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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.
John Rudlin is the author of Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook and Commedia dell’Arte: A Handbook for Troupes.
Antonio Fava is a world-renowned teacher, practitioner and scholar of commedia dell’arte, based in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Arlecchino is on trial. Le Docteur presides. Pulcinella stands ominously behind the accused, dangling a large bunch of keys.
Commedia dell’Arte, its Structure and Tradition
Antonio Fava in Conversation with John Rudlin
John Rudlin and Antonio Fava
First published 2021 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
The right of John Rudlin and Antonio Fava to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with Sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-64856-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12660-7 (ebk)
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eResource: www.routledge.com/9780367648565
For Dina, Trish and theatre-makers and theatregoers everywhere
List of figures
Detail of an engraving of a scene from Colombine Avocat pour et contre in Le Théâtre Italien by Evaristo Gherardi, Brussels, 1697. The engravings were made by Gabriel Huquier between 1729 and 1731 and published as Théâtre Italien Livre des Scènes Comiques inventés par Gillot.
1.1 Grande Zanni mask, from left to right: natural leather recently made; natural leather darkened after several years of use; natural leather blackened by many years of use. Atelier Fava. This image can be seen in colour via the book’s eResource page www.routledge.com/9780367648565. 2
1.2 Pantalone dancing in an inn: 17th century engraving by unknown hand. 3
1.3 Pedrolino/Pierrot with back turned: engraving by Du Bosc, after Watteau, 18th century. 5
2.1 Brighella: 17th-century engraving. 8
2.2 Arlecchino: engraving by Mitelli, 17th century. 11
2.3 Il Magnif ico: engraving by Joullain, in Riccoboni, Histoire du Théâtre Italien, 18th century. 13
2.4 Il Dottore: engraving by Joullain, in Riccoboni, Histoire du Théâtre Italien, 18th century. 17
2.5 Arlecchino disguised as a doctor. Engraving by Claude Gillot, 18th century. 20
2.6 A Bolognese Doctor. Lithograph, 19th century. 21
2.7 Angelo Constantini as Mezzettino. Acquatint by Yves Barret, 19th century. 22
2.8 Francesco Andreini: engraving by A. Fiedler after the fresco by Bernardino Poccetti, Church of the Santissima Annunziata, Florence, in Comici Italiani by Luigi Rasi, 19th century. 24
2.9 Antonio Fava as Il Capitano Bellerofonte Scarabombardone da Rocca di Ferro. 25
2.10 Pulcinelli cooking maccaroni: etching by F.G. Shmidt from G.B. Tièpolo, 18th century. Grimaldi, Rome, 1899. 26
2.11 The last rites: Tartaglia as a notary at Pulcinella’s deathbed, after Ghezzi. in Pulcinella e il Personaggio del Napoletano in Commedia by Benedetto Croce. 32
6.1 Domenico Biancolelli as Arlecchino: engraving, 18th century. 44
9.1 Zanni skinheads: montage, Atelier Fava. 59
A.1 Antonio Fava as Pulcinella. 63
B.1 Antonio Fava as Pulcinella in Il Pozzo. 67
Engravings, acquatint and etching all from the Archivio FavaBuccino. Photographer: Marcello Fava.
Preface
‘It gets dark quite early in Reggio Emilia in August. The station taxi-driver looks at me disbelievingly when I give him the name of the student residence on the outskirts of town where I am supposed to be staying for the next four weeks while attending Antonio Fava’s summer course in commedia dell’arte. ‘Vacanza –chiuso – clo-zed’ he says, but still takes me there, hoping perhaps for a return fare to a cheap hotel. Sure enough, there isn’t a light on, but I pay him off courageously and am standing forlornly in the porch when suddenly a car pulls up, and a small, dark ball of energy (later to be identified as Dina Buccino, Antonio’s partner in life and work) says “quick, put your bags in here and jump in –we’re going to see Antonio perform!”
At first sight, Reggio is not a very prepossessing town, especially when compared with the splendours of neighbouring Parma, Bologna, and Ferrara. Prosciutto crudo (the pig population is three times that of the human one), and Parmigiano Reggiano are what it is famous for. But behind the rather blank facades lie exquisite renaissance courtyards, and it was in one of those that Antonio was performing. The concert had already started and when we arrived and Antonio was providing comic interludes between madrigals. Dressed in a baggy white tunic, he was asleep – Zanni’s only relief from the primordial hunger that afflicts him – alternately snoring and farting. All at once, train-lag vanished, and it wasn’t dark any more: the irreverent elemental light of a Commedia lazzo, this was what I had come for…
Next day, in intense heat and humidity, the course started. Immediately one realised why the original 16th-century masks were made of leather – they absorb your sweat. Not very hygienic, but very practical. And practical is what we had to be: forty of us from fourteen different countries, speaking eight different languages.’
I wrote the above as the opening of my programme note for Antonio’s production of Love is a Drug for the Oxford Stage Company, which toured England in 1995. The note records the beginning of a dialogue which has continued up to the present day, with the following pages comprising a further episode.
One of our subsequent encounters was when we shared a platform together at the international conference ‘Crossing Boundaries: Commedia dell’Arte Across Gender, Genre, and Geography’ in 2013 at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I remember then alluding to the Arab saying that a teacher is a candle that burns down so that others might see, and Antonio vehemently denying that this was the case with him. Then he later wrote to me to say that he was, however, scandalised by the systematic way in which some former students have ‘stolen’ his work. He said he felt ‘cloned, copied, plagiarised’, and that his teaching was often not even credited, the worst example is that of an American student emailing his notes on each day’s teaching for use in a simultaneous workshop back home. ‘And what do they go on to do?’ he continued, ‘they invent a sort of ‘commedia’ that has no other existence, is alien, idiotic, rotten at the core. The result is the humiliation and amateurisation of a great historical phenomenon which led to the creation of the modern professional actor. Ignored today by theatres everywhere in the world, Commedia thus pays a very dear dramatic price and finishes up in the hands of ignoramuses and incompetents. I have a whole encyclopedia in my head about what commedia dell’arte is and what it is not. If I took time just to write it out, it would run to several volumes. Obviously, there wouldn’t be any readers patient enough to take it all in, but it would be ideal if we could eventually condense it into a single ‘conversational’ book.’
These conversations document the recorded discussions we had at my home in Charente over three sessions lasting 2/3 days each between 2017 and June 2019. Our language was French, which I have subsequently translated into English, the lingua franca which Antonio believes is vital to future world-wide study and development of the form.
The illustrations are from Antonio’s personal collection; most have never been published in an English edition.
The endnotes have been added post hoc, as have the appendices. Translations and explanations in square brackets […] have also been added later by me, often in consultation with Antonio.
John Rudlin
Prologue
JR: Here we are, then, eventually. What is our aim in these conversations?
AF: To reconsider a kind of theatre that was once simply the theatre, found more entertaining than any other kind and which, in consequence, is being variously re-interpreted. In order to perform commedia dell’arte one has an obligation to study the form from its inception right up to the present day. I consider it to be a vocation. Such consideration, incidentally, does not entail being a slave to the past, but we’ll come on to that.
Let’s begin with the name: c ommedia dell’arte is a term first used by the playwright Carlo Goldoni towards the end of the 18th century and it is open to misinterpretation. The word ‘commedia ’ itself simply means ‘theatre’ – of all kinds, not just ‘comedy’, and the word ‘arte ’ has nothing to do with ‘art’. The simplest translation would be ‘professional’. A more meaningful overall nomenclature would be the earlier ‘commedia mercenaria’, but ‘mercenary’ has unfortunate overtones in other languages: here it just meant that the plays were performed for money, i.e. professional. ‘Commedia improvvisa’ is another earlier term and one which it might be preferable to use today.
JR: I n English, some scholars are now content to reduce the nomenclature to just ‘Commedia’.
AF: A s shorthand possibly. For me the word ‘Commedia’ on its own would preferably be with reference to a particular scenario as performed. For the form as a whole I still prefer the whole phrase. Anyway, professional theatre is what we are talking about here, in a form that has changed and developed throughout its existence, but always on the basis of an underlying structure. It is that structure that I now want to insist upon. It is based on solid foundations with the following pillars: the mask; the personnages; performance
AF: In the beginning there were only zannis, and what they performed were called zannesca, comedie degli zanni, or zannata: zanni plays.
JR: How did they develop into the full form?
AF: 1560 enter the woman: it is she that imposes the mask as an object on the fledging commedia dell’arte. And, if you invent Isabella, the role of the attractive young woman, you must also invite on stage Flavio, the handsome young man, who must not have his face covered either. The female servant , furthermore, was required to expose more than just her face. Who was left to wear the leather mask, then? The old, the stupid and the grotesque. In the baroque period there were definitively five Masks: the two old men, the Magnifico (Pantalone) and the Doctor; the two male servants (zannis) and the Captain, making, with the addition of the Lovers, a company of seven. The old, the young, the servants and the intruder. The Lovers could be reduplicated and there could also be a servetta – a female servant, making a troupe of nine. As time went by different actors changed the names in order to make a name for themselves, but the tipi fissi [fixed types] remained basically the same.
Commedia dell’arte then dominated the European stage for more than two centuries, but the thing which nearly killed it off, like the huge meteorite which is supposed to have destroyed the habitat of the dinosaurs, was the French revolution. What happened in Europe at that moment was precisely the same sort of step-change: taste in art and all other cultural forms altered radically, first in France and then in monarchies throughout Europe whose aristocrats did not want to find themselves following their French counterparts to the scaffold. They preferred to change their constitutions.
JR: So commedia dell’arte became a profession that one could no longer profess to.
AF: It was inevitably a victim. Until then patronage had been extended by royalty, by the aristocracy and even rich merchants to troupes to be disbursed amongst individuals by mutual agreement, after production and other costs had been met. In Italy the amounts offered reflected a certain rivalry between Dukes, who each wanted to boast of having the best company under their wing. The Duke of Mantua was particularly magnanimous. That’s how the Renaissance had developed: there were lots of little States whose
Dukes wanted to be the biggest, the best, the most beautiful. The intensity of competition was incredible, not only in the beaux arts, but also in the sciences. That is why the French revolution was such a disaster: all that smacked of the Ancien Régime was swept away by fear. Since la commedia dell’arte had always been protected and provided for by that régime, it now became necessary for audiences to distance themselves from it. The exception was in the South of Italy, where Pulcinella survived as he always has done. There were new themes for him to explore, but he retained the same identity.
JR: A nd, under various guises, commedia dell’arte also survived in the Parisian foires… but that’s another story. Let’s go on to examine your sense of structure, then.
The mask 1
AF: As an object the commedia dell’arte mask is a false countenance made of leather. It is commonly thought that it was black, ab origine, but this is not the case: it was of natural tan colour when new, only becoming blackened with use and age. In the olden days, performing in the open air or by candle-light, it might take two or three generations of wear for a mask to blacken totally. Furthermore, the mask-makers of the time did not have the means to introduce different colours. With today’s stage illumination by electricity, the darkening process is speeded up considerably, and one also needs to introduce some subtlety of tone. When I dye a mask that I have made, it is in anticipation of the hue that the leather would have adopted after 10 years or so. Incidentally, the comici dell’arte would never have requested a new mask to be made black: a lot of servants were slaves at the time, but black slaves had no place in commedia dell’arte. Ariane Mnouchkine was quite wrong to make such a supposition.1
Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever for the misapprehension going round present-day mask-makers that Brighella’s mask should be olive-green. Where the green supposition has come from I do not know, but it is the kind of theorisation with no historical basis in actual Commedia performance that I find unacceptable. (See Figure 1.1)
JR: I think there’s been a mistranslation somewhere along the line. ‘Olivatre’ in French when referring to facial complexion would perhaps be better rendered ‘sallow’ than ‘olivaceous’ in English.
AF: Even olive-brown due to the natural tanning process, but not green. I repeat, as the leather ages, with temperature and sweat, the mask passes through all the colours by which a white European face is normally known. Green is not one of them. Commedia mask-makers never made fantastical masks.
Figure 1.1 Grande Zanni mask*
*This image can be viewed in colour via the eResource link found in the preliminary pages of this edition www.routledge.com/9780367648565 and on the book’s webpage on Routledge.com.
JR: I n the 18th century Brighella did acquire green frogging on his costume…
AF: A g reen-faced Brighella is on my no-no list, and that’s that.
JR: I’m interested to discover what else you are going to put on your no-no list…
AF: A ll in good time… It is not usually understood that the first mask to be found in commedia dell’arte was make-up, that of the infarinato, [literally ‘the enfloured one’, the white-faced fool]. His make-up was white2 , heavily so, made popular again in the 19th century, particularly by the French Pierrots. In the early days of playing in the street in the broad light of day, actors wanted to show a face that was not their own: that of the character, not of the actor. The white face also more readily enabled women’s parts to be played by men, as was the tradition. (See Figure 1.2)
JR: Traces of the floured face can still be found in early cinema: the Keystone Cops, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel, for example, Why?
AF: B ecause the principals needed to stand out from the crowd in both cases – the sunlit streets of the Italian carnivals and the film lots of Hollywood.
JR: And early black-and-white one and two-reelers were filmed outdoors…
AF: Yes.
JR: …Hollywood becoming the movie-making centre it did because of the exceptional quality of the light in the days before pollution. But why then did those white-faced comici dell’arte end up wearing the mask?
AF: The facial mask alone is not a sufficient disguise: the head needs to be considered as a whole: the wig or hat, facial hair, the chin below the half-mask line, the cheeks even in the case of the doctor’s quarter-mask. Today there is a whole line of theatrical investigation, altogether modern, specific to our times, which is based on the presumption that all you need is the mask and that if you put it on, and little else in terms of dressing head or body – are practically naked, in fact – it will dictate to you how your body should behave. I’ve seen this several times on the internet as street performance being practised in the name of commedia dell’arte; it makes about as much sense as promenading naked except for a pair of shoes.
Figure 1.2 Pantalone dancing in an inn
JR: No-no list?
AF: No-no list. Inevitably, each time, the mask has been that of Arlecchino; the actors, also inevitably, are young, with handsome, good-looking bodies. But to take on a mask is a commitment for life, a professional commitment. What are these youngsters going to do when they grow older?
JR: T hey may be latter-day disciples of Etienne Decroux who worked in just a loincloth.
AF: A h, the tanga…. The most important disciples of Decroux are Eugenio Barba of Odin Teatr and Jerzy Grotowski who developed the idea of the corps plastique. But you can’t mix near nudity with a mask on with Decroux’s gestuality and Grotowski’s plasticity and claim the result to be commedia dell’arte. Commedia dell’arte is much more precise, much less elastic, much less individually expressive. It is a genre which exists within specific boundaries: when we recognise those boundaries, we know where we are. Form and content coincide.
JR: In commedia dell’arte you have to work with constriction, not freedom. Pantalone’s Moroccan slippers, for example, have open backs and pointed toes, obliging him to shuffle and even dance in a particular way. (See Figure 1.2)
AF: A nd there’s also the fact that, in the expressive system of commedia dell’arte, a mask never takes its clothes off. The costume is part of the mask – in fact, the only non-masked part of the actor is his hands. These should never be brought into proximity with the mask for fear of betraying its lack of plasticity. Also, and it doesn’t matter whether the actor is masked or not, I find that one must never turn one’s back on the spectator or, if absolutely necessary, only rapidly: anything more than a fleeting glance at the back of the neck and the mask’s identity is lost. I notice in my collection of engravings, especially those of the 17th century, of Watteau and his school in particular, that occasionally Pierrot, for example, does turn his back. (See Figure 1.3) But on stage, rather than on canvas, one learns what I call the ‘principle’ of the masks. I prefer this word to ‘laws’ or ‘rules’ because it is something you learn through personal experience, not as behaviour imposed from without by society’s enforcers: police, priests, teachers and so on.
Notes
1. The Théâtre du Soleil’s L’age d’Or (1975) featured a North African immigrant worker in Marseilles named Abdullah. He was based on Arlecchino.
2. Probably made by using rice flour which is finer and whiter than wheatmeal and is still used by Japanese Kabuki actors today. The English Pierrot troupes used zinc oxide – highly carcinogenic...
Figure 1.3 Pedrolino/Pierrot with back turned
2 The personnages
JR: What do you mean by a ‘personnage ’?
AF: Occasionally (for present purposes, and even though our intention is ultimately anglophone), there is a word which is better left, for clarity’s sake, in a romance tongue. The masks of the commedia dell’arte are known as tipi fissi (‘fixed types’), or personaggi in Italian, but the French personnage is to my mind more readily adoptable into English.
JR: Whereas the word ‘personage’ in English signifies someone of elevated status, and ‘personality’ defines individual character, for example, one of the dramatis personae of a particular play.1
AF: Let’s stay with the French, then. Each personnage hailed from a different part of Italy and spoke in a different tongue. They can however, be grouped into families: Bergamese, Tuscan, Venetian, Bolognese, and then Neapolitan, the language of the south.
I’ll begin with the northern families and the innamorati, the Lovers, since the inception of what is now called commedia dell’arte dates from their arrival.
Gli innamorati
It’s important to recognise that the young lovers were not lovers, in fact, but adventurers – adventurers in love. How they were portrayed varied from company to company, although they moved from troupe to troupe as a pairing much more than other comici. They invariably spoke Tuscan since it was linguistically the most elegant, the language of the academies, and the literati. Since they acted without the mask, the question was always, how long they could go on convincing audiences that they were young lovers?
JR: Perhaps their make-up helped there?
AF: Yes, to that extent, it replaced the mask: it was always thickly applied and was based on the white face of the infarinato Why white-face? Because it is an object half-way between mask and face, you could call it a mask that moves, capable of multiple variations.
JR: Stan Laurel rather than Buster Keaton, then…
You used the phrase ‘young lovers’. When a larger troupe had two pairs, were the second pair usually older?
AF: First of all, one must avoid considering the pairings as being first and second, as if one were more important than the other. Over the centuries, that did become the case, but in the origins of Commedia, its foundations, which are our most important reference point in trying understand how this kind of theatre works, they had equal status on stage. It might be better to call them the blue pair and the red pair. They are distinguished by the fact that one couple are ingénues and brimming over with love, an idealised love, which has marriage as its objective, whereas the other couple seeks amorous adventure, preferably clandestine and erotic. The first two are very young and dependent on their fathers, they are adolescents; the second is adult, independent, rather irresponsible. Some are already married, such as the woman who is the wife of an old man who is always, in all the plays, widowed from his first wife, who was the mother of his son or daughter. The second male might be a gambler whose addiction causes enormous problems. The male of the first pair is mentally fragile and given to foolishness, which has to be resolved in the happy ending.
The intrigues of both pairs can be fuelled by madness, most often in the female, or by the quest of a rich and beautiful widow for stimulating company, sometimes even by the seeking of an assassination rather than an assignation. These give rise to comedic situations, and that is what the Commedia ‘system’ is based on putting the Lovers into various extreme situations, each of which offers both actors and spectators something to get their teeth into.
Zanni
AF: If we go back beyond the arrival of the Lovers to the origins of commedia dell’arte, we find Zanni. He was not a mythical or fantastical personnage, but a reality: an immigrant. His name is a diminutive of ‘Giovanni’, the most common first name in the Po valley.
JR: Why are there always two zannis in the developed form? What is the distinction between first and second Zanni?
AF: First Zanni is always there, a continual presence, whereas second Zanni comes and goes – something which is completely ignored by everyone who performs commedia dell’arte today. No-no list. First Zanni schemes and intrigues, second Zanni botches things up. Both are essential to the development of the plot.
JR: The most common first Zanni being Brighella? (See Figure 2.1)
AF: The frogging on his costume, which you mentioned earlier, is a sort of livery worn in Italy by those who worked in kitchens, especially the head chef. The costumes of the masks often made reference to clothing worn in real life; in the case of Brighella, as first Zanni, it shows that he has a metier, a real job, not a servile one – he may even own the business – and he never goes hungry, unlike second Zanni who is always half-starved.
Figure 2.1 Brighella
The personnages
JR: Is he always independent, then?
AF: He can be a servant when his services are needed, usually by the Lovers, but he does not change costume for that. For the 150 years that commedia dell’arte dominated the world stage, actors did not want changes or development in their costume: what was desired was instant recognition of their personal personnage, the sort of recognition that we give today to serial cartoon characters such as Tom and Jerry or Wilee Coyote and the Roadrunner. When you see such characters on screen, you know what to expect, including surprises. What actors did change other than minor details, was the name of their personnage, making it specific to their own interpretation. Brighella is simply the best known among hundreds of variations – Beltrame, Mezzetino, Flautino, Gradellino, Traccagnino, Finocchio, Bagolino, Scapino, etc.
JR: Why is Brighella so malevolent?
AF: He isn’t, he isn’t evil. Amoral, perhaps, but he only does what is necessary. You won’t find a scenario where he takes pleasure in harming someone.
JR: Even Scapino?
AF: Ah, you’re thinking of Molière, that’s something different. Molière was formed by commedia dell’arte, but he did not practise it. His Scapin is not the Scapino invented by Francesco Gabrielli. There is a comic poem, written by an actor, Bartolomeo Bocchini,2 who sepcialised in a personnage he called Zan Muzzina, who hailed from Lombardy and lived in an imaginary country he called La Zagnara, using the definite article as in ‘La France’ or ‘L’Italie’. In the poem Il Trionfo di Scappino, written in a mixture of Northern dialects, it is inhabited solely by zannis and zannettas. Grub and sex are all they want and all they have. Scapino is made king because he is righteous. He tries to resolve all disputes. He is a good man. Bocchini based his Scapino character on the experience of working for many years with the Gabriellis – I’ll come on to them in a moment.
The first known edition of the poem is from Modena in 1648, well before Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin. Molière has perhaps done commedia dell’arte a disservice by portraying Scapin as someone with a mean streak, out for revenge.
JR: Why then does Brighella/Scapino sometimes do awful things?
AF: Because, like Pulcinella, he is a survivor, and in order to survive, he has to protect himself. But he is not wicked, no: moral concerns have no place in commedia dell’arte, which is essentially secular. His name comes from the Lombard word ‘scapa’, to escape in English. He escapes from the consequences of his actions, but he is not a coward.
The personnages
JR: So, at a certain moment, Zanni divided himself into two: how, where, and when?
AF: At the end of the 17th going into the beginning of the 18th century, the Gabrielli family, father Giovanni and son Francesco, were very active, the father in particular being very inventive. They created a personnage they called Scapi in 1702/3 in Paris. The suffix ‘ino’ was added, not as a diminutive but, as is often the case in Italian, meaning ‘inhabitant of’. Although he was crafty in the extreme, Scapino needed a sidekick to do some of his dirty work for him. However, the Gabriellis didn’t use the terminology ‘first and second Zanni’, they called them ‘l’astuto’ or ‘il furbo’, the clever servant, and the stupid one, ‘sciocco’ [pronounced ‘shoko’] which is difficult to translate – more naive than stupid, ‘silly’ perhaps in English.
JR: Foolish?
AF: Ah, yes. But naive, not stupid, I don’t like to call a zanni stupid, because stupidity is limiting, whereas naivete has a certain dynamism. Anyway, he later becomes known as ‘second Zanni’. Second, Zanni has considerable experience of life, rural life, that is. He knows about plants and animals and is a hunter of great ability. For example, he can ensnare songbirds and make bamboo cages for them to sell at the market. In the days before the gramophone, people would pay good money to have music in their homes. In the commedia dell’arte Zanni finds himself as a migrant in an urban environment where his lack of urban savoir faire and illiteracy is a handicap, and he becomes a facchino, a porter of heavy loads. Nevertheless, he does not allow himself to become burdened by them: he remains resilient. He is an adult, a man of culture, just not the culture in which he finds himself. In my research, I have found more than three hundred names for him, but whether he is called Arlecchino or Truffaldino or Tabacchino or Traccagnino or by any derivative name, he is still second Zanni and his function remains the same, as do the patches on the costume. As I said about the first Zanni, the name changes reflect the change of actor, each one wanting to give a signature to their personal take on the role. In the hundreds of years of commedia dell’arte, he has been played by hundreds of actors, and that is why there are hundreds of names. We must, therefore, correct today’s prevailing idea that there is only one single second Zanni, the famous Arlecchino/Arlequin/Harlequin. (See Figure 2.2)
JR: No-no list?
AF: No-no list.
The personnages
What I detest above all is ‘Harlequinism’, the idea that he is the ace which trumps all the other cards in the pack. To many people, Mozart is baroque music. In fact, his music is rococo, but that’s not the point. Likewise, to many people, Harlequin is commedia dell’arte. I am against the synthesising of culture around illustrious exponents.
JR: A definite no-no?
AF: He has become a brand-name for everything you can think of from delivery vans to shopping centres like the one near you [Exeter] when we stayed with you in England.
JR: Even a rugby team.
AF: It cheapens not only him, but also the form to which he belongs, where he has his place but should not predominate.
To an extent the same is true of Pulcinella, but he has to be forgiven because he spent so many years in isolation. Who today has heard of his variant Shcatozza (or Shcatotza, in Campanian pronounciation)? Most people don’t even realise that he and Arlecchino are second zannis and, when you have a second Zanni, that presupposes that there is a first. Together they become a
Figure 2.2 Arlecchino
comedic machine, a dynamic duo. The first Zanni is the leader, the one who says ‘Let’s go’ and second Zanni is happy to follow. One understands the problem better than the other, but it is often number two who comes up with an idea of how to solve it. But once the idea is adopted, it creates another, larger difficulty, and so on. We call this the panettone effect.
JR: When you cook panettone [an Italian sweet bread, originally from Milan, now a Christmas treat] in the oven it gets bigger and bigger…
AF: But finally there has to be a simple solution – you eat it!
JR: Laurel and Hardy again: in The Music Box, having delivered the piano (finally) up seemingly never-ending steps, they discover there is a road which goes round leading to the front door.
AF: So, with the introduction of the two zanni system, the commedia dell’arte structure was complete, and there was no reason to change it for a 100 years until in Un Servitor di due Padroni [A Servant of Two Masters], Carlo Goldoni called the second Zanni ‘Truffaldino’ because that was the name that Antonio Sacchi used for his Zanni. Because it was Sacchi, who asked him to write a play rather than a scenario3, Goldoni the playwright gave Truffaldino a little more licence and continuity of presence than would normally be allowed the second Zanni, a little more freedom to do as he pleased, effectively rolling the two zannis back into one.4
JR: However, the general belief amongst people who have not actually read the play is that the role is Arlecchino’s: this is because Marcello Moretti played him as such in the omnipotent 1947 Piccolo Teatro di Milano revival.
La servetta
AF: ‘Zagna ’ was the original female counterpart of Zanni in the zannesca plays. ‘She’ was played by men, infarinato, with grotesque padding in gender specific places, and often wearing a headscarf (See Figure 1.2). When the zannis became masked ‘she’ did likewise, wearing one that was similar or even identical. Then, with the arrival of actresses on stage, came la Fantesca – a rather simple peasant girl whose charms were, however, real. The name is simply an older word for ‘female servant’. Next, around 1580–90, the s ervetta drove them both, masked and unmasked, off stage. In the La Scala scenarios la servetta is Colombina, the girlfriend of Pedrolino who is first Zanni, and she is still a little naive. In the Casa Marciano scenarios, however, which are a little later in date
The personnages
(or at least date of reference since La Scala was writing retrospectively) she becomes Rosetta. Sometimes Rosetta is attached by the scenario to second Zanni Pulcinella, sometimes to first Zanni, Coviello. No matter: she is smarter than both of them and has become in fact the most intelligent personnage in the commedia dell’arte. So much so that when a plotline couples her with second Zanni, she assumes the function of first Zanni.
Il Magnifico
AF: The Magnifico (See Figure 2.3) most often goes under the name of Pantalone, but again there were others, Stefanello, for example. Venetians pronounced his name ‘Pantalon’, as in ‘San Pantalon’, but since commedia dell’arte is a secular form it doesn’t do to insist. As with Brighella’s supposed malevolence, too much can be made of his meanness and his prurience. C ommedia dell’arte is not about sending him to hell for being a self-made man who wants to hang on to his money and/or for being an old man who has trouble
