Orality and Literacy in the Commedia dell’Arte and the Shakespearean Clown
نویسندگان
چکیده
Although rarely considered in such terms, Renaissance theater provides particularly salient examples of interactions between oral and literate modalities. Renaissance playwrights, dramatic theorists, and antitheatricalists themselves viewed theater through the prism of orality and literacy, if using different terms. The relationship between orality and literacy was highly charged, variously characterized by conflict, competition, accommodation, or, very often, interaction. Improvisation in the Italian commedia dell’arte and in the Shakespearean clown offers an especially interesting and controversial locus of oral-literate interaction, and will be our chief object of scrutiny. I am less interested in compiling a detailed list of oral characteristics in these two areas—so long as the presence of residual orality can be demonstrated—than I am in exploring the cultural valences of orality and literacy. The relationship between orality and literacy offers the most generative point of comparison between the two professional theaters, about which surprisingly few comparative studies have been made.1 If comparative study of Renaissance drama has largely abandoned traditional and positivistic source and influence mapping, the negotiation of orality and literacy in theaters of independent yet parallel development provides an important cultural homology: the most fruitful kind of topic for comparative inquiry. A rich combination of oral and literate modalities may be seen in both the medium of theater and in the period of the Renaissance. There appears to be a historical if not inherent paradox in regard to orality in Western theater. Delivered and apprehended without texts, at least in the performance event, theater might seem to be the most oral of “literary” media. But the ancient Greeks, who awarded the prestigious prizes at the
منابع مشابه
Eloquent Action: the Body and Meaning in Early Commedia Dell'arte
ion should not surprise us: to the contrary, as Castagno points out, portraiture as well as religious and allegorical painting during the period reflected the “hegemony of typification over individuation” (Early Commedia dell’Arte, 165); and Katritzky reminds us that “a sixteenth-century artist is rarely or never concerned with presenting an accurate ‘snapshot’ of a particular performance” (“Re...
متن کاملCommedia Virtuale: Theatre Inspiration for Expressive Avatars
We are investigating face, hand and body expressions to be applied to avatars of a virtual environment to improve their communication capabilities and enrich and facilitate their perception by users of the environment . We support the idea that avatars have to be designed in such a way as to express state of mind, mood and emotions that are easily understood by the users of the environment. We ...
متن کاملI Comici Roboti: Performing the Lazzo of the Statue from the Commedia Dell'Arte
We are combining robotics and puppetry to build a multirobot team that performs a lazzo from the Commedia dell’Arte. The robots are built on lego bases using a Handyboard processor. The robots communicate with each other and with a human director via radio links. Our robot hardware and software are described, as our experiences at AAAI-02.
متن کاملCommedia Virtuale: from theatre to avatars
We are investigating face, hand and body expressions to be applied to avatars of a virtual environment to improve their communication capabilities and enrich and facilitate their perception by users of the environment. We report on our work based on obtaining inspiration from the world of theatre. In this perspective Commedia dell’Arte and Noh theatre have been the focus of our attention. We ex...
متن کامل