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ELOQUENT ACTION: THE BODY AND MEANING IN EARLY COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2009

Matthew Buckley
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Extract

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. 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 itself, and invoking at times as their implicatory context human nature, common character, and identity rather than situation, attitude, or emotion.

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Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , November 2009 , pp. 251 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2009

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References

Endnotes

1. As Paul Castagno has pointed out, commedia's adoption of the half-mask not only “foregrounded the bizarre estrangement of speech, as the mouth no longer seemed connected to the face” but by “removing from view the most expressive parts of the visage … opened the entire body as the instrument of expression.” Castagno, , The Early Commedia dell'Arte (1550–1621): The Mannerist Context (New York: P. Lang, 1994), 88Google Scholar.

2. Quoted in Duchartre, Pierre-Louis, The Italian Comedy: The Improvisation, Scenarios, Lives, Attributes, Portraits and Masks of the Illustrious Characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, trans. Weaver, Randolph T. (1929; New York: Dover, 1966), 22Google Scholar.

3. Hallar, Marianne's study of commedia's physical theatre, Teaterspil og tegnsprog: Ikonografiske studier I Commedia dell'Arte (Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1977)Google Scholar, begins to explore this territory, bringing together a wealth of visual and textual evidence on gesture and appearance and drawing out the varied character of commedia's physical play. Her foundational study has been supplemented by a substantial body of work on lazzi. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, Tim, The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes in the Commedia dell'Arte: Beyond the Improvisation/Memorization Divide (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Henke, Robert, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell'Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Sprengel, Peter, “Herr Pantalon und sein Knecht Zanni: Zur frühen Commedia dell'arte in Deutschland,” in Wanderbühne: Theaterkunst als fahrendes Gewerbe, ed. Rudin, Bärbel (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte, 1988), 5–18Google Scholar; Katritzky, M. A., “Hippolytus Guarinonius' Descriptions of Commedia Dell'arte Lazzi in Padua, 1594–97,” Quaderni Veneti 30 (1999): 61–126Google Scholar; and Martino, Alberto, “Fonti tedesche degli anni 1585–1615, per la storia della commedia dell'arte e per la constituzione di un repertorio dei ‘lazzi’ dello zanni,” in Aspetti dell'identità tedesca: Studi in onore di Paolo Chiarini, 2 vols., ed. Ponzi, Mauro and Venturelli, Aldo (Roma: Bulzoni, 2003), 2:657–708Google Scholar.

4. Henke notes in his discussion of actors' use of generici (collections of speeches organized “according to rhetorical action, locutionary situation, and emotional comportment”) that “to each of these speech genres the actors must have linked codified gestures, motions, and expressions” (44). He also notes the use of a codified art of facial expression by Venetian buffone (60). However, that is as far as he pursues the topic of “extra-verbal signals” (36). Hallar clearly recognizes the coincidence between roles and specific types of gesture and posture, as well as the existence of a coherent shared language of movement and sign, and suggests explicitly that “the figures, their looks and gestures, the symmetry and contrasts between them, that which each of them with their character and outer appearance represents and symbolizes—all this must have had a deeper meaning than the immediately comical and entertaining one” (6). [This translation is by Ruth Bjeder.] However, Hallar's work is too general to do more than suggest what it recognizes or suppose what it thinks must have been so and is more concerned, perhaps appropriately, with introducing readers to the breadth of iconographic material than in pursuing a systematic study of the physical language that material depicts.

5. Castagno, Early Commedia dell'Arte, 107.

6. See, for example, Kathleen Lea's observation that it “stands for improvisation” and should be understood and studied “as a method of playing,” in Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell'Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 3; or Richard Andrews's observation that the novelty of the commedia dell'arte is most evident in its “methods of composition,” in Scripts and Scenarios: The Performed Comic Text in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xii.

7. As late as 1993, for example, Andrews suggested in an accurate summary of prevailing scholarship that commedia's actors worked “without any supporting tradition of performance in their new genre” and that “almost every element of their dramaturgy was a shot in the dark” (xii). In recent years this estimation has faded, at least among specialists, yet we have no detailed treatment of commedia's improvisational practices and techniques, let alone an extended critical study of the topic.

8. For examinations of verbal and textual performance practices, see Andrews; Fitzpatrick; and Henke. On the relation of verbal elements to the rhetorical practices of the period, see also Castagno, Early Commedia dell'Arte, 83–122. This bias toward textual evidence, I should note, is not individual but disciplinary. William Worthen points out that “one of the ways both literary studies and performance studies have misconceived dramatic performance is by taking it merely as a reiteration of texts, a citation that imports literary or textual authority into performance.” See Worthen, , “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113.5 (1998): 1093–1107, at 1098CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This tends not to be the case in much traditional scholarship on the commedia dell'arte, but the recent proliferation of historicist studies of surviving texts (and the prominence within that field of work by scholars whose training and perspective is formed by the study of English drama) seems to have pushed critical views of commedia temporarily—and productively—in this direction.

9. Appendix Figures are numbered independently from those of the text proper as Fig. A1, A2, etc.

This is a good moment to clarify terms, especially for the uninitiated (though some of this is covered in the Appendix's brief introductory text). The complete collection of images amassed by Sieur Fossard, a functionary at the court of Louis XIV, is known as the Cabinet Fossard. The Recueil Fossard refers to one portion of that collection: the bound notebook of eighty-five images discovered in the archives of the Drottningholm Museum and now held by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. The Recueil Fossard itself contains a number of different groups of images, one of which is the series of thirty-two woodcuts published herein: this series of images is so celebrated that it has become effectively synonymous with the Recueil, so it is important to note that the series does not constitute the Recueil Fossard in its entirety. I have ordered the reproduced images into generic types (vignettes, portraits, and miscellaneous), and have used their binding order as a rationale for my ordering of the vignettes (see n. 28).

10. It is worth noting that this series and the notebook to which it belongs are by no means the only iconographic resource for the study of early commedia performance. The Trausnitz frescoes offer a work of equal complexity and interest, and they are joined by a diverse host of other images. However, no other early source approaches the Recueil Fossard woodcuts in complexity, extent, and breadth, and no other appears to have had the same wide dissemination and reproduction. For the definitive treatment of known early commedia iconography as well as the best overview of both the Fossard series and the Trausnitz frescoes, see Katritzky's magisterial study The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell'Arte 1560–1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006), esp. 107–14 (on the Fossard series) and 50–3 (on the Trausnitz frescoes). For good color reproductions of the frescoes, see Falavolti, Laura, Attore: Alle origini di un mestiere (Rome: Lavoro, 1988)Google Scholar; and Molinari, Cesare, La Commedia dell'Arte (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1985), 51–64Google Scholar.

11. The definitive treatment of the bearing of the series on the origination of Harlequin and of its possible correspondence to some actual performance is offered in Gambelli, Delia, Arlecchino a Parigi: Dall'inferno alla corte del Re Sole (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), 149–56Google Scholar. Katritzky offers both a summary of scholarship on and the most important recent study of the collective structure, provenance, and identity of the vignettes in “A Renaissance Commedia dell'Arte Performance: Towards a Definitive Sequence of Sieur Fossard's Woodcuts?” Nationalmuseum Bulletin 12.1 (1988): 37–53, an article that appears in slightly revised form as “The Recueil Fossard 1928–88: A Review and Three Reconstructions,” in The Commedia dell'Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo, ed. Christopher Cairns (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 99–117.

12. At least sixteen roles are depicted, many of which have been identified with some of the most prominent and original artists of the early commedia stage. See Gambelli, 150–3, for the most concise and authoritative discussion of such identifications. See also Katritzky, M. A., “Eight Portraits of Gelosi Actors in 1589?” Theatre Research International 21.2 (1996): 108–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mastropasqua, Fernando, “Lo spettacolo della raccolta Fossard,” in Ruzante e Arlecchino: Tre saggi sul teatro popolare del Cinquecento, ed. Mastropaqua, F. and Molinari, Cesare (Parma: Studium Parmense, 1970), 91–125Google Scholar; and Mastropasqua, , “Pantalone ridicola apparenza—Arlecchino comica presenza,” in Alle origini del teatro moderno: La Commedia dell'Arte—Atti del Convegno di Studi di Pontedera, 28–30 maggio 1976, ed. Mariti, Luciano (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 97–103Google Scholar.

13. The best effort to date to reconcile these interpretive problems is Delia Gambelli's hypothesis that the series records the performances of various actors and companies that appeared at the Hôtel de Bourgogne over a period of a few years in the mid-1580s. See Gambelli, 153.

14. Castagno, Paul, “Grotesque Images of Early Commedia dell'Arte Iconography,” Theatre History Studies 12 (1992): 45–67Google Scholar; and Castagno, Early Commedia dell'Arte, 155–66. Such abstraction should not surprise us: to the contrary, as Castagno points out, portraiture as well as religious and allegorical painting during the period reflected the “hegemony of typification over individuation” (Early Commedia dell'Arte, 165); and Katritzky reminds us that “a sixteenth-century artist is rarely or never concerned with presenting an accurate ‘snapshot’ of a particular performance” (“Recueil Fossard 1928–88,” 108). As Castagno has observed, the great majority of formal research on these images has tended to focus not only on “classification rather than context” but on documentary rather than interpretive questions (Early Commedia dell'Arte, 145–6).

15. Castagno refers to the set as a “theatrical machine”; Early Commedia dell'Arte, 165. Pellegrino describes the collection as “un théâtre du théâtre, et même un théâtre du théâtre pour le théâtre, en ce sens qu'il est constitué de ‘modèles’ de scènes pour des pièces à jouer—et sur le fait que ses planches composites on sur le lecteur-spectateur la mème efficacité qu'une ou plusieurs représentations théâtrales, car elles savent [quoting Anna Panicali] ‘rendere sensibilmente presenti, con ogni sorta di linguaggio, anche le immagini interiori e le emozioni’”; Panicali, Anna, Rappresentare gli affetti: Commedie, retorica e musica fra Cinquecento e Seicento (Siena: Edizioni di Barbablù, 1984), 5Google Scholar, quoted in Pellegrino, Alba Ceccarelli, “Gravures et légendes du Recueil Fossard: Essai d'analyse sémiologique,” in La Commedia dell'arte tra Cinque e Seicento in Francia e in Europa, ed. Mosele, Elio (Fasano: Schena, 1997), 129–70Google Scholar, at 156.

16. Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 40–63Google Scholar.

17. For good treatments in English on commedia's conception of character and role, see Duchartre; Lea; and Henke. In Italian, see particularly Molinari.

18. See Henke for an excellent treatment of this dialogic role structure (12–30), though he later tends to flatten roles (“love for the innamorata/o, lust for Pantalone, fame for the Capitano, and wisdom for the Dottore”) to single kinds of “elemental human need” (133).

19. The “central types of role” varied over time as well as between companies. However, what I take to be the core family of roles in the early commedia dell'arte is not much disputed: namely, zanni, vecchi, innamorati, and servette.

20. This is a good moment to clarify my use of names. Where I refer in general terms to a role or a type of role, I employ the standard Italian name (e.g., arlecchino, Pantalone, the Dottore, vecchi, zanni, or servette), and where I refer to the role of arlecchino in this historical context (that of late 16th-century France) I employ “Harlequin.” Where I refer to figures in the Recueil Fossard images, I employ, wherever they occur, the more closely descriptive and more variable names specified in the series' captions. The figure of the first zanni, for example, is named in the series as “Zany,” as “Zany Corneto,” and also appears in the more specific guises of “Francatrippa” and “Philipin”; the servette appears as both “Licetta” and “Francisquina,” and the innamorati adopt no less than seven different identities over the course of the series. These names, and their honorific titles especially, seem to be polyglot, variably spelled admixtures of Italian, French, and Spanish. Pantalone, for example, appears as “Pantalon” throughout, though at times he becomes “Il Segnor Pantalon” or “Messere Pantalon,” and even “Pantalon Inamorato,” and the Dottore, similarly, appears as “Messerre Dottore” and “Il Segnor Dotour,” and even as “Doctor Gratian.” The innamorata's conventional “La Donna” becomes “La Dona” in most instances, and “Il Segnor Horacio” becomes in one instance “Il Signor.” As virtually all of these variations appear to me to be deliberate and meaningful, I have left them intact.

21. On the role of Francatrippa, see Duchartre, 177. For the most balanced treatment of the earliest character of the Harlequin role, see Gambelli, 171–2. On Pantalon and the Dottore, see Molinari; Lea, 18–41; and especially Henke, 137–52. For an excellent discussion of the early development of stock types and characters, see Katritzky, Art of Commedia, 83–106.

22. It is worth noting that this formal strategy of repetition with variation informs all of the images of the series: rarely do we find exactly the same figure twice, and even minor changes in a figure's appearance and aspect often carry pointed implication. In the portrait images, however, such variation is used more bluntly and systematically, serving as a basic means to suggest basic aspects of character associated with each typological pairing of a role.

23. For a useful if tentative discussion of the topic, see Pellegrino, 139–41. Hallar provides a great deal of exemplary information on commedia's physical language, but she presents no discussion of its fundamental structure or basic conventions.

24. Pellegrino cites Mastropasqua, “Pantalone ridicola apparenza,” 100–1, as the most informative discussion of Pantalon's phallus in these images.

25. “Di maniera che non sappia qual sia destra o la sinistra.” Perrucci, Dell'arte rappresentativa premeditata ed all'improvviso, quoted in Castagno, Early Commedia dell'Arte, 98.

26. Kenneth and Laura Richards put it well: “A scenario is at best a pointer to ways in which performers might through improvisation compose plays. But the scenario is not a particular play; the play composed from a given scenario could be radically different in the hands of different groups of players and, according to immediate needs and emphases, in different performances by the same group of players.” Kenneth Richards and Richards, Laura, The Commedia dell'Arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 142Google Scholar. As Andrews explains, early commedia especially was, in performance, closer to “modern vaudeville or pantomime” than to dramatic theatre: “The ‘story’ was intermittent, if there was one at all, and the performers faced their public more openly, holding attention by means of an ambiguous merger between their own everyday personalities … and the role adopted for the occasion” (23).

27. As Richards and Richards point out, “the essential value of a scenario lay in what a company was able to do with it—and that depended on the quality of the players in the troupe, on the individual players' mimic and verbal repertoires, their ability to work with and off each other, and on the knowledge and skill of the capocomico [chief player, troupe leader] to harmonize the stage action” (142).

28. Pellegrino, 156. It is worth noting here that my arrangement of the dramatic vignettes in this series hews as closely as possible to the order reflected in the Fossard miscellany. My rationale for this arrangement, while it differs from those suggested by previous commentators, is that it corresponds to the basal numbers indicated on each plate (or, put differently, its scenes all occupy what seems their given sequential position within an act) and that it accepts (after removing scenes that do not seem to form part of the set) the only indicator we possess of some preferred precedent order (namely, the order in which the images were mounted). At the same time, I argue that these individual images are typological and thus that they should be legible in any number of different arrangements so long as their sequential positions are maintained. In this sense, the long dispute over the most plausible single arrangement seems both logical and irresolvable. For the definitive treatment of this issue, see Katritzky, “Renaissance Commedia dell'Arte Performance”; and Katritzky, Art of Commedia, 109–14.

29. For an excellent discussion of the relationship of the series to the genesis of Don Quixote, see Julio Vélez-Sainz, “El Recueil Fossard, la compañía de los Gelosi y la génesis de Don Quijote,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 20.2 (2000): 31–52.

30. The inclination of the wedding scene is set not by position so much as by stance. That is, Harlequin leans in from the left, but his weight (like so many reluctant grooms) is on his rear foot, suggesting that he is pulling up and away from Pantalon's grasp rather than leaning forward towards his bride. Francisquina, similarly, doesn't lean back so much as slouch, with her hips and her (pregnant? Certainly full) belly thrust loosely forward and her weight firmly, stolidly planted, right hand and right foot advanced. Unlike Harlequin, she appears ready to move forward. The rising right to left line of inclination runs from her lap to her hand (suggestively overlapping Pantalon's codpiece) to Pantalon's dagger (suggestively overlapped by Harlequin's hand, which is slyly fingering a jewel set in its hilt) and up Harlequin's arm to his face and his upraised cap (probably the signifier of his potential elevation of status through marriage).

31. On these complementary lyric modes, see Henke, 52. My identification of Cornelia's gesture is based on Louis Cresol's Autumn Vacations, or the Complete Action and Pronunciation for the Orator (1620), quoted in Castagno, Early Commedia dell'Arte: “Holding the two middle fingers together was a sign of hauteur, the noli me tangere gesture which warned inferiors away” (116).

32. For more on the logic of the lower senses in early modern culture, see Hillman, David and Mazzio, Carla, ed., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar, particularly Michael Schoenfeldt, “Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England,” 243–62.

33. For a fascinating treatment of zanni literature, including several selections that render this vision of Cockaigne with vivid immediacy, see Henke, 106–36.

34. Beijer, Agne and Duchartre, Pierre-Louis, Recueil de plusieurs fragments des premières comédies italiennes qui ont été representées en France sous le règne de Henri III: Recueil, dit de Fossard, conservé au musée national de Stockholm (Paris: Duchartre and Van Buggenhoudt, 1928), xxxiiGoogle Scholar.

35. Henke, 127.

36. On Zany's function as the “spring of comic intrigue,” see Richards and Richards, 140.

37. For an extended discussion of the relation of the senses to commedia dell'arte, see Peters, Julie Stone, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 7, “The Sense of the Senses: Sound, Gesture, and the Body on Stage.”

38. On the epistemological claims of the embodied aesthetic of early modern drama, see Peters, 159. On the strong connection between commedia's embodied aesthetic and humanist academics, see Richards and Richards, 59; and Vélez-Sainz, 33.

39. It is worth noting that the remaining images of Figs A31 and A32 similarly establish the contingency of the formal vision offered in the series' central frames, as they depict very specific role types, particular roles associated with specific performers, and in one instance—the breathtaking image of Stephanel Bottarga mounted alongside that of Subilot (Fig. A32)—what is clearly a celebratory portrait of a player rather than a role. Standing upon the abstract terrain of a leafy grotesque scroll, Bottarga steps forward in a graceful grinning bow, hands spread wide, in what seems the appropriate action of a capocomico at the close of the show. Although I am not aware of any additional evidence that suggests Bottarga's particular role in the creation of the series, this portrait alone seems to me to imply that he might well have had a hand in its design.

40. Scott, Virginia, The Commedia dell'Arte in Paris, 1644–1697 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 122Google Scholar. On the chronology of commedia's formal and institutional development during this period, see especially Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari: La Commedia dell'Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993)Google Scholar; Gambelli; and Andrews. Although histories of commedia dell'arte usually trace the development of the form at least as far back as the 1530s, Andrews suggests that commedia dell'arte took on an identity distinct from commedia erudita and commedia ridiculosa around 1550 (xi). Henke places that date slightly later, tying it to the rise of professional companies and the addition of actresses in the 1560s (69). The first wave of international performances took place in the 1570s, and Ferrone dates the moment when commedia achieved its mature form to 1580 (xiv). Ferrone also suggests that 1630 (the date of the Sack of Mantua) can be taken as a convenient marker of the end of commedia's formative period, and this general chronology is supported by the formal histories Andrews and Henke have constructed.

41. Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1945), 507Google Scholar. For an in-depth treatment of the topic, see Judovitz, Dalia, Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Barkin, Leonard, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Hillman and Mazzio; and Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Méchoulan suggests, following Bakhtin, that a shift extended from the mid-sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries from the medieval “open” body to the modern “closed” body, a process that imprisons the body in silence. Méchoulan, Éric, Le Corps imprimé: Essai sur le silence en littérature (Montréal: Les Éditions Balzac, 1999), 14–15Google Scholar, 21. In an essay on figurative language in late-sixteenth-century French poetry, Adam notes increasing pressure on the metonymic meaning of the body during this time as simile pushed to metaphor in an effort to intensify (and revive) dead figures of synecdoche. She links these efforts to the construction of interiority and to the closing off of the body as a legible sign of meaning. Adam, Véronique, “La Représentation du corps dans la poésie du XVIe siècle,” in Les imaginaires du corps: Pour une approche interdisciplinaire du corps, ed. Fintz, Claude, vol. 1, Littérature (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), 53–74Google Scholar.

43. Hillman and Mazzio; Burke, 205.

44. See Barkin; Paster; Burke; Fintz; Enterline, Lynn, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hillman and Mazzio; Vickers, Nancy J., “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 265–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wofford, Susan L., “The Body Unseamed: Shakespeare's Late Tragedies,” in Shakespeare's Late Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Wofford, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1996), 1–21Google Scholar; Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Jean Starobinski, “The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation,” trans. Sarah Mathews, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 350–405.

45. Benjamin's remains the best treatment of this process. See Benjamin, Walter, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, John (London: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar, esp. 159–89, 217–35. For Benjamin on Dürer, see 140, 149–58. For a fascinating discussion of such issues in Cervantes, one that suggests much of his overlap with the comic vision of early commedia, see Bénédicte Torres, Cuerpo y gesto en El Quijote de Cervantes (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2002).

46. See Maten, Jeffrey and Wall, Wendy, eds., Dramas of Hybridity: Early Modern Performance and the Body (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Wofford.

47. Probably the two most influential studies in this regard are Worthen, William, The Idea of the Actor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roach, Joseph, The Player's Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, both of which begin with this unstable internalization of character. Needless to say, I am not arguing against the validity or the importance of such work but merely pointing out its partiality. Other scholarship has filled out our understanding of that particular process; see, for example, Thomson, Peter, “Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. Cox, John D. and Kastan, David Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 321–35Google Scholar; and Thomson, , On Actors and Acting (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

48. Pellegrino, 132.

49. Katritzky, “Renaissance Commedia dell'Arte Performance” (cf. “Recueil Fossard 1928–88”). See also Katritzky, Art of Commedia, esp. 107–14; and Gambelli, 149–56.