Commedia dell'Arte, its Structure and Tradition chronicles a series of discussions between two renowned experts in commedia dell'arte – master practitioners Antonio Fava and John Rudlin. These discussions were recorded during three recent visits by Fava to Rudlin’s rural retreat in south west France. They take in all of commedia dell'arte's most striking and enduring elements – its masks, its scripts and scenarios, and most outstandingly, its cast of characters. Fava explores the role of each stock Commedia character and their subsequent incarnations in popular culture, as well as their roots in prominent figures of their time. The lively and wide-ranging conversations also take in methods of staging commedia dell'arte for contemporary audiences, the evolution of its gestures, and the collective nature of its theatre-making. This is an essential book for any student or practitioner of commedia dell'arte – provocative, expansive wisdom from the modern world's foremost exponent of the craft.

Commedia dell'Arte, its Structure and Tradition chronicles a series of discussions between two renowned experts in commedia dell'arte – master practitioners Antonio Fava and John Rudlin. These discussions were recorded during three recent visits by Fava to Rudlin’s rural retreat in south west France. They take in all of commedia dell'arte's most striking and enduring elements – its masks, its scripts and scenarios, and most outstandingly, its cast of characters. Fava explores the role of each stock Commedia character and their subsequent incarnations in popular culture, as well as their roots in prominent figures of their time. The lively and wide-ranging conversations also take in methods of staging commedia dell'arte for contemporary audiences, the evolution of its gestures, and the collective nature of its theatre-making. This is an essential book for any student or practitioner of commedia dell'arte – provocative, expansive wisdom from the modern world's foremost exponent of the craft.

The commedia dell'arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell'arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell'arte.

A history of Italian theatre from its origins to the the time of this book's publication in 2006. The text discusses the impact of all the elements and figures integral to the collaborative process of theatre-making. The distinctive nature of Italian theatre is expressed in the individual chapters by highly regarded international scholars.

"The mask - as object, symbol, character, theatrical practice, even spectacle - is the central metaphor around which Fava builds his discussion of structure, themes, characters, and methods. His book combines historical fact, personal experience, philosophical speculation, and passionate opinion. Including period drawings, prints, and color photographs of leather masks made by Fava himself, The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell'Arte is a rich work of singular insight into one of the world's most venerable forms of theater." --Book Jacket.

This book explores the commedia dell'arte: the Italian professional theatre in Shakespeare's time. The actors of this theatre usually did not perform from scripted drama but instead improvised their performances from a shared plot and thorough knowledge of individual character roles. Robert Henke closely analyzes hitherto unexamined commedia dell'arte texts in order to demonstrate how the spoken word and written literature were fruitfully combined in performance. Henke examines a number of primary sources including performance accounts, actors' contracts, and letters, among other documents.

The Metamorphoses of Commedia dell’Arte traces the steps by which Commedia has been transformed by cultural contact outside Italy into popular forms which bear little resemblance to the original. The book follows the Masks of Arlecchino, Pedrolino and Pulcinella as they gradually migrate and mutate into Harlequin, Mr. Punch and seaside Pierrot troupes. What happened to Pantalone, Scaramouche, Colombina and the male Lover is also investigated, though they had no final forms of their own. This study constitutes a history of what happened, notably in France and Great Britain, to a supremely popular theatrical genre as a result of changing fashions in entertainment brought on by societal developments, civil and industrial revolution and dynastic change. It investigates how the genre was exploited by management, and even its own stars, lost its vitality and gradually ended up in ‘sunken’ forms.