Kate Meehan
Commedia and Shakespeare
Here's a bit of further reading, and some of the texts we discussed in class for your reference.
Books
Why must the books we love so much be so terribly out of print and therefore ridiculously expensive? Here are some links to the Google Books pages, which offer some previews of some very useful texts.
Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare & his Contemporaries.
Lettere, by Isabella Andreini (in Tuscan)
Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini - In English, much of the lyricism is lost in the translation.
The Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala - A collection of a number of Commedia dell'Arte scenarios, translated. Those selected are primarily comedies, though a handful of dramas (a tragedy, Royal Drama, and Heroic Drama) are included.
Websites
PDFs of Scholarly Articles
Robert Henke's article, "Back to the Future: A Review of Comparative Studies in Shakespeare and the Commedia dell'Arte," published in Issues in Review, provides a tidy summary of existing comparative studies in Shakespeare and Commedia.
Andrew Grewar's article, "The Old Man's Spectacles and Other Traces of the Commedia dell'Arte in Early Shakespearean Comedy," published in Shakespeare in Southern Africa, Vol. 11 (1998), challenges a century-old tendency towards academic vagueness about the possible connection between Shakespeare and Commedia. At any rate, there's lots of good history here, though much of the actual connecting material is circumstantial.
Louise George Clubb's well-researched but distracted article, "Italian Comedy and the Comedy of Errors," on the potential influence of commedia grave on Comedy of Errors, published in Comparative Literature, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer, 1967).
Erith Jaffe-Berg's article, "New Perspectives on Language, Oral Transmission and Multilingualism in Commedia dell'Arte," published in Issues in Review, discusses some misconceptions about the use of writing amongst Commedia troupes, with an emphasis on women and the use of multilingualism as both a necessity and performance tool.
Kevin Crawford's article on his experiments with alternating Commedia and Shakespearean scenes at Accademia dell'Arte in Arezzo.
Richard Whalen's "Commedia dell'Arte in Othello: a Satiric Comedy Ending in Tragedy," published in Brief Chronicles, Voll III, 2011, asserting that Othello is supposed to be a dark comedy, and draws on Commedia tradition.
F. D. Hoeniger's quick read, "Two Notes on Cymbeline," published in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 1957) that shows how both Shakespeare and Commedia troupes manipulated source material for their work, in this case, Boccacio's The Decammeron, adapted for Much Ado and Cymbeline and La Innocentia Rivenuta.
Eugene Steele's "Verbal Lazzi in Shakespeare's Plays," published in Italica, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Anglo Italian Studies and Italian Literature in English Translation, Sumer 1976), offers some fun corollaries between word play in Commedia and Shakepearean texts.
Nina da Vinci Nichols' "The Arlecchino and Three English Tinkers," from Comparative Drama, Vol. 36, No. 1/2 (2002) looks at the various fools of European antiquity and notes their similarity to Arlecchino.
Lisanna Calvi's "From Statecraft to Stagecraft: The Tempest in the Italian Arcadia," from Shakespeare, Vol 8, No. 2 (June 2012), looks at all of the cross-cultural hullabaloo around The Tempest.