Publish (f) or Paris? G. B. Andreini in France

Abstract

The media crucial dell'arte role played troupes, by in Italian the actors, development especially of the those early of the modern commedia dell'arte troupes, in the development of the early m dern French theater has been studied extensively, starting in the nineteenth century.1 As the renowned French historian Fernand Braudel long ago observed, Italian art and culture were exported throughout Europe far more extensively in the Baroque era than in the Renaissance.2 Among Italian playwrights of the seventeenth century, none had greater international stature than Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654). Although his work lay largely forgotten for centuries after his death, and still has not been translated into French, Andreini in his prime between the second and third decades of the Seicentowas a prominent figure on the theatrical scene in Paris, where he introduced the court of Louis XIII and the paying public to his unique version of the early modern Italian comedy now known as commedia dell'arte (or, as it is often called in English, Arte). In this essay I will consider a group of five plays published by Andreini in Italian in Paris in the pivotal year 1622. These include at least two landmarks of the Italian Baroque stage that were printed only this one time and only in the French capital. Rather than look closely at the texts of the plays themselves, I will examine the circumstances in which they first appeared in print while their itinerant author was on the road, far from his home base in northern Italy. Why did Andreini, the consummate actor-author of his generation in Italy, choose Paris as the preferred