What is Commedia dell'Arte Today?

2008 was a watershed year for international scholarship on the commedia dell'arte. The year saw the joint Italian-French effort at securing for the art form the UNESCO status of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), and while the motion was eventually unsuccessful, for the diverse parties (academics and practitioners) interested in the subject—as Christopher Balme puts it in his conclusion to Commedia dell'Arte in Context—the project served as 'a rallying point to overcome old rivalries and speak as one group' (317). That same year, a new journal was launched by Italian academics with an international advisory board: Commedia dell'arte: annuario internazionale.¹ Further afield, Early Theatre's 'Issues in Review' section for 2008 (volume 11 issue 2), organized by contributing editor M.A. Katritzky, reflected on recent research into the phenomenon. In the same year, also, Richard Andrews published a translation of thirty scenarios of Scala's 1611 Il teatro delle favole rappresentative; and essays by several leading commedia scholars appeared in the first volume of the Theater Without Borders research collective, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater.² This essay reflects on developments in the field since, focusing on selected book publications on the commedia of the last few years.

Among the volumes covered by Katritzky in her Early Theatre 'Issues in Review' essay was Alena Jakubcová's monumental Czech encyclopedia of early modern theatre in the Czech lands, Starší divadlo v českých zemích (2007).³ This invaluable resource was translated into German and newly edited by Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer as Theater in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien.⁴ The volume presented novel information on commedia practitioners operating in central Europe in the long early modernity. Another follow-up initiative to Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck's A Treatise on Acting from Memory and by Improvisation (1699) by Andrea Perrucci was a website containing facsimiles of Perrucci's treatise.⁵ The same editorial team had published the 176 Casamarciano scenarios.⁶ Together with the Correr scenarios, published by Alberti in 1996, a selection from other collections edited by Cesare Molinari (1999), a great number of commedia canovacci have now been made available, most recently the Corsini collection, Scenari più scelti d'istrioni (2014), published in a bilingual Italian-German edition prepared by a team of scholars (Elisabeth Büttner, Klemens Gruber, and Christian Schulte) from the University of Vienna led by Stefan Hulfeld.⁷ With a thorough introduction and annotation, this two-volume edition of the Corsini manuscript, with 102 colour plates reproducing the manuscript's drawings, makes a fundamental contribution to commedia scholarship and deserves to be much more widely known and used.

Several authors covered in this review reflect on the prominence of the myth around commedia dell'arte—almost growing to a cult in some circles. This mythologized...