From Theatre Journal, 1997

Women at the Windows: "Commedia dell'arte" and Theatrical Practice in Early Modern ItalyAuthor(s): Jane TylusSource: Theatre Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Oct., 1997), pp. 323-342Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208646 .

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Women at the Windows: Commedia dell'arte and Theatrical Practice in

Early Modern Italy

Jane Tylus

I

In a passage from Book 3 of the Discorsi, in the midst of a discussion of the violence that can overtake principalities, Niccolb Machiavelli calls attention to a singularly bizarre episode in Italian history. The incident occurred when conspirators who were

formerly citizens of Forli

killed Count Girolamo, their Lord, and took prisoner his wife and his children, who were little ones. It seemed to them, however, that their lives would scarce be safe unless they could get hold of the citadel, which its governor declined to hand over. So Madonna Caterina [Sforza], as the countess was called, promised the conspirators that, if they would let her go to the citadel, she would arrange for it to be handed over to them. Meanwhile, they were to keep her children as hostages. On this understanding, the conspirators let her go to the citadel, from the walls of which, when she got inside, she reproached them with killing her husband and threatened them with vengeance in every shape and form. And to convince them that she did not mind about her children she exposed her genital members, saying that she was still capable of bearing more. The conspirators, dumbfounded, realized their mistake too late, and paid the penalty for their lack of prudence by suffering perpetual banishment.1

In a perceptive article on this passage, John Freccero links Caterina not only to Dante's Medusa above the gate of Dis but to a more pervasive tradition from which Dante plundered, one that can be traced to "those images [on city walls] of divine

maternity-welcoming outsiders, offering sanctuary."2 Caterina Sforza and Dante's Medusa demonically invert the welcoming and loving Madonna as they lift their skirts

Jane Tylus is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford, 1993), and is presently at work on a manuscript entitled, "Displaying Women: Gender and Theatre in Early Modern Italy."

My thanks to Rob Henke for inviting me to submit an initial version of this paper for his panel at the 1995 American Society for Theatre Research Conference in St. Louis, and to Charles Dempsey for the invitation to read a second version at the Villa Singleton in Florence, Italy, in February 1996. 1 Niccol6 Machiavelli, The Discourses of Niccolb Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker (London: Routledge, 1991), 3.6; 487.

2 John Freccero, "The Madonna and the Medusa," in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 171.

Theatre Journal 49 (1997) 323-342 ? 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



324 / Jane Tylus

not to envelop needy pilgrims but to "dumbfound" their enemies with the sight of their "genital members" as the mythological Medusa had dumbfounded hers with the sight of her (sexually suggestive) snaky locks. Experienced in the ways of theatrical spectacle, as witnessed by his Mandragola with its brilliantly sinister revisions of classical comedy or his praise of Cesare Borgia for his bloody display in the Romagna, Machiavelli turns this exhibition into a coup de theatre. Refusing to elaborate, for example, on what must have been Caterina's bold denouncement of the conspirators, he leaves us with the stark image of a countess atop her own fortress, a liminal space between the citadel and the piazza, where she employs her womanhood to advantage in a fashion that recalls not so much the Madonna and the Medusa but the only somewhat less spectacular antics of the clever wives in Boccaccio's Decameron.

One such wife is Monna Ghita, married to the Aretine merchant Tofano, who appears in a tale from Day Seven. She is a striking departure from the type of woman to whom Boccaccio putatively addresses his tales, those who are "too often cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms."3 To get even with her excessively suspicious and jealous husband, Monna Ghita begins to cultivate the affections of a young man in town. "When little remained other than to translate words into action," she encourages Tofano's inclination to drink, with the result that he falls into nightly stupors and she is free to escape to consummate the affair. When Tofano finally realizes that he has been tricked, he locks his wife out of the house when she returns early one morning. She in turn threatens to throw herself into the well rather than to face dishonor. Hearing a great splash, the guilt-stricken Tofano rushes outside. But the noise was made only by an enormous rock that Monna Ghita had thrown into the well. While Tofano is anxiously peering into the water, she rushes inside, locks the door on him, and proceeds to denounce her husband from the upstairs window for all the town to hear. Awakened from their sleep, the neighbors round on Tofano and inform his wife's relatives, who take away their daughter and her dowry and threaten Tofano with worse to come. Tofano finally gets his wife back, but not before he concedes to every one of his wife's demands-including her nocturnal forays with her lover.

What both these anecdotes (based at least on half-truths, for one can still go to Arezzo today and see the imposing well into which Tofano's wife supposedly plunged) allow us to entertain is a connection between female spectacle and the space in which that spectacle is produced. The window or the citadel's wall offer secure places that give the "actress" at once visibility and safety, as she negotiates the boundary between public and private spaces. In Boccaccio's story, the household which had functioned earlier as a place of imprisonment becomes the site from which Monna Ghita achieves her liberation, as she denounces her jealous husband for all the neighborhood to hear. And from her secure position on the wall of a citadel that frequently functioned in Renaissance culture as a symbol of female chastity, Caterina speaks out as a public figure, to negotiate, to manipulate, and to make the obscene gesture that secures freedom for her family and exile for the conspirators. Like her Boccaccian prototype, Caterina need only secure a safe haven associated with her very "femaleness" in order to produce the spectacle that will liberate her. She thereby becomes that anomaly-and so she certainly was to Machiavelli-of a private woman

3 "il piu del tempo nel piccolo circuito delle loro camere racchiuse dimorano"; Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1966), 26. Translations are my own.



WOMEN AT THE WINDOWS / 325

going public in order to redirect political events and to control the public's reception of her name and her always vulnerable honor.4

Some forty years after Machiavelli's Discorsi, women did begin to appear, with startling regularity, on the public stages of Italy's piazze and the somewhat less public stages of Italian courts and aristocratic homes. With the appearance of these newly public women, the very spaces from which Caterina Sforza and Monna Ghita spoke and gestured became a crucial part of the settings and iconography of the commedia dell'arte. In the fifty scripts or canovacci collected and published by the actor Flaminio Scala in his 1611 Teatro delle favole rappresentative (which can be loosely translated as "The Theatre of Everyday Life"), there are several episodes played upon a city wall, all from Day Forty-one, in which various personages from Mulehamett, the king of Fessa, to Fatima, his daughter, and her page, appear "on the walls" to greet ambassadors and to enact love scenes.5 The appearance of the rampart on which Fatima and Pelindo exchange their passion is limited to a single day or giornata (like Boccaccio, Scala divided his collection into a number of different "days"-fifty, in his case). But there are over a hundred examples in Scala's Teatro of the place from which Monna Ghita safely hurled her insults: the window. Situated on an upper level, the window occupies that borderline between the safety and privacy of the bedroom and the openness of the traditionally male-dominated piazza6 (Figure 1, p. 326). In the overwhelming majority of cases in Scala-109 out of 120-the liminal space of the window is occupied by women of various stations and statuses: wives, widows, unmarried maidens, servants. In over one half of Scala's fifty days, women of various stations, ages, and classes appeared spontaneously and unpredictably at the upper level of the stage. The fact that the window scenes are occupied so completely by women, and hence by actresses demonstrating considerable versatility, encourages one to wonder why it was the case. It may be true that from these windows (or, on a less sophisticated stage, a gap in the curtain which served as backdrop), Isabella, Flaminia, and Franceschina never make the same grotesque gesture as that of Machiavelli's Caterina, although at times they come close. What they do perform at the windows, as examples later in this essay will indicate, encompasses a wide-range of activities that disrupted and redirected the actions happening below.

4 On Machiavelli's unease with "strong" women and with the concept of the feminine in general, see Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolb Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and more recently, Juliana Schiesari, "Libidinal Economies: Machiavelli and Fortune's Rape," in Desire and the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 169-83.

s See Flaminio Scala, Il Teatro dellefavole rappresentative, ed. Ferruccio Marotti (Milan: Polifilo, 1976). Other characters in this giornata, such as the king, the "buffone" Burattino, and various soldiers also have scenes on the ramparts, suggesting that scenes played on the walls are not as restricted to female characters as are the window scenes. Further references to Scala's work will be cited parenthetically in the text; translations are my own.

6 Tim Fitzpatrick, "Flaminio Scala's Prototypal Scenarios," The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell'arte, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Dovehouse, 1989), 181-98. Fitzpatrick comments, "The paucity of the iconographic evidence regarding performance of the commedia dell'arte reflects the temporary nature of the theatre buildings ... used by the travelling companies, but Scala's collection, like most of the others, requires an upper level--the windows of the houses in the comedies, battlements or the like in tragedies" (188). He goes on to suggest that "the window provides an obvious advantage in terms of the blocking of the scene: one of the characters is fixed, providing a ready-made focus for the moves of the other characters... ." (189).



326 / Jane Tylus

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That my own text relies so heavily on Scala's Teatro requires some explanation and some contextualization. Scala was an actor and capocomico (director) who was associated on various occasions with the courts of the Gonzaga and Medici.7 Scala's collection was the only published anthology of canovacci in the seventeenth century. Insofar as Scala is the only actor to have published what seem to have been closely- guarded plots, his book must be seen as an anomaly, particularly when one reflects on the oral and improvisatory nature of the commedia dell'arte tradition.8 Further, one must consider that this work, compiled for the edification and amusement of its readers-

7For background on Scala's life, see Ferruccio Marotti's introduction to II Teatro delle favole rappresentative (and the entry for Flaminio Scala in the Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, ed. Silvio D'amico et al. [Rome: Le Maschere, 1954]).

8 For a fascinating article on the impact of the actress's emergence on theatrical practice in the mid- sixteenth-century, see Kathleen McGill, "Women and Performance: The Development of Improvisa- tion by the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell'Arte," Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 59-69. While McGill's discussion of the role of improvisation in the actress's repertoire is vital for our understanding of the early modern actress, I question her assumption regarding the universal "female culture" from which these improvisatory skills supposedly arose. See also the important chapter on commedia dell'arte troupes and improvisation in Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 169-203.




the well-known actor Francesco Andreini even suggests in his preface to the volume that "Ladies and Gentlemen" may wish to act the scripts out for themselves9-no doubt refuses to reproduce the extensive bawdiness frequently associated with the earliest theatre troupes. It is a handsome and costly volume produced not so much for other actors as for rather well-off consumers who have the luxury to perform amateur plays with their friends.10 On the other hand, several of Scala's scripts, such as the famous "Pazzia d'Isabella," were described by other contemporary sources, and the accounts vary little from the plots as Scala elaborates them." Perhaps most importantly, the publication of Scala's text in 1611 and his association with the famous troupes I Confidenti and I Gelosi in which one of the most influential first actresses, Isabella Andreini, performed, give us a terminus ante quem to the canovacci published therein. While many of the improvised scenes that survive in manuscript are undated, the plays from Scala's volume are clearly works from the earliest generations of the commedia dell'arte, and hence from the period that is the most vital to our understanding of the impact of the troupes, with their paradoxically public women, on traditional dramatic forms and practices.12

It is no doubt dangerous to generalize about these traditions as early as 1545, when the first acting troupe was formed, or 1565 when women first began to appear on membership roles.13 I argue nonetheless that the evidence suggests that the introduction of actresses allowed Italy's professional players to exploit the boundary between women's private and public lives in a way that both defined for the actress her role in the theatre and redefined the playing space as one relentlessly exposed to its prying and manipulative female spectators. The disruptive behavior of the female figure in the upstairs window becomes in many ways Scala's comment on the disruptive

9 "Eccovi adunque le non mai a bastanza lodate fatiche del vostro tanto affezzionato Signor Flavio, le quali serviranno nell'ore oziose del giomo e della notte per passar via la noia, e per dar onesto e piacevol trattenimento a Dame e Cavalieri, che di simili spettacoli sono tanto bramosi. E perche pih agevolmente si possano rappresentare l'opere sue, a porre in scena, egli ha a ciascheduna d'esse fatto il suo non disdicevole argomento, ha dichiarati, e distinti i personaggi, et ha per ordine posto tutti gli abiti che in esse si ricercano per non generar confusione nel vestire" ("here you will find the never adequately-praised efforts of our beloved Signor Flavio, which will make the idle hours of day and night fly by and give honest and pleasing entertainment to ladies and gentlemen who have desired spectacles such as these. And so that his works may more easily be represented on the stage, he has attached to each of his tales a not inconvenient argument, has named and listed the characters, and has throughout recorded all of the costumes found within so that there will be no confusion in dressing") (Scala, Teatro 1:13).

10 Kenneth and Laura Richards suggest similar limitations involved in relying on Scala's volume; see The Commedia dell'arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 145. 11 See the account of "La Pazzia d'Isabella," performed at the famous Medici wedding of 1589, by Giuseppe Pavoni; quoted in Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 263-64.

'2 See McGill, "Women and Performance." Eric Nicholson's recent article on "The Theatre" in A History of Women in the West, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1993), 309-14, also discusses the various "scandals" involved in introducing women onto the stage and provides a brief description of the many roles female characters played on the European and later the English stages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

13 For background on the history of the development of commedia dell'arte troupes, see Richards and Richards, Commedia dell'Arte; also, Ferdinando Taviani, La commedia dell'arte e la societia barocca, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1969); Vito Pandolfi, La Commedia dell'Arte: Storia e testo, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Florence: Le Lettere, 1988); and Roberto Tessari, Commedia dell'arte: La maschera e l'ombra (Milan: Mursia, 1984).



328 / Jane Tylus

appearance of the actress on the sixteenth-century stage, while they also serve as the improvisatory action par excellence for a theatre that excelled in escaping from and challenging previous theatrical conventions.

II

Given the wide diversity of dramatic genres and theatrical spaces--courts, academies, private homes, the piazza, streets during carnival--one must be cautious regarding blanket statements about the nature of theatre in mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Yet one point would seem to be well established. Save for the example of carnival, bitterly denounced by San Carlo Borromeo for permitting men and women to exploit with liberty roles to which they had no right, amateur theatre was an overwhelmingly male preoccupation; the spaces of playing were seen as simply too dangerous for women to participate.14 The classical comedies of Terence and Plautus which were performed and imitated in the late fifteenth century in cities such as Mantova, Ferrara, and Florence even excluded female characters who were not hardened courtesans or matrons well past their child-bearing years.15 Machiavelli reiterates this ban on young women appearing onstage in the prologue to his version of Plautus's Casina when he chides, "This tale is called Clizia, because that's the name of the girl everyone's fighting over. Don't expect to see her, though, because Sofronia, who has raised her, won't let her onstage for the sake of propriety."'6 When Cinzio Giraldi made the bold move in the early 1550s (shortly before women began acting) of introducing unmarried women as characters onto the stage, he insisted that they appear only in his tragedie di fine lieto-tragedies with happy endings. He added the extra provision that they should always be alone onstage, far from the temptations to which they would be subject were other characters nearby: "I don't hold it blamewor- thy that in this kind of tragedy nobly-born young women should unleash their amorous passions when onstage by themselves ... not while talking with their lover, or their nurse, but alone, as they would do in their very own rooms.""17 And at the end of the century, the dramaturg Angelo Ingegneri, associated, like Giraldi, with the Estense court, would argue that the "innocent" pastoral was by far the most appropriate genre for young women: "With their rustic apparatus and scenery, and with costumes more elegant than pretentious, pastorals are most pleasing to the eye; and with their soft verse and delicate sentiments, most beautiful to the ears and the intellect. In permitting onstage young maidens and honest women who are forbidden

14 See the treatise "Discorso contro il Carnevale," in which carnival is condemned in those cities where women wander out in in the streets, often in disguise and "with seditious and unusual liberty"; in Taviani, La commedia dell'arte e la societai barocca, 1:71

5s See Leo Salingar's comments on the tradition of new comedy and its roles for female characters in Shakespeare and the Comic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 120-28.

16 "Questa favola si chiama Clizia, perche cosi ha nome la fanciulla, che si combatte. Non aspettate di vederla, perch. Sofronia, che l'ha allevata, non vuole per onestA che la venga fuora"; The Comedies of Machiavelli, ed. and trans. David Sices and James B. Atkinson (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), 282.

17 Cinzio Giraldi, "Discorso overo Lettera di Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio intorno al Comporre delle Comedie e delle Tragedie," in Scritti critici, ed. C.G. Crocetti (Milan: Marzorati, 1973), 218.




from comedy, they give a voice to the noblest of affections, not to be disdained by tragedy itself."18

As this scattering of citations suggests, in the elite and courtly circles where troupes such as the Gelosi and Scala's Confidenti would do much of their performing, the space of classical drama-the urban settings familiar to us from Plautus's Menaechmi or Terence's Andria-was seen as a place of danger and contamination, in which young vergini were vulnerable to the bawdy intricacies of comedy and the horrors of tragedy. This was one key reason for the overwhelming popularity of pastoral in the late sixteenth century, a dramatic form which was applauded as much more "civi- lized" than either of the ancient dramatic genres, comedy and tragedy, and which in time helped to establish a taste for melodrama and opera.19 Hence Ingegneri's praise of its delicate exploration of a feminine sensibility that is both ignorant and innocent of the dynamics of a more manipulative stage setting.20 The pastoral experiments of Torquato Tasso and Guarini were, moreover, performed for courtly and aristocratic audiences by professional troupes aspiring beyond their trade. Situating the acting space in Arcadia, a space that could serve as a double for the court itself, was no doubt one way for the comici to project themselves into a natural and "noble" setting that temporarily obscured their own less than noble origins.21

Yet one may ask to what extent women were "protected" by a genre which frequently preyed on the inherent vulnerabilities of the shepherdess when faced with dangers that often seem transplanted from the city to the countryside. The 1528 anonymous favola boschereccia about a nymph named Lilia whose solitary woodland haunts are invaded by a passionate shepherd and his buffoonish servant who is continually counselling him to rape the nymph hardly seems to provide for its

18 Angelo Ingegneri, "Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche," in Ferruccio Marotti, Lo spettacolo dall'Umanesimo al Manierismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), 276.

19 This is certainly the perspective of Angelo Ingegneri, cited above; it is also argued by the author of the period's most famous pastoral play, Gian Battista Guarini, throughout his extensive writings on his own Pastor fido. See his various treatises collected in Opere (Verona: G. Turamani, 1737-9), vols. 3 and 4; his "Compendio della poesia tragicomica," excerpted and translated by Allen Gilbert in Literary Criticism from Plato through Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965) is a representative statement of his major concerns.

20 See the comments of Susan McClary on the operatic difficulties involved in portraying Eurydice as a maiden in Monteverdi's Orfeo (based, significantly, on the traditions of early modem pastoral drama): "If her speech were too compelling, her innocence might well come into question (how did she learn to manipulate-or even to express-desire?)"; Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1991), 42.

21 Giulio Ferroni observes that the pastoral of Tasso, for example, "reproduces" the dynamics of the court as it offers to its audience a mirror of their own relationships and desires; 11 testo e la scena: saggi sul teatro del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 29. On the attempts of the professional troupes to obscure the commercial basis for their art, see Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, "Strategie di difesa e di mercato," section III of II segreto della commedia dell'arte (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1986). One might even argue that the comparatively innocent status of the pastoral domain influenced the emergence of a range of genres very different from that which the rest of this essay will take up: the bourgeois domestic comedy of the eighteenth century, with its intimate and largely feminine and feminizing interiors, as well as the more grandiose but no less feminizing domains of melodrama and opera, which flourished well into the nineteenth).



330 / Jane Tylus

eponymous character the moral safety Ingegneri would later praise.22 Such thematics recur in the later and better known pastoral plays which were occasionally produced by professional troupes rather than amateurs working at court.23 Thus in Torquato Tasso's well-known Aminta, the chaste huntress Silvia is overwhelmed by the emi- nently theatrical force of pity when she hears the false news of Aminta's death; and in Guarini's Pastor fido, the beautiful Amarilli reveals her secret love for a shepherd in what she believes to be a secluded Arcadian grove, only to be surprised by the scheming Corisca, full of eyes and ears and ready to use precisely this revelation to bring public shame upon Amarilli herself. Free to express her deepest sentiments on the pastoral stage, the vergine who is prohibited from Machiavelli's Plautine play or Giraldi's horrific tragedy literally finds herself with nowhere to hide, a constant object of spectacle to audiences both on and off the stage. Repeatedly in the first dramatic genre to encourage the presence of innocent and unmarried female characters, the unsuspecting shepherdess who believes that she inhabits a private space uncontami- nated by the machinations of the urban, public stage is compromised by this very belief.

To put it another way, in none of the various genres of Italian Renaissance theatre that predated the arrival of the professional troupes was there any space that might be considered private and therefore safe, in which a woman's honor would neither be challenged nor compromised. Much as a play such as Lilia leads to an ultimate crumbling of the nymph's theatrical defenses, so does Machiavelli's Mandragola move steadily toward the eventual compliance of the "innocent" Lucrezia with the supposedly powerful fertility ritual that culminates finally in her bedroom-only after she has been drawn, however briefly, into the public space of an ironically corrupt church.24 As in Roman comedy, women who are less than reluctant to enter onto the stage and become a part of the social action that constitutes it are women whose good reputation, with few exceptions, has long been left behind. Ariosto's Lena, the courtesans of Aretino's satires, and the wife of Ruzante's forlorn soldier in II Parlamento are figures who are beyond the sense of shame that the glare of the public stage or the piazza which it replicated might generate. On occasion we are treated to a sympathetically-portrayed nurse or a wise and matronly wife, such as Sofronia, the spouse of Nicomaco, from Machiavelli's liberal translation of Casina. But in general a female character's appearance on the stage announces her already "fallen" social status.

The well-known Sienese comedy Gl'Ingannati (The Deceived), one of the most

popular comedies of Renaissance Europe, can be said to be a formidable exception to these general rules; in many ways the play looks not only toward Twelfth Night but to the commedia dell'arte practices that would follow it in a few decades. The play boasts

22 See Jane Tylus, "Colonizing Peasants: The Rape of the Sabines and Renaissance Pastoral," Renaissance Drama N.S. XXIII (1992): 113-38 for a discussion of Lilia and a pastoral play by the Congrega dei Rozzi.

23 For the conflicts between professional and amateur actors, see Siro Ferrone, "Attori: professionisti e dilettanti," in II Teatro del Cinquecento, ed. Ludovico Zorzi et al. (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), 59-79.

24 On the disturbing ending of the play, see Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, 55: "All we can say is that if we are expected to rejoice with [Lucrezia], Machiavelli has been inefficient about making the fact clear on paper."




a Spanish captain, an elderly Pantalone in love with a young girl, and most importantly, a resourceful young heroine from romance, Lelia. Yet like so many romance characters, Lelia can only enter the stage's public space (a piazza in the town of Modena) when disguised like a man. In this manner, she contrasts strikingly with the undisguised Isabella, to whom she carries messages from the man Lelia herself loves (and as in Twelfth Night, Isabella falls madly in love with the cross-dressed page). Gl'Ingannati permits the disguised Lelia full access to the stage, whereas in her very few appearances Isabella does not stray from her window or her door. As though the Intronati were testing the classical strictures that had led Machiavelli to banish Clizia from his urban stage, Isabella is allowed to appear only within the architectural frames of the play's presumable backdrop. In Act II, Lelia, speaking for her master, accuses Isabella of looking angrily at Flaminio when he comes by her house and closing the shutters before he can speak a single word.2Y A few lines later, however, Isabella ushers Lelia into the entranceway where she energetically attempts to steal a kiss, a move that not surprisingly provokes horror from two spying servants. This marks one of Isabella's only appearances in the play, and it is noteworthy that it is an appearance in which she is literally framed by a doorway, and thus only tentatively present on the

stage. The Intronati's reluctance to break with classical precedent and place an unmarried, upper-class woman onstage without the benefit of a disguise (before, as the Prologue informs us, a group of upper-class Sienese women attending holiday festivities) is evident in their half-hearted attempt to introduce Isabella fully into the

public space of the theatre. Their nervousness is in fact represented by the hand-

wringing servant, Clemenzia, who, when she recognizes Lelia prancing about the

stage in male garb, instantly begins trying to draw her back indoors: "Get inside! I don't want anyone seeing you in this outfit!" she demands, adding impatiently, "aren't you ashamed to be seen this way?"26

The professional companies turned the Intronati's timorous breakthrough into a theatrical strategy that exploited the distinctive borderline characteristics of the doorway or the window as a way of getting around Clemenzia's and arguably the audience's nervous concerns about women acting in public. On the one hand, of course, the troupes were well practiced in the dynamics of pastoral and romance, elite and largely courtly forms which no doubt served to distance the comici from the itinerant and deceptive poetics of the practicing charlatans or mountebanks, as well as from a figure to which I will return, the courtesan. The last ten of Scala's fifty days feature aristocratic and pastoral figures in a variety of fantastic situations as the contaminated civic space of the piazza is left far behind. Much recent work on the commedia dell'arte has in fact focussed on the troupes' attempts to elevate their social and moral standing within a society that was often profoundly suspicious of their itinerant way of life as well as of their allegedly lascivious ways.27 Isabella Andreini

25 "Come passa il mio padron di qui, di grazia, fuggite e serrategli la finestra in fronte"; text from 11 Teatro Italiano, vol. 2, La commedia del Cinquecento, ed. Guido Davico Bonino (Turin: Einaudi, 1977),130. A lively translation of "The Deceived" can be found in Bruce Penman, Five Italian Renaissance Comedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); for inexplicable reasons he omits the prologue.

26 "Entrami innanzi, veh! ch'io non voglio che tu sia piu veduta in questo abito"; "O non ti vergogni d'esser veduta cosi?"; La commedia del Cinquecento, 106.

27 See Roberto Tessari, La Commedia dell'arte nel Seicento: 'Industria' e 'arte giocosa' della civilta barocca (Florence: Casa Usher, 1969).



332 / Jane Tylus

has attracted special attention from scholars because of her and her husband Francesco's extraordinary efforts to cast her as no mere actress who worked for hire but as the member of an elite group of literary and artistic contemporaries, whose praises were sung by kings and whose verses rivalled those of Tasso. Writer of a pastoral play, La Mirtilla (1588) as well as dialogues, lyrics, and letters, Andreini indeed attained the status of an untouchable diva who was awarded honorary membership in several literary academies and mourned by royalty when she died from a miscarriage at age 44.28

Yet such attention to the manner in which Andreini and others manufactured positions of prominence and respectability has obscured the actual roles that women, Andreini included, performed within the canovacci themselves-the kinds of canovacci that comprise the bulk of Scala's collection, the first forty days. These take place not in the putatively private realm of pastoral or romance, but in the recognizably urban space of the piazza, and hence in the space that dominated the comic tradition from which even pastoral can be said to have derived.29 And this is the space which is marked by the presence of modest households with numerous doors and windows. Such are the very openings (aperture) which, in his commentaries on Vitruvius some 100 years before the professional acting troupes began to appear, Leon Battista Alberti noted as being utterly crucial for the space of the theatre, a word whose etymology includes the imperative of seeing: "I don't think I'm in error when I say that theatres are made entirely of openings, that is, of stairways and particularly of windows and doors.""30

Yet the kinds of seeing that go on in the commedia dell'arte tradition can be said to be a far cry from Alberti's humanist counsel regarding the place of theatre in the city, which, with its loggias, windows, and doors, is designed to frame "conspicuous examples of public morality."3 In turning to the spectacle of women at these windows overlooking the public squares and streets of Florence, Venice, and other Italian towns, one is rather struck by two observations. For one thing, while the characters of Isabella or Flaminia are frequently disguised as gypsies, pages, or male travellers when they appear in the piazza-just as Portia goes in disguise to the court of Venice and Rosalind to the potentially threatening woods of Arden-when they appear at windows they are almost always undisguised. They employ masks only when they

28 Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time, 249-80, and Roberto Tessari, "Sotto il Segno di Giano: La Commedia dell'Arte di Isabella e di Francesco Andreini," in The Commedia dell'Artefrom the Renaissance to Dario Fo, ed. Christopher Cairns (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 1-31. But while these discussions of the manner in which Isabella Andreini and the Gelosi sought to elevate the ostensibly lowly and problematic status of the actress have been critical for our understanding of the way that the commedia dell'arte troupes functioned within society, little has in fact been done analyzing the roles women took on in the scenari themselves.

29 For suggestive remarks on the role of the piazza in Renaissance literature, see Mikhail Bakhtin's comments in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), "And in this concrete and as it were all-encompassing chronotype, the laying bare and examination of a citizen's whole life was accomplished, and received its public and civic stamp of approval" (132).

30 De re aedificatoria, ed. Pietro Bonelli and Paola Portoghesi (Milan: II Polifilo, 1967), 1:83. 31 See Carroll William Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of

Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55 (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1974), 82.




occupy the central space of the stage, donning, along with Pantalone and Gratiano, costumes that distort their proper image, usually removing their disguises only when they return to their strategically-placed rooms. Secondly, as the above comment suggests, women rarely remain at the window for the entirety of a play, although they often make their first entrance there. There are comparatively few window scenes in the final acts of Scala's canovacci, and the play staged from a window for Orazio's benefit in Day Thirty-nine is, as we will see, largely an exception. It would thus appear that women are largely initiated into theatre's public space through the windows to their rooms, where they are as free to exist without a mediating disguise as they are either to inflict themselves on or absent themselves from the piazza below.

What actually happens in the window in these numerous scenes tends to resist easy generalizations. There are, to be sure, occasions in which Flaminia or Isabella simply watches the actions transpiring below, often withdrawing in tears when she learns that Orazio or Flavio no longer care for her. This dynamic is complicated when, as in Day Twenty-four, Flaminia pretends not to notice that Isabella is watching from above, and proceeds to make her jealous by pretending to love Orazio.32 In such cases, the female spectator is made pointedly vulnerable to the actions taking place in the piazza: unable or unwilling to act, Flaminia or Isabella can only withdraw, no longer a critical participant. But there are other scenes in which spectating exerts its own subtle form of control. Hence in Day Thirty-nine, the lecherous Pantalone who has fallen in love with a visiting actress suddenly realizes that he is being watched by his wife and so refuses to greet Vittoria when she effusively welcomes him in the street ("Pantalone arrives and, seeing Isabella at the window, refuses to greet Vittoria"; 2:402). More than simply a silent and unobserved spectator, Isabella here plays the watchful and surveillant wife who by her presence controls the activities of men in the piazza.

Yet Scala's female characters rarely remain silent when at the window. Rather, their transformation from spectator to actress can be said to constitute one of the commedia dell'arte's more dramatic challenges to the traditional distinction between spectator and spectacle. Probably the most common development in Scala's canovacci is for the female character to disrupt the events happening below. On more than one occasion, Isabella coyly drops her handkerchief for Capitano Spavento to retrieve; in more violent fashion, in Day Thirty-five, Franceschina throws dishwater on top of Flavio's head (2:356). Later in the same day, Isabella climbs out of the window to hit Flavio after he has confessed to cheating on her ("she climbs from the window, jumps on top of Flavio, and beats him up, without giving him the chance to say a word. Flavio departs ..." [2:358]). Even in those scenes which offer the fairly conventional sight of a lover serenading or praising the woman who stands at her window (a familiar scene from the tradition of the medieval alba or the Florentine stornelli; Figure 2, p. 334), the listener is only momentarily silent.33 In Scala's canovacci, far from being the mute audience to the Capitano's or Orazio's song, the young woman often initiates the romantic liaison, much as Juliet can be said in Shakespeare's play to embolden the

32 "Isabella alla finestra; Flaminia la vede e finge non vederla, e, per darle martello, parla amorosamente con Orazio"; 2:243.

33I am grateful to Aldo Castellani for the opportunity to read his excellent work on the canti carnascialeschi written during Lorenzo de'Medici's rule; see his unpublished thesis entitled Alfonso de'Pazzi: Canti carnascialeschi (UniversitA di Firenze, 1996).



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spying Romeo as she expresses her own brazen and even conniving desires from the window. (A scant eighty lines into this famous scene, Juliet is instructing Romeo to send her word as to "where and what time" he "wilt perform" the marriage rite, leaving Romeo virtually no possibility of refusing as she shrewdly retreats back into her room.)m The amorous dialogue from the window thus easily turns into the occasion for female manipulation, as when Isabella plots with Pantalone against an Orazio who has just spurned her. It is also from the window that the women--and not only the outspoken servants--hurl sometimes prolonged insults and denouncements in the spirit of Boccaccio's Monna Ghita. Isabella and Flaminia accuse the men of cheating on them in Day Nineteen, and in Day Twenty-five Isabella uses her window as a privileged locus from which to reveal to the audience the affairs in which Orazio is engaged; she will shortly slam the window shut in Orazio's face after he responds to Franceschina's seductive remarks.35 Yet as another scene from Day Twenty-five reveals, the window can also be the site from which one woman acccuses another, for shortly after she has publicly denounced Orazio for cheating on her, Isabella calls her servant Franceschina a slut (2:253). While in numerous instances women chat amica- bly to each other from their respective windows, it is equally clear that the female community is not always a unified one. In fact, in the above example, Franceschina exploits her concealed space behind the window by pretending that she is Isabella, in the hopes either of luring Orazio into her room or inciting Isabella's jealousy (2:252).

This last example suggests that Scala often exploits the window as an explicitly theatrical space in its own right, either in order to frame the actress as a spectator of a

performance, or to stage a spectacle in itself. In Day Twenty-one, Arlecchino and Franceschina perform a magic scene, assisted by Orazio and Flavio dressed as ghosts, before the pregnant Isabella and Flaminia who watch safely from their upper-level windows and their fathers who watch in terror in the piazza (1:220-21). The denouement is performed by the pregnant women themselves, when they leave their windows to reappear alongside the newly-discovered ghosts and inform their fright- ened fathers whom they wish to marry (1:221). In one instance from "La Pazzia d'Isabella," Isabella first overhears that the man for whom she killed her husband is in love with a woman from Milan, upon which she enacts a scene of rage from her window (2:393) that will become by Act III a spectacular act of frenzy onstage (permitting the actress Isabella Andreini to give the audience a full display of her real "worth and virtue," as one contemporary observer of the scenario put it in 1589).m In another scene in Day Thirty-nine (the famous favola called "I11 Ritratto"), Isabella and Flaminia stage a "scene" at their window for Orazio to watch so they can wean him from his passion for the visiting actress, Vittoria (2:406-7). Finally, in an example that

34 See Juliet's lines at 2.2.143: "If that thy bent of love be honorable, / Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow, / By one that I'll procure to come to thee, / Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite, / And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay, / And follow thee my lord throughout the world." Before Romeo has a chance to respond, Juliet "exits above" to the call of her Nurse. It is important to note that at the beginning of Act II, scene 2, Juliet appears not from a balcony but "enter[s] above at her window." Citations from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

35 "Orazio vorrebbe scusarsi con Isabella, la quale, sdegnata, non lo vuole ascoltare, gli serra la fenestra sul viso" (2:252).

36 See the account of Pavoni cited in Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time, 263-64.



336 / Jane Tylus

returns us to Machiavelli's Caterina Sforza, in Day Nineteen, Franceschina makes obscene gestures from her window for the benefit of the Capitano (1:200), who promptly invites her to join him in the piazza.

Such activity from the house's second story by a large number of female characters-aristocratic women as well as clever servants, fashionable widows as well as unmarried (and sometimes pregnant) young girls--defied Alberti's counsel in his book on the family (much better known than his book on architecture). When he appeals in the third volume to the padre difamiglia to keep his wife occupied and busy in the house, he warns that a good housewife will not be like "those lazy and foolish women who spend the whole day sitting idly at the window with their elbows on the sill, and who as a pretext keep something to sew in their hands and never finish it."37 Alberti's ideal wife should only occasionally show herself in public, and then only by appearing at the door, "in a manner very dignified and serious, so that our neighbors would come to know and appreciate her as a prudent lady and the family would respect her."38 But even if Alberti labels the woman at the window an "idler" who is the very opposite of the "dignified and serious" matron, he would not go so far as to associate her with a figure who dominated the city where commedia dell'arte was particularly popular, Venice, and who in the wake of the Counter-Reformation would become linked with all that was immoral and scandalous: the prostitute, for whom the window was a place for procuring customers.39 Pietro Aretino's outrageous Ragionamenti are full of references to courtesans leaning out of windows to attract prospective clients, and there were a considerable number of prostitutes in the sixteenth-century Venice of which Aretino was writing. Not surprisingly, as Taviani and others have emphasized, the actress was frequently aligned with the courtesan by ecclesiastics and other anti-theatrical writers in early modern Italy. Not only did the actress occupy the anomalous position of the public woman, displaying her body without shame, but she was supposedly possessed of libidinous desires of such potency that she automatically infected her audiences, according to the author of the 1595 treatise entitled Negotium diaboli.40

Indeed, there is no question that the images of women at windows in Scala's canovacci evoke precisely that shunned and yet fascinating figure of the courtesan, and I have already mentioned the degree to which the courtesan was one of the few female characters "permitted" on the Roman and early Renaissance stage. Interestingly, Scala's scripts make virtually no use of the courtesan as a character, although other canovacci and plays by actors feature her as an occasional participant. In one comparatively early scenario in manuscript, the Magnifico spies a woman at her window and states that he'd be willing to pay quite a lot for an hour or two of her

3 I libri dellafamiglia (The Family in Renaissance Florence), trans. Renee Neu Watkins (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 222.

38 Alberti, I libri della famiglia, 229. 39 See Margaret Rosenthal's fascinating account of the life of the erstwhile Venetian courtesan and

writer, Veronica Franco, along with a detailed account of contemporary attitudes toward courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice; The Honest Courtesan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

40 See the treatise by Domenico Gori, entitled Trattato contro alle commedie lascive (1604), excerpts of which can be found in Taviani, La commedia dell'arte e la societa barocca, 136-44. Throughout the treatise, Gori relies on the writings of Saint Paul and the Church Fathers to argue that women are not allowed in public spaces, where the mere sight of their faces will urge men to lust ("concupiscenza").




attentions. Typically, the servant he sends to her with his message is awarded her favors instead.41 In one of the first full-length plays by an actor, L'alchimista (The Alchemist) by Bernardino Lombardi, the courtesan Angelica discusses from her balcony her plans to attract "messer Carlo," and a later play by the Roman courtesan Margherita Costa features the prostitute Ancroia: in one scene, she looks out her window to see who is knocking below and discovers to her chagrin that it is only her servant Filipetta.42

Texts such as Lombardini's or the early scenario featuring Magnifico and his Zani have led Hanna Scolnicov in a recent book to suggest that the female figure at the window in sixteenth-century drama is always either seducing or seduced, and there is much in Scala's examples of commedia dell'arte literature to justify Scolnicov's conclu- sion--despite the notable absence of the courtesan as a character.43 Yet even while Scala's female characters serve as a visual echo of the practices of the all-too- recognizable courtesan, the analogy was clearly not meant to be arrested at this level, particularly when the scripts themselves are so varied, and particularly when Scala himself was so invested in making commedia respectable enough for the drawing rooms of his elite and middle-class readers. One might more profitably see in the figure of the courtesan an example of a privileged spectatorship which contrasted strikingly with a theatre whose participants were ostensibly innocent and ignorant of occupying a space full of potentially immoral social discourses and agents. The theatre of windows introduces female spectatorship onto the stage in such a way as to allow the woman to transform traditional passivity into manipulative action. On the other hand, in Scala's Teatro, the woman who renders herself completely visible and therefore vulnerable, ever a part of a public space she wishes to dominate through her sexuality and charm, is ultimately no match for the real actress, whose deployment of the boundaries between public and private spaces make her superior to the shadowy and finally unacceptable figure of the courtesan."

This dynamic becomes particularly clear in Day Thirty-nine, the favola called "Il Ritratto" (the portrait), which, even as it involves a more self-conscious use of windows than do other days, may serve to clarify and extend some of the points made above. Additionally, a careful reading of this crucial day--the only one of Scala's fifty to feature as a central character the actress herself-enables us to recognize the extent

41 See the (translated) playscript printed by Richard Andrews as an appendix to his article in Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (London: Macmillan, 1991). Entitled a "dialogue between a Magnifico and Zani from Bergamo," the scene introduces the courtesan only through the comments of the two characters; the Magnifico notes in his first speech that "Yesterday I saw a superb looking girl here on that balcony" (39).

42 See L'alchimista, II.v, in which Angelica notes (presumably from stage level) that "Ho veduto dalla fenestra il mio Carlo e Pirillo"; in Commedia dell'arte, ed. Siro Ferrone (Milan: Mursia, 1985), 103. Ferrone's collection also includes Margherita Costa's Li buffoni; Ancroia appears at the window in I.iii (2:259). Later in the play Ancroia's servant, Filippetta, appears at the window when the scoundrel and "bravo" Scatapocchio threatens to tear the door down if she doesn't open it for him.

43 Hanna Scolnicov, Women's Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62. 44 The fascinating anonymous play La Veniexiana, recently edited by Giorgio Padoan, must serve as

an interesting exception to the above discussion. The two women who "court" the young stranger, Giulio, are, respectively, widow and married wife, and they appear variously in their bedrooms, at their windows, and within their doorways, but not in the street. They are clearly not courtesans, although it is not unthinkable that the widow, Angela, should become one.



338 / Jane Tylus

to which the commedia dell'arte may have exploited the image of the courtesan in her role as a public woman, while purposefully limiting the extent of that association. The context for Day Thirty-nine is the arrival in Parma of the actress Vittoria, who (as she puts it) manages to tear husbands away from their wives in every town she plays in.45 However, Vittoria's analysis of the situation is far too simple, and as shall be seen, the wives are only momentarily flabbergasted, ultimately managing to use Vittoria's arrival to their advantage. The action begins with Flaminia asking her servant Arlecchino to deliver a letter recalling from the theatre not her husband, but her lover, Flavio. Flavio's arrival before Flaminia's house-standing outside, he makes a sign which brings her again to the window-is the cause not for lovemaking but for argument. From her own window, Isabella participates in the tirade against men who visit actresses, enjoining Flaminia "not to trust a traitor." The two women abruptly retire into their rooms before Flavio has a chance to respond, leaving him to murmur to himself, "Oh, poor Flavio!" (2:400).

In Act I, Isabella and Flaminia attempt to restrain lovers rather than husbands, but in the second act their attention is turned to their spouses, as Pantalone cautiously refrains from greeting Vittoria when he encounters her on the street because he knows that Isabella is observing his every move. Women's presence at the window will again exert control over events in the piazza when the page Lesbino is almost killed by Arlecchino who has learned that Lesbino plans to kill the Capitano. Thanks to their vantage point, Isabella and Flaminia have overheard Lesbino confessing that she is really Silvia, travelling in disguise in order to punish her lover for abandoning her for the actress. Thus when Arlecchino returns to kill Lesbino, Isabella and Flaminia move from window to street, where they defend Lesbino and lead him "as a woman" to Flaminia's house (404). It is in Act III where the window itself becomes occasion for spectacle, as Isabella, in order to take vengeance on her lover, Orazio, for courting Vittoria, pretends that she and Flaminia now dote on Lesbino. Calling Flaminia, she tells her that her "new lover will shortly appear at the window" (406). With Orazio looking on, "Lesbino" arrives "at the window, asking 'What do you wish of me, signora?,"' enraging Orazio, and thereby taking part in a communal spectacle designed to lure Parma's men away from the visiting actress. Husbands and lovers indeed return home by the end of the favola, and the Capitano, admitting he was "bewitched" by Vittoria, agrees to marry Lesbino/Silvia, a reunion which happens not behind windows but centerstage.

The only person missing from this final and ironically harmonious reunion, in which lovers appear next to husbands, despite the fact that "Isabella and Flaminia exhort their husbands to stay away from the theatre and attend their homes and

govern their wives,"46 is Vittoria herself. She has been unceremoniously carted away by the young gentlemen of Parma eager to take her from the two dottering husbands at whom Vittoria has spent much of the play laughing. Chastised as a whore by the women, revealed as manipulative by her fellow actor and procurer, Piombino, and blamed by the husbands themselves for leaving in her wake not entertainment but

4s "Dove arrivano compagnie di commedianti, le donne maritate il piii delle volte stanno a bocca secca" (2:406).

46 "Isabella e Flaminia esortano i loro mariti a lasciar stare le commedie et attendere alle case loro et al governo delle loro mogli" (2:409).




scandal,47 Vittoria has become by a scapegoat whose departure stabilizes the licit and illicit relationships in which Parma's women are engaged. The curious message that emerges from the end of the day is that while men may not have more than one lover, women may-while Isabella's and Flaminia's husbands were at the theatre in the play's final scene, Orazio and Flavio were at those husbands' homes, playing, so Isabella claims, "a primiera": a game of cards. But what differentiates Isabella and Flaminia from Vittoria is not merely the latter's ostentatious wealth, the many trinkets given her by various visitors-she appears onstage "lavishly dressed, wearing gold about her neck, pearls around her wrists, and diamonds and rubies on her fingers" (401)-or even the number of her admirers. Unlike Isabella and Flaminia, Vittoria has no room of her own. Rather, she is cast and perceived as an unremittingly public figure, who on the open stage of the city both draws an inexhaustible amount of attention and is unable to control the kind of attention she receives. Her final exit from the play at the hands of Parma's gentilhuomini could be played as a prelude to gang rape. The two wives, on the other hand, carefully negotiate their public appearances, withdrawing from the windows when necessary to do so, manipulating from behind the scenes the spectacle that others such as Lesbino will and can performfor them. As such, they emerge from this play, as in others, as exemplary actresses and, arguably, exemplary middle-class Italian women, comfortable with neither the posture of the passive spectator nor the phenomenon of absolute disclosure and unfettered circulation.

III

As Day Thirty-nine demonstrates, Scala's women occupy a carefully negotiated midpoint between the typical shepherdess, who is ignorant of the dynamics of theatre to which she is ever vulnerable, and the wily courtesan, who is typically little more than a brazen seductress and whose unrelenting publicness finally prevents her from making use of the effective strategies of withdrawal and disclosure practiced by Parma's wives. Neither courtesan nor shepherdess has access to a private space of retreat and ultimately of manipulation where she can escape others' gazes. That privilege is reserved only to those who control the second story of the stage which the professional troupes exploited with such cleverness. Bordering on the intimate space of the bedroom, the window grants integrity not to those in the piazza but to those looking down into it: in over ninety percent of Scala's examples, female characters, and hence, the actresses themselves.

It seems possible at this point to draw some preliminary if tentative conclusions regarding the effects of the window as documented by Scala. First of all, the abrupt presence of the female spectator at a window that suddenly opens (or if we envision the typical staging on an impromptu stage in a piazza, the curtain that suddenly parts)48 prohibits the public space of the piazza from having its own integrity. The

47 "Le comedie sono si bene di spasso e di trattenimento, ma che vi nascono per esse di molti scandali" (408-9).

48 Tom Heck has pointed out that "the parting of the curtain was not the only way to suggest a window or a balcony in performances. One could also have a cloth backdrop on a trellis stage behind which a woman could mount a ladder and appear over the top of the railing or rod." My thanks for the very helpful suggestion. See also Paul Castagno, The Early Commedia Dell'Arte, 1150-1621 (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 59.



340 / Jane Tylus

existence of the window or the parted curtain thereby marks the enforced openness and necessary receptivity of the public to the private. Even as it destabilized the traditional hierarchy of the acting space, the use of the window also reconceptualized the traditionally passive role of the spectator, particularly the early modern female spectator. As the tale of Monna Ghita boldly suggests, the woman in control of the window could control her space in the public realm below her, as far as her reputation and honor were concerned-the very commodities which as influential a courtly writer as Baldassar Castiglione felt women of all classes were almost powerless to supervise. In a characteristically fatalistic moment from II Cortegiano (The Courtier), that most typical of Renaissance dialogues about woman's place in society, Signor Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, author of the early sixteenth-century comedy called La Calandria, observes that "for us [men] a dissolute life is not a vice, or fault, or disgrace, while in women it means such utter opprobrium and shame that any woman of whom ill is once spoken is disgraced forever, whether what is said be calumny or not."49 II Cortegiano does not try to counter such a rule so much as it tries to solicit women's compliance with it, as witnessed by the escalating praises of female chastity in the following book. The strategies with which so much of Scala's text is occupied dilute the authority of Bibbiena's rule as Isabella and Flaminia refuse to be seen as the victims of the public space. They can be said rather to exploit their knowledge that they form part of an ongoing spectacle--one, as in the example of "I1l Ritratto," that does not simply end when the play is over, and from which they can remove themselves when necessary to do so.

Secondly, for those who saw the professional troupes act-particularly those comparatively elite spectators at courts-the women speaking from their windows would have had a startlingly realistic effect which countered any attempts to bracket commedia entertainment from everyday life. As we know from comments made apropos of Baldassare Peruzzi's supposed design for a production of a comedy in the first decades of the sixteenth century--one that features, we are told, "women on balconies and in doorways"-it seems that the painted presence of spectators on a backdrop made for a kind of realism that the avowedly classicizing Serlio warned against in his rigidly Vitruvian guide to theatre, and that the mannerist Giorgio Vasari, on the other hand, praised. In Peruzzi's design, Vasari notes, "the square did not appear as a small, painted area, but real and capacious."" Scala's "backdrops" give us not painted women and painted windows, but real women appearing within a three- dimensional frame, thereby producing a far more convincing effect of realism than

49 Baldassar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), 188-89.

-' See the essay of Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, "From Scenery to City: Set Designs," in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, ed. Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (Milan: Bompiani, 1994), 529-37. Tofani cites an "Incomplete Study of

Perspective Scenery," an ink drawing of Baldassare Peruzzi now at the Biblioteca Reale in Torino, in

light of opposing comments by the classicizing Serlio and the mannerist Vasari. Serlio objects to scenes such as Peruzzi's when he complains about backdrops "where some have painted a few living figures, such as a woman on a balcony or in a doorway, and likewise some animals: these things are inadvisable, because they do not move, even though they represent living people." Vasari, on the other hand, comments directly on Peruzzi's scena prospettica, saying that the buildings were "so excellently designed that they did not seem artificial, but extraordinarily real" (531).




what may have been the setting for Bibbiena's Calandria almost a century earlier. Moreover, Scala's own theory of comedy, gleaned from decades of experience with the professional troupes and expounded in the prologue to a play called Ilfinto marito (The False Husband) seven years after publishing his Teatro, was grounded in the familiar. The actor of Scala's prologue argues cogently that "Experience is the teacher of all things""' and that it is only from quotidian actions that one may arrive at the "true norm." In a radically anti-Aristotelian move, Scala's spokesperson reverses the relationship between text and performance to maintain that the "actor should be able to give rules to playwrights" (Teatro, CX). As one finds in the fifty days that Scala collected and composed, "the rules" can be seen as emerging from the behaviors and exchanges, the intrusions and interruptions, that characterize the relentless give-and- take of the comedians' piazza-the very place in which so many of the improvised comedies were performed.

Perhaps it was this very willingness to incorporate into the canovacci the vibrant space of the marketplace, characterized by women leaning out of their windows not only to watch but to buy and exchange, that made commedia so scandalous-just as Pantalone and Gratiano claim. For finally, in creating an arguably realistic and recognizable urban piazza dominated by women, the early professional troupes brought to sixteenth-century theatre both a communal form of culture associated with such oral forms as gossip and the spreading and checking of slander, and a disparate and diffuse pattern of activities that defied a single panoptic gaze such as that which more courtly spectacles sought to impose. Michel de Certeau has spoken of "urbanistic space" as "impossible to manage," suggesting that far from functioning as a "theatre for programmed, controlled operations," the city offers a "proliferation of tricks and fusions of power that are devoid of legible identity, that lack any perceptible access and that are without rational clarity."52 On a somewhat less extreme scale than that to which de Certeau refers-the contemporary metropolis-the crowded piazzas of the comic stage likewise foregrounded multiple windows and multiple disruptions, thwarting any attempts at "management" by the protagonists occupying center-stage. The relentless energy of the commedia dell'arte performance became an extension of the energy of the late sixteenth-century urban space, a space represented as subject to the demands and aspirations of Italy's once-exclusively private subjects: its women.

The scandal of which Pantalone and Gratiano speak thus has less to do with the arrival in town of a beautiful and manipulative actress than with the troupes' insistent representations of a public square in which women bargain not only for herbs or a song from an itinerant salesman, but for their very reputations, as society's traditionally passive spectators took it upon themselves to survey and control the events that

51 The Prologue to II Finto marito is published as an appendix in Volume I of Scala's II teatro dellefavole rappresentative; citations are from Vol. I, CX. Worth noting is the fact that the actor or "Comico" gives a fairly standard definition of the genre of comedy that takes on new light if one considers the manner in which women intervened on the professional, comic stage: "nella commedia basta che vi sia buona imitazione et il verisimile ... anzi, che la familiare, e senza tanta arte, e la puit propria, perche la commedia rappresenta azzioni comuni" (it's enough if in comedy one finds sound imitation and verisimilitude ... for that which is familiar, and without much art, is the most proper for comedy, which represents common actions").

52 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 127-28. My thanks to Michael Vandenheuvel for this reference.



342 / Jane Tylus

transpired in the public space. The scandal consisted in the abrupt and yet guarded presence of unmasked women in a recognizably urban setting, dominating from above the social dynamics of the piazza below in order to watch others and control others' perceptions of them-and perhaps to establish new examples for behavior within the very piazza in which women spectators were standing. Yet arguably this invasion of theatre's public spaces by the actress and the disruptive female figure she so frequently personified had a cost. Writing in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti imagined theatre and the piazza which theatre represented as having an explicitly political function, insofar as they enabled a discourse about the life of the early modern city and its citizens; and arguably, Machiavelli, Bibbiena, and other early sixteenth-century writers of comedy continue to consider drama as a politically useful spectacle. Perhaps women's invasion of theatre-and the professional theatre's exploi- tation of the complex dynamics of urban life-was compensated for by the gradual domestication of the stage, as it was transformed from functioning as a potentially political space into an explicitly social one. No longer a space for political interaction or allegory (as it is in Machiavelli's vividly imagined scene with Caterina Sforza), the improvised theatre of the professional actors, whether performed in a crowded piazza or at a northern Italian court, was grounded firmly in social rather than civic or political dynamics. It may have been because of this ultimately narrow grounding that the bold innovations of Italy's first professional troupes gradually deteriorated into tired love scenes and predictable lazzi. But the practices of the comici in the decades following Scala's is matter for a much different essay, and the eventual fate of comic improvisation should not obscure what was, for several decades, a vital new art form. To this extent, the works of Scala and his fellow actors and actresses were revolution- ary in their unpretentious if occasionally hyperbolic realism, as the comici strove both to represent and to destabilize those conventionalized spaces which their spectators daily inhabited, whether those were the spaces demarcated by the household, the piazza, or the theatre itself.



From Theatre Journal, 1997

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