The Commedia Erudita vs. the Commedia dell’Arte - Humanist discipline versus professional improvisation on the Renaissance stage

 

Rudolfinum in Pargue is designed in the neo Renaissance style. 

Italian Renaissance comedy lives a double life. On one stage, erudite men of letters resurrect ancient texts with philological care, building comedies as if they were architectural projects. On another, masked actors roam Europe with trunks, bodies, and voices, improvising plots night after night. These two traditions—Commedia erudita and Commedia dell’Arte—are often conflated. They should not be. Their difference is not merely stylistic; it is epistemological. One trusts the book. The other trusts the body.

The Commedia Erudita: comedy as humanist reconstruction

The Commedia erudita emerges in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy from the intellectual climate of Renaissance humanism. As such it "has not enjoyed much critical favour in the past" (Brand, 1995). Its defining gesture is retrospective - a conscious return to classical antiquity, above all to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence. For Ireno Sanesi who wrote a comprehensive study of the gene, judging it as  "the dismaying uniformity of Cinque-centro theatre" (quoted by Brand, 1995). 

The criticism?

• The reliance on the Roman role models is "inhibiting the natural comic spirit of the Italians" (Brand, 1995)
• Other critics used these plays to diagnose "an inherent weakness in Italian theatre itself" (Brand, 1995) as they are "contributing to the linguistic difficulty of writers confronted with audiences whose spoken language is predominantly dialect" (Brand 1995)

Their comedies—lost for centuries and rediscovered through manuscripts and early print editions— have however undergone something of a revival. In fact, they erudite comedy became a model to imitate, adapt, and modernize for much of European theatre in the late 16th and early 17th century.

These plays were written texts, composed by learned authors and intended primarily for courtly or academic audiences. Performances often involved non-professional actors—courtiers, students, members of humanist circles—rather than touring specialists. The aim was not spontaneity but imitation (imitatio): to recreate the structure, intrigue, and decorum of ancient comedy within a contemporary Italian setting.

Formally, the Commedia erudita favors:

• Complex plots based on intrigue, disguise, and mistaken identity

• Unified scenic space, anticipating the Renaissance “picture-frame” stage

• Literary dialogue, carefully crafted rather than improvised

• Satirical edge, often directed at social types such as misers, foolish old men, corrupt officials

• Revival of antique plays in updated form "in accordance with the view that 'comedy' (unlike tragedy) should be a mirror of everyday life" (Jordan, 2010) 

Canonical examples include La Cassaria by Ludovico Ariosto, La Calandria, and La Mandragola by Niccolò Machiavelli. These works are not merely entertainments; they are demonstrations of humanist competence, proof that antiquity can be revived, disciplined, and put to work in the present.

Comedy here is an intellectual artifact. Laughter is structured, earned through recognition of form, allusion, and wit.

The Commedia dell’Arte: comedy as embodied practice

By contrast, the Commedia dell’Arte, "is generally regarded as the earliest example of professional secular theatre in Europe" (Jordan, 2010). As a genre it takes shape in the mid-sixteenth century, dispenses with literary authority almost entirely as is performed, not written; improvised, not scripted. 

What exists on paper are only canovacci: skeletal plot outlines indicating entrances, exits, and basic situations.

Everything else happens live.

Professional actors—often organized in family-based troupes—specialized in fixed roles, recognizable across regions and languages: Pantalone, the miserly Venetian merchant; Il Dottore, the bombastic pedant; the Zanni, cunning or foolish servants; and lovers without masks, eloquent and physically agile. Masks, gestures, dialects, and acrobatics are not decorative but structural. They are the text.

Key characteristics include:

• Improvisation within stable role-types or "a simple comic plot, involving various love intrigues with attendant complications and subsequent happy resolutions" (Jordan, 2010) 

• Actor specialization in a single character over an entire career - "stock character types, which mostly fell into three distinct categories: masters, servants and lovers" (Jordan, 2010)

• Physical comedy, lazzi (comic routines), and exaggerated gesture

• Portability, enabling performances across Italy and Europe

• Elastic Dialogue (cf. Richard Andrews) that could be lengthened or shortened at will by actors (Jordan, 2010)  

• Expression in the local vernacular cf. the character of Pantalone 

Unlike the Commedia erudita, the Commedia dell’Arte is transnational by nature. Its reliance on bodies rather than words allows it to travel: to France, Spain, the German-speaking lands. It does not need a shared literary culture—only shared laughter.

Comedy here is generated in the present, night after night, through the friction between social norms and human inadequacy.

Two comedies, two ideas of culture

The contrast between these forms is stark but instructive.

The Commedia erudita belongs to a culture of texts, models, and authority. It presupposes readers, editors, manuscripts, and courts. It is bound to humanist education and to the belief that cultural legitimacy flows from antiquity.

The Commedia dell’Arte belongs to a culture of performance, repetition, and variation. It presupposes skill, memory, and audience response. Its authority lies not in the past but in practice—what works, what gets a laugh, what survives touring.

And yet, the two traditions are not enemies. The erudite comedy borrows situations from popular storytelling and novella traditions; the Commedia dell’Arte absorbs plots, social types, and satirical targets from learned comedy. Together, they map the Renaissance itself: a period torn between reverence for inherited forms and fascination with living, embodied experience.

One comedy reads the ancients.
The other sweats, trips, improvises—and keeps going.

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References:

• Brand, C.P. (1995). The Renaissance of Comedy: The Achievement of Italian ‘Commedia Erudita’. The Modern Language Review, 90(4), p.xxix. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/3733146.
  
• Ireneo Sanesi, Storia deigeneri leterari italiani: La Commedia, 2 vols (Milan: Vallardi, I9I I), I, 23
• Jordan, Peter. “In Search of Pantalone and the Origins of the Commedia Dell’Arte.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 64, no. 252 (2), 2010, pp. 207–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23961163. Accessed 7 Jan. 2026.

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