Commedia dell’Arte in Context (Literature In Context )

By: Christopher B. Balme and Piermario Vescovo and Daniele Vianello

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Synopsis: 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 symbolise 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 the myth from the history of the phenomenon, remains, however, largely untranslated into English. The present volume gathers together an international group of scholars to synthesise 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.