Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy.

In his insightful and witty study, Richard Andrews remedies the disparity between scholars' recognition of Italian Renaissance playwrights' pioneering role in "a modern European concept of theatre" (xi) and their inadequate familiarity with the actual texts, performances and audiences. Among the tools which he provides are a chronologically-arranged bibliography of comedies with modern editions and English translations (271-79), plot summaries, lively colloquial translations of representative passages, and detailed reconstructions of the historical circumstances of many plays. Moreover, his choice of the perspective of the "theatre practitioner" (xii) who struggles to invent a dramatic tradition and convert "a script into performance" (xii) brings fresh insights, such as his comparison of medieval theater with vaudeville (23), his understanding of the functions of monologues and lazzi (62, 179-81), and his analysis of Aretino's refashioning of La cortigiana from a spectator's play to a reader's play.

Opening with a discussion of the "uses of comedy" (10), Andrews stresses the range of situations that provoke laughter in different cultures and eras. Placed in the context of research on social dynamics, his examples contribute to a hypothesis about the changing role of the comic in early modern Italy. The Mediterranean originated the kind of domus culture described by Ian Hodder in The Domestication of Europe (1990). Organized around inherited land and the cultivation and preservation of plant food, such cultures give a high value to the culturally feminine and to descent lines. However, they develop a rigid male hierarchy to restrain the threat of conflict created by geographical fixity and population density. Such a system characterized medieval Italy, explaining Dante's use of "potentially funny" punishments to humiliate sinners (14) and reinforce the moral and social hierarchy ruled by the triune male God. Pressures upon the system, though, were already such that in the next generation Boccaccio manifests conflicting tendencies to promote personal creativity while increasing social control; that is, he rewards "intelligence, energy," and enterprise in tales while insisting on a conservative courtliness in the tellers (18-20). He also gives unusual scope to women characters, while savagely repressing them (II, 9; IV, 1; X, 10), particularly in sexual matters, women's only province in patrilineal variants of domus culture. The source of liberalization, as Victor Turner noted in "Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology" in Rice University Studies (1974), was the advent of technology in the late Middle Ages, which valorized individual talents and creativity over fixed authority structures and which was particularly consequential in Italy. But hierarchizing forces were at work contemporaneously; the overpopulation observed by David Herlihy intensified male-male competition, contributing to the rise of the patrilines noted by Herlihy, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber and Diane Owen Hughes. Such a social dynamic is unusually oppressive of women, as Barbara Smuts has demonstrated in "Male Aggression Against Women: An Evolutionary Perspective," in Human Nature (1992).

The later rending of the social fabric by the Italian Wars suspended carefully-crafted hierarchy, promoting and even requiring self-authorization. Participants in the expanded Carnival of the Renaissance "were perhaps acting out a deconstruction of the text of society," particularly in the plays of Ruzante (17-18; 203), while aristocrats gave "collusive approval" to lower-class characters' freewheeling actions (209, 124, and passim). The loss of the wars, however, thwarted liberalization as the Italian patriciate recouped its status internally by reinforcing its subjugation of the irregular and the lower-class, as I noted in Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante) (1990) and work cited therein. Again Andrews' examples are instructive: "[c]ommedia dell'arte, carefully fenced off from approved culture . . . provided in its Zani and Arlecchino the only permissible safety valve for both rulers and ruled" (21, 203, 209-16).

LINDA L. CARROLL Tulane University