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In the certainty that he towered above his time, traditional criticism tends to deny that Shakespeare also was of his time, one in which Italian theater had been flourishing for nearly a century before London's first theaters were built. To the contrary, however, as Harry Levin points out, Shakespeare "was not less but more responsive than others to the currents of his age.... He had achieved them by using the same materials and techniques that they [the Italians] did and can be most fully understood in the light of conditions they shared." (1) In a spirit of inquiry about such shared conditions and theatrical cross-currents from approximately 1590 to 1625, I consider the likelihood that the Arlecchino, star of commedia dell'arte, served as godfather to several English player-fools, from Shakespeare's drunken tinker Christopher Sly, to his singing tinker Autolycus, to Chapman's riddling tinker, Capriccio. Each stands in a dappled shadow of Italy's nimble impersonator and each excites a consciousness of fooling as deeply antiauthoritarian. Whether or not an Arlecchino ever visited England, he seems to glimmer like a sprite in these characters, whose respective works bear other signs of Italian appropriation--a pivotal reason for my choosing to examine them.
To position my argument theoretically: the Arlecchino of commedia synthesizes several traditions about fools in folklore, myth, medieval drama, and sixteenth-century styles of playing, both in theaters and on the piazze. These wide-ranging antecedents, many with near parallels in England and Europe, add to the probability that reports of an Arlecchino usually, unknowingly, refer to the archetypal impersonator who is liminal, transformational, and without a propria persona. He becomes a character only when in a particular role. Even then, to the extent that fooling and role-playing always pull against the grain of romantic plot and character, fools are appositional outsiders, perched at the edge of a drama and more accurately defined in theatrical rather than representational terms. The archetypal fool might present himself to the playwright's imagination as a sketch, a ghost, a template, so to speak, as insubstantial as fools by their own report, capricious nothings. Some such concept reputedly inspired Moliere, Gozzi, Goldoni, Marivaux, and Pirandello--and I propose, inferentially, may well have inspired Shakespeare and his contemporaries. (2)
Additionally, certain kinds of fools seem to be as thoroughly integrated into comic situations or theatrical strategies as borrowed literary texts are in a finished work. Just as a pastoral like Guarini's much translated Il Pastor Fido was reinvented in Italy and flourished in Shakespeare's late plays, so some roles travel with a particular form. Critics have noticed such resemblances as "intertextuality" referring to a hypothetical descent of strategies or situations from a common ancestral text. Analogously, Arlecchino would be a "text" composed of theatrical and historical legacies, traits, styles, actions, and emblematic signs called upon by performance of a role. One action repeated in scenari with an Arlecchino, for instance, strongly suggests that either he or one of his near ancestors appeared in the earliest known Dialogue in commedia style (1568), almost a scenario, performed as the entertainment at a wedding feast and illustrated on the walls of Trausnitz castle. (3) According to its description, the action involving a Zanni and a Magnifico grew out of a recognition scene dramatizing the antitheses of authority and antiauthority. The scene became standard in full scenari and crucial to romance plots that hinge on one or more mysterious identity. Shakespeare wrote both comic and tragic variations on the basic recognition scene in all but three of his plays.
Finally, the theme of transformation in Renaissance comedy, romance, and masque relied for its expression on spectacle--acting, singing, dancing, sets, and staging. Comment about these and their relation to commedia draws on records and illustrations once considered idiosyncratic rather than authoritative evidence: diaries, playbills, broadsides, reports of performances by private persons, and like materials. I admit to guesswork about the Arlecchino who appears in these sources since he is, literally, manifested only in disguises, inversions, doubles, and a whirlwind of illusory roles assumed in the interests of transformation. About this, a reminder: Commedia was theater without a playwright; thus, a theater of actors; thus essentially theater about theater. Its primary goal was not to satirize social or political life, except as all comedy contains elements of subversion, but to offer popular entertainment, especially through its dreamlike reversals of power in a time of social chaos. The anarchic spirit of scenari coupled with their farcical aggressiveness indicate that commedia's paramount goal was to generate wonder at its artistry and amusement at its entirely spurious content. (4) In other words, addressing the idea of transformation in relation to commedia means speaking to theater as a subject as well as a medium. About these topics, I must take much for granted as already known.
I. Cultural Legacies
Harlequin has every possible gesture. He doubles and trebles himself, changes and transforms himself. He is a poor starved servant and a great conjuror. He is all intelligence, elemental, a demon of movement. He puts two flowers in his mouth and, for a dozen seconds, is a beautiful woman. He is neither a clown nor a marionette. It is he who pulls the strings of all the other characters in the comedy. He sets the mechanism of this little world in motion. But at the same time he parodies and mocks it. For he is the only one who knows all the moves. (5)
The great critic quoted here, Jan Kott, envisioned "Harlequin" as a consummate impersonator, a shape shifter, an antiauthoritarian fool, and implicitly a noncharacter. Kott idealized a form of mid-sixteenth-century theater cast up by the historical and cultural circumstances of the Venetian state, including its flourishing literature and drama, system of patronage, authoritarian Church, yet also the secular attitudes of its humanist movement. Commedia flourished where a strong Christianity embraced its own fools, in Italy, France, and England, chiefly in medieval plays and performances of ritual, carnival, and liturgical holidays that established the fool as a cultural phenomenon. Beyond this, differing responses to popular theater in each country call for some reminders about the Arlecchino's rise in Italy and flowering in France, which governed much of Italy from the 1530s to the end of the century.
Unlike commedia's innamorati, vecchi, and zanni who spin off from learned comedy, the Arlecchino from his first mention in scenari (c. 1570) is not fixed by his mask to a specific literary or social role. He arrived in commedia from diffuse connections to fools, and when particularized in a role he became his own double: at once a fool defined by his function and a character by his personification. (6) He defied a fixed identity in the same sense that his actions undermined all forms of bourgeois authority. Studies of commedia may have minimized the Arlecchino's relation to other fools partly as they fall outside of a strict definition of actors performing all' improvviso in a stable, tightly coordinated troupe. Still, "performances of sacred dramas featured mimes, jugglers, and tumblers, especially in the role of devils, whose spontaneous buffoonery clearly seems to anticipate the capers of the Arlecchino and Zanni in commedia." (7) Given commedia's celebrated life in France, the Arlecchino probably assimilated some elements of the sortie, primitive, satiric playlets by university boys costumed as sots or fools (in one script "charlatans"), coinciding with the Feast of Fools and based on mockery of clerics and other men in power. The Feast is the day of inversions--a central feature of commedia's scenari--when beggars become kings. Disguises, concealment, sudden appearances, and revelations typify sortie, as do tricks and mistakes. Roles were fixed, the players usually masked, and nonsense language prevailed. In plays like La Mere de Ville and Le Jeu du Prince des Sotz, the chief fool and ruler of the sortie was Mere Sotte, a cleric or priest in woman's dress to whom the boys reported discovered wickedness. (8)
Such associations extend the Arlecchino's links backward to medieval extempore players and goliards in Italy and France, while they illuminate commedia's continuing development during the mid sixteenth century in carnival, rustic farces, and dialect theater with lured types. A group of street players calling themselves Zanini formed at Padua in 1545. Twenty years later, in 1568, the famous Gelosi troupe was in demand throughout the Venetian province. Suffice it to say that the Arlecchino "moves up" into commedia with a bag of tricks, turns, and impostures already familiar to his audiences from his earlier popular forms. The invaluable evidence provided by illustrations of performances shows his ordinary trade to be that of Tinker and Bellows mender (figs. 1 and 2), both reputed pickpockets but a common guise among fools throughout Europe and England. The occupation gives Arlecchino a point of reference, yet not a definition or fixed character. Scenari in Scala's collection, for example, rarely name the Arlecchino in the Argument; he simply materializes at a fortuitous moment either as a breathless messenger moving the basic love story along (as in 3, 4, 9, 15); or as a mountebank dentist (12); a doctor (17); a magician (21); a woman (32); a shepherd (75); a mythic deity (145); and so on. Perhaps his long beard in Fossard's prints of performances, the earliest known, hints at his role reversals with the powerful vecchi, always bearded. Fossard's illustrations also show the Arlecchino doubling the Pantalone when teaching him to sing to the lady; when playing a Quixote who wears a kettle as a helmet (321); when parodying himself as Tinker carrying not domestic oddments or glassware but Pantalone's many bastards (322). The latter role is illustrated in fig. 3, although the basic image of transporting fools (fig. 4) repeats in several contexts with varying interpretations, as we will see. Typically, Arlecchino plays the outsider who mocks his betters by outsmarting them, while the sheer number of his manifestations from early to late underscores his one constant quality as liminal. (9)
[FIGURES 1-4 OMITTED]
In spite of Fossard's documentation of an Arlecchino's specific roles, criticism of Renaissance drama still tends to identify him with zanni: varlets, servants, and downs who proliferate in formal drama as well as in reports of public entertainments, in diaries, in theory, in accounts of aristocratic and court performances, scenari, and illustrations, none of which distinguish consistently among servants, fools, and Arlecchini. Even a preliminary survey of the material shows that some Arlecchini played the role of zanni, but obviously not all zanni were Arlecchini. The resulting confusion has led critics to assume that at some point two zanni from Bergamo came into commedia, one a dolt, the other a wit. To complicate matters further, zanni also appeared with carnival maskers, acrobats, quacks, and charlatans in the piazze--relationships that are much disputed and surveyed meticulously by Kenneth and Laura Richards. (10) At the least, a generic zanni reflects the historical world of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy with its migratory laborers, workers (fachini), vagabonds, thousands of peasants dislocated by shifting borders, political wars, foreign rule, and economic ruin.
If, instead, performance is used as a rule of thumb for identifying the figure, the zanni who joined mountebanks and ciarlitani in their shows was probably a proleptic Arlecchino. Thomas Coryat's much quoted description of a "baudie" comedy he saw in the Piazza San Marco of Venice featuring a "Pantaloun, a Whore & a Zanie" supports a similar distinction). (11) This witty zanni, moreover, not only played with mountebanks, his role was played by mountebanks, according to pictures in the album amicorum of Hans Eitel Neupronner (dated 1619-25) as well as other records discussed by M. A. Katritzky. (12) Notes in an album belonging to Michael Mailinger, dated 1615-31, describe a zanni in a variant Arlecchino costume arguing with a mountebank, confirming other evidence that disputation was a central component of performances, complete with mime, gesture, and horseplay.
One of the best authenticated albums, that of the Swiss traveler Thomas Platter, minutely records the activities of an Italian company of four actors and two actresses led by "Zan Bragetta," who drew a crowd of up to one thousand people in a Venetian piazza. (13) They played on trestle tables in the tennis court, expensively rented for the purpose, and moved outdoors to the "Place au change" after a few days when crowds thinned out. Bragetta, who seems to have been a witty Arlecchino in all but name, performed verbal set pieces such as pseudo-scientific monologues and dialogues as well as comic disputations and mimes with his opposite the "Pantalon," who dressed as a learned doctor for both the magic and the mountebank parts of their show. Apparently, sales were lively--"Zani" was able to sell "several hundred boxes this way" before and after his plays and musical interludes. Platter says that Bragetta's troupe also played "very pretty pastorals"; that Bragetta wore a zanni costume, and, separately, that the mountebank was sometimes assisted by "Harlequin, Stentorella or Francatrippa" (that is, variant forms of Arlecchino).
Some mountebank troupes such as Bragetta's routinely included full-length pastoral romances in their repertoire and thus blurred the distinction between their activities and those of commedia troupes. The predominance of fast-talking trickery in the repertory may well point to links among the itinerant mountebank, the Arlecchino...
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