The Changing Scene: Plays and Playhouses in the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

Almost exactly a century separates the publication of the editio princeps of Vitruvius’ De Architettura (probably in 1486) from the completion of Italy’s first permanent theatre constructed on Vitruvian principles. To this day the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza can impress the visitor with a sense of the classicising spirit which revived the drama of Greece and Rome in Renaissance Italy. Yet, as has often been observed, Andrea Palladio’s theatre seems to lie outside the main line of historical development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the time of its opening, public playhouses built on different principles were in regular use in Paris and Madrid as well as London, and in Italy itself the Teatro Olimpico’s monumental frons scaenae failed to set the pattern for the theatrical architecture of the succeeding century. The history of theatre building in sixteenth-century Italy often looks at odds with the intense activity in the writing and staging of plays, the development of stage effects and illusionistic scenery, and the emergence of professional companies of players who emulated and were eventually to replace the courtly performers of the commedia erudita. In the following pages some explanation for the apparent delay in the provision of purpose-built homes for the newly-developed drama will be attempted.