century.

Here we see Captain Zerbino and Scapino. Zerbino is one of many braggart soldier figures popular in commedia, but Scapino is particularly famous for inspiring the character of Scapin that Moliere frequently played. To see these treasures and other curiosities of the past, take a tour of Kelton House Museum in Columbus. It's worth a visit!

The Commedia Legacy

Traditional commedia dell'arte used stock characters performing improvised actions and dialogue. However, during the eighteenth century, this improvisational form became increasingly codified with written scripts that were based on traditional characters and scenarios.

The commedia style influenced the drama of many countries. In France, where the Comédie Italienne was one of two state-sanctioned theatres in Paris, the French author Pierre Carlet de Marivaux wrote a series of plays using commedia characters, but with written scripts rather than bare-bones scenarios. Though Marivaux had begun his career writing works for the more respectable Comédie Française, he is best remembered for the commedia-inspired works he wrote for its smaller rival.

Marivaux's most famous play, The Game of Love and Chance, uses multiple stock characters from commedia, including the servant character Arlecchino who appears as "Arlequin" in the play. However, Marivaux introduces a level of emotional complexity to his characters that was rarely seen in commedia performances of the past. The same is true of his later play The Triumph of Love, first performed in 1732. Though critics attacked the play and it closed after only six performances, Triumph of Love is now considered a classic. Marivaux's later plays became increasingly bitter. His 1744 comedy The Dispute depicts a cruel scientific experiment in which aristocrats have orphaned boys and girls placed in an Eden-like setting to see if men or women are less likely to be faithful in a state of nature. Neither gender comes off particularly well in the play.

While Marivaux was clashing with critics in Paris, Carlo Goldoni was writing commedia-inspired scripts in Italy. He actually began writing tragedies and operas, but at the request of the actor Antonio Sacchi he wrote the comedy The Servant of Two Masters. Though the play originally had sections that allowed for improvisation, Goldoni revised the play in 1753 to codify the action in a complete script. The play uses stock commedia characters, such as the old miser Pantalone and the quarrelsome innkeeper Brighella, but gives them set dialogue, eliminating much of the need for (and fun of) improvisation. Goldoni's success in Italy drew the attention of people in other countries, and in 1762 he settled in Paris, then considered the center of the theatrical world.

Goldoni took charge of the Comédie Italienne, but while audiences wanted the old tricks of traditional commedia, he wanted to move forward to a new, more realistic form of comedy. In 1763, he wrote the first version of his play The Fan, a comedy in which multiple lovers quarrel over a misunderstanding involving one of the simplest of objects, the titular fan. The self-consciously ridiculous play failed to make an impression in Paris, so Goldoni translated it into Italian and premiered the new version in Venice in 1765, where it was a hit. The play contains an attractive widow named Geltruda, who is a theatrical descendant of the many vivacious young widows played by Isabella Andreini in commedia plays during the Renaissance. Similarly, the play's apothecary, Timoteo, has elements of the learned yet foolish Dottore character from commedia.

The playwright that Goldoni most often quarreled with was Carlo Gozzi, another Italian writer, but one who wished to preserve rather than reform the conventions of commedia. Gozzi's 1761 play The Love of Three Oranges satirized Goldoni and other reformist writers, and Gozzi gave the play (along with other scripts) outright to Sacchi's struggling company of commedia performers to keep them going. Many of Gozzi's plays, including The Stag King, are based on fairy tales. His 1762 play Turandot was later turned into an opera, and in 1765 Gozzi wrote a sequel to The Love of Three Oranges called The Green Bird. Though Gozzi used commedia techniques, he also utilized Asian characters and settings to lend an element of exoticism to his plays. Thus, even in preserving commedia, he aided in its gradual evolution.