SOURCE: Henke, Robert. “Toward Reconstructing the Audiences of the Commedia dell'Arte.” Essays in Theatre 15, no. 2 (1997): 207-22.

In the following essay, Henke describes the relationship between actors of the commedia dell'arte and the audiences for which they performed.

During its “golden age” of 1565-1620, the professional Italian theater that has come to be known as the commedia dell'arte performed before a much wider range of audiences than attended the nonprofessional, scripted theater of the contemporary commedia erudita. The latter theater, performed in the courts and the academies, could largely count on its audience as a “reliable presence,” and the aristocratic spectators were a social and cultural reflection of the dilettante actors.¹ The early humanist theater developed between 1480-1520 in the courts and academies of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Rome under the sway of Ariosto and others anticipated the eighteenth-century notion of the theater audience as arbiter and judge.² Ariosto...