Although commonly ignored in criticism, it is very clear that Shakespeare was familiar with commedia dell’arte, a masked and improvised Venetian drama that emerged in the 16th century and produced many traveling troupes. Both its roles (or masks) and its characteristic structures and actions repeatedly appear in his comedies, from the repressive father Pantalone to the stuttering Tartaglia and braggart soldier, Il Capitano, and from the cross-pairings of lovers to the disastrous encounter of Il Capitano with that real soldier, Il Cavaliero – but they also make the jump to his tragedy, with startling results.
The Folio text of Love’s Labour’s Lost gives Don Adriano de Armado and Holofernes the speech-prefixes Brag (for Braggart) and Ped (for Pedant), underlining the presence of character-types, and the action centres on four pairs of lovers, doubling the two typical of Commedia. But in Shakespeare’s scripted and usually unmasked dramatic world those elements must be set to new and distinctive uses, while all are subordinated to his greater comedic purpose. That purpose brought Shakespeare almost a decade later to Twelfth Night, and while his comedy had by then evolved far beyond Commedia its elements and tropes remain, shaping the characterisation of Sir Toby Belch and the encounter of Sir Andrew Aguecheek with Sebastian. Yet the pairing of fat Belch and thin Aguecheek also parallels the odd couple of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet – where the part of Pantalone is played by Polonius, even unto his absurd and awful death. And in theatrical terms Polonius’s greatest descendant as an angry, prating, and profoundly foolish parent whose children all die is King Lear, a tragic protagonist whose peculiar agony largely depends on the comedic armature Shakespeare used to construct him.
Awareness of the presence of elements taken from Commedia in Shakespeare’s drama, and especially awareness of their translocations into tragedy, illuminates much about his work. They made up a significant part of his comedic toybox, and brought to his great tragedies the generic tensions that animate them and make for their most haunting scenes. It also speaks directly to the matrix of theatrical knowledge and practice within which he always worked, and without which the true scope and nature of his achievement cannot be clearly understood.
Learning outcomes
- To understand the presence of material derived from Commedia dell’arte in Shakespeare’s work;
- To compare its uses in earlier and later Shakespearean comedy;
- To recognise its continuing use in mature Shakespearean tragedy.
