While in Florence I saw most of the minor theatres. ‘Stenterello,’ the Florentine Punch, has the big part in all the pieces at the people’s theatre, and is a unique specimen of theatrical art. In order to appreciate him thoroughly, I have sat out several evenings’ amusement under rather distressing circumstances. When you pay sixpence to go into a theatre, and sixpence more for a posto distinto or reserved seat, you must not grumble if your neighbours are not of the haute noblesse. But the manteaux noirs in which the Italian common people wrap themselves during the winter are, when worn with Florentine thrift for, say, thirty years, apt to get unpleasant, and the wearers have besides unpleasant little ways, and are curiously afflicted, and—— But I will not go into details. I have endured much by passing my evenings in the popular parts of popular theatres—I mean the theatres patronized by the masses—but I have gained an experience which ought to be valuable. I shrink at nothing where my favourite study—the people—is concerned.
How shocking—isn’t it?—to waste one’s time studying the people of to-day—living, breathing flesh and blood: tragedy, comedy, and farce all packed together under a ridiculous modern costume—while there lies all around one a whole population of stone and marble and painted ladies and gentlemen, all classically draped or equally classically undraped, and not one of them less than a thousand years old at least! I cannot help preferring the living flesh to the dead marble, the country to the canvas, and all that is wicked and philistine in me rises in rebellion as I peruse the guide-books and catalogues and find nothing but galleries and churches considered worthy of a tourist’s observation. I am not blind to the beautiful in art, I hope. A modern picture gives me often the greatest of pleasure, and so, for the matter of that, does an old one if it has a story to tell, and tells it well; if out of the painted eyes there looks forth a human soul, if in the grouped figures there is some suggestion of human feeling. But the things which are as a red rag to a bull to me are the Virgins and Children, the Holy Families, the saints, the martyrs, the portraits of painters’ mistresses, labelled now a heathen goddess and now a Catholic saint. For tourists to spend as they do day after day contemplating these things, worrying away at a note-book with a pencil, and then chevying off to spend more hours staring at churches and cathedrals and listening to the droned-out lies of the cicerone, while a people as interesting in their manners and customs as any in the wide world live and move around them, under their very eyes, despised, unstudied, and unnoticed, is to me incomprehensible.
At all the theatres, save those where grand opera is given, everything—tragedy, comedy, and farce—is ‘con Stenterello.’ Punch is dressed always the same, no matter what the period of the play may be. He is the low comedy man, and has all the funny lines, but at times he utters noble sentiments, and becomes pathetic over the sorrows of the heroine, who is habitually protected by him.
No matter how tragic or pathetic the situation, Stenterello, with his queer costume and painted face, has a share in it. The bereaved wife wails out to Punch her sorrow for the dear departed, the betrayed maiden reveals to him the name of the villain at whose hands she claims retribution. The Medicis of old cannot plot and plan without Stenterello, the masher of to-day has Stenterello as his companion when he goes a-wooing, and after a round of the Florentine playhouses I was considerably astonished to find that ‘Othello’ was played at the Teatro Tommaso Salvini without a Stenterello. I quite expected to see him turn up as the devoted friend of Desdemona, or as the virtuous foiler of the wicked schemes of Iago.
Stenterello is literally worshipped by the Florentines. In every play he talks in the Florentine dialect—that is to say, in the patois of the people.
The late King Victor Emmanuel used to come in the good old days to the little theatres, and roar as loudly as anyone at Punch’s wheezes, and one evening expressed his delight at the performance by making a knight there and then of the Stenterello who had given him so much amusement. The history of these Punches would make a long magazine article. They are classical in Italy. Stenterello is indigenous to Tuscany. Other provinces have their Punch, who appears in nearly all the plays, but in a different garb. In Naples it is Pulcinella who is the omnipresent comic man. Pulcinella is dressed in a loose white costume, and wears a black domino, with a beak to it—a property which deprives the actor most effectually of the aid of facial expression. But Italian actors and pantomimists do not need their faces to tell a story. They use their hands most marvellously, and will tell a whole five-act drama with gesture alone. In one little theatre the other evening I saw a mime hold an audience spell-bound for fully ten minutes while she described a tragedy, and showed how it was to be revenged, without uttering a single word.
At the bulk of the Italian theatres you can enter by simply paying fifty centimes or a franc for the ingresso. This entitles you to stand in the large vacant space at the back of the stalls, which takes the place of our pit. If you want a numbered seat or a box, of course you pay extra for it. Once having paid your ingresso, you can go to all parts of the house where there is room to stand and see. If you have friends in a box, you walk in and sit with them, as each box is sold as a whole, and is never split up into seats. The Italian theatre consists entirely of stalls and private boxes and ‘standing room.’
At many of the theatres smoking is allowed all over the house during the performance. Even the musicians smoke their cigars during the entr’acte, and lay the half-finished ends on their music-stands when the conductor waves his bâton.
To see the reckless manner in which matches are struck and flung about would strike terror to the panic-monger’s heart were it not for the fact that the houses, being built mostly of stone and marble, are not very inflammable. The audience is always a wonderful study. The Italians fling their hearts into the scene. The drama or farce is to them no play, but a reality. They hoot the villain, they encourage the hero with reassuring words, they cap Stenterello’s jokes with original ones of their own, and they keep up a running fire of comment on the story as it develops. They are as loud in their disapproval as they are in their commendation. They will hoot a bad actor or singer off the stage mercilessly, and if the moral of a play or its dénouement does not interest them they will howl with rage till the curtain falls.
One remarkable feature of the popular playhouses is the prompter. This gentleman sits in the centre of the stage, covered over with a green wooden hood. I had a box one night on the stage, and I heard the prompter deliberately read the whole play to the company a line in advance of each actor, who repeated it like a schoolboy. The turn of each actor to take up the text was indicated to him by the prompter’s finger pointing at him. This continuous prompting is, of course, only necessary in minor theatres, where the bill is changed almost nightly, and the actors have little time for study.