There is no doubt that during their flourishing period the companies of the Commedia dell' Arte afforded the rarest amusement, not only to the vulgar, but also to refined and cultivated audiences throughout Europe. They were especially appreciated at Paris. From the year 1572, when the Confidenti and Gelosi made their first appearance, to the close of the eighteenth century, Italian troupes at the Hôtel de Bourbon, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the Palais Royal, and the Opera Comique, formed the delight of the French court and the Parisian public. Under various names, Uniti, Fedeli, Barbieri's, Bianchi's, and Cardinal Mazarin's men, actors who had learned their trade in Italy continued to seek larger profits and a wider audience in that capital. "The way in which Italian comedians compose, study, and represent their plays," says a French critic in the year 1716,[50] "is quite beyond the powers of language to describe. I might venture to call it inconceivable; with such a wealth of new and agreeable sallies and of unpremeditated dialogue do they adorn their scenes." Many anecdotes regarding these Italian players in their French homes have been transmitted to us, with detailed descriptions of their qualities. I will confine myself to two extracts.[51] One is taken from Constantini's Life of Tiberio Fiorelli (1608-1694), the famous Scaramouche. "He was one of the most perfect mimes who have appeared in these last centuries. I call him mime advisedly, because he played his part by action more than speaking. Scaramouche was not satisfied with making what he represented intelligible by speech; he translated everything into movements of his face and body, adapting his gestures to his words and his words to his gestures with incomparable art. Everything became vocal in this man, his feet, his hands, his head; the slightest attitude he took had meaning and significance." Gherardi adds that "he could keep an audience in fits of laughter for a long quarter of an hour without uttering a word. A great prince, who saw him act at Rome, uttered these words, 'Scaramuccia does not talk, and yet he says everything,' and at the end of the performance presented him with his coach and six horses." Of Tommaso Vicentini, called Il Tommasino, who made his début at Paris as Harlequin in 1716, we read: "His suppleness, his natural gaiety, his graceful airs of rustic simplicity, made him a first-rate Harlequin. But nature had also made him an excellent actor in the more extended sense of that phrase. True, naïve, original, pathetic, amid the laughter he excited by his buffooneries, a single trait, a single reflection which became a sentiment by his manner of expressing it, drew tears from the audience, and surprised the author of the piece no less than the public, and that too in spite of the mask, which seemed intended to inspire as much fear as merriment. Often, when one had begun to laugh at his way of simulating grief or pain, one finished by being melted with the tenderness of the emotion which came from the bottom of his heart."
Italian companies delighted the court of Spain during the reign of Philip II., and were welcomed in Portugal. We find them in Bavaria, at Dresden, and in other parts of Germany. Nor were they entirely unknown in England. Collier, in his "History of the English Drama," speaks of a certain Drousiano, who played with his troupe in London during the winter of 1577-78.[52] This was probably Drusiano Martelli. The extempore plays of the Italians are mentioned by Whetstone, Kyd, Jonson, and Brome; and it seems probable that the plat-comedies, ascribed to the famous fools Tarleton and Wilson, were modelled on Italian Commedie a Soggetto. Kyd, in the Spanish Tragedy, shows that the method of studying an improvised play was well understood. Hieronymo, who wishes to have a certain subject mounted in a hurry, says to his confidant—
| "The Italian tragedians were so sharp of wit, |
| That in one hour's meditation |
| They would perform anything in action." |
Lorenzo replies—
| "I have seen the like |
| In Paris, among the French tragedians." |
The full history of Italian companies in foreign lands still remains to be written; but I have said enough in this place to prove their wide popularity.
In its native country, the Commedia dell' Arte was long regarded as the special glory and the unique product of Italian dramatic genius. Gozzi, though he wrote as its apologist, only expressed common opinion when he said:[53] "I reckon improvised comedy among the particular distinctions of our nation. I look upon it as quite a different species from the written and premeditated drama; nor have I the shameless audacity to stigmatise with the title of an ignorant rabble those noble and cultivated persons whom I see with my own eyes following and enjoying a play of this description. I esteem the able comedians who sustain the masks, far higher than those improvisatory poets, who, without uttering anything to the purpose, excite astonishment in crowds of gaping listeners."
XII.
This essay would be incomplete if I failed to describe the decadence of the Commedia dell' Arte, and the various inconveniences which attended its performance by incompetent or wilfully scurrilous actors. Without such a sequel to the history of its development, Goldoni's reform of the theatre, and Gozzi's energetic attempts to sustain the old style by works of a peculiar and hybrid character, will not be intelligible.
In its higher manifestations, this comedy, as we have seen, allied itself to fine art by singularly delicate links of connection. More than in other kinds of drama, where actors make themselves the mouthpieces of poets whose creations they incarnate, the performers of improvised comedy had to be complete and finished works of living art in their own persons. So long as they were conscious of their mission, and earnestly aspired to the highest points within the range and scope of their achievement, they supplied a scenic travesty of actual life unequalled for its freshness and its truth to nature—sparkling with salient traits of character, seasoned with mirthful sarcasm, and pungent by its satire of contemporary manners. But the roots of this unique and singular species of the drama were grounded in a deep sub-soil of vulgar instincts and dishonest proclivities. It clung to the tradition of mountebanks and mimes, acrobats and jongleurs, circus-clowns and rope-dancers. The rare flower of racy humour and refined parody, which fascinated Paris in the age of Louis XIV., sprang from a stock discredited and outcast through fifteen centuries of Christian teaching. The Church in council and in synod had anathematised the ancestors of Andreini and Fiorelli, Sacchi and Darbes. Burial with the sanctities of religion was forbidden them, as it is forbidden to suicides. They were reckoned among the enemies of social order and civil discipline. The State, in its sumptuary laws, forbade their entrance into decent houses, relegating them to dark corners of the city, where they lurked with thieves and prostitutes. Saintly pastors of the flock, like Carlo Borrommeo, carried on a crusade against these corruptors of public morals.[54] Even in Venice, the city of their adoption—the sea-Sodom, as Byron called it, of carnival licentiousness, the mart of pleasure for all Europe, the modern Corinth—an Inquisitor of State scourged them with these words of stinging reprobation:[55] "Bear in mind, you actors, that you are folk beneath the ban of blessed God's almighty hatred, and that the prince allows you only as pasture for the common people, who take pleasure in your ribaldries." With such a record of contempt and disesteem and outlawry, the Commedia dell' Arte was always sinking back into the slime from which it rose. Unhappily, the same eyes which delighted in its glory during the years when genius shed brilliant lustre on its noblest representatives, had only to look on this side or on that, and a crowd of shameless merry-andrews, the scum and dregs of the histrionic profession, made the evidences of its inherent immorality only too apparent.