Abstract
Erith Jaffe-Berg. Commedia dell'Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping Others. Transculturalisms, 1400-1700. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. x + 173. $104.95. With this volume, Erith Jaffe-Berg brings to a wide audience the Mediterranean perspective of Italian Commedia dell'Arte and its civic context. Focusing on Commedia's glory days of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jaffe-Berg highlights its transcultural referents, its many non-Italian and non-Christian characters and settings, the prominence of travel among its themes, and the eclectic social and financial backgrounds of its audiences. By utilizing collections of largely unpublished primary materials, Jaffe-Berg provides the study with an evidentiary base that is broad and strong and the elements for important new perspectives, including that Commedia dell'Arte offers a platform for reflection on power and cultural exchange (i). Based on the experience of Italian audiences of the continual comings and goings of foreigners, Commedia helped to mediate intercultural contact among different ethnic communities within the Italian Peninsula (4). Also noted is the sometimes illusory and always fragile nature of that contact, subject as it was to swiftly changing political, financial, and religious conditions. Particularly important is Jaffe-Berg's delineation of the role of theatre for Mantua's Jewish community and in the relationship between the community and political authority figures. Travel influenced Commedia defl'Arte in its very performance DNA, as troupes, many of which by this time were fully professionalized, often had to travel to provide themselves with sufficient income--although it should be pointed out that others remained in a single locale and supplemented theatrical work, by its nature seasonal, with other jobs. The Italian peninsula being divided into numerous states, even relatively short journeys, such as that from Venice to Ferrara or to Mantua, involved entering a different state with different social, political, and economic circumstances and different traditions. Troupes also traveled outside the peninsula, including to aristocratic and royal festivities. Thanks to their continuous movement among the leadership circles of numerous states, they were in the position of serving as cultural ambassadors of sorts (5). Performing both in palaces for elites and in public squares for open audiences, they also functioned as cultural ambassadors across internal social dividing lines, particularly of class and wealth. By including characters of diverse backgrounds and conditions in their scenarios, troupes provided themselves with a means of connecting with diverse components of their audiences, as well as allowing the development of a full range of emotions and social situations on stage and providing work for actors of varied talents. Moreover, as Jaffe-Berg asserts, they used performance as a site for sharing ideas and innovations that were otherwise restrictive; as an example, she cites the mixing of the Petrarchan language and elevated love themes of the innamorati characters with Commedia's other, bawdier tropes (5). Another important feature of the study is Jaffe-Berg's articulation of the varied effects of the sea within the plays: it both distances and connects human societies of vastly different ethnic, religious, and social customs. Travel across it destabilizes identity, a process that is accelerated by love. However, as the author shrewdly observes, while both Christian and non-Christian characters travel to the other's locales and fall in love with members of the other population, it is prevalently non-Christians who convert and who remain permanently in the other's locale (46-64). An intriguing view that Jaffe-Berg sets forth is that the Commedia stage served as a kind of map for the audience, reproducing in a small format the locales that a play involved in the same geographical relationship as a map. …
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