The Body and Meaning in Early Commedia Dell'arte
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Theatre Survey 50:2 (November 2009) # American Society for Theatre Research, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0040557409990068 Matthew Buckley ELOQUENT ACTION:THE BODY AND MEANING IN EARLY COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE One of the things that strikes one most forcibly in surviving images of early commedia dell’arte is its enigmatic physicality, the manner in which its actors everywhere adopt postures and make gestures that seem not merely emphatic and exaggerated but almost hieroglyphic, full of some additional implication, laden with a figural and emblematic resonance that we sense but no longer see. In general terms, this quality is easily understood, as the body clearly served in commedia as a complex and polyvalent instrument of expression. Its gestures and movements were, as in all theatre, indexically linked to dramatic action, and they also served, as in much masked drama, as surrogates for the facial expression of affect, in that the movements and aspects of the whole body were enlisted to articulate the motions and mien of a veiled face and to overcome or play upon the sensation of estranged speech produced by the half-mask’s bifurcation of the visage.1 Moreover, in a manner less familiar but illustrated well in Fig. 1, these movements and aspects also functioned as expressions in their own right, not articulating the affect or expression attendant upon immediate speech or situation or delineating the lines of external action but signaling the many impulses and various appetites of the world, the varied aspects of all persons and of the body Matthew Buckley is an associate professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His publications include Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution and the Emergence of Modern Drama (Johns Hopkins, 2006) as well as articles in Modern Drama, Studies in Romanticism, and Victorian Studies. He is currently completing books on theatre and visual culture between 1580 and 1880 and on the development of early melodrama. My thanks are due to the Rutgers University Faculty Research Council for its financial support of the project; to Kate Babbitt and Michael Gnat for their excellent editorial assistance; to Catherine Cole and Martin Puchner for their generous interest in the article’s publication; to the two unnamed reviewers of the submitted piece for their thoughtful and engaged comments; and to the many colleagues and friends who commented on this project during its long incubation. 251 Theatre Survey Figure 1. Harlequin, Pantalon, La Dona Cornelia, Zany, Nodet le Tavernier, Tissia, and Gringolet. From the Recueil Fossard. # Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. (Same as Fig. A31.) itself, and invoking at times as their implicatory context human nature, common character, and identity rather than situation, attitude, or emotion. This broad and variable system of physical acting, it now seems clear, was intimately linked to commedia’s equally polyvalent use of speech. Language in commedia ranged in a dialectical interplay with its action over straight dialogue, rhetorical play, and macaronic babble, and its formation and structure was in many ways densely bound up with those verbal modes. Yet commedia was international almost from its beginnings, especially in the first period of its expansion and formal consolidation, as Italian troupes encountered growing audiences who were increasingly unfamiliar with their spoken language and unable to follow the matter and meaning of verbal discourse, track its dizzying enlistment of rhetorical figures and conventional sayings, note its wordplay and lyric dissonance, or appreciate the complicated interplay and insinuation of Italian civic commedia’s multiple dialects. As a result, the physical language of the form evidently moved to the fore as a privileged, even primary representational mode. As Charles Sorel observed of performance at this time, the comedians “represent many things through action,” so that “even those who do not understand their language cannot fail to understand the subject of the piece.”2 252 Eloquent Action What remains unclear, however, is just how this language really worked. We know some of the rudimentary elements and many of the specific elements of commedia’s physical method: the gestures and poses that actors typically used have been identified, and scholars are beginning to understand more clearly the lazzi, or little bits and routines, that most strongly characterized its physical play.3 That the techniques of this physical language were formally understood and practiced in accordance with a coherent set of conventional rules is unquestionable: scholarship has recognized early commedia’s appropriation of classical vocabularies of manual rhetoric as well as its incorporation of an already formalized popular theatrical art of facial expression and its enlistment of popular idioms of gesture that carry their own formal logic.4 Yet we still know very little of how all these physical elements worked together and were combined, how they helped define roles, how they were organized and determined in practice, the assumptions and the conventions that would have rendered them so legible (in combination and in flow) to those who watched, the dramatic implications and social resonance they carried, or the vision of the world they produced and conveyed. The interest of these questions lies in part in what they might tell us of commedia’s relation to other theatrical and social practices, for it seems evident that commedia’s enigmatic physicality seemed by no means as mysterious to its original audiences as it appears to us and that its conventions and idioms must therefore have had some common currency with the performance of theatre elsewhere and with the performative theatricality of everyday life. However, their most immediate value may lie in what they can tell us of commedia’s improvisational method, that “necessary guide” or “disegno interno,” as Paul Castagno has described it, that “substituted for the absence of a dramatic text (disegno esterno)” in much commedia performance.5 Not all commedia performance was unscripted, of course, but as scholars have long recognized, it was that method of improvisational performance—the virtuoso ability to stitch together an unscripted tale on the fly, building action and incident from a skeletal template or a familiar premise or a rumor in the air—that marked the formal novelty of the commedia dell’arte, defined its particular character, and constituted the basis of its influence and reputation. For many, it is as an improvisational method that commedia best studied and understood.6 Yet, with the exception of a number of recent works that have interrogated the role of literature and text in the improvisational practices of early commedia, critical understanding of that method remains extraordinarily limited, and the role physical techniques played in it, while now widely recognized as integral and important, remains largely unexplored.7 That this is so is due in part to the nature of the historical record: surviving texts offer a great deal of information about commedia’s institutional practices, its development of roles and repertory, and its diverse stock of conventional plots, dialogues, and speeches, but for many reasons, they contain comparatively little about its improvisational methods and even less about its physical techniques. However, it is also due to an apparent bias within commedia scholarship, which has tended (following the bulk of archival evidence) to privilege such textual records over what is now a considerable, well-articulated body of pictorial evidence and to 253 Theatre Survey focus, commensurately, on early commedia’s improvisational use of verbal and literary rather than physical and gestural elements.8 The implications of these questions extend well beyond the study of commedia itself. As is well known, the commedia dell’arte had a profound impact upon early modern theatre and exercised a lasting influence on the development of theatre and drama in modernity. From it would emerge some of the most innovative and radical theatre of modern times, and in the history of its appropriation and reappropriation in subsequent centuries one can recognize what is in some sense an alternative, often anti-Aristotelian genealogy of modern theatre—a “minor” genealogy that looks very different from the trajectories traced out by the realist tradition and its focus on interiorized character and action. In France, commedia sets a strong line that runs through the barbed political comedy of Molie`re, the subversive play of the feˆtes galantes, and the scabrous farces of the pre-Revolutionary fairs to the incendiary works of Beaumarchais, de Musset, and Apollinaire and in refracted form those of Jarry, Artaud, and Genet. In England, it frames a history that runs through Commonwealth fairground puppetry and John Rich’s explosively popular harlequinades to Fielding’s and Hogarth’s politically charged stages, the popular pantomime traditions of nineteenth-century spectacular theatre, and the sensational melodramatic stage. In Lessing and in Bu¨chner we find it shadowing Germany’s radical tradition as well, and in Meyerhold’s work commedia becomes imbricated in the theatrical aesthetics of Soviet modernism. In short, the influence of commedia is powerfully evident in many of what now appear to be the most interesting developments in modern theatre, and it informs, often in intimate ways, some of the most radical and significant engagements of the modern theatre with political and mass modernity. To lack a clear understanding of commedia is to lack a clear sense of these changes and of the larger trajectory they describe, and to lack a clear understanding of commedia’s physical methods and techniques, of its use and understanding of the body, is to lack a clear sense of the radical history of the theatrical body in modern culture. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of that history and to provide some better basis for understanding the “minor” genealogy of modern theatre it helps to define, and in the conclusion I offer some observations to that end.