Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630

Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor Emerita of Theatre and English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. Her wide-ranging scholarship includes Befriending the Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala: The Comic Scenarios (2014) and essays on commedia dell’arte in New Theatre Quarterly, Viator, Renaissance Drama, and Text and Performance Quarterly. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and of Humanities Center fellowships at Stanford University and at the University of Illinois.

• List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Improvisation: why, what, how 2. Acting styles: dialects, voice, gesture; 3. The uses of masks; 4. Coda: commedia dell’arte today; Index

''Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570–1630 takes this method as its subject, exploring the practicalities of arte performance, and the social, cultural, and political contexts of Italian professional theatrical production, during its sixty-year ‘golden age’..... It is a masterclass in synthesising often disparate sources, and speaks to the innovative nature of what is no doubt an important book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this elusive theatre.'' Tom Roberts Exeter College, Oxford; Early Modern Literary Studies''Natalie Crohn Schmitt’s new work makes a valuable addition to her previous Befriending the Commedia dell’Art of Flaminio Scala which highlighted dimensions of the commedia dell’arte often overlooked, with close readings that paid attention to Scala’s mastery of literary devices and rhetorical flourishes. In Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570–1630 she goes much deeper in her analysis of the means and methods the actors employed: improvisation, acting styles, and masks.'' Rosalind Kerr, University of Alberta; Renaissance and Reformation