Italian Bookshelf (download as PDF) - Ibiblio

442 “Italian Bookshelf.” Annali d’italianistica 25 (2007)
Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, eds. A History of Italian Theatre. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2006. Pp. 418.
Lecturers of Italian theatre will welcome the publication of this new history of Italian
theatre in English ― a very useful reference tool for students ― which covers the entire
Italian theatrical tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. The main
characteristics of the volume are underlined in the introduction by Joseph Farrell, who
co-edited it with Paolo Puppa. While acknowledging the seminal works of previous
theatre historians such as Silvio D’Amico and Mario Apollonio, Farrell states that
probably no scholar today would attempt to write a historical overview of a national
theatrical tradition single-handedly (5). Thus the editors have assigned different periods
of the history of Italian theatre to international specialists (academics from Europe, the
United States, and Australia), who widen the prospective of the work to include both the
impact of Italian theatre on European stages, as well as the influence of foreign
playwrights and theatre practitioners in Italy.
Farrell further states that the Italian theatrical tradition differs greatly from that of
other European countries, in which the figure of the playwright is central. For the Italian
stage, he maintains, from the Renaissance to Eduardo and Fo through the commedia
dell’arte, it is the actor-author who has been dominant (2). As a consequence of this
unique development in the theatrical tradition, this work aims to “discuss theatre in its
fullest sense and not merely as dramatic literature” (5), by looking at a number of
elements which go beyond the play scripts alone: theatrical spaces (royal palaces, streets,
churches, and the first permanent theatres), the audience (whether made up of friends or
students, nobles or middle class, paying or nonpaying), the occasions for which a play
was written and performed (Carnival, or special celebrations), the role of the reviewers
and treatise writers (especially after the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1536), and,
of course, the actors themselves (whether amateur or professional, male or female, able
and willing to improvise or more inclined to follow the script strictly as written by a
playwright).
In every chapter, moreover, particular consideration is devoted to what Peter Brand
defines as the “eternal problem of the Italian theatre of finding a spoken language that
could be understood across the different regions of the country” (75), and so to the use of
dialects, multilingualism, or music to compensate for the lack of a universal Italian
theatrical language. The importance of dialect, moreover, is underlined in separate
chapters which discuss the heritage of dialect theatre in several regions of the country.
A further element of interest of this volume is the attention to the presence (or
absence) of women among performers, in the audience, to the changing psychology of
female characters, as well as women playwrights themselves, to whom a chapter is
devoted in the last part of the work.
The volume is divided into six sections. First, Nerida Newbigin explores the secular
and religious drama of the Middle Ages. The following section contains several chapters
which either look at the dramatic genres developing during the Renaissance, from the
erudite comedy and tragedy to pastorale and commedia dell’arte, or focus on major
playwrights and the environment in which they flourished.
In the section on the seventeenth century, Maurice Slawinski highlights the
contradiction of the era, which was rich in the development of theatrical spaces and
technologies, but produced no “significant canon of dramatic work” (127-28). The
Enlightenment section opens with a chapter by Farrell in which he underlines the