Hey there, I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater,
and today we’re going to be moving from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance,
a time of discovery, innovation, beauty, sophistication and…comedy.
In this episode, we’ll take a trip to Italy,
exploring the elegance of the Neoclassical revival and the
invention of one of theater’s best-loved popular forms, commedia dell’arte.
That’s right.
The Golden Age of the poop joke has dawned.
[INTRO MUSIC]
The Renaissance in Italy lasts from roughly 1300 to 1600.
That earlier date overlaps pretty significantly with the Late Middle Ages, because no one
really puts out press releases letting everyone know when a historical era has ended.
Plus, cultural change takes time.
A lot of the forms we’ll talk about today were in vogue at the same time as those cycle
plays and their pageant wagons.
But mystery plays and passion plays never really caught on in Italy, which may explain
why other genres flourished.
If the Middle Ages were about God—and, yes, I’m generalizing because they were also
about feudalism, and Crusades, itchy clothing
and the plague—then the Renaissance was about people.
And also still the plague.
The Renaissance introduced humanism, the idea that earthly life isn’t just a vale of tears
that might lead to heaven if you’re good, but maybe worthy in and of itself.
This encouraged an upsurge in human achievement – music and medicine and visual arts and physics.
And...Theater, too.
Hey, that’s us!
Theater starts moving forward by looking backward.
We know from our episode on Hrotsvitha that Roman drama never disappeared.
The plays of Terence, and Plautus, and Seneca were read throughout the Middle Ages, but
they weren’t performed.
They were enjoyed for their style, in the case of the comedies, and their moral lessons,
in the case of the Senecan tragedies.
In the 1300s, Italian writers started trying to make these plays their own, but it took
a while for them to come up with anything as distinctive as Hrotsvitha’s work.
Most early attempts were based on Roman tragedies,but
by the late 1390s, Italians were writing Roman-style
comedies, too, with twins and mix-ups, and,
you know, all the good stuff you’ve come to expect.
For a while, these plays were written in Latin and they weren’t intended for performance.
But in 1429, a bunch of Plautus’s plays were found; and when Constantinople fell,
a bunch of Greek manuscripts returned to Italy.
By the late 1400s, some nobles wondered “Hey, what if we turned the banquet hall into a
theater and put on Plautus?”
And then, a few years after that, they wondered “Hey, would it be more fun if plays were
written in the vernacular rather than in Latin, and spoke to how we live now?”
And then presto!
Neoclassical plays!
So called because they’re classical.
And also new.
At first writers churned out Plautus-like comedies with young lovers, mean parents and
cheating wives.
Even Niccolo Machiavelli got in on the action with “The Mandrake.”
These comedies were called commedia erudita, or erudite comedies, because they were based
on classical models you had to be well-read to know.
But were they all that classical?
Yes and no.
By 1498 Aristotle’s Poetics was back in circulation, and people were actually reading
it by 1550.
But their takeaway was pretty different from Aristotle’s.
Italian writers got rid of choruses, they moved toward greater realism, and often wrote
tragedies with happy endings, which we now call tragicomedies.
Italians decided that tragedy had to teach useful moral lessons, an idea they borrowed
from the Roman critic Horace and they really ran with.
Almost all of these plays were privately produced by courts or schools.
They were staged to honor some person or event.
Nobles made up the audiences, and nobles usually made up the actors, too.
If you were a lower-class person, your chances of seeing commedia erudita were slim.
But luckily, commedia erudita wasn’t the only theatre game in town.
A lot of Italian Renaissance theater’s innovation didn’t have much to do with the plays themselves.
Italians were wizards ... of stagecraft.
They were like, I’ll see your trap door and your medieval Hellmouth, and I’ll raise
you crazy advances in perspective.
Also: rigging!
Always got somewhere to go that guy.
The staging renaissance gets started when fifteenth-century Italians rediscover Vitruvius’s
treatise De Architectura, which was written around 15 BCE and is basically the Poetics
of architecture, chockablock with set design protips.
The discovery of single-point perspective painting transformed theater sets, too, helping
them look three-dimensional.
Though it helps if you’re the emperor or the duke or the count or whatever, because
single point perspective really only works if you’re sitting smack in the center, which
is where the nobility were placed.
Typical.
In the 17th century, we get shifting scenery, which is accomplished with wing panels that
slide in and out on grooves in the floor, among other methods.
When a scene changed, wing panels slid out.
Each set of painted wings that disappeared revealed more just behind.
Backgrounds and borders could also be shifted in and out.
And a little later, Italian theaters adopted a chariot-and-pole system, which shifted all
of the scenery at the same time, using poles, ropes, and wheels beneath the stage.
In the late 1500s, gardens and banquet halls give way to permanent, purpose-built theaters,
possibly the first in Europe since Roman times.
In Vincenza, the Olympic Academy built the Teatro Olimpico, which opened in 1585 and
was designed by rockstar architect Andrea Palladio - whose name you may recognize from
every medium-sized concert venue you grew up going to!
It’s very busy and looks a lot like a Roman theater got shrunk and enclosed.
It wasn’t used very much, but it influenced later theaters: its widened arch may have
contributed to the proscenium arch, which you’ll recognize in most Broadway theaters
today: arches or rectangles that frame the stage from the audience’s perspective.
In Renaissance Italy, how-to books also circulated detailing effects to make gods and clouds
rise above the stage, or rocks and trees sink below it.
Ocean scenes were common, as were fire effects, and contraptions that mimicked the sounds
of wind and thunder.
No electricity for a while still, so candles and oil lamps lit the action, which typically
made the theater hot and hazy.
All this was pretty cool, but not as cool as the commedia dell’arte,
which means artful comedy, or the comedy of players.
It’s the earthier, lustier, counterpart to the commedia erudita, and it has an even
more dramatic special effect: Women!
That’s right: from 1560 on, women were finally allowed onstage in Italy.
(They won’t show up onstage in England for another century—more on that later.)
Scholars can’t really agree on the origins of the commedia dell-arte, but the most popular
theory traces its lineage from our old, lewd friend, the Atellan farces.
These had been preserved by strolling minstrels and jesters during the Middle Ages.
Like the Atellan farces, commedia dell’arte relies on stock characters and improvised
situations that allowed the actors to string together conveniently memorized lines and
an array of pre-arranged comedic bits, called lazzi.
Basically, a lazzo is a gag.
There are books listing hundreds of lazzi, like “hat lazzi” and “food lazzi”
and “pee lazzi” and just countless lazzi involving butts.
The mix of lazzi and improvisation meant that, while most stories progressed along the usual
Plautus-Terence-Menander-like lines, an audience never knew exactly which lazzi a stock character
would throw into the mix or how other stock characters would react.
[Mike sees Yorick and screams]
That was a “lazzo of fear.”
It was hilarious.
Stock characters were based on regional types, so each had a specific style of dress, a specific
accent, and even a specific food associated with them.
Each traveling troupe of 8–12 actors had a slightly different mix of types, but here
are some of the main ones—masters, servants, and lovers.
Lazzi some more in the Thought Bubble:
There are usually three masters:
The Captain or Capitano.
He’s a Spanish military guy with a mask and a cape and a sword and a moustache.
He’s swaggering and braggy until he actually gets near a fight, and then he’s a coward.
Pantalone is a miserly merchant type from Venice who wears a red vest and a long coat,
plus a mask with a big nose and a grey beard.
Even though he’s old, he lusts after young women, and the young women are…
not psyched about it.
The Doctor, or il Dottore.
He is—surprise!—a doctor from Bologna, masked and dressed like an academic.
The Doctor is a friend of Pantalone’s and he needs everyone to know how smart he is
so he uses a lot of Latin words and phrases.
Some of the grosser urine lazzi involve him, and his wife is often cheating on him.
Between the Latin and the urine, I mean, can you blame her?
And now the servants, who are often called zanni.
They’re mostly men, though some troupes had women who played maids.
Harlequin or Arlecchino wears a green mask and a diamond suit.
He carries a wooden sword that he hits people with.
He’s wily and acrobatic, but also kind of simple.
And boy is he hungry.
He speaks in gibberish.
Pulcinello was a less defined type.
But he’s from Naples and dressed in a hunchback and a pointy hat.
There was another servant, Brighella, who was mean and kind of a lech, though he’s
really more of an 18th-century figure.
Finally, the lovers:
They are nice and fresh-faced and clean-cut.
Sometimes, they’re a little stupid.
They don’t wear masks.
They’re kind of boring.
Still, it’s their love, often thwarted, that gets the plot going.
Thank you, Thought Bubble.
We still have books of lazzi, and even some
commedia dell’arte scripts, though they’re not that great.
Later dramatists, like the eighteenth-century writer Carlo Goldoni, wrote plays based on
commedia dell’arte, so you can check out
a work like “The Servant of Two Masters” if you’re curious.
What we do know is that these plays follow conventional narrative lines, but what happens
in the middle is fast and gross and apparently really, really funny,
because the genre lasts for centuries, into today.
Ever heard of slapstick?
Yeah, that was a term for Arlecchino’s wooden sword.
A slap stick
Eh? Eh?
[Mike turns to Yorick] Oh come on, you’re no fun!
The next time you see some rude physical comedy, amaze and delight your friends by telling
them that the wedgie they just saw derives from an Italian Renaissance form.
And then hope that your friends still talk to you.
[MIKE EYES YORICK]
Don’t avoid eye contact with me! Where are you going?---
Next time we’ll get serious, sort of,
when we set sail for England and explore Elizabethan
theater before some bloke named Shakespeare
shows up and hogs all the candle-powered spotlight.
Until next time… curtain!
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