Improvisation in the Commedia dell'Arte in its Golden Age: Why, What, How

Abstract

It mance was principally famous. Improvisation improvisation provided that made a commedia unique theatrical dell'arte interest. performance famou . Impr visatio provided uniq e th atric l i t rest. We can appreciate this most particularly by seeing it within the context of Renaissance culture and its rhetorical tradition, a tradition that depended upon imitation and memory. Both imitation and memory were regarded not merely as skills of copying and reiteration but as arts of invention. Unlike earlier analyses of commedia dell'arte improvisation, this one calls attention to the centrality of these arts in the very process of improvisation. The improvised performances of the Italian commedia dell'arte continued for more than two hundred years and spread throughout Europe. Over this expanse of time and space and with its many acting troupes of varying quality, commedia dell'arte improvisation was doubtless many things. I limit my focus to the kind of improvisation that would mostly likely have been employed for the scenarios (plot outlines) of Flaminio Scala.1 This is a reasonable limitation. Theater historian Louise George Clubb remarks that Scala's publication of his fifty scenarios in l6ll was an event of the first importance to theatre history because it gives a fuller idea of the nature of commedia dell'arte performance than any other single text has done.2 Scala's collection represents commedia dell'arte at its height, I57O-I63O, and was the only collection to have been published in the seventeenth century. Recognizing its importance, others who have recently