Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630 by Natalie Crohn Schmitt (review)

Natalie Crohn Schmitt, who has already written a solid analysis of Flaminio Scala's published scenario collection entitled Befriending the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala: The Comic Scenarios (2014), provides in Performing Commedia dell' Arte a concise, useful, and informative study of the performance techniques of Italian professional theatre during its heyday of 1570-1630. The book divides into chapters titled "Improvisation: why, what, how"; "Acting Styles: dialects, voices, gestures"; and "The Uses of Masks" (the latter perhaps better titled "Characters and Genres"), in addition to a short historical introduction and a final "Coda" on twentieth and twenty-first century theatres drawing in part on the commedia dell'arte.

Schmitt is a generous scholar with a strong sense of the community of Anglo-American (less so Italian) scholars at her beck and call: she does not reinvent the wheel but uses other studies as springboards to her work, including recent ones such as Emily Wilbourne's beautiful 2016 book on opera and the "sound" of the commedia dell'arte. When attempting to reconstruct performance techniques such as improvisation, vocal delivery, and gestural comportment—techniques for which there often is scant documentation from the extant historical documents—she ingeniously and fruitfully looks at adjacent cultural areas.

Of particular note is her ample and inventive examination of the arts of oratory, as she practically convinces us that the first Renaissance acting treatise was, in effect, not that of the early seventeenth century actor-writer Pier Maria Cecchini, but rather Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria—obviously a classical text but continually reprinted and widely disseminated in the Renaissance. Quintilian's minute advice on the vocal delivery of a speech from Cicero's Pro Milone, his delineation of various vocal tones from the harsh to the sweet, and even his discussion of the rhetorical effects of tattered clothes and disheveled hair—all seem to have been read by the First Player of Hamlet. In a fascinating and informative section on the art of gesture in the commedia dell'arte, Schmitt shows Quintilian animating the relationship between the "word and the action." My only quibble with Schmitt's discussion of the Institutio oratoria is that, on page 31, she seems to undercut the application of the Roman writer to the Arte by only mentioning the commedia erudita and the professional actors' performance of scripted plays as sites where we can be assured that he was applied. Many of the Arte actors received a classical education and could have either read the text itself or absorbed it by osmosis, and the much of the beauty of Quintilian lies in its application to improvisation—wasn't that Schmitt's point?

A rounded cultural approach enriches Schmitt's discussion of improvisation in the Italian professional theater. She appositely quotes Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning on improvisation as an "opportunistic grasp of that which seems fixed and established" (7), which nicely applies to the Arte actors' canny use of "fixed" literary material. Schmitt profitably frames Arte improvisation in the general ambience of the Renaissance, whether in the court culture of "sprezzatura" represented by Castiglione, or in the performative worlds and demi-worlds of preachers, mountebanks, cantastorie, and piazza actors. Both the rhetorical arts of copiousness, which can be applied to both writing and improvised oral delivery, and in utramque partem composition (arguing both sides of a question) were effectively arts of improvisation. Particular interesting was her reference, following Julia Sutton's study of Italian dance manuals, to improvisation in Renaissance dance. Following Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory, Schmitt shows us how Renaissance memory itself was conceived of as a "compositional" art (14) lending to improvisational elaborations. All in all, Schmitt gives us a good picture of what Walter Ong dubbed "secondary orality": the oral methods of composition that mostly literate actors wrought on codified fragments of literary texts. And drawing from her own observations of improv in Chicago, Schmitt persuasively refutes the received idea that improvisation beyond two or three...