ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
2016 Firenze University Press
Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 5 (2016), pp. 237-260
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-18091
‘ready apparrelled to begyn the play’:
Collaboration, Text and Authorship
in Shakespeare’s Theatre
and on the Stage of the Commedia dell’Arte
Paola Pugliatti
University of Florence (<paola.pugliatti@gmail.com>)
Abstract
Comparative examinations of the Commedia dell’Arte and early modern English theatre (and
Shakespeare in particular) have been directed mainly to the study of texts. These studies
have argued convincingly that scripted and non-scripted comedies of the Italian stage and
those of early modern English theatre developed similar themes, characters and conventions,
constituting – in the words of Louise George Clubb – ‘an international movement of
playmaking recognizable as Renaissance Drama’. Less attention has been devoted to a study
of the material organizational side of these (different but similar) theatrical enterprises. The
article is a first attempt to consider, in a comparative perspective, what in both contexts
happened ‘behind the scene’: in other words, how – in some cases similarly, in others differently
– players and other professional figures collaborated in preparing the staging of plays.
Keywords: Collaborative Authorship, English Theatre, Italian Theatre, Staging Practice
1. Introduction
Kathleen Lea was the first to suggest competently a comparison between the
Italian Commedia dell’Arte and Shakespearean drama (1934). Her study was
followed, years later, by an important book by Allardyce Nicoll (1963) and by
other works, produced mainly in the field of Anglo-American scholarship.1
These works discussed mainly the influence of the Italian commedie on
Shakespeare, both in their fully scripted version (the so-called commedie
1 Clubb 1989, 2007 and 2010; Andrews 1993 and 2014; Grewar 1993; Henke 2002;
Katritzky 2006; Henke and Nicholson 2008 and 2014 to name only a few. I wish to thank
Bill Leahy and Mirella Schino for reading an early version of this article and for suggesting
strategies and reconsideration of certain issues.
paola pugliatti238
erudite) and in the abbreviated version of scenari or canovacci that were the
basis of the improvvisa. Their main concern, therefore, was textual in a broad
sense: those elements that Clubb calls ‘theatergrams’, or ‘reshuffleable pieces’
which ‘included types of characters, of relationships between and among
characters, of actions and speeches, and of thematic design’ (2010, 4).2
While its influence on plays has been convincingly supported, much
less attention has been devoted to a comparative study of the material
organizational side of these (different but similar) theatrical enterprises – to
the way in which the fully scripted English dramaturgy and the stenographic
outlines of Commedia dell’Arte scenarios were prepared for the stage.
Work by theatre historians has acquainted us with the distribution of tasks
among the personnel that contributed to the staging of plays in the Elizabethan-
Jacobean playhouses. Important reference works on these issues are, to name only
a few, the four volumes of Chambers’ The Elizabethan Stage (1923), the critical
editions of Henslowe’s Papers and Diary (Greg 1907; Foakes and Rickert 1961), the
seminal books by G.E. Bentley (1971, 1984), the many contributions by Andrew
Gurr (1980, 1996, 2004; Gurr and Ichikawa 2000) as well as a number of articles
on more specific themes. Recently, attention has been devoted to rehearsal (Stern
2000), the distribution of parts to players (Palfrey and Stern 2007), or the ways
in which the whole process was fragmented and collaboratively realized (Stern
2009). But in the case of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatre, we have evidence
on which to rely – not only Henslowe’s papers, but also the plays themselves.
Indeed, in the chapter entitled ‘Staging in the Theatre’, Chambers notes that to
reconstruct ‘the structural resources which were at the Elizabethan manager’s
disposal for the accomplishment of his task’, he mainly relied on ‘the numerous
indications in dialogue and stage-directions’ (1923, III, 70-71).
When we search for similar evidence as regards the preparatory steps
that led to the staging of Commedia dell’Arte scenarios, we find an almost
complete lack of documents. This is surprising, since the peculiar trait of the
improvvisa was precisely the way in which comedies were staged. We may
rely on the treatise Andrea Perrucci wrote in 1699, but Perrucci was a late
witness; and the only direct documents we possess, the many letters from the
comici themselves, nearly all of which are addressed to their noble protectors
or to their protectors’ secretaries, contain almost exclusively complaints
about financial or logistical difficulties or the private troubles disturbing the
harmony of the companies. The few hints at their material organization and
task division concern the fact that the box office was manned in turn by one
of the players,3 that certain players were charged with props and costume
2 Clubb developed the concept of ‘theatergram’ for the first time in her 1989 book.
3 There is a story about a player, Battistino, who was manning the box office while his
company, the Gelosi, was performing in Paris. A gentleman, whom Battistino asked to pay
collaboration on the stage 239
transportation, or that others were sent as ambassadors to the courts where
their services were required in order to hear their employers’ requests.4 All we
can glean from more than one thousand surviving scenari is a certain ratio of
entrances and exits, as well as the positioning of the zanni’s comic interludes
(usually announced by the formula ‘X fa lazzi’, which means ‘makes jokes’).
It is beyond doubt that, while in both cases we are talking about
exceptionally successful commercial enterprises, the Elizabethan-Jacobean
theatrical organization was incomparably more complex and professional than
that of the Italian comici, much more ‘domestic’ and almost wholly internal to
the group. This consideration allows us to outline an initial basic difference.
While, in the case of English players, the authorship, so to speak, of staged
plays was fragmented and distributed among a number of professional figures
of which players were one of the components, in the case of the Italian comici
the whole process seems to have been their exclusive creation. This meant
a heavier weight on their shoulders, but also a closer control of the whole
process and therefore a more direct authorial responsibility.
The aim of this article is to consider, in a comparative perspective, the
practical steps which led to the realization of the two perfect machines that
constituted the most innovative manifestations of European Renaissance
theatre; what, in both cases, happened ‘behind the scene’ in terms of
preparation and collaborative practices, from signing contracts, to the players’
lives as communities sharing professional and personal interests, to the text
readings and rehearsals that constituted the actual preparation of plays for
the stage, to – finally – the side activity players performed, in both cases, to
redeem their ill-reputed practice by trying to ascend the higher spheres of
poetry and literariness.
A methodological premise appears necessary. What, in comparative
treatments of the two phenomena as regards texts and themes, has been
discussed in a perspective of influence, of kinship, or, at least, of ‘resources
in common’ (the expression is in the title of Andrews 2014) is here meant as
a comparison between means and methods employed in the two different
contexts to reach the final aim of performing on a stage or in a room.
The comparison, based on the few relevant documents we possess, shows
similarities and differences; and it may help to initiate a debate on models of
collaborative authorship as regards the activity of preparing (scripted as well
non-scripted) texts for performance.
for his ticket, beat him and said, ‘I paid you with the money you deserve’ (quoted by Schino
in Taviani and Schino 2007, 280-281).
4 In a letter dated 28 August 1629, Pier Maria Cecchini informs his patron, Ferdinando
Gonzaga, that a comico named Gallotta had just returned from the French court where he
had prepared his company’s tour (Ferrone et al. 1993, I, 286).
paola pugliatti240
2. Contracts and Agreements
On Wednesday 25th February 1545, in Padua, eight men went before a notary.
They desired to establish ‘una fraternal compagnia’ (a brotherly company)
that should last ‘in amor fraternal’ (in brotherly love) between Easter 1545
and Carnival 1546 ‘without hate, rancour and dissolution’. They agreed to
‘lovingly observe, as is good custom between good and faithful companions,
all the following articles, under pain of losing the moneys disbursed’.5
Their names are ‘ser Maphio ditto Zanini da Padova, Vincentio da
Venetia, Francesco de la lira, Hieronimo da s. Luca, Zuandomenego detto
Rizo, Zuane da Treviso, Thofano de Bastian, et Francesco Moschini’. Their
agreement implied a bond of obedience to Maphio, who was acknowledged
as the capocomico of the compagnia: the signatories committed themselves
‘to do all he would command’ as concerned ‘the performing of his comedies
in all places where they will be’ (Schino in Taviani and Schino 2007, 184;
my emphasis). Obedience was due to Maphio also as regarded ‘the order of
performing’ (184); as F. Marotti explains, ‘the distribution of roles, but also
entrances and exits, that is, the whole assembling of the scenic actions’ was
‘the capocomico’s responsibility’ (in Marotti and Romei, eds, 1994, xxvii).
They also agreed that if one of them got sick, he would be helped with the
money earned in common; that all the arrangements for travel would be made
by Maphio; that the income from their communal work would be put in a
cassella (little box) whose three keys would be held ‘one by the said leader, the
other by Francesco de la lira and the other by Vincenzo da Venetia’ (Schino
in Taviani and Schino 2007, 184); also, if while the company lasted any of
the associates left the same, he would not have any of the money and would
also be fined ‘lire cento’. The confederates also agreed that the money kept
in the cassella would be divided between the members of the company the
following month of June, when they would again be in Padua (185).
This is the first of a group of documents that have survived from the dawn
of the Commedia dell’Arte. In other agreements, certain tasks or functions of
individual comici are specified. For instance, in a contract signed in November
1549, again in Padua, there appears a certain Checo, a blacksmith, ‘che fa da
donna’ or ‘who plays women’s roles’ (190); it is stated that Moschin (Francesco
Moschini) is charged to find a place for rent and, once found, ‘to fit out the
scene and do whatever is necessary’ (190).
The formula for ‘the performing of his [Maphio’s] comedies’ and the
engagement of the signatories to follow Maphio’s prescriptions ‘as regards the
5 The contract was first published by Cocco (1915). This and the following contracts
are quoted from the texts published by M. Schino in Taviani and Schino (2007, 177-204).
Unless otherwise specified, translations are mine.
collaboration on the stage 241
order of performing the said comedies’ has raised doubts about the kind of
‘texts’ these actors meant to perform. This formula, however, is not repeated
in subsequent agreements, where the expression faciendi comedias appears,
and therefore any allusion to authoriality has disappeared.
A few documents allow us to follow the activity of this company up to
1553. Of those who signed the first agreement, only Maphio and Moschini
are found; the others were substituted by different men who signed more or
less the same articles, including – as the first agreement also states – ‘recitar
di loco in loco’, which is to tour the country when and where the capocomico
established. In 1553, following a brawl, Maphio was killed by a horse trainer;
on 22nd September of the same year, again in Padua, Moschini established a
new company in which he took the leading role that had been Maphio’s. The
formula expressing the signatories’ basic obligation is ‘ad faciendas comedias’
(192). These contracts repeat in slightly different forms (with a mixture of Latin
and Italian) the same obligations; but they say nothing about the ways in which
performances were prepared, apart from the necessity to ‘fit out the scene and
do whatever is necessary’. No obligation, for instance, concerns the actors’
attending any sort of rehearsal or any previous knowledge of any kind of text.
A contract signed in Rome on 10th October 1564 binds seven people,
‘omnes ut vulgo dicitur Commedianti … super faciendis commediis’. This
contract binds the signatories to be present ‘at the usual times when comedies
are played’ (182). But the reason this particular contract should be mentioned
is that for the first time a woman (‘domina Lucretia Senensis’) is one of the
signatories with the same obligations that bind the male actors. The contract
(a mark of regard to the woman?) was signed ‘in domo dicte domine Lucretie
Regionis Campi Martis’ (182). We do not know whether the date on which
this particular agreement was signed marks the inception of women’s presence
on the stage of comedies, for nothing allows us to glean from the text that we
are in the presence of a new course.
Only one contract has survived among the documents relating to early
modern English professional players. The agreement, dated 7th April 1614, was
signed by Robert Dawes, actor, before Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade.6
Although this is a much later document, certain differences between the two
kinds of agreement may be considered unaltered because they appear to be
structural. The length of Dawes’s engagement is not one ‘season’ as in the case
of the groups of comici, but ‘three yeares from the date hereof ’ (Greg 1907,
123), and the wages are going to be ‘at the rate of one whole Share’ (124). But
one of Dawes’ main commitments is that he ‘shall and will at all tymes during
6 The original contract has not survived. As Greg notes, it ‘was given by Boswell as
among the Dulwich papers which he had from Malone’ (1907, 123). Quotations are from
Greg (1907, 123-125).
paola pugliatti242
the said terme duly attend all suche rehearsall which shall the night before the
rehearsall be given publickly out’ (124); if he fails to appear, he will be fined.7
The article about rehearsal is unclear. The word ‘rehearsall’ appears twice in the
same sentence, but it apparently refers to two different stages of preparation: a private
repetition of the text which the players have memorized before the play is presented
to the public and (probably) the very public performance. This formula has raised
the question about what exactly ‘rehearsal’ meant. As Tiffany Stern argues, ‘rehearse’
may both ‘refer to something that happens more than once’ or simply mean ‘to
recite’; therefore, ‘rehearsal did not necessarily signify a re-hearing or recurrent event’
(2000, 24). The term, furthermore, also referred to non-theatrical situations, and,
in the first place, to ‘the school-room where children learnt to “rehearse”, “repeat”,
or say over their lessons’ (24; see also Guarino 2010, 86-87).8 The very ambiguity
of ‘rehearsal’ and ‘rehearse’ raises the problem of whether the company’s rehearsing
encounters were one or more. One might conjecture that only one collective, final
rehearsal (usually called ‘general’) was the rule, unless serious blunders or memory
failings suggested a second, either collective or individual, repetition.9
Again under pain of a fine, Dawes signed his commitment to ‘be ready
apparrelled … to begyn the play at the hower of three of the clock in the
afternoone’ (124). A fine was also applied if the player failed to appear or
happened ‘to be overcome with drinck at the tyme when he [ought to] play’
and also if he failed to be present at the time appointed ‘having noe lycence
or just excuse of sicknes’. But the highest fine (40 pounds) was applied ‘if the
said Robert Dawes shall at any time after the play is ended depart … with
any [of their] apparel on his body’ or allow any other player to go out of the
playhouse with any belongings of the company (125).10
7 Bentley states that fines ‘in most companies would be paid not to the owner of the
theater but to the company treasury’ (1984, 50).
8 Also private performances given before the town Mayor and Aldermen by the
London companies when touring in the provinces were called ‘rehearsal’, although they
were not a repetition, but a sort of première that only served to see whether permission to
play might be given (Stern 2000, 26-28). The idea that the activity of rehearsing a play is
similar to what happens in schoolrooms has also been exploited in treatments of the Italian
theatre. Ferdinando Taviani quotes a passage by Evaristo Gherardi who, in 1700, contrasted
the practice of improvisation with that of players who play a premeditated text saying that
these are ‘like students who trembling repeat a lesson they have learned word by word’
(in Taviani and Schino 2007, 312). The Jesuit Giovan Domenico Ottonelli, in his Della
Christiana Moderatione del Theatro (1646), talks admiringly about those players who either
do not have a completely written text or, if they do, ‘they do not learn [it] by heart as some
boy players do, but simply learn the substance of the text’ (quoted by Taviani, 316).
9 Stern concludes that ‘there is no evidence to indicate that more than one group
rehearsal was normal’, and adds that ‘Partial rehearsals ... did also take place’ (2000, 77).
10 Particular items of apparel were owned by players. In his will, Augustine Phillips bequeathed
certain costumes and props of his to some of his fellow players (Bentley 1984, 19-20).
collaboration on the stage 243
No mention is made of what on the contrary appears as a vital
engagement for the comici: the obligation to travel ‘di loco in loco’ as the
capocomico will enjoin. Indeed, as is known, touring in the provinces was, for
the London residential companies, an occasional event, a necessity mainly
determined by the closing of the London theatres especially during plague
epidemics, while it was a necessity for the comici, whose activity (and income)
depended on the signori who asked for their services. A major disparity is
the different overall organization that becomes apparent when reading these
two kinds of agreement. By signing a contract, the Italian comici established
a community that only depended to a certain extent on the capocomico,
who was himself an actor. Robert Dawes’ obligations (and maybe those of
most English players), although he appears to have been a shareholder, were
instead due to an outside impresario who financed the whole process, from
text production to performance,11 and therefore granted wages to a number
of hired men (musicians, stage keepers, prompters, scribes, bookkeepers,
etc.) that made up the backbone of the whole enterprise. The companies’
organization, Andrew Gurr explains, ‘was commercial, a core of shareholders
and decision-makers, and a periphery of hired hands, backed in many cases
by a theatre- and property-owning impresario who supplied ready cash in
return for a share of the takings’ (1980, 29).
We are, therefore, in the presence of two different kinds of commercial
enterprise: in the first the whole profit was shared among the players to
ensure their living by practising the Art, while in the second the entrepreneur
must be granted an income large enough both to get his own profit and fuel
the theatrical enterprise. But how far these general rules were followed is a
different matter. The ‘fraternal’ companies of comici seem to have been, at
certain times, not fraternal at all; and, as regards the English players, it can
be imagined that the shareholders, certain distinguished actors, and probably
also the playwrights made their influence felt on important matters.
3. Communities
But communal work and interests also imply a communal kind of life.
The dynamics governing the companies of comici appear clearly from the
many letters which have survived.12 ‘Each player’, Siro Ferrone argues, ‘when
admitted to be part of a company, lent to the common enterprise his or her
personal store of experience and, at the same time, received a similar loan
11 As Bentley states, ‘The contribution of capital as well as histrionic ability was a
requirement for the sharers’ (1984, 32).
12 For a rich collection of letters, see Ferrone et al. (1993); for an English translation of
a few of these, see Pugliatti (2014).
paola pugliatti244
from the others’ (1997, 9). Generally speaking, however, what the letters show
is not the harmonious relationship ‘without hate, rancour, and dissolution’
that was wished for in the first contract; instead what prevails, apart from
preoccupations about the many material difficulties to be met, are the feelings
of rivalry, the meanness of envy and jealousy, the threats of abandoning the
group, the gossip and hearsay. In them we read the vicissitudes occasioned
by the instability of a vagrant, risky militancy, the pettiness of personal and
contingent tribulations, the violent jalousie de métier, but also the energy of
a ‘collective mind’.13 Ferrone maintains that, ‘one may start from there to
see how much their mean everyday vicissitudes may have given birth to their
brilliance, their hyperboles and their artistic utopias’ (1993, 15). Ferrone also
gives us an idea of the difficult balance of the group dynamics:
Each player, by joining the company or by leaving it, produced immediate effects not
only on the organization, but also on the nature of the fabula that was to be represented
… If even one of its constitutive elements was changed (or lost), the fabula also had
to be changed without altering the overall balance of the performance. (1997, 13)
All players, and especially the capocomico, were perfectly conscious of the risks
represented by the instability companies experienced in their migrant life, but
side by side with the anxiety about mutability and restlessness, their letters
display a feeling of complete integration of individuals and their trade, as if
nothing else existed for them outside the activity and creativity of playing and
the professional pride of their militancy, a militancy that, as is well known, in
most cases the comici transmitted by legacy to their children.14 Their complete
involvement in the Arte is shown, among other things, by the fact that in
almost all their letters they refer to themselves not by their actual names,
but by those of the characters they impersonated: Lelio, Florinda, Frittellino,
Arlecchino, Cintio, Baldina, Bernetta, the Captain, Fichetto, and so on.
As regards the community of English professional players, Bentley
remarks: ‘An enterprise so popular and so allegedly profitable … inevitably
developed certain standards or customs of organization, of procedure, of
remuneration, of division of labor, of conduct, of hierarchy, of the acquisition
of property, and even of providing for the widows of deceased members’
(1984, 24-25). Raimondo Guarino, in turn, observes that ‘beyond the
adventurous and uncertain footprints of single players, there appear the marks
of a collective identity’ in that ‘the world of the theatre becomes, in the age
of Elizabeth, a world apart, recognizable and circumscribed’. Guarino notes
13 The expression is by Ferdinando Taviani in a private communication.
14 The presence of family ties characterized the companies of comici, the most frequent
being that of husband and wife.
collaboration on the stage 245
that the concept of the ‘microsociety of players’ that has been formulated by
recent scholarship as regards the Italian companies can be usefully applied
to this other theatrical community as it emerges from the inextricable net
of documents such as testaments and marriage contracts which ‘reveal the
intersection between family relationships and professional communities’
(2010, 42-43).
For both groups, the feeling of community was also strengthened by
the necessity to pen defences of their trade against detractors. The Italian
comici had to plead especially about the charges of venality and scurrility as
well as about the presence of women on stage; English players were obliged
to legitimize the whole of their activity, including the facts that on the stage
men played women’s parts, thereby encouraging homoeroticism, and that
plays kept people away from church services.
In both contexts, therefore, players were stimulated to establish a dialogue
with their detractors. In certain cases, the defence produced extremely subtle
reflections, as in the passage in which Heywood contrasts the ‘descriptive’,
‘narrative’, or ‘pictorial’ genres, to stage re-presentation: ‘A Description is
only a shadow receiued by the eare but not perceiued by the eye; so liuely
portraiture is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action,
passion, motion, or any other gesture to mooue the spirits of the beholder to
admiration’; only in the theatre are characters presented ‘as if the personator
were the man personated’ (1612, B3v).15
Certain defences, however, claim the superiority of one particular manner
of acting against a different one and use the arguments elsewhere displayed
by antitheatrical writers:
Our Players are not as the players beyond sea, a sort of squirting baudie Comedians,
that haue whores and common Curtizans to play womens parts, and forbeare no
immodest speech or vnchast action that may procure laughter, but our Sceane is
more stately furnisht than euer it was in the time of Roscius, our representations
honorable, and full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun,
a Whore, and a Zanie, but of Emperours, Kings, and Princes. (Nashe 1592, H3r)16
15 In the soliloquy he pronounces after meeting the players, Hamlet expresses a similar
view about the impact of re-presentation when he plans to ‘catch the conscience of the King’
(2.2.601) ‘by the very cunning of the scene’ (2.2.586). Here and elsewhere quotations from
Hamlet are from Jenkins, ed., 1982.
16 The most famous defence of Italian theatre is La supplica that a comico, Niccolò
Barbieri, wrote in 1634. In 1646, after Barbieri’s death, the Jesuit G.D. Ottonelli, in his
Della Christiana Moderatione del Theatro (1646), established a calm dialogue with Barbieri’s
book, criticising some of the comico’s arguments, but also acknowledging that there were
virtuous instances of comedies which might even be attended with profit.
paola pugliatti246
The rivalry and the jalousie de métier, it appears, were not only part of the
groups’ dynamics – they went beyond the sea, up to the point of borrowing
the moralists’ arguments that it was the players’ effort to fight at home.
4. Preparation
4.1 Play-Reading
As regards the steps that led to the acquisition of plays by English companies,
Bentley notes that ‘There is enough evidence to show that the sharers often
had to assemble to listen to the reading of a new composition and to pass
judgment on it’ (1984, 39); and indeed many items in Henslowe’s diary
confirm that this was a current practice. Henslowe, for instance, records a sum
given to Ben Jonson for introducing a play to a company: ‘lent vnto Bengemen
Johnson the 3 desembz 1597 vpon a boocke wch he showed the plotte vnto the
company’ (Foakes and Rickert 1961, 85). In a letter dated 8 November 1599,
a player named Robert Shaa recommends to Henslowe the buying of a book
after ‘hearing’ it: ‘mr Henslowe we haue heard their booke and lyke it’ (Greg
1907, 49). Years later, on 8 May 1613, Robert Daborne writes to Henslowe
about a play he promises to deliver soon and asks him ‘to appoint any howr
to read to mr Allin’ (69). On 16 May, Daborne writes to Henslowe, again
about reading part of a play he is writing: ‘J will meet yu & mr Allin & read
some …’ (70). In a letter dated 9 December 1613, Daborne again announces
a new play; the text, he says, ‘shall make as good a play for ye publiq’ howse
as ever was playd … & J will vndertake vpon the reading it’ (79).
From these documents, however, it is unclear whether the whole text of
plays was actually read to the company (or to the shareholders), or only an
idea of the plot was given (see ‘which he showed the plotte’, or the unclear
expression ‘heard their book’, in the passages quoted above).17 Bentley argues
that it would have been impossible for shareholders to listen to a reading of
the whole five acts of plays (1984, 40).18
17 The idea of a plot being read to the company raises a question about what is meant by
‘plot’. A special kind of document, also called ‘plot’, was a stage memorandum for entrances and
gave a few elements of what happens in each scene. Of these, only seven fragmentary specimens
have survived. They were transcribed and published by Greg (1907) and later by Bradley (1992).
For extensive treatments of these plots, see also Stern (2009, 8-35) and Pugliatti (2012). Other
documents, also called ‘plots’, were meant as guidelines for the composition of plays (see infra, 5.2).
18 In one of Leone de’ Sommi’s dialogues, the author, who was a playwright and
concertatore (a position similar to that of capocomico), has one of his characters, Veridico, who
represents Leone’s own point of view, explain to his interlocutors how he presents his texts to
the players. He first distributes the various roles according to his idea of each character, then
collaboration on the stage 247
What we know for certain is that after the play was bought for staging,
players were given their ‘parts’ to learn by heart. Parts were copied out by
scribes, and each fragment of a player’s part included the cue immediately
preceding every speech, so that players might know where to enter in the
dialogue (see Palfrey and Stern 2007).19
4.2 Scenario-Reading
Andrea Perrucci (1651-1704) wrote his treatise Dell’arte rappresentativa
premeditata e all’ improvviso in 1699, when the experience of playing
all’ improvviso, reciting a seemingly absent, or rather unwritten, text, had been
rife in Italy for about a hundred and fifty years. What he says is more or less
all we have to build up our knowledge of the way in which the comici prepared
their performances. Obviously, the passage he devotes to this issue, and one
furthermore set down by a late witness, cannot be generalized as describing
a stable practice for all the companies from the start, but its verisimilitude
has the support of what appears reasonable and even obvious.
The comici built their performances on the basis of scripts or scenari.
‘The soggetto [scenario or plot outline]’, Perrucci says, ‘is nothing more than
a fabric of the scenes on a given subject, which indicates, in outline form,
what action is to be spoken or performed all’ improvviso by the actor’ (2007,
186). But the scene-by-scene subject has been read to them before by the
director.20 The reading of the subject was performed as follows: ‘All the
characters should gather in a circle to listen; they should not rely on already
knowing the comedy by heart or having played it before, because it could
be that different directors handle the plot in different ways, and the names
and places might be different as well’ (196). Then, ‘Once they have listened
to the directions about the soggetto, the actors should think about how to use
things they have already prepared. These can either be made expressly for this
play … or they can be general matters, learned by heart so that they can
be applied to any comedy or story’ (196, my emphasis). What was needed,
gathers the group and gives each of them his part. He then makes them read the whole text, ‘so
that even the boys who have a role in it be instructed in its subject, or at least in the role that
pertains to each, and that the quality of the character they must impersonate be impressed
in their mind; then I dismiss them and give them time to learn their parts’ (1968, 39). de’
Sommi’s dialogues were written between the end of the 1560s and the end of the 1580s.
19 That of distributing parts to the actors when a play had to be learned by heart was
a widespread custom in west European early modern theatre. In the case of the Italian
academic plays, actors’ parts were called ‘parti scannate’ (fragments from a marred text),
in Spain ‘papeles de actor’, and in France ‘rouleaux’. As documented by Palfrey and Stern
(2007), a few parts for English professional players have survived.
20 The English translation gives ‘director’ for concertatore.
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therefore, was a perfect coordination between the characters acting in each
particular comedy, which − Perrucci argues – was easily reached because
‘Once the characters have heard what they are to do when entering, and
when performing and concluding the scene, they can repeat the scenes with
their fellow actors and come to an understanding about any new lazzo or
jest, however they like’ (195).21
The director’s action is summarized as follows:
The director should interpret and explain the lazzi and the plot saying: ‘Here we need
such-and-such a lazzo, which is done like this, and here we need a scene of double
meanings, here this metaphor, or that hyperbole, or irony’, and so forth, with all
the lazzi or jests, assisting the characters in whatever difficulties they face. (195)22
Perrucci also deals with technical issues, especially onstage traffic blunders
to be avoided:
The characters should be careful not to run into each other when exiting, which is
more easily handled in improvised plays than in scripted ones. This is because while
an actor is speaking … he can see which wing is occupied by the character who is
about to enter; and so avoid exiting by that wing, and go instead to where there is
an empty one − though there is an inviolable rule to enter from the upper wings and
exit from the lower ones, unless necessity requires something else. (195)
The dynamics of entrances and exits which appears to be, for the comici, part of
their general professional training, could not be prescribed by means of general
rules to those who played a scripted text, on account of the great variety of plots
presented by scripted texts versus the simplified modular structure of the scenari.
In the case of fully scripted texts, players should memorize their entrances and
exits and also when to enter, as is shown by the fact that – at least in some cases
– characters’ entrances were set out, as a memorandum, in certain plot outlines
21 There is no evidence to support Stern’s assertion that ‘Commedia dell’arte players had a
single rehearsal before their (largely extemporized) performances’ (2000, 56, n. 18).
22 That special suggestions were made about the lazzi is explained by the fact that the
zanni who performed them were the most unruly components of the group and therefore their
interventions tended to be uncontrollable. Furthermore, when in a comedy there were two
zanni, these had to coordinate their comic action and be careful not to interrupt the main plot
improperly. In his Discorso sopra l’arte comica (1608), Cecchini states that the comic parts ‘are
pleasant but they sometimes break the plot of the comedy’ and may run the risk of making
the audience lose track of the events staged (Marotti and Romei, eds, 1994, 74). In his speech
to the players, Hamlet similarly warns the comic actors about their tendency to overdo by
improvising: ‘And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them
... though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered’
(Hamlet, 3.2.39, 42-43); that is, they risk to break the plot of the play.
collaboration on the stage 249
which were probably hung on the backstage next to the entrances (see note 17).
As David Bradley maintains, ‘It is not an exaggeration to say that the action
of an Elizabethan play consists of entrances. They are the means by which the
story is told; the controllers of the illusion of time and place; the sign-posts for
the understanding of the plot’ (1992, 23).
5. Text
5.1 Shakespeare and Company
That the Elizabethan-Jacobean production of plays was intensely collaborative has
long been acknowledged, and Shakespeare scholars have accepted (and examined)
the fact that even Shakespeare worked in collaboration. But the fact that a
Shakespeare existed and that he wrote plays has conditioned the vision of that
perfect collaborative machine that English Renaissance theatre must have been,
for collaboration inevitably means a diminution of authoriality. Consequently,
scholars have been induced to scrutinize his (suspect) texts in order to isolate other
writers’ hands and restore to posterity the genuine text created solely by his genius.
Recently, however, such terms as collaboration, co-authorship, joint
authorship, or play-patching have gained fresh attention in a perspective which
is, in part, new. Against distribution and attribution, this study trend tends
to discuss the way in which plays were produced – from the first idea of a plot
to its production on a stage – and to include or assimilate the various hands,
discouraging the work of distinction, separation, and exclusion performed by
attribution studies. More or less directly, the questions these studies raise are:
in what terms can authorship be evoked? How can the very concept of Author
be formulated? How can a Sole Author be isolated given that the hands which
worked on the composition and transmission of a play are so indistinguishably
entwined? How can a Sole Author be isolated given that each of those different
writers working on the same text may have tended, for uniformity’s sake, to
conform to the style of other writers’ hands, imitating them and adopting the
co-author’s writing habits and even way of thinking? Jeffrey Masten posits that
in such a context collaboration should be viewed as ‘a dispersal of author/ity,
rather than a simple doubling of it’ (1997, 19). In the final analysis, therefore,
the suspicion arises that the presence of a Shakespeare and the consequent need
to construct a strong and convincing personality/individuality structure may
have acted against an accurate reconstruction of what collaboration in text-
writing may have meant historically and conceptually, for Shakespeare as well
as for his fellow playwrights.
These quasi-heretical positions represent the symptom of a certain
uneasiness about – if not utter mistrust of – what attribution studies can
tell us of the real conditions under which the Elizabethan and Jacobean
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playwrights worked, of the real meaning of their being associates intellectually,
personally, and materially, for they substitute the idea of Sole Author by an
idea of ‘corporate authorship’. A similar view of collaboration, when we talk
of written texts (and of immensely worshipful written texts), may open up a
black hole where all our convictions about authoriality (and, in particular, of
the authoriality of Shakespeare’s plays) risk being swallowed.
A similar kind of heresy was pronounced as early as 1913-1914 by E.
Gordon Craig who asked how it was that no manuscripts of Shakespeare’s
plays have survived and answered by invoking what he thought was an utter
instability of these texts precisely because they must have been inextricably
collaborative: ‘In my opinion the Dramas were created by Shakespeare in close
collaboration with the Manager of the Theatre and with the actors; … and
I believe that a glimpse of the manuscript of the plays would reveal a mass
of corrections, additions, and cuts made in several handwritings’. To this,
Craig adds the idea that following the ‘newly formed dramatic art’ that was
the Commedia dell’Arte, much of the Shakespearean texts as we know them
are the fruit of the players’ improvisations (1913-1914, 163-165).
5.2 Plots and Scenarios
One of the issues which have been raised to affirm how impracticable it is to
distinguish and apportion the intellectual property of texts produced in these
circumstances is that of ‘plots’, those skeleton outlines which seem to have been
prepared either before or during the composition of (some) plays, compiled,
as it seems, by playwrights who were acknowledged as good ‘plotters’.
From the only quasi-complete plot of this period which we possess, that
of a play probably called Philander, King of Persia, published by J.Q. Adams
(1946), we see that these must have been similar to the scenari, although they
had an entirely different function.23 Elements of these plots, as can be drawn
from the one published by Adams, are indication of act and scene and, for
each scene, characters and a brief summary of the scene’s content.
This preparatory plotting seems to have been fundamental for the
development of the text to be composed. Quoting the cases of Greene and
Munday, who seem to have written plots for plays, W.J. Lawrence claims that
‘An engrossing story, if well schemed, was then half the battle’ (1937, 101).He
then devotes a few pages to Ben Jonson as ‘scenario writer’ and notes that, as
is witnessed by several passages in Henslowe’s papers, for many of the plays
in which Jonson collaborated he was simply the author of the plot.
23 About the bare outlines which recorded mainly the players’ entrances and were
probably hung in the backstage as simple reminders, see note 17. For a comparison between
both kinds of plots and Commedia dell’Arte scenari, see Pugliatti (2012).
collaboration on the stage 251
That some sort of preparatory work was considered necessary when preparing
both premeditated and unpremeditated texts is witnessed by many sources.
Domenico Biancolelli, maybe the greatest Arlecchino of all times and a
comico much loved by the French public, wrote down the scenic actions he
performed in seventy-three of the comedies in which he played. In a form that
is different from both that of the scenari and that of the English playwrights’
plots, Biancolelli describes act by act and in the first person his own lazzi,
also summarising the action of the other characters present in those particular
scenes. Here is a fragment from one of his scenari:
Pantalone arrives and tells me he married Diamantina and shows her to me; I make
lazzi (I would like to fall dead or swoon, but I don’t succeed), then I take off my
coat, move a little farther, lay on my coat and feign to be dead. Pantalone lifts me
up and lays me against the wall, but when he turns away I rush out and when he
again turns towards the place where he left me, not seeing me, is astonished. (Taviani
and Schino 2007, 221)
Leone de’ Sommi describes a different kind of plot, one that illustrates his
activity as concertatore when preparing the staging of his plays. After compiling
a list of all the props needed by each player, he compiles a different list in
which, he says:
I note down all the scenes in the right sequence, with the names of the characters
appearing in them, marking down the house or the street they must leave, and after what
cue, with also the first words of their speech, so that with this governance the person
who is in charge may at the right time direct all players to their place and push forward
each at their cue and also remind them of the first words of their speech. (1968, 54)
Flaminio Scala ranges two kinds of plots for the same text in his scenari (1611),
for each scene-by-scene summary is preceded by an Argument in which the
action of the whole comedy is summarized.
When we consider the plots written by English playwrights in preparation
of plays, the question arises about what distinct authorial weight should be
attributed to the outline of the plot and what to the words of the finished
play. Apart from the fact that we have the plays but not the plot outlines,
how can we distinguish, at least in a theoretical perspective, so different and
differently aimed forms of creativity, both converging onto the composition
of one text? To whom is the sequence of actions – so important, for instance,
in the case of plays inspired by an existing narrative text – to be apportioned?
The creeping heresy hidden behind these questions embodies a radical revision
of settled analytical procedures and, one may say, of a settled text-ideology,
for it tends to consider plays as the product of a collective personality (as well
as the intellectual property of a group) which it is impossible – and probably
inappropriate – to dismember.
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5.3 ‘Improvisation Is Not Improvisation’
‘A famous Spanish comedian named Adriano, who came to Naples with
other [actors] to put on their comedies, could not understand how one could
produce a comedy by simply coordinating several characters and staging it in
less than an hour’ (Perrucci 2007, 101). Perrucci acknowledges the exceptional
character of the enterprise and explains it as follows:
An undertaking as fascinating as it is difficult and risky, it should not be attempted
except by qualified and competent people, who know what the rules of language
mean, [who understand] the figures of speech, tropes, and all the art of rhetoric, since
they have to accomplish all’ improvviso what a poet does with premeditation. (101)24
If described as a comedy which may be put on ‘in less than an hour’, the
improvvisa may appear a miraculous achievement to those who are not familiar
with its methods and prerequisites. Indeed Perrucci rightly stresses some of its
necessary implications in that those who practice that ‘fascinating’, ‘difficult’,
and ‘risky’ way of acting should be equipped with exceptional knowledge of
the language and with ‘all the art of rhetoric’ (101): that is, they must be so
competent as to be able to do without a poet’s oeuvre.
Perrucci then proceeds with a comparison between premeditated and
impromptu comedies. The first, he says, ‘win[s] esteem and appreciation’ only
‘because of the poet’s effort in composing [them]’ and owing to ‘the help,
effort, and toil of so many trial runs and rehearsals’. An impromptu comedy, on
the contrary, continually runs the risk of blunders because an actor who is not
completely in control of the language may pronounce on the stage quidquid in
buccam venit. Later on, Perrucci explains what he meant by saying that players
must know ‘what the rules of language mean’ as well as master ‘all the art of
rhetoric’: actors who perform ‘this attractive and unusual entertainment …
should be armed with some general composition that can be adapted to every
kind of comedy, such as concetti (literary conceits), soliloquies, and dialogues
for the male and female lovers; or speeches of advice, discourses, greetings,
speeches with double meanings, and some gallantries for the old men’ (103).
Perrucci wrote his treatise when the rules of the improvvisa had been
settled for a long time; therefore, they had probably also undergone deep
24 Some players, both in England and Italy, were praised for their ability in extempore
rhyming. Adriano Valerini, in his Oratione in praise of Vincenza Armani after her death,
states that the Academy of the ‘Intronati’ in Siena ‘affirmed many times that this Lady
succeeded much better in extempore talking than the most consummate Authors in
thoughtfully writing’ (1570, 8). Another famous actress, Isabella Andreini, was much
praised for her extempore verse composition. In England, Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp
were also praised for their talent in extempore versifying.
collaboration on the stage 253
mutations since the start. But one particular rule among those he mentions
had been exposed many years before, in 1628, by Pier Maria Cecchini, one
of the comici who also wrote precepts for impromptu playing. Cecchini
recommended to his colleagues that they frequently ‘read uniformly elegant
books, because in those who hear them remains such an impression of
most pleasing sentences as, deceiving the hearer, they are believed to be the
daughters of the speaker’s wit’ (1628, 19).
Perrucci’s formula to describe this unusual practice of text-building is
interesting: the comici, he says, ‘have to accomplish all’ improvviso what a
poet does with premeditation’ (2007, 101). Actors, in other words, create their
texts having freed themselves of the tyranny of the Sole Author and of the
stable and immutable text (but how stable and immutable?) which constrains
them inside a pre-ordered chain of words. The passage implies they are no
less authors than the poets, authors who have invented an extremely refined
and sophisticated technique for creating their texts.
However, descriptions of the Commedia dell’Arte performance practice
have fostered a view of improvisation as the equivalent of unregulated
spontaneity and of free creative fantasy (Taviani in Taviani and Schino 2007,
312), an idea that was especially rife in the romantic period. On the contrary,
the criteria according to which improvisation should be characterised have
nothing to do with ‘naturalness’ or ‘spontaneity’. ‘Improvisation’, Taviani
concludes, ‘is not improvisation’, but only less premeditated acting, an acting
less ‘by heart’. The issue, therefore, is ‘the composition of comedies after the
manner of the comici’, and the essential thing is what this manner implied,
what was behind it, what substantiated ‘the actors’ dramaturgy’ (322).
Actors, therefore, are authors. As Siro Ferrone says,
They permanently face the dilemma of how to compose, together with their fellow
actors, the parts of the action of which each of them is the vehicle. Each time they
pose to themselves fresh questions and adapt themselves to the others’ responses,
experimenting different solutions. They are, in the final analysis and to all intents
and purposes, the authors of their performances’. (1993, xxii)
The relevant alternative, as regards the texts they created, is not the one that
contrasts premeditated and unpremeditated production. The distinction to
be made is, as Taviani argues, the one between written versus non-written
dramaturgy, and in this case ‘non-written’ does not mean
anti-literary, gestural, mimic, but – on the contrary – a kind of theatre which
downplayed the written text and sanctioned the composition of cases and actions,
and that therefore could by no means be considered as theatre without a literary
text, even though that text was produced in such a way as to appear only during
performance. (in Taviani and Schino 2007, 330)
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6. Literariness and Emancipation
Tomaso Garzoni (1549-1589), a Lateran canon from Bagnacavallo in northern
Italy, was one of the most alert critics of mid sixteenth-century theatrical
activities in Italy. He knew there was a continuity between mountebanks,
charlatans, and comici; and, wishing to shield the reputation of the latter, he
drew a sharp difference between certain second-rate players, the immediate
heirs of mountebanks, and those comici who practised the Arte following
the example of the famous Roscius (1996, II, 1180). Above all, he honoured
certain actresses whose refined elocution and spellbinding speech revealed
their literariness and made them accepted and indeed cherished in the high
spheres of contemporary culture: ‘The gracious Isabella [Andreini], honour
of the stage, ornament of theatres, superb spectacle no less of virtue than of
beauty’; ‘the learned Vincenza [Armani] who, imitating Cicero’s eloquence,
has made the comic art vie with elocution’; ‘the divine Vittoria [Piissimi],
… that beautiful love-sorceress who, with her words, entices the hearts of a
thousand lovers’ (1182).
But Garzoni also goes a step farther when he admiringly alludes to the
other activity of the comici, that of writing (and publishing). Those who
write are to be praised both for comedies and tragedies because they ‘have
crowded their written works with most moral habits, keeping in mind the
praiseworthy aim of teaching the art of living wisely, as is suited to all comici’
(1185). Indeed it was their activity as writers that ended up by promoting the
emancipation of comici from their traditional vile repute, and it is true to say
that the furthering of this process was fuelled by the intellectual prestige which
women players conferred on the profession. As Taviani says, the presence of
women, the meretrices honestae who were poets as well as players, was not
‘simply a matter of liberalization’; it rather meant
the engrafting, in the body of the male actors’ professional playing, of a different
cultural trend—academic, Petrarchan, classicizing, lyrical ... The importance of
actresses was not limited to their ability to charm and seduce audiences; their presence
meant, above all, an enlargement of the companies’ expertise, a broadening of their
qualifications, and the inception of a new dramaturgical dimension. (in Taviani
and Schino 2007, 340-341)
The theatrical activity of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights underwent
an analogous process of emancipation. Not differently from the comici, they
had noble protectors to whom they were attached as ‘servants’; they wore
their sponsors’ liveries and depended for their playing activity on the central
government as well as on the municipalities, both in London and when
playing in the provinces. They were also subjected to censorship (although
less strictly than might be imagined) and were attacked, more violently than
Italian players, by both civil and ecclesiastical authorities.
collaboration on the stage 255
It is therefore not surprising that, in an age of fierce antitheatrical
prejudice, in England the emancipation of players and playwrights was also
attained far from the stage. It was a process connected not only with writing
but with publishing, and even a certain mode of publishing which had
distinct characteristics of literariness. Bentley argues that ‘the most tangible
impetus to the slowly altering status of the players was the publication of the
Jonson folio in 1616’ (1984, 9). Guarino, in turn, believes the publication of
the 1623 Shakespeare folio was the inception of a change in the social status
of players and playwrights:
The outcome of the work of the theatrical companies of Shakespeare’s time consists in
a reversal of values: the literature of commercial theatres, an improper and defective
instrument, achieved a consecration at the same time functional and absolute. The
leading figure of the printing group that published the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s
dramatic works had published Montaigne’s Essais and Cervantes’ Quixote, the books
which, together with Shakespeare’s works, reshaped the European literary space.
(2010, 10)
But we may go a step farther. Unlike most of his plays, that were published
in cheap editions and often with no author’s name during his lifetime and
also after his death, both Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece
(1594) bore Shakespeare’s signature in the dedicatory letters, and the first
edition of his sonnets (1609) was authored in the title-page as Shake-speares.
But these were poems, not plays; they belonged to an indisputably dignified
literary genre, not to the genre of ephemeral scribbled papers whose authorship
and author-ity was an indifferent matter, for they served only to feed an
ephemeral (and morally dubious) kind of entertainment. Similarly, the
cultural promotion of the comici was not entrusted to the publication of the
even more ephemeral scenari (the first collection of scenari was published by
Flaminio Scala as late as 1611), but to the players’ poems of various kinds,
letters, pastorals, dialogues, or to their fully scripted plays composed à la
manière de ‘commedie erudite’.
As has been argued, the idea of immortality through writing can be
said to link two player-writer personalities as distinct as Isabella Andreini
and William Shakespeare (Pallotti 2003). Indeed, both for Shakespeare
and Andreini (but also for Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, as well as
for Piermaria Cecchini or Francesco Andreini) gaining a higher reputation
implied their (temporary) estrangement from the community of players.
Shakespeare may have attended to the publication of his sonnets during
what was one of the most prolonged and severe plague epidemics since the
beginning of the century probably because he was forcefully kept away from
the activity of playing and therefore owing to the fact that for a long time
‘mony [was] not stirring’ (Dekker 1609, B1v). Of Francesco Andreini, in turn,
paola pugliatti256
we know that, after the death of his wife Isabella in 1604, he left his company
and gave up playing to devote himself to the publication of his and his wife’s
works with intent to gain both, as writers, imperishable fame.
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece and his Sonnets, no less than
Isabella Andreini’s works, express the idea that poetry ‘redeems’ time and
treasures fame, and, probably, that it also redeems the players’ ill-reputed,
volatile, and ephemeral art.
7. Conclusion: A Possible ‘Meeting’
At the end of the speech in which he introduces the players, Polonius
pronounces an enigmatic sentence: ‘For the law of writ, and the liberty, these
are the only men’ (Hamlet, 2.2.397-398). Editors have acknowledged that the
sentence has never been ‘satisfactorily explained’ (Jenkins 1982, 260). The
current interpretation, however, is that Polonius is comparing plays written
according to the classical rules with those written more freely, those that
disregard the rules.
But the opposition between ‘the law of writ’ and ‘the liberty’ may
also mean a distinction between two different ways of producing a text for
performance and two different dramaturgies: ‘the law of writ’ can mean the
theatrical activity in which the ‘book’ is a central element, and ‘the liberty’
the different way of text-construction, à la manière de the Italian comici,
whose own dramaturgical contribution is unreadable because unwritten, but
composed when and where it is delivered. This reading is strengthened by
another expression Polonius uses in the same speech: the actors’ versatility, he
claims, is equal whether they perform ‘scene indivisible, or poem unlimited’
(2.2.395-396). This sentence, too, is usually interpreted with reference to the
unities, ‘scene indivisible’ alluding to a play that respects them and ‘poem
unlimited’ to one with a not-so-tight plot construction. But the relevant
opposition here is that between ‘scene’ and ‘poem’, between a text that gives
the illusion of being composed on the stage and one that relies on a poet’s
work for its scenic presentation.25
25 Louise Clubb was the first to deconstruct Polonius’ speech in a sense that is similar
to mine, noting that Hamlet editors have regularly forsaken the possible allusion to Italian
drama: ‘If the editors of the new Norton Shakespeare … gave more attention to Italian
drama, they would not be satisfied with defining “the law of writ and the liberty” as a
reference to “plays where classical rules are either observed or abandoned”. The contrast is,
in fact, between scripted five-act plays observing the rules (the “writ”) and improvised three-
act performances from a canevaccio or scenario (“the liberty”), also obeying some of the
rules, sometimes’ (2007, 15). Robert Henke, too, interprets Polonius’ speech as alluding to
‘the contrast between scripted five-act plays (the law of writ) and improvised performances
(the liberty)’ (2007, 69).
collaboration on the stage 257
Furthermore, the company of players visiting Elsinore is, from the point
of view of their material organization, nearer to those of the Italian comici
than to that of the English players. They travel ‘di loco in loco’ in search
of work, carrying the paraphernalia of their trade and stopping at court or,
presumably, in other places where their performances are requested; they do
not perform in regular theatres but in the halls of princes; they are ready to
quasi-improvise by learning, for the following day, ‘a speech of some dozen
or sixteen lines’ (2.2.535) to insert in The Murder of Gonzago, a play they
have in repertory; in short, the authorship of their whole trade seems to be
their sole responsibility. And should we really take for granted, as all editors
do, that Hamlet’s ‘young lady and mistress’ (2.2.421) is the boy actor who
played the female parts?
But also Hamlet 3.2 may have other things to reveal in terms of reciprocal
knowledge. In fact, certain passages from Cecchini’s Discorso sopra l’arte
comica con il modo di ben recitare, probably written in 1608 after a Paris tournée
of the ‘Accesi’ (Marotti in Marotti and Romei, eds, 1994, 65), show striking
resemblances to Hamlet’s advice to the players.26 In Paris, the company’s
performances were probably attended by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Lea
1934, I, 179), who was a close friend of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, as well
as the cousin of Shakespeare’s protector, the Earl of Pembroke. Did Herbert
of Cherbury bring to Paris a copy of Hamlet as a present to someone who
might be interested in reading a play that in 1608 was still the crucial cultural
event in the ancien régime of Elizabethan theatre? If further explored, the
hypothesis of such an ideal meeting may prove to constitute the only proof
of a direct textual loan at the very top of the two theatrical enterprises I have
tried to describe.
But this is matter for further research and reflection.
Works Cited
Adams J.Q. (1946), ‘The Author Plot of an Early Seventeenth-Century Play’, The
Library, fourth series, 26, 17-27.
Andrews Richard (1993), Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in
Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Andrews Richard (2014), ‘Resources in Common: Shakespeare and Flaminio Scala’,
in R. Henke and E. Nicholson, eds, Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern
Theater, Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate, 37-52.
26 Cecchini’s Discorso was kept as a manuscript in a Turin Library that was destroyed
by a fire in 1904. Modern editions reproduce a handwritten copy made by Luigi Rasi in the
early years of the twentieth century. For one of these resemblances, although not the most
striking, see note 22.
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Barbieri Nicolò (1634), La supplica. Discorso famigliare di Nicolò Barbieri detto
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Chambers E.K. (1923), The Elizabethan Stage, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 4 vols.
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London, Yale University Press.
Clubb L.G. (2007), ‘Pastoral Jazz from the Writ to the Liberty’, in M. Marrapodi,
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