Il finto negromante: The Vitality of a Commedia dell'Arte Scenario by Flaminio Scala, 1611

Abstract

In 1611, during what is called the golden age of commedia dell'arte, 1570–1630, Flaminio Scala published the only collection of scenarios to have been printed during the seventeenth century. Recently Robert Henke has invited close examination of these scenarios by asserting that they are “sophisticated and detailed dramaturgical machines.” I provide evidence to defend this view with a close study of one of the scenarios, Il finto negromante (The Fake Necromancer). My evidence shows the extent to which the scenario is a dramaturgical machine and more—it is full of the life of its time. I instance this scenario to show how, to a far greater extent than has been supposed, the performance of the scenarios and the interest of them can be recovered.

Keywords:

• Commedia dell'arte
• Scenarios
• Flaminio Scala

Notes

1. Robert Henke (Performance, 190) refers to them as set speeches. The speeches and dialogues would have to have been adapted to the scenario at hand and were probably memorized not verbatim (memoria ad verbum) but as a cluster of meanings that could be adapted to different words (memoria ad res). Edward Leon Sostek in his perceptive dissertation also identified places for the insertion of prepared materials in the Scala scenarios (“The Commedia dell'Arte,” “Identification of Prepared Materials and Scenario Cues,” 101–37). For the distinction between memoria ad verbum and memoria ad res as it pertains to commedia dell'arte see Schmitt (“Improvisation” passim).

2. Spavento (meaning fear) is the captain, Francesco Andreini, Scala's friend, made famous performing with the Gelosi. There is no evidence that Scala wrote for the Gelosi. Rather he seems to have used this name in his printed versions of the scenarios to honor his friend and to capitalize on his reputation.

3. In a source play, Girolamo Bargagli's, La pellagrina, c. 1567, two women in similar situations hide their clandestine marriages, one pregnant and pretending to be mad, the other cross-dressed as a man. But in 1563, the Council of Trent proclaimed that clandestine marriage was invalid. Scala played it safe.

4. Italy was the most urbanized city in Europe; villas constituted an important retreat for the well-to-do. Alberti, in his praise of the villa as contrasted with the city, even as it was in 1432, continued: “And even better, in the country you can avoid the noise of the city, the tumults in the public square, the struggles in the Government Palace” (201).

5. E.R. Chamberlin describes a typical merchant's house as “essentially a shell subdivided by wooden partitions. There was no opportunity for, and therefore little sense of the need for privacy” (80).

6. In La pellegrina, Lespida's nurse fears that if the father realizes that she is pregnant, he will disown her (Act I, scene 2).

7. The renowned Isabella Andreini, for instance, who bore seven children and died in childbirth with her eighth, must often have been performing pregnant. We do not know for whom the role was written. Pantalone's daughter is usually Isabella rather than Flaminia.

8. Kinsman's epigraph from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, reads: “Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, delirium is a common name to all” (273).

9. And, for the mad woman, not just the character's, of course, but the actress's breasts were bared.

10. In Scala's single example of mad speech, in his scenario The Madness of Isabella, there is no underlying psychology. Louise George Clubb suggests that mad Isabella's reference to Isola (i.e. Isabel or, in English, Elizabeth) in “‘a clister for Isola of England who couldn't piss’ is probably an echo of Catholic anti-Tudor calumny referring to various physical abnormalities attributed by rumor to the Virgin Queen.” Thus, the possibility for social commentary, at least safe social commentary, is suggested (270).

11. Nudity was part of the folklore of madness; those who reduced their apparel to rags or cast away body coverings repudiated their place in the social hierarchy (Valesio 203; Salkeld 109). Conversely, sumptuary law forbade people from dressing above their station. A costume actually distressed would have been an added expense and is not mentioned in the prop list.

12. Hale has observed that by the late fifteenth century doctors were expected to be able to discriminate between twenty varieties of color and density in urine (543; White 122).

13. It was believed that the urine of a pregnant woman, after several days, developed a pearly film on top. In 1928, it was proven that hormones in the urine of pregnant women stimulate bacterial growth that results in such a film (Cornell 75).

14. In Day 29, Il fido amico (The Faithful Friend), Scala uses Arlecchino's fall from a ladder to end Act I. The actor playing the role at the time must have been good at this.

15. We do not know the doctor's diagnosis. Black hellebore, a supposed cure for dropsy, also caused among other things, vertigo, emesis, and catharsis. In The Madness of Isabella, Scala introduces it as a cure for madness. Women's mental disturbances, it was widely believed, were frequently caused by a failure to menstruate, too much blood in the uterus (Neely 94 and passim). For this there were “menstrual regulators.” These same drugs, available in every apothecary shop, were effective abortifacients, even for late-term pregnancies, although, because they were strictly forbidden by the church, they were not openly referred to as that (Riddle 124, 147–48). I do not know their side effects.

16. The eighteenth-century Dutch artist, G.-J. Xavery represents Harlequin vomiting and then, in another image, defecating (reproduced in Duchartre 56, plates II, III).

17. Peter Burke, defines magic as “the attempt to produce material changes in the world as the result of performing certain rituals and writing or uttering certain verbal formulas (‘spells,’ ‘charms’ or incantations) requesting or demanding that these changes take place” (“Worldviews” 184).

18. The Recueil Fossard woodcuts, from the mid-1580s, show very explicit sex play between “Harlequin” and “Francisquina.” (Reproduced in Duchartre 320).

19. “The handshaking ritual among merchant elite… took place between the relatives of the betrothed couple and represented only the first step of a complex series of negotiations, which involved the bride-to-be only in the final stages” (Lombardi 145).

20. In alchemy, Mercury is the medium of conjunction or the reconciliation of opposites. He is also the protector of thieves.

21. The spiritual and material world continued to seem very close (Ruggiero “Witchcraft” 477).

22. There is documentation of men having played the role of Franceschina in I Comici Uniti, 1584 and in 1614, and in the Gelosi, 1570, and from the Confidenti at the end of the sixteenth century.

23. Walker observes that part of the reason for the church's objection to magic was that it imitated the trappings of the mass: “The church has her own magic; there is no room for any other” (18).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Crohn Schmitt

Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor Emerita of Theater and of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directed Il finto negromante. In Text and Performance Quarterly 21, 1(2004), she published “Commedia dell'Arte: Characters, Scenarios, and Rhetoric.” She is presently working on a book on the scenarios of Flaminio Scala