Commedia dell'arte

Scenarios, scripts, and lazzi of comedies popular in the 16th-18th centuries that were improvised by professional actors within a conventional framework of masked stock characters and rehearsed comic routines.

found: The Oxford companion to the theatre, 1983(commedia dell'arte, the name usually given to the popular Italian improvised comedy first recorded in 1545, which flourished from the 16th to the early 18th centuries. Other names for it: commedia a soggetto; all'improvviso; dei zanni; dei maschere; all'italiana. Dell'arte, the only phrase to survive in general use, means roughly 'of the profession', the actors being trained professionals. To distinguish it from the popular theatre, the written Italian drama of this time was known as commedia erudita. Actors made up their speeches as they went along; comic servants provided most of the humour; most of the actors wore masks; acted in accordance with a scenario or pre-arranged synopsis)

found: Baldick, C. The Oxford dict. of literary terms, 2008(commedia dell'arte. The Italian term for 'professional comedy', a form of improvised comic performance popular between the 16th and 18th centuries in Italy, France, and elsewhere in Europe, acted in masks by travelling companies of professional actors each of whom specialized in a stock character)

found: Wilson, E. The theater experience, c2004, via McGraw-Hill Higher Education online learning center, Nov. 14, 2012:glossary (Commedia dell'arte: Form of comic theater, originating in Italy in the sixteenth century, in which dialogue was improvised around a loose scenario involving a set of stock characters, each with a distinctive costume and a traditional name.)

found: Grantham, B. Commedia plays : scenarios scripts lazzi, 2006:p. v (at no time was Commedia dell'Arte totally spontaneous. The improvisation was laced with memorised speeches, rhymed couplets, witty sallies, exit lines, and above all, the rehearsed comic business we call Lazzi) p. 209 (a Lazzo might be said to have been a piece of rehearsed comic business inserted into the improvised drama, usually at a moment when the audience's attention was flagging. Here, I use the term in a broader sense to mean any bit of stage business, from a single action or word, to a whole scene, which is devised and rehearsed beforehand and inserted into an improvised or scripted production, and usually called for by the dictates of the scenario.)

found: The commedia dell'arte in Naples : a bilingual edition of the 176 Casamarciano scenarios, 2001.

Scenarios, scripts, and lazzi of comedies popular in the 16th-18th centuries that were improvised by professional actors within a conventional framework of masked stock characters and rehearsed comic routines.

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