ABSTRACT
The some eight hundred Commedia dell’Arte scenarios that survive attest to an art of improvisation that cannily negotiated flexibility and structure. Notwithstanding the professional actors’ frequent performance of scripted as well as improvised plays, these curious and controversial texts quintessentially reflect the collaborative nature of an actors’ theater, and the paradoxical fact that the performed scenario was both repeated and unique. The scenario provided the perfect textual machine for a theater that had to be constantly on the move, improvising on the entrepreneurial level just as it did in the performative domain. And, although the Italian actors equaled or excelled their English counterparts in internecine hostility, the short form of the scenario lent itself to collaborative dissemination more than did the zealously guarded English playscript. Mostly manuscript collections from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced by dilettanti as well as professionals, the scenarios can tell us important things about how improvisation actually worked, even as they only tell part of the improvisation story and, in most cases, bear marks of literary embellishment. Even in this last respect, however, they are not divorced from the performative world of the Commedia dell’Arte troupes, who freely pillaged conceits, tropes, and themes from Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, and other authors, simply bringing to the stage the humanist habit of modular, “rhapsodic” composition. The comici were, in that respect, humanists in action.
