Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte

By Emily Wilbourne

In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell’arte. Along the way, she forges a new history of Italian opera, from the court pieces of the early seventeenth century to the public stages of Venice more than fifty years later.

Wilbourne considers a series of case studies structured around the most important and widely explored operas of the period: Monteverdi’s lost L’Arianna, as well as his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Mazzochi and Marazzoli’s L’Egisto, ovvero Chi soffre speri; and Cavalli’s L’Ormindo and L’Artemisia. As she demonstrates, the sound-in-performance aspect of commedia dell’arte theater—specifically, the use of dialect and verbal play—produced an audience that was accustomed to listening to sonic content rather than simply the literal meaning of spoken words. This, Wilbourne suggests, shaped the musical vocabularies of early opera and facilitated a musicalization of Italian theater.

Highlighting productive ties between the two worlds, from the audiences and venues to the actors and singers, this work brilliantly shows how the sound of commedia performance ultimately underwrote the success of opera as a genre.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226401607

Book preview

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte

Emily Wilbourne

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40157-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40160-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401607.001.0001

This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilbourne, Emily, author.

Title: Seventeenth-century opera and the sound of the commedia dell’arte / Emily Wilbourne.

Other titles: 17th century opera and the sound of the commedia dell’arte | XVII century opera and the sound of the commedia dell’arte

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033174| ISBN 9780226401577 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226401607 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Opera—Italy—17th century. | Commedia dell’arte—History and criticism. | Commedia dell’arte—Influence. | Commedia dell’arte—Characters.

Classification: LCC ML1733.2 .W55 2016 | DDC 782.109/032—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033174

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my family, given and chosen

Contents

Note to the Reader

INTRODUCTION

"The Tragedies and Comedies Recited by the Zanni"

CHAPTER ONE

The Commedia dell’Arte as Theater

CHAPTER TWO

Ma meglio di tutti Arianna comediante

CHAPTER THREE

The Serious Elements of Early Comic Opera

CHAPTER FOUR

Penelope and Poppea as Stock Figures of the Commedia dell’Arte

CONCLUSION

Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Note to the Reader

Many of the musical examples are based on seventeenth-century copies, whether manuscript or early printed editions. In such instances, note values and original barring have been maintained. If an excellent modern edition exists however—for example, Rinaldo Alessandrini’s edition of Il ritorno d’Ulisse, or Hendrik Schulze’s edition of L’Artemisia—I have consulted the relevant texts.

Where I have transcribed Italian lyrics or play texts from original sources, I have maintained the spelling and punctuation of the originals, avoiding the common practice of silently adapting the orthography to modern standards. In this book I am particularly interested in the sound of early seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte and operatic performances, and in the absence of audio recording technology, it is the written records that provide our best guess as to how the pronunciation, declamation, and intonation of such performances functioned—particularly in regard to dialect speech. Frequently it is the presumed errors and exceptions of the original texts that provide a way for modern readers to approach the noise of the performances indexed by these words. As a consequence, I have retained the atypical formulations precisely for the witness they might make to sounding practice.

INTRODUCTION

The Tragedies and Comedies Recited by the Zanni

As early as 1581, when Vincenzo Galilei could but dream of a fully musical theater, he suggested that musicians take inspiration from the sound-in-performance of the Italian vernacular stage: "When [composers] go for entertainment to the tragedies and comedies recited by the zanni," he urged,

let them restrain their immoderate laughter and instead observe, if they would, in what manner and at what pitch (high or low), volume of sound, accents and gestures, speed or slowness of articulation a gentleman speaks quietly with another. Let them pay attention to the difference with respect to all these qualities when one of them speaks with his servant, or a servant to another. Let them consider when this happens to be a prince talking with his subjects or vassals, or a supplicant pleading, how a furious or excited person speaks, how a married woman, a girl, a mere tot, a clever harlot, someone in love speaking to his beloved when he is trying to bend her to his will, how someone who laments, or one who cries out, how a timid person sounds or one exulting in joy. From these characteristics, observed with attention and diligently examined, they could take the norm of what suits the expression of any other idea that might come to hand.¹

Here sound is of central importance. In the theater now known as the commedia dell’arte, Galilei heard an exemplary aural model of dramatic expressivity. He heard a sonic text that could function as the norm for composers of the music that we now call opera. Listening attentively to commedia dell’arte performances, Galilei noted the way in which information about each character, from social status to emotional state, was coded into sound—marked out through pitch (high or low), volume of sound, accents and gestures, speed or slowness of articulation.

Musicology has long used texts such as this one as part of an ongoing search for opera’s origins, yet earlier scholars have looked in vain for a direct evolutionary trail leading from the surviving musical and dramatic texts associated with the commedia dell’arte to those of early opera.² Rather than seeking evidence for the influence of the commedia dell’arte in the surviving musical elements of the spoken plays, however, I emphasize the aurality of the plays themselves, reanimating the extant documents and the sounds to which they point. Thus, my work emphasizes performance and the resonant, fleshly bodies who made and heard the noises in question, both musical and vocal. The shift to foreground sound contextualizes the development of opera and the relationship between commedia dell’arte and opera in new and productive ways. In this book, I listen to the traces of commedia dell’arte performance and show how commedia’s sound prefigured the sonic drama of the dramma per musica. The preexisting aurality of the commedia dell’arte made sense of sound, allowing the sonorous dimensions of Italian theatricality to resonate with commedia dell’arte and opera audiences alike.

In the absence of an umbrella term describing Italian theatrical practice, Galilei refers to the "tragedies and comedies recited by the zanni," deploying a word with no direct translation into English: zanni is a derivative of the name Giovanni. Though not all zanni were called Zanni, the word quickly came to represent the stock comic servants or buffoons of the Italian stage. In Galilei’s usage the synecdoche is repeated on a larger scale, utilizing a memorable and popular character to stand in for the entire edifice of the professional theater. Over the last 150 years, it has become common to refer to this theater as the commedia dell’arte. While this term was not in common use until the late Settecento, modern usage applies it to the entire history of the phenomenon it describes, beginning around 1550, when the documentation of professional troupes and of female performers begins in earnest.³ The genre as a whole was characterized by professional actors (of both sexes) and a cast of stock roles; performers developed such facility with a chosen characterological persona that they could improvise from rough scenarios, providing monologues, dialogues, and lazzi (farcical or slapstick comedy routines) on the spur of the moment. The arte of the dell’arte theater should thus be understood to mean artisanal—practiced, that is, by skilled laborers within a recognizable tradition—and the commedia dell’arte can be conceived in broad terms as the professional theater of its time. Despite the prominence of the zanni in Galilei’s circumlocutious description and that of commedia in the term commedia dell’arte, comedy alone does not adequately constitute the material at hand. Galilei, it should be noted, was interested in both the "tragedies and the comedies recited by the zanni," just as he was concerned with the gentlemen, the princes, the married women, harlots, lovers, and mere tots who labored alongside the zanni characters. Galilei’s exhortation points beyond the comic figures of the commedia dell’arte and toward the interaction of multiple social classes. In his account, these characters speak with and across the boundaries of their given positions.

Beginning in 1970, with the publication by Ferdinando Taviani and others of La commedia dell’arte e la società barocca (2nd ed. 1991), an influential group of Italian scholars has been intent on finding, cataloguing, and, in many cases, publishing primary sources related to commedia dell’arte history, with a particular focus on the scattered yet fertile documentation of the period from 1580 to 1630.⁴ The consequences have been enormous, drastically shifting the parameters of how the term commedia dell’arte itself is defined, and radically reconceptualizing what is understood about commedia performance and reception.⁵ While older scholarship on the commedia dell’arte searched the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for rigid, almost pantomimic characters—such as the Harlequin and Colombine prototypes familiar to modern audiences in their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French instantiations—recent research has emphasized the flexibility of stock roles and their pervasive presence in the Italian theatrical imagination. The new focus on historical specificity makes it easier to conceive of the original performers as individuals rather than merely character types, and to think seriously about what and how they might have performed.

Crucially, the professional actors of the commedia stage performed in a range of theatrical forms. These included comic scenarios fleshed out in performance through improvisatory tropes, as has become synonymous with the genre name, but also fully scripted plays, sacred drama, intermedi, musical works, short skits, and so on. Commedie proper were set in an urban environment, with two houses (case) onstage as well as a section of street; the action involved entering and exiting, knocking on doors, and leaning in and out of windows on the upper floors (fig. 1.1 shows one such casa). In addition, commedia troupes performed commedie boscareccie or pastorali, set in the woods or countryside and populated by nymphs and shepherds; sacred dramas, which were based on the lives of saints; and tragedie, which featured some tragic death or supernatural occurrence, with the serious characters given royal names and occupations. Commedia troupes also regularly staged adaptations of classical tales—for example, Greek dramas such as Plautus’s Menaechmi, and the stories of Ovid and Ariosto. Many of these forms are directly opposed to the commedia dell’arte in the narrow sense in which it has frequently been described by historians and musicologists, yet such genres drew heavily upon the same dramatic and theatrical standards as improvised works. Increasingly, scholars have understood the full range of such theatrical variation as part of the commedia dell’arte’s art: we find the same stock characters, the same narrative tropes, the same scenic structures, the same jokes, the same laments.⁶

Professional actors—that is, commedia dell’arte actors—performed in the streets, in public theaters, in private houses, and in the rarefied spaces of various courts and academic circles. While the most established theatrical season was that of Venice, where upward of a dozen competing productions graced the public stages of the city during Carnival, itinerant troupes of commedia performers made regular stops in all the major Italian civic centers and many smaller towns. The most successful ensembles were patronized by members of the country’s elite and were therefore seen and appreciated in private performances for courtly crowds as well as at ticketed public performances; commercial performances by troupes of all standards drew audiences from merchant and citizen classes as well as the nobility. Other, less organized, less talented, or less well-connected performers mounted trestle stages or banks in the street and hawked trinkets and medicinal goods to passers-by. Such mountebank shows ranged from fully articulated multiact plays to individual slapstick encounters between a handful of characters. Commedia dell’arte performance thus cut across class boundaries and occupied a variety of locations. Characters popularized by commedia dell’arte scenarios also appeared in isolation—as roving entertainers at street fairs and fancy feasts, or even in sacred dramas as performed by church congregations. At the same time, amateur performances aped professional techniques—in courts, in academies, in confraternities, and at private gatherings—and literary plays incorporated dell’arte characters, plot devices, and linguistic tics.⁷ Perhaps most crucially, the line between improvised and scripted material was blurrier than scholars had first imagined. The improvised dialogue of the commedia dell’arte was based on an imaginative bricolage of learned material, not the creation of new words.⁸ Much as musical improvisations used passaggi and ornaments derived from a learned repertoire of melodic flourishes to decorate standard chord progressions, the comici dell’arte relied upon poetic conventions and literary exemplars, weaving fragments of preexisting texts together with the help of recitational formulae. It was the spontaneity of delivery and the virtuosity and eloquence with which actors combined material that delighted their audiences and inspired such esteem, not the wholesale production of something new. It should also be noted that professional comici were not necessarily limited to improvised repertoire. Large-scale court productions of single-author plays had frequent recourse to commedia players, and in several documented instances professional actors and actresses participated in academic settings too, dramatizing the literary contributions of academicians and circulating their own theatrical contributions for the entertainment and input of academy members.⁹

The seismic shift in the conception of commedia dell’arte has generated something of a renaissance in commedia scholarship, resulting in a number of important publications not only in Italian, but increasingly in English-language sources too. In 2008 a new journal, Commedia dell’arte: Annuario Internazionale was launched, and a review of recent research appeared in the Issues in Review section of Early Theatre during that same year.¹⁰ The year 2015 saw the publication of The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte, which includes contributions from academics and performers; and a more academically minded volume, The Commedia dell’Arte in Context, is slated to appear from Cambridge in the near future.¹¹ Rosalind Kerr’s The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage translates a number of historical documents into English for the first time, presenting an up-to-date narrative of the emergence of the professional theater within a context of broad economic change.¹² An excellent introduction to the newly conceived field of commedia dell’arte studies is provided by Siro Ferrone’s latest monograph, La commedia dell’arte: Attrici e attori italiani in Europa.¹³ Ferrone emphasizes the broad scope of commedia practice and provides a wealth of information about changes to the genre over time. Fascinatingly from a musicological perspective, Ferrone includes the operatic performances of post-1637 Venice within his survey, justifying the inclusion of opera through his conception of the commedia dell’arte as the professional Italian theater in its entirety.¹⁴

Although Ferrone brings il repertorio cantato and the spoken theater together under the umbrella of the commedia dell’arte, he offers little that is new for the understanding of opera, for the most part summarizing musicological approaches to commedia dell’arte and opera that have circulated for some time. He relies in particular on a 1987 reprint of Nino Pirrotta’s foundational 1955 article, "Commedia dell’arte and Opera; on Paolo Fabbri and Sergio Monaldini’s Dialogo della commedia; and on Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker’s Dalla ‘Finta Pazza’ alla ‘Veremonda’: Storie di Febiarmonici."¹⁵ Ferrone’s account covers two hundred years of history in a little over ten pages, so his portrait is of necessity painted in broad strokes. He cites several practitioners who performed both sung and spoken drama, most from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but for the earlier period that is the focus of this book, such details are scant.

All told, three important points inform Ferrone’s thinking about the overlap between commedia dell’arte and opera. First (via Pirrotta), that troupes of predominantly Roman singers circulated through Italy in the years leading up to 1637, when public opera officially found a home in Venice, and that these troupes had a great deal in common with those of contemporary actors. Second (via Fabbri and Monaldini), that the tropes and topoi of the commedia dell’arte stage reemerge in operatic libretti; Fabbri also made a similar point in Il secolo cantante, though his larger argument in the earlier book concerned the influence of scripted pastorales on operatic libretti.¹⁶ Third, Ferrone stresses the flexible talents of known commedia figures—many of whom were celebrated as singers or instrumentalists—and the large amount of music that was incorporated into commedia performances. Musical aptitude has become particularly associated with the prime donne innamorate of the late sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries; this point is well made by Anne MacNeil in her book Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte.¹⁷

The status quo of musicological scholarship on the commedia dell’arte expands only marginally on the arguments laid out by Ferrone and is evidenced by the three chapters on music included in the Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte.¹⁸ MacNeil contributes a chapter titled Celestial Sirens of the Commedia dell’Arte Stage, which draws upon and expands on the content of her 2003 book, enumerating many accounts of vocal and musical prowess attributed to commedia actresses during the second half of the sixteenth century.¹⁹ Thomas Heck’s chapter, Incidental Music in Commedia dell’arte Performances, is a reprint of an article first published in 1993. Heck’s discussion severs music from the sonic content of commedia dell’arte performance as a whole, as evidenced in the article’s concluding words: How does one spot potential musical opportunities in dramatic texts? Usually when I scan a theatrical text looking for musical clues, my eye will gravitate to the shorter-lined poetry within a longer section of prose. One develops this skill when working with opera librettos, because in opera librettos, typically, the arias have the briefest text of all, yet represent the richest musical events that one will find.²⁰ Separatist approaches of this nature are common in musicological work on theatrical topics. Music was a frequent occurrence in commedia dell’arte performances, and such scenes are rich indeed; I discuss several in chapter 1. Music alone, however, fails to account for the enormous sonic inheritance that opera took from the commedia dell’arte. The literal music of the commedia dell’arte stage proves richer still when considered as part of the broader aural context of commedia performance.

The third article in the Routledge Companion, Roger Savage’s Meetings on Naxos: Opera and Commedia dell’Arte, nominally addresses the overlap with which this book is concerned.²¹ Attempting to cover over three hundred years of operatic history in fewer than eight pages, however, presents much the same set of circumstances as with Ferrone: there is little opportunity to do more than summarize the state of the field. Savage touches on all the standard tropes: the commedia dell’arte actress Virginia Andreini performed in the opera Arianna in 1608, there was a large quantity of music in commedia dell’arte performance, opera borrowed plot materials from commedia traditions, and commedia troupes provided a model for professional operatic ensembles. From there Savage leaps directly to the presence of comic scenes and characters in opera and to the development of the comic opera tradition. He closes with a reading of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1916). Although Savage mentions the noncomic material presented by commedia troupes, when he turns to the question of influence he limits the discussion to purely comic elements.

Notwithstanding some excellent work on the literary actress Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) and the classicizing agenda of several early commedia dell’arte innamorate, the conflation of the commedia dell’arte and its comic elements persists.²² This habit can be traced back to Pirrotta’s 1955 article, mentioned above, which has proved the touchstone of musicological work on the two genres. While Pirrotta himself stressed the wide variety of materials performed by commedia dell’arte troupes, specifically tragedies and the opera regia—a genre he defines as a combination of the noble characters common to tragedies with the happy endings and tangled romances of comedy—in the turn to a concrete discussion of characterological influence, Pirrotta, like Savage, treats exclusively comic characters. Despite its clear grasp of the wider world of commedia performance, Pirrotta’s article, counterintuitively, helped to cement a narrow and anachronistic definition of the professional spoken theater.²³ Subsequent musicology has therefore often misrepresented the commedia dell’arte in relationship to other theatrical forms.

There are exceptions to the standard musicohistorical account, but as yet these works have had little impact on the wider disciplinary landscape. For example, Paola Besutti’s article "Da L’Arianna a La Ferinda: Giovan Battista Andreini e la ‘Comedia musicale all’improviso’" (1995) begins from the premise of commedia dell’arte actors as multitalented performers but finishes in a rare reading of a commedia text as a legitimate musical exemplar in its own right.²⁴ John Walter Hill’s article, "Travelling Players and Venetian Opera: Further Parallels between commedia dell’arte and dramma per musica," excavates the influence of commedia dell’arte improvisatory practice on operatic libretti and their poetic meters.²⁵ My own published work on Giovan Battista Andreini’s Lo Schiavetto (looking at sound, racialization, and the travestied body) and on his Amor nello specchio (looking at sonic representations of sexuality) should also be mentioned.²⁶ Such work, however, has been the exception rather than the rule.

Justifiably wary of reductive conflation, musicologists have been quick to mark the differences between various types of early modern musical theater: court opera has been carefully distinguished from public opera, Roman opera from that of the Florentines and Venetians, genuine opera from intermedi, balli, and other spectacular musical-theatrical productions—and commedia dell’arte has been held largely separate from musical theater as a whole. The geography of disciplinary specialization and the categorically different formats in which historical materials have survived have encouraged differentiation. These can be useful distinctions—with important ramifications for a topology of regional style, and for the modern understanding of stylistic development, historical influence, and accurate performance practice. Without wanting to render such distinctions moot, I am interested in the fundamental musical and theatrical assumptions that all such genres share. If I may paraphrase a question posed by Suzanne G. Cusick during a recent conversation: what if the subtle generic distinctions—between terms such as veglia or favola in musica—reflect a fundamental shift in the function, not the content, of a musical-theatrical performance? What—I would add—is common to these productions? What assumptions do they share about theatricality, representation, imitation, and characterization? What are the similarities and differences between musical theater and the commedia dell’arte? These are the kinds of questions I hope to answer.

In this book I map the influence of the commedia dell’arte on the medium of opera, emphasizing the broad dimensions of dell’arte practice—incorporating serious characters and dramatic genres alongside the comic elements—and the resonant aural dimension of early modern dell’arte performance. From these characteristics, observed with attention and diligently examined, I reconstruct a theatrical epistemology of sound that characterizes not only the established medium of the commedia dell’arte stage, but also early Italian opera. The precedent offered by the commedia dell’arte provides a forceful argument for why and how Italian opera succeeded, and understanding this legacy is important for scholars of opera and of the spoken theater alike. Taking the newer, more nuanced understanding of the term commedia dell’arte as axiomatic, I will make three important claims, each with ramifications for the way in which we understand the development of opera.

First, following Galilei, I want to consider the serious characters of the commedia dell’arte along with the tragedies and tragicomedies in which serious and comic characters regularly appeared. All too often the dramatic and characterological variety inherent to commedia productions has been lost on the genre’s commentators. Comedy was, for example, an easy target of indignant early modern moralists (as was the presence of women onstage).²⁷ Critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who objected to the professional theater did so primarily because of the opportunities it offered for vice—and the very existence of comedy and comic characters fueled the fire. The music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino, responding directly to the Galilei passage under discussion here, excoriated Galilei for the recourse he made to the commedia dell’arte: for Zarlino, the practice of musical imitation was itself suspect, serving to reduce the practitioner utterly (in tutto & per tutto) to the level of Histrioni ò Buffoni—both derogatory terms for an actor.²⁸ Zarlino’s criticism, however, takes the imitative prowess of the commedia dell’arte for granted, eliding the very practice of imitation itself with the professional stage. At the same time, he uses the zanni figure, with his lowly buffoonish characteristics, to stigmatize the entire edifice of commedia dell’arte performance.

This brings me to my second point: I want to recognize the extent to which the basic tenets of commedia dell’arte theatricality can be understood to represent broad conceptual norms. The stock characters and hackneyed plot turns of the commedia dell’arte repertoire provided an infrastructure of theatrical representation that constituted the very fabric of the Italian stage. This point, too, can be inferred from Galilei: his acceptance of the commedia dell’arte as a mirror of social interactions emphasizes the importance of the genre’s clichés as cohesive elements of the Italian theater. Not only is Galilei attuned to the entire cast of commedia characters, comic and serious alike, but he views them as convincing representations of the real world. As the dominant vernacular theater, the commedia dell’arte provided a characterological and behavioral map by which actions and interactions onstage became legible. The conventions of dell’arte performance were the means by which all theatricality achieved verisimilitude.

Third, I want to suggest that the sound of the commedia dell’arte theater provided an explicit precursor to opera’s music. Again, Galilei helps. By privileging a dramatic and explicitly theatrical representation of speech—rather than the mundane, everyday conversation of the court or private household—Galilei underscores an important and overlooked distinction between the two. For Galilei, the commedia dell’arte already imitates and codifies the expressive sounds of everyday speech with admirable success. Musical theater need only transcribe these sounds into music, building on an extant infrastructure of theatrical representation. Galilei asked his audience to observe the manner, the pitch (high or low), the volume, the accents and gestures, and the speed or slowness of articulation that they could hear in performance. To his ear the commedia dell’arte was dependent on a soundtrack of speech melodies, modulated according to emotional circumstances (wheedling, pleading, lamenting, exulting) and by the behavioral conventions held proper to certain types of people (gentlemen, servants, married women, girls). The composer can thus parse these sounds in order to imitate them in music: From these characteristics, observed with attention and diligently examined, they could take the norm of what suits the expression of any other idea that might come to hand. For Galilei and his Florentine collaborators, the variable sonic fabric of the commedia dell’arte was to provide a model for the new art of recitative. As I will argue, however, the influence of the spoken theater can be traced far beyond the courtly and academic experiments of the primo Seicento, up into the public theaters and the mature Venetian style of the second half of the century.

In commedia dell’arte performance, the intersection of sound and identity was the constitutive site of meaning. The stock characters were mapped across aural and linguistic axes. Each character spoke a different dialect: the lovers communicated in a learned Tuscan; the Captain spoke Spanish; the zanni, Bergamasco or Neapolitan; and Pantalone, Venetian. The play of intelligible words and distinctively regional sounds carried a wealth of social implications exploiting the stereotypes of early modern urban society. The sound of performance itself meant something, conveying contextual information that was absent from the words alone. In this book I want to excavate the noise of commedia performance and the sonic epistemology through