The Comedy in Commedia dell’Arte

(The Social View)

Numerous theories of comedy seek to explain laughter and humor, how it functions, its origins and
what its psycho/social and political grounds are. Highlighting here only two theories on the basis of
social relations, we can say that comedy can be used as a force for domination of one group over
another or can be used to subvert that domination. We normally do not discuss this when discussing
Commedia dell’arte but it would be interesting to ask what sort of comedy Commedia is or was.

Thomas Hobbs refers to laughter and humor as resulting from the feeling of “sudden glory” or the
notion that laughing results from identifying those inferior to us, as in ethnic, racist or class based
humor. This sort of humor reinforces the status quo of power relationships. Michael Bakhtin argues
that laughter can also be used to subvert power as in the carnival laughter or laughter that depends
on the ironic inversion of social status.

I want to argue that commedia dell’arte can be played either way, as reactionary comedy that
reinforces the existing hierarchy of society or subversive comedy that attempts to take down the
hierarchy in favor of those on the bottom. However, I also want to make the point that it has its
point of origin in the world as subversive comedy more akin to carnival laughter and that its basic
structure is inherently subversive. Only later did Commedia morph in such a way that a reactionary
version of the commedia form was possible.

To begin with I would like to point out that most of the significant efforts in the twentieth century
“rediscovery” of the commedia was motivated by the subversive side of comedy: Mejerchol’d,
Vakhtangov, Dario Fo, Strehler, San Francisco Mime, Mnouchkine, etc. Their interest was in utilizing
the commedia dell’arte form to provoke a comic critique of existing power relationships: against war,
against racism, fascism, sexism and capitalism itself. The reason the commedia form was valuable is
that it is fundamentally structured by social formations of real power relationships. In its origin, this
would be ideology, military violence and money. These power centers are manifest in the stock
characters of Dottore, Capitano and Pantalone. They form an essential part of the rigid hierarchy of
power in the 16th C.

To understand Commedia dell’Arte we must remember that it was born in the ambiance of the
Renaissance and took on the characteristics of a Renaissance art form fundamentally distinct from its
medieval predecessors. While undoubtedly linked, however loosely, to the travelling giullari
sociologically, their art differed in that it was quite self-consciously an expression of the new
consciousness ushered in by the Renaissance and its new class configurations. It is worth pointing
out that the actuality of the Commedia was historically bracketed roughly between the years of 1540-
1789, from its founding to the outbreak of the French Revolution. This has obvious significance.
The emerging class/power relations initiated by the Renaissance no longer held its rigid status after
the French Revolution; fluidity of power and the triumph of money henceforth characterized the
majority of social relations. The Commedia failed to adapt to these new formations and withered
into irrelevance or banality.

By the late 18th C the Commedia dell’Arte had become a sclerotic caricature of itself, a fact lamented
by Goldoni and confirmed by contemporary observers. One might argue that its fall was price of its
own success. Goldoni wrote, The soul under the mask is like a fire under the ashes. This, in itself, was the
recognition that the Commedia form no longer captured the social and psychological realities of
contemporary society. Rather than engaging in the profound dialogical communication with
emerging social and political realities commedia performers resorted to a lifeless self-referential set of
formulas, in a word, they became boring.

I would argue that the principle characteristic of Renaissance thought, at its most radical, was the
humanist concept of self-creation. That is to say that man is not a tipi fissi (fixed type), nor the result
of forces outside of his control, as was the characteristic of medieval thought with original sin
manifesting itself in the seven deadly sins corresponding to character types. This is specifically
rejected by Renaissance humanism.

In the Oration on the Dignity of Man, often referred to as the Manifesto of the Renaissance, God says to
Adam:

The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which we have laid down; you, by
contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may by our own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you,
trace fro yourself the lineaments of your own nature ….. We have made you a creature of neither heaven nor
of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being,
fashion yourself in the form you prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutal forms of life;
you will be able through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.
Giovanni Pico 1486

It was in this spirit that Machiavelli wrote his Prince and his extraordinary comedy the Mandragola that
sought to understand the actions of men, as they really are, not through the lens of fixed types but as
men act in the storm of human relations with choices.

Unfortunately, modern interpreters of the Commedia dell’arte miss this point and revert to the idea
of tipi fissi as if the springs of human action are to be found beyond their control in the primordial
character of man. Many make reference to the concept of human archetype. The archetype as a
modern concept is adopted from Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, where the
primordial image, character or pattern of circumstances is considered universal, originating in pre-
logical thought and outside of time, space and culture. This distinctly modern version of commedia is
the inversion of the Renaissance idea of man as a self-creator. It implies that the social structure is
the product of mans’ fixed character and that hierarchies of power are natural hierarchies. Thus, only
a fool would challenge such hierarchies. In this sense, Pantalone is a merchant because he has a
greedy character, rather than the more fluid idea proposed by Renaissance thought, that Pantalone is
greedy because he is a merchant. In the latter concept, the emphasis is not on the character as a
human archetype but rather on the structure of social power relations, which the stock characters
incarnate on stage. As Carlo Boso correctly points outs, each character is the representative of a social class,
by the act of theatre, becomes the magical incarnation of all its class. More specifically as Erhard Stiefel (mask
maker for Teatre du Soleil) put it: the mask’s revelatory power is

not in giving the audience (and the actor) the possibility of constructing a preconceived stereotypical
identification, but on the contrary, in giving them the means to see a particular class through the character,
with which they can identify……. Thus, society can be unmasked with a mask, which becomes revelatory
and makes life’s truth, which we have never known how to see, spring forth ….. The beauty and precision of
its gestures generate a radiance, which reveals and distinguishes the inner workings of society, which denounces
them, but at the same time invokes hope of a different life. 1

Jacque Lecoq has unfortunately recast the Commedia dell’arte, in his own terms as, La comedie humaine
(human comedy) where the motor force of the perpetual and universal contradiction of opposite
poles contained within each character: Harlequin is simultaneously naive and cunning, Capitano is
both strong and scared, Dottore knows everything and understands nothing etc. 2 While this may be
a good devise for teaching the actor it neutralizes the social power of the commedia and potentially
sets the stage for the its reactionary version as the universal study of human archetypes. That is,
humanity as a fixed unalterable being across space, time and culture.

Those trained in the Lecoq method tend to put the physical mask at the center of the actors craft; the
body must be at the service of the mask is the imperative, requiring an architectural study of the physical
form of the mask. Rather than ask how the mask walks, stands, sits etc. it is far better to ask, how
does an intellectual stand, how does the bureaucrat make love, how does an officer walk, how does
the bourgeoisie sit etc. The function of the mask is to de-personalize and universalize the class
relationships, and social interactions and to make easily recognizable how the social relationships are
translated through the body in space. To reduce the body-physicality to the architecture of the mask-

























































1 E. Stiefel. L’Age d’Or (teste-Programme), Paris: Stock, 1975
2 J. Lecoq. The Moving Body, London: Methuen 2000 (p. 119-120)
form is to simply substitute the mask for the bourgeois form of individual character study. Such an
approach also gives primacy to form at the risk of subordinating what exactly one wants to
communicate. That is to say the total emphasis becomes the individual (mask) that in fact can
actually hide the social character of the theatrical form.

The very structure of the early commedia and its genius was to successfully incarnate on a small stage
the real power relations of their time, both culturally and spatially bound. They did this by creating
stock characters of power: Dottore, Capitano and Pantalone. 3 These are characters that act as
representatives of their class. And Zanni, who is he? We should be careful not to confound Zanni
with his masters. He is an unstable character, and anarchistic mischief-maker, who refuses definition,
refuses to accept the signs and symbols of power, creating confusion by inadvertently challenging the
logic of the hierarchy; in short, he is the humanity in everyman who longs for the exuberant freedom
from the tyranny of a petrified world.

The modern expressions of the inescapability of original sin, as found in the medieval world view,
can be found in numerous scientific, esoteric, and economic theories all of which posit a tipi fissi,
from Smith’s acquisitive man, to Bentham’s pleasure pain principle, to the social Darwinism of the
late 19th C, to Freud’s unconscious impulses, to socio-biology’s discovery of the selfish-gene, to the
universal archetypes etc. What all of these theories have in common is the reinforcement of what
can only be called bourgeois individualism where war, inequality and the need for a hierarchies of
power are inescapable. After all, in one-way or another, man has always been the same!

Commedia dell’Arte that is played with the emphasis on the human archetype, tipi fissi, at the expense
of the socially constructed class/race and gender relations of which the stock characters are
expressions, plays a conservative comedy at best, and reactionary comedy at its worst. Historically,
we can see this development as commedia troops essentially moved in two directions, one remained
in the piazza among the common people, responding to their desire to invert the world, and the
other, in the direction of courtly diversions with their natural interest to be constantly affirmed in
their positions of power.

To recover the subversive (popular) side of commedia we should understand the relationships
between the characters as reflecting relationships found in broad social conflict in existing society.
Furthermore, it would seem essential to set the Zanni apart in this sense. The stock characters of

























































3
It is worth pointing out that when commedia troops played in Sicily the character of Pantalone was sometimes
substituted by the Barone. Why? Because merchants had no socially significant role in Sicily as they did in
Venice. And we can be certain that the characteristics of the comical aristocrat were not those of the comic
merchant.
power confront Zanni with the semiotic architecture through which he must navigate and in so
doing, subvert its foundations through the free play of his imagination and his consistent failure to
internalize the power relations and the structure of the of dominant “logic.” The stock characters
can only see the world through this logic even when it is demonstrably shown to be absurd. This is
the subversion and this is the comedy.4

S. McGehee
Accademia dell’Arte

April 2010


























































4
One further point in regards to the relatively rigid structure of the commedia, which many misunderstand as a
simplistic form resembling children’s theatre. The stock characters themselves oppose one another through
their own semiotic logic, always in conflict because, in essence, they are living in different realities: violence,
money and knowledge. A good example of the semiotic conflict in a pre-commedia play is Ruzante’s Pastoral.
Arpino, the arcadian shepherd and invention of literary mind, confronts Ruzante the earthy, flesh and blood
peasant. Arpino invokes the god Pan and Ruzante believes he wants to share his bread (pane). The comic
dialog follows. This is clearly Beolco (Ruzante) the humanist confronting the real with the idealized. There are
infinite similarities with Zanni’s visceral confrontation with the lovers’ romantically idealized sense of sexual
attraction. But, to make these conflicts clear the characters must express the essence of the social types whose
reality manifests itself along the axis of their own “ideological” perception.