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Dissimulation in the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala
- Author(s):
- Natalie Crohn Schmitt (see profile)
- Date:
- 2015
- Group(s):
- CLCS European Regions, CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern, GS Drama and Performance
- Subject(s):
- Drama, Italian literature
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- literary history, commedia dell'arte, Early modern studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6N88T
- Abstract:
- Commedia dell’Arte was the most influential and widespread theatre movement in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe. A considerable part of its popularity can be accounted for by its comic representation of stressful occurrences within everyday life in early modern Europe, including in its representation of the period’s widespread dissimulation, that is, the hiding of one’s true thoughts and motives by means of discretion, indirection, and outright deceit. The theatricality of Commedia dell’Arte, among other things, provided a way for the audience to briefly dissociate itself from and to fantasize about ways of coping with dissimulation. A number of characteristics of Commedia dell’Arte, including disguise, lying, tricks, spying and gossip, and portrayals of honor, previously seen as separate, cohere in the concept of dissimulation. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theatre and of English, Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago. She recently published Befriending the Commedia dell’Arte of FlaminioScala: The Comic Scenarios (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
- Notes:
- The subtitles in this essay, unlike in the version of it published in New Theatre Quarterly, includes the subtitles as the author intended them to be.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
- Share this:
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schmitt-dissimulation.pdf