Meeting at the Sign of the Queen: The Commedia dell’Arte, Cheap Print, and Piazza Performance

Abstract

Recent critical emphasis on the court patronage enjoyed by the commedia dell’arte may create the impression that professional actors did not perform in Italian streets and piazzas, as nineteenth-century Romantic critics asserted they did. Although it does exist, archival evidence for outdoor commedia dell’arte performance is slimmer than one might imagine. Cheap print, however, which flourished in the sixteenth century and frequently invokes the actual actors as well as the fictional personages of the commedia dell’arte, provides concrete additional evidence for outdoor performance, and for the ways in which the worlds of cheap print, piazza performance, and organized professional activity interacted.