Healing, performance and ceremony in the writings of three early modern physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the brothers Felix and Thomas Platter

While the writings of early modern medical practitioners habitually touch on performance and ceremony, few illuminate them as clearly as the Protestant physicians Felix Platter and Thomas Platter the Younger, who studied in Montpellier and practiced in their birth town of Basle, or the Catholic physician Hippolytus Guarinonius, who was born in Trent, trained in Padua and practiced in Hall near Innsbruck. During his student years and brilliant career as early modern Basle's most distinguished municipal, court and academic physician, Felix Platter built up a wide network of private, religious and aristocratic patients. His published medical treatises and private journal record his professional encounters with them as a healer. They also offer numerous vivid accounts of theatrical events experienced by Platter as a scholar, student and gifted semi-professional musician, and during his Grand Tour and long medical career. Here Felix Platter's accounts, many unavailable in translation, are examined together with relevant extracts from the journals of his younger brother Thomas Platter, and Guarinonius's medical and religious treatises. Thomas Platter is known to Shakespeare scholars as the Swiss Grand Tourist who recorded a 1599 London performance of Julius Caesar, and Guarinonius's descriptions of quack performances represent the earliest substantial written record of commedia dell'arte lazzi, or comic stage business. These three physicians' records of ceremony, festival, theatre, and marketplace diversions are examined in detail, with particular emphasis on the reactions of 'respectable' medical practitioners to healing performers and the performance of healing. Taken as a whole, their writings contribute to our understanding of many aspects of European theatrical culture and its complex interfaces with early modern healthcare: in carnival and other routine manifestations of the Christian festive year, in the extraordinary performance and ceremony of court festivals, and above all in the rarely welcomed intrusions of quacks and other itinerant performers

Stefanelo Botarga and Pickelhering: Fishy Italian and English Stage Clowns in Spain and Germany

Fish represent one of the most significant of several shared themes in the stage names chosen by early modern Italian and English travelling players. The most celebrated fishy stage name of the commedia dell’arte, Stefanelo Botarga, refers to a mediterranean seafood speciality; Pickelherring, the most popular English stage clown in the early modern German-speaking regions, took his name from North Sea pickled herring. The impetus for these stage names clearly came neither directly nor solely from the fish itself. Rather than simply reflecting vague late medieval pan-European links between foolery and carnivalesque foods, early modern fishy stage names complicate culinary connotations with darker and more recent ethnographical and religious associations. Focusing on some of these associations, this paper suggests that the choice of fish featured in stage names reflected regional considerations of the players’ home and host nations, and that transnational perspectives are relevant to their understanding at many levels

Issues in Review: New Developments in Commedia Research: The Commedia dell'Arte: New Perspectives and New Documents

Introduction to "Issues in Review: New developments in commedia research", 141-240, guest editor M A Katritzky. The first of six articles in this section, it introduces the five further articles, by Maria Ines Aliverti (158-180), Rosalind Kerr (181-197), Erith Jaffe-Berg (198-211), Stefano Mengarelli (156-7 & 212-226) and Robert Henke (227-240) and reviews recent significant developments and publications in the field of commedia dell'arte studies

Improvisation in the arts of the middle ages and renaissance

Abstract not available

Reading the actress in commedia imagery

Offering evidence of women's extensive contributions to the theatrical landscape, this volume sharply challenges the assumption that the stage was 'all male' in early modern England. The editors and contributors argue that the pervasiveness of female performance affected cultural production, even on the professional London stages that used men and boys for women's parts. English spectators saw women players in professional and amateur contexts, in elite and popular settings, at home and abroad. Women acted in scripted and improvised roles, performed in local festive drama, and took part in dancing, singing, and masquing. English travelers saw professional actresses on the continent and Italian and French actresses visited England. Essays in this volume explore: the impact of women players outside London; the relationship between women's performance on the continent and in England; working women's participation in a performative culture of commerce; the importance of the visual record; the use of theatrical techniques by queens and aristocrats for political ends; and the role of female performance on the imitation of femininity. In short, Women Players in England 1500–1660 shows that women were dynamic cultural players in the early modern world

'Some tymes J have a shillinge aday, and some tymes nothinge, so that J leve in great poverty': British actors in the paintings of Frans Hals

About the book: Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe is the first book to focus directly on the visual representation of marginal and outcast people in early modern Europe. The volume offers a comprehensive and groundbreaking analysis of a wide range of images featuring Jews and Turks, roguish beggars, syphilitics and plague victims, the 'deserving poor', toothpullers, beggar philosophers, black slaves, itinerant actors and street hawkers. Its broad geographical and chronological scope allows the reader to build a wider picture of visual strategies and conventions for the depiction of the poor and the marginal as they developed in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Britain and Ireland. While such types had often been depicted in earlier centuries, the essays show that they came to play a newly significant and formative role in European art between 1500 and 1750. Marking a clear departure from much previous scholarship on the subject – which has tended to view representations of poverty as passive by-products of non-visual forces – these essays place the image itself at the centre of the investigation. The studies show that many depictions of socially marginal people operated in essentially hegemonic fashion, as a way of controlling or fixing the social and moral identity of those living on the edge. At the same time, they also reveal the inventiveness and originality of many early modern artists in dealing with this subject matter, showing how the sophisticated visuality of their representations could render meaning ambiguous in relation to such controlling discourses