The architecture of Italian theaters around the time of William Shakespeare.

Johnson, Eugene J.

IN ITALY during Shakespeare's lifetime (1564-1616] two of the most important architectural innovations in the history of modern theater took place: the invention of the proscenium arch and the invention of the theater with boxes. Together, these innovations redefined the way the audience viewed the action of the play and the audience was accommodated. In the decades before Shakespeare's birth, the modern notion of an illusionistic setting for the action had been developed by Italian painters and architects. The purpose of this series in Shakespeare Studies on drama outside England is to situate early modern English theater in a larger global context. Continental Europe in the sixteenth century saw the simultaneous growth of several centers of new dramatic expression, each with its own distinct characteristics. English drama was uniquely splendid as literature, for instance, but it was Italy that largely gave Western theater its modern visual and spatial forms.

The Italian contributions came into being through a rich series of experimentations with possible architectural forms for theaters: from literal reconstructions of ancient Roman theaters, driven by humanist interest in antiquity, to the construction of large rectangular rooms with their own stages to house court spectacles, to the building of commercial theaters for the performances of commedia dell'arte troupes. The situation was extremely complex, and so these three categories were quite fluid and often bled into each other. Further complicating the story was the political situation on the Italian peninsula, divided into a number of separate small states, each with its own peculiar form of government and its own cultural traditions. These states watched each other carefully, sometimes emulating and always striving to outdo whatever their rivals may have ventured in the way of theater. Out of this stew of political, cultural, and economic interests rose the architecture of the modern theater. Sadly, the visual and physical evidence for this remarkable moment is almost entirely gone. All the theaters built in Italy during this period, with three exceptions, have vanished, as has most other visual evidence. As a consequence, the study of Italian theater architecture of early modern times has to be based almost entirely on written documentary sources. Only from these documents, which scholars continue to unearth, can we reconstruct in our imaginations what once stood.

A standard way to define the theater focuses on three elements: the text, the actors, and the audience. For an architectural historian, this definition is inadequate, because it fails to take into account the physical setting that brings these three elements together--that allows the audience to hear the actors recite the text, to see their movements and expressions, and to be carried visually to another time and place by the illusions created by the scenery. This essay, then, focuses on spaces that were constructed or adapted to contain theatrical performances rather than on the performances themselves.

Although a few plays were given in private settings a bit earlier, modern theater history in Italy, in the sense of performances presented to a more or less public audience, seems to begin in 1486, when Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, ordered a production of Plautus's Menaechmi in the courtyard of his palace and when the production of a tragedy by Seneca, Ippolitus, was offered by Cardinal Raffaele Riario, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, in front of his palace in Rome. (1) In both cases ancient Roman plays were deliberately revived, in line with the general interest in revivifying the culture of antiquity in fifteenth-century Italy. Very quickly modern plays began to be written and performed at courts around the peninsula, alongside revivals of Roman works, which were given sometimes in Latin and sometimes in new translations into Italian. In these early years no one built theaters. Plays were performed on temporary stages erected in the courtyards or large halls of palaces. To maintain decorum, men and women were accommodated in different parts of the theater, and princely personages became as important a part of the show as what appeared onstage.

Artists of the caliber of Leonardo da Vinci, in Milan, and Raphael, in Rome, designed sets for courtly theatrical events. For one set by Leonardo, who was a mechanical as well as an artistic genius, a few quick sketches are preserved. The set consisted of a mountain that, to the amazement of the audience, opened to reveal another scene inside. All visual traces of Raphael's set for a performance of the great playwright and poet Lodovico Ariosto's I suppositi in 1519 (2) have vanished, but perhaps one may be able to imagine something of what they looked like from the architectural settings of his last frescoes in the Vatican Stanze. The play was given under the patronage of Pope Leo X, who had it performed in the palace of a friendly cardinal rather than in the Vatican itself. The political import of the gathering of the audience into a palatial hall can be grasped from a couple of details. After the audience (all male) had arranged itself on steps at one end of the room, the pope, followed by cardinals and foreign ambassadors, entered. Leo settled himself in a chair raised on a podium five steps above the floor, while the cardinals and ambassadors arranged themselves in lines to either side of the elevated papal throne. The audience literally watched the play over the shoulders of Leo, who was symbolically placed at the center of the Christian world. The room was lit by a series of newly made candelabra in the form of letters that spelled out LEO X PON. MAXIMUS--a dazzling early moment of having one's name up in lights. Presumably Leo sat directly opposite the vanishing point of Raphael's one-point perspective set. As the ruler, Leo was uniquely privileged to have that view--the only point from which the perspectival illusion worked perfectly. After the performance the theater was dismantled. Raphael's set was never seen again, and the blazing papal name went to who-knows-what reward. This Roman theater, in its temporary nature, was utterly typical of what happened in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Not too long before Shakespeare was born, however, permanent court and commercial theaters began to be erected in Italy. The earliest evidence we have for a permanent theater was one built in 1531 in Ferrara, the architect apparently none other than Lodovico Ariosto himself. (3) The theater was not erected in the ducal palace, as one might expect since it was under ducal patronage, but rather in a space above an apothecary shop. There is no known description of the seating, but we do know that the set was a permanently installed generic view of a city (how constructed we are not told) that could be, as a contemporary source put it, "Cremona one night and Ferrara the next." As such, it could serve year after year for a succession of plays. Sadly, the theater only lasted one year, burning down in December of 1532 just before the scheduled performance of one of Ariosto's own plays. We are told--who knows how reliably--that Ariosto died shortly thereafter, grief-stricken by the loss of his design.

The earliest permanent court theater for which we have an actual description was built in Mantua by the court architect Giovanni Battista Bertani, an artist of considerable inventive powers whose work is unfortunately not very well known outside Italy. Mantua since the late fifteenth century had been a city with a rich theatrical life, even if its Gonzaga rulers could never quite afford everything their voracious appetites for the arts led them to desire. The theater was commissioned from Bertani by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, regent during the minority of the heir, Francesco. The building was well under way in 1549, but it may not have been completed until 1551. (4)

The only trace we have of this theater is a short passage in a longer poem written by one Raffaello Toscano to celebrate the wonders of Mantua. The poem was published in 1586, two years before the theater was destroyed by fire and replaced by one designed by Antonio Maria Viani, court painter and architect at the end of the sixteenth century.

Toscano devotes a mere sixteen lines to the theater, but from that brief notice quite a clear general picture of the theater emerges.

 Rich is the scene: where the actors intent
 On the beautiful works gather often,
 Whose proud and noble ornaments
 Show how much art Art has placed here.
 And there quickly follows a city of hewn beams
 and of wood painted, or carved in relief,
 Which seems to be filled with as many arts
 And virtues as once had Athens.

 Against the great Stage which gracefully slopes
 Bertani the architect places a thousand steps
 That a half-circle make, and there one ascends
 With great ease to the roof;
 Below is a field, where often the fiery Mars
 Lights the breasts of his followers:
 Temples, Towers, Palaces and Perspectives
 There are; and figures that appear live.

The poet's opening blast, "Rich is the scene," sets the stage for telling us that the scenery was made of wood, painted, and covered in relief. The forms came together to make a city "which appears to be filled with as many arts and virtues as once had Athens." Although this claim must be taken with a tablespoon of salt, it tells us of the ambition to rival the ancients that stands behind the theater's design. The last two lines of the next stanza make clear that all the arts were used for the scenery: the architecture of the stage buildings, the sculptural figures that appeared to be alive, and the perspective paintings that presumably suggested depth behind the three-dimensional structures. Whatever was performed in Mantua in the court theater during the second half of the sixteenth century took place before that unchanging city of arts and virtues.

Opposite the gracefully sloping stage (surely raised) Bertani placed "a thousand steps," easily ascended to the roof. That number of steps seems unlikely, but surely several rows rose toward the ceiling. The steps were arranged in a half-circle--a crucial point. Greek and Roman theaters, avidly studied by humanist scholars, had semicircular seating, and Bertani's theater deliberately imitated that aspect of ancient theater design. At the base of the steps lay an open area, like the orchestra of an ancient theater, on which the actors also performed. The poet's image of Mars, the god of war, often inflaming the breasts of his followers from here makes one wonder if the theater might have been put to other, more obviously political uses--the rallying of troops when Mantua was threatened, for instance. All in all, the poet describes a theater whose auditorium could have been taken almost literally from the text of the Roman architect, Vitruvius, whose de architectura is the only architectural treatise to come down to us from antiquity. But the set was not derived from antiquity. Rather, it was the generic, illusionistic city set that had been developed in the first half of the sixteenth century. Ariosto's set that burned in Ferrara in 1531 is but one in a line of illusionistic city sets that goes back to Ferrara in 1509, when Pellegrino da Udine painted an illusionistic backdrop of a view of that city.

Bertani's theater followed by only a decade the theater that Sebastiano Serlio had erected in a palace in Vicenza in 1539. Like Bertani's, Serlio's theater had curved seating (albeit not in a semicircle, but in a segmental curve) and a scene of a city onstage. Serlio's publication in 1545 of woodcuts of his Vicentine theater in the first volume of his multivolume illustrated book on architecture probably served as an important contemporary source for Bertani. (5) Serlio's theater is very famous, because he left us visual traces in his book, but one must be careful not to put too much emphasis on it--to take it as too completely typical--just because we are lucky enough to have an actual record of what it looked like. Serlio's theater, like almost all theaters that preceded Bertani's, was temporary. The Mantuan theater was permanent. Theater architecture was no longer just for the moment; if it was not for the ages, at least it was for the foreseeable future.

What Bertani's theater stood inside is not clear. Some scholars believe that instead of constructing the theater in one of the cavernous rooms of the extensive and ever-expanding Gonzaga palace, Bertani built a new shell to contain it outside the walls of the palace, along an important street of the city. If that were indeed the case, then Bertani's was surely one of the very earliest freestanding buildings in Italy erected to house a permanent theater. It makes sense that such a development might have taken place in Mantua. Unfortunately, we just can't be sure that it did. By the middle of the sixteenth century going to regularly staged theatrical performances, sponsored by ruling princes, had become part of normal life in some court cities, especially during carnival season. Putting a new theater between the palace and the town would keep the crowds out of the palace, while the prince and his party could enter and leave with ease. A visible theater outside the palace would be yet another example of princely largesse--of that duty of good princes to patronize the arts, embellish their realms, and entertain their citizens.

No other city in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century had a more vigorous development of court theater than Florence under the Medici. (6) Particularly to celebrate dynastic weddings, but also to honor important visitors, the Medici produced a series of spectacular theatrical events. In 1565, for instance, the enormous Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio was fitted out by Giorgio Vasari for a performance of La Cofanaria by Francesco d'Ambra to mark the marriage of the heir to the duchy, Francesco, to a Hapsburg princess, Giovanna d'Austria. (7) This was a signal event in Medici history. Francesco's mother, Eleanora of Toledo, was not a princess, but only the noble daughter of the Spanish viceroy of Naples. Francesco's father, Duke Cosimo I, later the first Grand Duke, had not been able to command a consort of royal blood, but he could provide one for his heir.

Vasari arranged the rectangular Salone dei Cinquecento so that seats were placed along three walls, atop a raised terrace protected by a balustrade, to accommodate some 360 women. In the middle of the hall rose a dais on which the duke and duchess and the royal newlyweds sat, the center of attention. The men of the audience occupied benches placed around the dais The raised stage, placed on one of the short sides of the room at the same level as the terrace of the women's seats, was framed by a pair of Corinthian columns that formed what seems to have been the very first proscenium arch. Between the columns hung a curtain painted by Federico Zuccaro to show a ducal hunt taking place in a landscape with the city of Florence in the background. This first proscenium arch, then, literally acted as a picture frame. When the curtain disappeared, another picture was revealed--a set that represented an actual quarter of Florence. In the middle of the set the Via Maggio, a major thoroughfare south of the Arno, seemed to stretch into the distance, because Vasari had painted it according to the principles of one-point perspective. To either side of the receding street, and at right angles to it, were shown the houses that bordered the Arno a the entrance to the street. Via Maggio was one of the major urban developments of the reign of Cosimo I, and so the set represented modern Florence prospering under Medici rule. There was also a triumphal arch depicting the Arno and the Danube, now in symbolic confluence through the Medici-Hapsburg union. Over the architrave that spanned the distance between the columns of the proscenium to form the top of the picture frame rose the Medici coat of arms, borne by putti. The walls of the room had already been decorated by Vasari with important scenes from Florentine history. The whole was a celebration of Florentine and Medici power, with the rulers at the center of the show. The room did not serve only as a theater, however. After the play, the audience withdrew and then returned to find the space set up as a banquet hall. After eating, the guests again withdrew and returned to find the room converted to dancing, which lasted till dawn.

The Medici continued to use views of their city and its cultural heritage as the sets for important theatrical performances that served dynastic purposes. In 1569, to honor the visit of the Archduke Karl of Austria, the Medici produced Giambattista Cini's play La Vedova, with a set by Baldassare Lanci that showed the political heart of Florence. The audience looked at a representation of Palazzo Vecchio, the medieval town hall that the Medici now occupied as their residence. In the distance rose Filippo Brunelleschi's dome of Florence Cathedral, moved for the occasion a bit to the east so that that staggering achievement of Florentine architecture would be visible onstage. In front of Palazzo Vecchio appeared the three sixteenth-century statues that grace the Piazza Signoria, including Michelangelo's famous David. To stage right one made out the arcade of the Loggia dei Lanzi, while to stage left appeared the northernmost bays of the Palazzo degli Uffizi, under construction at the time. Vasari, the favored architect of Cosimo I, designed the Uffizi to house the bureaucracy of Cosimo's newly created autocratic state. Lanci's set represented the past and present achievements of Florence and the symbols of Medici control. According to a contemporary observer, Ignazio Danti, Lanci used periaktoi, rotating vertical triangular prisms with different scenes painted on each side, to make possible quick set changes. The scene of Palazzo Vecchio gave way to the Ponte Santa Trinita, another site in Florence, and that in turn to the nearby village of Arcetri. In this production, the unity of place established by the single city set earlier in the century was abandoned for a far more fluid movement of the action from place to place.

Vasari's Uffizi was to serve several other purposes, however, one being as the site of a new permanent court theater to replace the Salone dei Cinquecento. The Salone did not easily lend itself to the increasingly lavish court spectacles the Medici wished to put on, because there was no room for the deep stage such spectacles required to house multiple sets and the machinery to make flights of gods and goddesses appear onstage. Lanci's periaktoi took the shallow stage of the Salone about as far as it could go. Vasari designed the new theater in the Uffizi with a stage almost as deep as the length of the long, rectangular auditorium, to which he gave a sloping floor to enhance the audience's ability to see the fabulous things happening on stage. The theater was not completed until it was used for the celebration of the wedding in 1586 of Cosimo I's daughter, Virginia, to the Duke of Modena, Cesare d'Este. At that time the architect Bernardo Buontalenti decorated the interior of Vasari's auditorium so that it seemed to be a vast garden, with trellises containing fruits, rabbits, and deer overhead. Live birds were released after the audience entered. Here the auditorium space itself became a means to transport that audience to another place, long before the curtain went up to reveal a view of a part of Florence in which the theater was not actually located. Women sat on carpeted steps arranged against three walls of the auditorium. Men again sat on benches surrounding the dais placed in the center of the hall to show off the royal personages.

In 1589, for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici to a French princess, Christine of Lorraine, the Medici put on what was probably the most sumptuous theatrical performance of the entire sixteenth century in Italy, and maybe in Europe. Buontalenti remodeled the theater a second time, turning it into a monumental hall with a giant order of pilasters along the sides. Three stage curtains played havoc with the audience's sense of place. A red house curtain dropped to reveal a second curtain, painted to look like a continuation of the architecture of the rest of the room to create what a contemporary called a "perfect amphitheater." This curtain, in turn, dropped to reveal a depiction of the city of Rome. Then Rome fell to uncover a set of the city of Pisa, a Medici possession, which was the location of the action of the play, a comedy, La Pellegrina, written some years earlier by Girolamo Bargagli for Ferdinando, but never performed. For this wedding, however, the dusted-off play was not the thing. Instead, all the stops were pulled out for the intermedi, six musical interludes performed before the play began and after each of its five acts. Each intermedio had its own elaborate set, often with moving parts. Figures in lavish costumes designed by Buontalenti, whose drawings are preserved, floated down to the stage on clouds, or dove into what appeared to be ocean waves. There was a hellish grotto with flames. At the end all the Olympian gods descended from the skies to bless the happy couple and augur a new golden age for Florence. The poetry of Giovanni Bardi for the intermedi was learned and elegant--if not perhaps up to Shakespearean standards--and the music required remarkable vocal agility from the singers. The whole was designed for political purposes; the libretto of the intermedi was published so that it could carry praise of the new couple and their realm throughout the courts of Europe.

Commercial theaters for paying audiences enjoyed a development parallel to that of court theaters. Around 1549, the year the permanent court theater in Mantua was begun, a commercial theater was constructed in Rome in Palazzo Santi Apostoli, a large residence next to the church of the same name. Giorgio Vasari tells us that a man named Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara, "a truly rare man in every sort of poetry," put together a company of people of various talents and erected an "apparatus" for playing comedies to "gentlemen, lords and great personages." (8) The seating area consisted of steps ordered to accommodate people of different ranks. Unfortunately Vasari doesn't get more specific about the structure, but he at least tells us that architectural consideration was given to the several classes of spectators who paid to see the performances. The audience in Serlio's theater in Vicenza in 1539 had also been arranged according to rank. In this Roman theater cardinals and other high prelates, who might not want to be seen at a public performance of a comedy, got quite special treatment. Unique to Roman society, this group was provided with "some rooms" where they could see the comedies through shutters without themselves being seen. This detail of the theater in Santi Apostoli is remarkable, because it seems to be the earliest of its kind of which we have notice. Here the highest class had the privilege of being in the theater, a public place, without anyone seeing them. In court theaters, the rulers wanted to be the center of the show. In Rome, the cardinals wanted not to be part of the secular show at all.

This theater, Vasari tells us, was quite beautifully decorated by two members of the troupe, the painter Battista Franco and the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati, the latter about to be employed on the lavish villa constructed between 1550 and 1555 by a new pope, Julius III. Each artist contributed works of his own specialty to the theater in Palazzo Santi Apostoli. The troupe spent so much money on it that they could not collect sufficient receipts to cover their expenses--presumably because the space was too small. So the whole apparatus was moved into a recently completed church, San Biagio della Pagnotta in the Strada Giulia, into which the scenery, paintings, sculptures, seats, and the rooms for cardinals were made to fit. San Biagio had been designed in the second decade of the sixteenth century by Donato Bramante as part of the vast Palazzo dei Tribunali, commissioned by Julius II to house all the ecclesiastic and civil courts of Rome. The palace was never completed, and so the church was an orphaned building that could be converted to the purposes of a theater. It must, however, have taken friends in high places to obtain permission to use the church that way. The plan of San Biagio, known from a contemporary drawing, (9) was that of a Latin cross, with three equal arms ending in shallow apses and a longer fourth arm for the nave. Semicircular seating, if the theater had such seating, could have been fit into the crossing area, with the stage placed in the arm where the high altar would have stood. But the seating could also have been arranged to form three sides of a square or rectangle.

In the theater in San Biagio, says Vasari, many comedies were presented "to the incredible satisfaction of the people and courtiers of Rome." Vasari closes this passage by mistakenly telling us that it was in the theater in the church of San Biagio that commedia dell'arte was invented. We know that not to have been the case, but Vasari's calling the performers "Zanni,"--the name of a stock character in commedia dell'arte--does mean that such a troupe or troupes performed here. We have no idea how long the theater in San Biagio remained open, but at least for a while it permanently housed performances of comedies before a paying audience rigorously separated by class.

The rise of commedia dell'arte, a popular form of entertainment performed by troupes of what Cole Porter dubbed "strolling players," was one of the crucial developments in the history of the theater in Italy during the sixteenth century. (10) The earliest document we have for the creation of a commedia dell'arte troupe dates from 1545--a contract signed by a small group of men in Padua. They performed in Venice in 1546 and 1549; in the latter year they left Venice for Rome to play that city for carnival. They may have appeared in the theater in the palace of Santi Apostoli or in the church of S. Biagio that Vasari described. The dates are certainly right. According to the remarkably reliable Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo, a troupe of players from Rovigo had appeared even earlier, in 1533, in a private palace on the island of Murano, where Venetians made their famous glass. The audience had to pay to see the performance. Because these troupes were composed of professionals who made their living on the stage, they were often looked down on by upper-class Italians.

Comedies were immensely popular all over the peninsula, and each city or state seems to have accommodated them in its own way. In Naples in 1536 the Prince of Salerno had a comedy performed in his palace in honor of the Emperor Charles V. The prince footed the bill; the audience did not have to pay. Apparently the prince stood at the door of his palace and welcomed the citizens of the city to the performance. They went home, we are told, "full of love and affection for him." Theater as political bribery, one might say. He and his wife continued to support the performance of comedies in their palace into the next decade. It's not clear if the prince hired professional players or made use of the talents of local nobles for this effort. The earliest known contract among comedians in Naples comes from 1575, but Benedetto Croce, the author of the major work on theater in Naples in the Renaissance, (11) believes they must have been present far earlier. In 1581, in an act of counter-Reformatory zeal typical of the day, comedies in Naples were banned, just as they were banned in that decade in Milan and Venice, but in Naples the comedies rather quickly came back. In 1583 Philip II of Spain, who ruled the city, gave the Hospital for Incurables the right to the income from comedies. (12) In 1592 the papal nuncio lamented that even the clergy went to comedies, which were surely being performed at that point in rented spaces and also in a building dedicated to theatrical performances. In the early seventeenth century the church of the Genoese colony in Naples was called San Giorgio alla commedia vecchia. In 1595 the Genoese had acquired the property where the "commedia vecchia" stood to erect a new church--thus the name.

In the early years of commedia dell'arte--roughly the 1530s through the 1550s--the players had to play wherever they could find space. Sometimes it would be a hall in a palace; sometimes it would be a rented space in a much less distinguished building. They used only the simplest of sets, which they carried with them, and their costumes also came along in the baggage. The sets consisted mostly of a painted backdrop, perhaps with a view of a town, and two houses, placed to either side of the stage, through which they made their exits and entrances. The audience was accommodated in a casual manner. Perhaps the hall would contain stools to rent. Perhaps not. Women certainly could not have been in the audience unless separate seating was provided for them. In many cases the audience may have been all male.

The description of a rather modest theater in Venice that the English traveler Thomas Coryat set down during his visit to the city in 1608 (13) probably gives us a good idea of what many of these theaters were like. Coryat found the theater quite inelegant by English standards, and he was not impressed by the quality of the scenery and the costumes either. Much of his description is devoted to the lavish dress of the courtesans who sat apart from and above the male members of the audience, who occupied rented stools on the ground floor. From the scraps of information Coryat supplies, it would seem that the theater consisted of a single rather shabby room, with a stage at one end and some balcony or balconies for the courtesans. Coryat seems to have been unaware that this theater could hardly have been open more than a year, that it must have been hastily cobbled together after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Venetian territory in 1607 as part of the settlement of a bitter feud between Venice and the papacy. Essentially no theaters had operated in Venice between 1585 and 1607, as we shall see. What most amazed Coryat was the presence of women onstage. They charmed him; he felt that they performed quite as well as the men.

During the second half of the sixteenth century in the principal Italian cities theatrical spaces were set up to accommodate the traveling players, either by princes or by private citizens on the lookout for profit. For instance, a Mantuan Jew, Leone de Sommi (identified in documents as "Leone hebreo"), in 1567 petitioned Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga for permission to set up a "stanza" for the presentation of comedies "by those who go about performing for a price." He requested a monopoly on such an enterprise for ten years. In return, he offered to give two sacks of wheat annually to the poor. Leone was supported in his request by a ducal cousin, Francesco Gonzaga, count of Novellara, who found the proposal useful for the poor and for the pleasure of the city. The count seems to have consulted with Leone about his plans, for he believed that Leone intended to provide a commodious room where ladies and gentlemen could attend plays decently. That suggests something like the segregated seating universally employed in court theaters. There is no record of the duke's reply to the request for permission.

Comedy was a hot commodity in Mantua in 1567. Two companies were playing simultaneously, and the city was split in its allegiances to the two principal actresses, Flaminia and Vicenza. One of the troupes performed in the court theater, presumably the one designed by Bertani almost twenty years earlier--a fact that tells us that court theaters could serve popular as well as dynastic purposes. The other troupe worked in a private house fitted out to accommodate the plays. Both theaters were filled. At one point a performance was also given in the Palazzo della Ragione, or town hall. Even monks were going to the theater, as many as twenty-five at a time; the bishop was driven to issue an order prohibiting clergy from going near such sinful doings. In one theater members of the audience could stand on the stage and block the view of the action of the rest of those in attendance. This situation led to loud protests and even a near riot.

In Genoa, also in 1567, a group of professional actors drew up a contract to work together from Lent through the carnival of 1568. That year permission was given for the performance of a comedy in the hostaria del Falcone, an inn. Inns and taverns became the favored sites for theatrical events in Genoa. In 1572 the Gelosi, one of the most avidly sought-after troupes of the day, petitioned the government of Genoa for permission to perform for the entire month of November, something, the Gelosi pointed out, "universally desired by all the nobility." The government granted permission. The room the Gelosi planned to use, they said, had a capacity of only one hundred to one hundred fifty gentlemen (no gentlewomen, apparently). Such a size might well accord with the capacity of a large room at an urban hostelry. In 1575, according to a notarial act, a group of Genoese from leading families, such as the Spinola, Grimaldi, Doria, and Pallavicino, joined together to have a carpenter construct a stage and scenery for performances during the last week of carnival. The whole was to cost the not inconsiderable sum of eighty gold scudi, and the carpenter was provided with a painter to execute the scenery. Genoa found itself in an extremely prosperous state in the middle of the sixteenth century, in good part thanks to the very successful efforts of the city's aristocrat-bankers.

In Bologna as early as 1547 the great hall on the piano nobile of the Palazzo del Podesta was given over to housing entertainments. The palace had been built in the late thirteenth century as the seat of the administration of justice in the city. Remodeled in the late fifteenth century, the building continued to play its role as one of the city's principal governmental structures until Pope Julius II occupied Bologna and took over the governmental functions. The old oligarchical government of the city by its leading citizens was replaced by the rule of a single man, the papal legate. The Palazzo del Podesta became an immense relic of a past political situation, its great hall lit by nine enormous windows a white elephant of a space. The legate, however, allowed the old aristocracy of the city to run Bologna's cultural affairs, and so they took over the palace as the site of the entertainments they offered themselves and their city. In 1598, for instance, the papal legate allowed a certain Giuseppe Guidetto to fit the room out for the performance of comedies, to sell fruit, and even to schedule ball games in the hall. Such a conversion of a building of immense importance to a civic polity into a place of entertainment was not unique to Bologna. In Siena, after the Medici took control of the city in 1555 following a gruesome siege, they converted into a theater the room in the town hall in which the nobles of the city had met to vote on the laws of the land. The ancient seat of representative government became the showplace of the largesse of the conquering despot. Good government was usurped by good entertainment.

In Florence comedies became as popular as they were in other Italian cities. The Medici dukes, however, wanted to keep them under their control, and so they constructed a theater for comedies, the Baldracca, literally parallel to the court theater of the Uffizi. Located just east of the eastern wing of the Uffizi, the Baldracca consisted of a large rectangular room with a relatively shallow stage at one end. Although clearly inferior in status to the court theater in the Uffizi, it was directly connected to that part of the Medici architectural domain, so that the grand duke and his party could attend the comedies unseen. Along one side of the theater there were one or more rooms, screened from the view of the audience, that members of the court could enter directly from the Uffizi. While ordinary citizens enjoyed the raucous fun of the comedies in public, the grand duke and company could enjoy the coarse jokes in private and thereby maintain the air of superiority on which their increasingly autocratic rule in part depended. This theater appears to have been in operation by 1576-78, although its form may have been modified later. There are documents from the end of the century that speak of two tiers of "stanzini," or little rooms, controlled by private citizens of means, that acted like theater boxes, but it is not clear that these little rooms were part of the original design of the 1570s. (14) On at least one occasion, the commedia dell'arte folk were invited to play the big theater in the Uffizi itself. During the wedding festivities of 1589, comedies were given there to entertain the large wedding party, which probably could not have fit into the Baldracca. One of the great comic actresses of the day improvised a mad scene in fractured French that particularly delighted the French bride, Christine of Lorraine.

The Baldracca was not alone in being a separate theater for comedies directly connected to a princely palace. In Mantua a separate theater for comedies, connected to the Gonzaga palace by a long corridor that allowed the duke and his party to reach the theater directly, was constructed by the court architect, Antonio Maria Viani, probably in the 1590s. Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga had married a Medici, and so he was certainly well informed about theaters in Florence. Such theaters adjoining princely residences were the forerunners of the great opera houses that later came to be constructed next to royal palaces, such as the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, inaugurated in 1737.

Permanent commercial theaters for the performance of comedies, then, had been constructed by the 1570s, and perhaps even a decade earlier. In some ways the most important of these for the subsequent history of theater architecture opened in Venice for the carnival of 1580. There were two such, built not far from each other in the parish of San Cassiano by noble families, the Michiel and the Tron, for profit. (15) The two most famous commedia dell'arte troupes of the day played them, the Gelosi in the Michiel theater, the Confidenti in the Tron. Of both theaters we have no visual trace, but we can reconstruct at least something of their appearance from the considerable documentation preserved in the records of the Council of Ten, the powerful governing body that had decreed in 1508 that it had to approve all theatrical performances in Venice and its territories.

Venice was devastated by plague in 1576. As the city slowly got back on its feet, entertainment seems to have been crucial to its citizens' recovery of a sense of well-being. In the last years of the 1570s, the Council of Ten approved theatrical events for carnival with numbingly similar provisos: that the performances had to be decent and had to conclude at a reasonable hour of the night. Suddenly, in 1580, the language of approval shifted. The Ten ordered that the places where comedies were to be performed had to be inspected by competent architects to make sure that they were safe. The new language signals a new architectural situation, and that situation was the construction of theaters with rows of superimposed boxes. We know from other documents that there were boxes surrounded by corridors and entered by doors. In the next few years decrees of the Ten insisted that lights be kept lit in the corridors throughout the performances, and there were promises to the Ten from owners of the theaters and troupes of actors that the doors to the boxes would be kept open, so that nothing scandalous could occur inside. Such promises were surely the result of what had happened in the boxes during the first season these two theaters were open. Venetians seem quickly to have figured out how to use the boxes as if they were modern motel rooms. It is even possible that some of Venice's famous courtesans set up shop in a box or two. No such private space in a public place had ever existed before in the city, or indeed on the Italian peninsula. Meetings between men and women of the upper classes, the people who rented the boxes, were tightly regulated in Venice, as indeed in the whole of Europe, in the sixteenth century. The boxes provided private space where it was possible for clandestine encounters to occur.

We know that patrician families rented the boxes, which became extensions of the family's private space. Men and women of the same family could attend performances together, sitting side by side. We know this happened because of the comments of at least one prudish writer who strenuously condemned the patricians who took their daughters to comedies, where they heard the foulest possible language spoken onstage. The bawdiness of some of these plays was undeniable, and Venetians, who still have a taste for earthy humor, enjoyed them immensely.

The economic incentive for the construction of these theaters is clear. Venetian nobles were always out to make a ducat, and they saw a chance to profit from the great popularity of comedies at carnival, just as Leone de Sommi had hoped to do in Mantua a decade or so earlier. Their new type of theater with boxes took advantage of the unusual structure of Venetian society, dominated not by a ruling prince but by an oligarchy of rich noble families. Those families could afford to rent boxes that provided comfortable, private spaces at the theater, and which also provided small stages from which the nobles could display themselves to the rest of the audience. The theater owners and the actors split the income from the rents and ticket sales. The theaters seem to have started off as a great economic success. We don't know how large they were, or how many boxes each contained. They seem to have been constructed inside already existing spaces, perhaps warehouses or something similar, and to have been made of wood. One can imagine a system of wooden beams supporting wooden floors, with thin partitions between the boxes. There is no indication that they made any visual impact on the surrounding city. Both were next to canals, so that they could be reached by gondola. Many of the streets in Venice were not paved in the sixteenth century, and noblewomen would not have wanted to slog through mud in their lavish dresses to get to a performance.

The scandalous behavior in the boxes and onstage created a very strong reaction against these theaters among the elderly patricians who ran the city, whose thinking about public morality had come to be dominated by the Jesuits. The French ambassador informed Henry III in 1583 that the Jesuits had such influence over leading members of the Venetian government that they could get the government to do whatever they wanted. While this statement may have been an exaggeration--the government did not allow the Jesuits to build their church wherever they wanted in the city--it contained a large grain of truth. The Jesuits were said to have mounted a very Jesuitical argument against the theaters, claiming that much of the Venetian patriciate would be burned up, were the theaters to catch fire.

In 1585 the Council of Ten struck a mortal blow against the two theaters, ordering their demolition within fifteen days. Rarely indeed did the Venetian government bring an end to the business ventures of the patricians who dominated it. The threat of the theaters to public morality and even, perhaps, to the safety of the ruling class caused this highly unusual move. As far as we know, the theaters were immediately dismantled, and there is just one further mention of a theatrical performance in the records of the Ten for the rest of the century. Only in 1607, when the Jesuits were banished from Venetian territory, did comedies return. They did so with amazing rapidity; there is a report of the performance of a comedy within a month of the Jesuits' expulsion. Within a few years, the Tron family had built a theater on the site occupied by their theater of 1580, perhaps even out of the original materials of that structure. When the first public performance of an opera for a paying audience, anywhere, took place in Venice during the carnival of 1637, it took place in the theater with boxes of the Tron family (although by then the theater was in its third or fourth incarnation).

From Shakespeare's lifetime come the only two Italian theaters of the sixteenth century to survive: the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza and the ducal theater in Sabbioneta. The third remaining early Italian theater, the Teatro Farnese at Parma, was built in 1618, only two years after Shakespeare's death. Not much alike, these theaters point to the highly experimental nature of theater architecture toward the end of the cinquecento and the beginning of the seicento.

The Teatro Olimpico was designed by Andrea Palladio in 1580, the year of his death. (16) It was completed by his son and by the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi in time to open during the carnival of 1585 with a production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in a new Italian translation. Like Bertani's court theater in Mantua, which Palladio had probably seen, the Olimpico was a deliberate "copy" of an ancient Roman theater, except for the fact that it was an indoor rather than an outdoor space. The audience sat on curved rows of steps, laid out in an oval instead of a semicircle to fit the theater onto the piece of land that the Accademia Olimpica had purchased. At the opening performance, the wives of the members of the Accademia sat in chairs placed in the orchestra for them.

The Teatro Olimpico was not a court theater, however. The Accademia Olimpica was an association of Vicentine aristocrats passionately interested in antiquity. Palladio, an aristocrat only of talent, had been invited to join their ranks. He had spent much of his career studying the ruins of Roman architecture, and he had made drawings of the Roman theaters at Verona, Vicenza, and Pola. In addition, he had drawn the illustrations that graced the pages of Daniele Barbaro's learned commentary on Vitruvius, published in Venice in 1558. He probably knew more about Roman theaters than almost anyone else living at the time. He had even built temporary wooden theaters, designed in the ancient manner, in the main room of the town hall of Vicenza and in a still unknown site in Venice. No one else at the time could have brought so much experience to such a commission.

The stage of the Olimpico consists of a long, narrow rectangle raised above the adjoining orchestra. Surrounding the rectangle are tall walls articulated by ancient architectural forms and encrusted with statues of local worthies in ancient garb. Five doors lead off-stage, two at the sides and three in the back wall. From these doors extend in forced perspective remarkable sets of buildings supposed to represent ancient Thebes--although they could also, to recall what was said of Ariosto's city scene of the 1530s, double as Cremona or Ferrara if needed. Designed by Scamozzi, these perspectives fuse to Palladio's archaeological concept of a Roman stage wall a type of perspective scenery that had been current in Italy from at least the second decade of the sixteenth century. (Actors could not walk down the streets of this perspective city, because an actor at the far end of a street would tower over the flanking palazzi.) This kind of scenery, developed out of the interest of Italian painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in one-point perspective, had generally been applied across one entire wall of a space used for a dramatic performance. As such, it formed an illusionistic backdrop that could create the sense of an enveloping cityscape. Here the cityscape has been reduced to five streets that seem only tenuously connected to the all'antica architecture of the stage wall: two separate theatrical traditions in a forced, but very beautiful marriage.

The Olimpico, at least in the parts that are deliberately all'antica, is the fulfillment of more than a century of humanist study of the theaters of the ancients, going back at least to Leon Battista Alberti's de re aedificatoria, the first modern treatise on architecture composed around 1450. Basically, the Olimpico is the only built record we have of the antiquarian interest of humanists in the theatrical architecture of antiquity. The Olimpico is also a dead end. One can only pretend to be an ancient Greek or Roman in modern dress for so long before contemporary needs begin to take precedence.

In 1588 a member of a cadet branch of the Gonzaga family, Vespasiano, carved out for himself the tiny duchy of Sabbioneta, which is close enough to Parma almost to be a modern suburb. Vespasiano laid out the city as an example of the idealized urban planning that characterized Italian architectural thought of the time. Among the buildings he erected in his small capital was a freestanding theater, the earliest one to survive in Italy. (17) Vespasiano's architect was none other than Vincenzo Scamozzi, author of the perspective sets at Vicenza. Located halfway between the city square and the ducal Palazzo del Giardino, the theater is clearly a civic monument detached from the duke's residence, yet close enough to that residence to recall his control. Scamozzi may have had no precedents to which he could turn for the exterior architecture of a modern theater, and so he designed something that looked a bit like a palace, but with fewer stories. The pedimented windows, the niches, and the rather learnedly mannered play of their rhythms, mark this as a building of importance in the city, but they do not quite convey the notion that it is a theater. Scamozzi seems deliberately not to have recalled Roman theater architecture in this building, in that he did not employ superimposed arched orders of the kind found on the exterior of the Theater of Marcellus in Rome (illustrated in Serlio's books) or the Colosseum. In the 1530s that system had been employed in Venice by Jacopo Sansovino on the Libreria di San Marco, a building that Scamozzi knew well because he was about to complete it. One suspects that Scamozzi deliberately avoided superimposed arched orders so that he would not be seen as a follower of Sansovino, whose Libreria Scamozzi criticized for its "incorrect" use of the ancient orders.

Inside the theater at Sabbioneta is a rectangular space typical of the shape of court theaters in Italy throughout the sixteenth century. Most theaters at court had been temporarily erected in the largest room of the palace--invariably a rectangular hall--with a stage at one end and with seats at the other end and along the sides. (18) The great permanent Medici theater in the Uffizi, probably designed by Vasari in the 1560s but only completed and opened for business in the 1580s, had maintained just this form. At Sabbioneta, Scamozzi provided Vespasiano with a certain architectural grandeur. The steps for the audience are curved in a U shape, and at the top of the steps rises a row of monumental columns, among which Vespasiano and his courtiers sat. The seats, reminiscent of the steps in an ancient theater, literally had a novel twist toward the stage, where they curved outward so that the audience seated nearest the stage would have a head-on view of it. This curve allowed them to enjoy, without getting cricks in their necks, the permanent perspectival city scene that Scamozzi erected across the entire stage. A sketch by Scamozzi, now in the Uffizi in Florence, gives us an idea of the appearance of the set. It is not entirely clear how men and women were separately accommodated in this house.

The walls of the theater were decorated with frescoes. At the tops of the walls along three sides are painted balconies containing a painted audience whose members are frozen in eternal responses to the action onstage or in the auditorium, however that might change. On the broad walls that flank the space between the seating and the stage are depictions of scenes of ancient Rome, so that the theater not only provides the illusion of looking at an action in another time and place, but even of being in another place while enjoying the play. The Roman landscapes are framed by painted triumphal arches, through one of which Vespasiano would enter the theater to the acclaim of his subjects already gathered inside.

In 1618 the Duke of Parma, in order to impress the Grand Duke of Tuscany who was planning to pass through Parma on his way to Milan, ordered the construction of an immense theater in the ducal palace. Designed by an architect and hydraulic engineer from Ferrare, Giovanni Battista Aleotti, the theater occupied a huge existing space in the palace that had served as the armory. (19) Although the room is not on the ground floor, but rather on the piano nobile, Aleotti arranged for it to be flooded for mock naval battles. Like the nearby theater in Sabbioneta, which Aleotti must have gone to see, the Farnese theater in Parma has ties to several different theatrical traditions. The seating is on steps arranged in an elongated U, like the seating in a Roman arena rather than a Roman theater. The flat space surrounded by the seats could be used for mock naval battles, or for jousts and tourneys of the sort that Renaissance aristocrats enjoyed by donning fake medieval finery. Toward the stage, on the side walls, are triumphal arches surmounted by equestrian portraits of Farnese dukes. These portraits suggest the tourneys on horseback that could take place in the theater, but they also make clear that one purpose of the theater was dynastic celebration, which indeed had always been the purpose of court theaters. One imagines the the Farnese dukes used them for entrances, emulating Vespasiano Gonzaga at nearby Sabbioneta. At the far end of the theater is a truly modern deep stage, framed by a richly encrusted proscenium arch. Behind that arch was all the stage machinery a scene designer of the period could desire for fantastic effects of flying figures and quick scene shifts from one exotic locale to another. Such dual purpose theaters were sometimes erected as temporary outdoor structures. A particularly spectacular one was built in Bologna a few years later. But they were not common as permanent installations in a ruler's palace.

Perhaps the most remarkable detail of the Teatro Farnese is the wall of two levels of superimposed columns and arches that surrounds the arena seating. The architecture represents an almost line-for-line quotation of the exterior that Andrea Palladio had designed for the Basilica, or town hall, in Vicenza in the middle of the sixteenth century. In the Farnese palace the two rows of real columns and arches were continued by an illusionistic ceiling painting, now lost, into a third level thronged with enthusiastic painted spectators. In the center of the ceiling figures of ancient gods soared through the sky over the heads of the audience below. The illusion that one was outside must have been quite overwhelming. One approached the theater up a grand staircase in the palace and then entered a splendid architectural inversion of interior and exterior that foreshadowed the kinds of illusions of time and place that would occur onstage. Why Aleotti would choose to use the exterior architecture of a building constructed to house the oligarchical government of Vicenza (which was ruled by Venice at this point anyway) as the flame for a ducal arena cure modern proscenium stage is not an easy question to answer. In part the fame of Palladio's Basilica would have made the allusion to outdoor architecture clear. Ancient theaters were outdoor spaces. Modern Italian theaters, for reasons of climate, were indoor spaces, but they often tried to maintain a tie to the al fresco theaters of antiquity by masquerading, or indeed by transvesting. We know from a contemporary print of Vicenza that the space in front of the Basilica was used for processions, tourneys and other types of theatrical events. (20) The citizens of the city watched from Palladio's porticoes, just as the illusionistic audience watched from the top portico painted on the ceiling in Parma.

Shakespeare died, then, before the experimental stage of Italian theater architecture had run its course. The Teatro Farnese, with its roots in Roman arenas, in the theaters constructed for tourneys and in those constructed for performances at court, offered little that would prove useful for commercial theater in the future, although the future of theater would be commercial. At the same time the Farnese theater was built, Venetian aristocrats were busily opening new theaters with boxes for commedia dell'arte, theaters modeled on those built in Venice in 1580. Sadly, we still know all too little about Venetian theaters of the years 1607-1637--the years between the return of comedy to the city and the first public performance of an opera for a paying audience. Someday, one hopes, someone working in the vast Venetian archives will come across the material to tell that crucial part of the story of the development of the modern theater. The Venetian theaters are the origin of the teatro all'italiana, with boxes stacked in several levels around the auditorium. As Italian opera began to spread around Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, this type accompanied the new theatrical art form, much as the sea turtle carries its own house, its shell, to become the most prevalent form of theater architecture in the Western world for at least two centuries.

Bibliographic Note

The study of these theaters and their architecture has been carried out almost exclusively by Italians, although in French we have an important series of essays by an international group of scholars: Le lieu theatral a la renaissance, Jean Jacquot, ed. (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1964). There is almost nothing by English-speaking scholars except the passages in Allardyce Nicoll's The development of the theatre, first published in 1927 and then revised four times. (21) Partly to remedy the lack of a comprehensive study of this material in English, I am in the process of writing a book about the architecture of Italian theaters from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. This article may be seen as something like an outline of part of that book.

Italian scholarship on this subject has been prolific and often of very high quality. The fundamental work on the history of the Italian theater is Alessandro D'Ancona's Origini del teatro italiano of 1891 (Rome: Bardi Editore, 1971, reprint) a remarkable achievement of late nineteenth-century scholarship. Graced with copious quotations of original documents, D'Ancona's work takes the reader from the earliest public performance of a Roman comedy since ancient times, in the courtyard of the ducal palace of Ferrara in 1486, through a range of developments in the seventeenth century. Although the two volumes of the book are out of date in many ways, it is always a pleasure to go back to see what D'Ancona had to say. He almost never lets you down.

In 1968 Simon Towneley Worsthorne issued a second printing of his musicological study, Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), with an updated bibliography that included only one new item on theater architecture, Licisco Magagnato's slim volume, Teatri italiani del Cinquecento (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1954). (Worsthorne missed Le lieu theatrale a la Renaissance.) Since 1968 there has been a flood of new scholarship in Italian. The most accessible to an English-speaking audience is the excellent volume by Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theater from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), an English translation of their Li due Orfei: da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Turin: Einadui, 1975). Pirrotta, one of the most distinguished musicologists of his day, focused on music history in his half of the book. Povoledo, on the other hand, is one of the leading Italian historians of the visual aspects of theater: the house, the scenery, the costumes. Those are the subjects of her part. Povoledo was responsible for the publication of the Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, 9 vols. (Rome: Le Maschere, 1954-62), the marvelous compendium that has formed the basis for the flowering of Italian scholarship on the history of the theater during the post-World War II period. The encyclopedia gathered together, with commendable accuracy for the Italian entries (I hesitate to judge in other fields), what was known about the history of the theater in the mostly Western world at that time. The very scholarship that the encyclopedia encouraged, of course, has made it in some ways out of date.

Of the Italians who have contributed particularly important studies I would like to single out a few. Lodovico Zorzi's Il teatro e la citta (Turin: Einaudi, 1977) consists of three long chapters devoted to the history of the theater in Ferrara, Florence, and Venice, three of the principal centers of theatrical life in early modern times. In his introduction Zorzi wrestles with poststructuralist methods coming out of France, feeling the need to explain them to an Italian audience and to adapt his own work to them--which he proceeds to do in blessedly clear prose. Each of the three cities had a unique theatrical culture, just as Ferrarese, Florentine, and Venetian painting all look very different. Zorzi makes the history of theater an integral part of the history of urbanism and the history of ideas. If one has time for no other book mentioned here, then one should treat oneself to Zorzi (an English translation of which is as much to be desired as it is unlikely). Another particularly noteworthy volume is Siro Ferrone, Attori mercanti corsari: La Commedia dell'Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993). And one needs also point out a quite recent volume, with entries by many experts, that surveys the theater in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Storia del teatro moderno, vol. 1, La nascita del teatro moderno: Cinquecento-Seicento, Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). A particularly useful, up-to-date bibliography can be found in Emmanuelle Henin, Ut pictura theatrum: theatre et peinture de la Renaissance italienne au classicisme francais (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2003).

Much of the work done by Italians has been on theater in specific cities. Fabrizio Cruciani has produced two very fine volumes on Rome: II Teatro del Campidoglio e le feste romane del 1513, con la ricostruzione architettonica del teatro di Arnaldo Bruschi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1968) and Teatro nel Rinascimento: Roma 1450-1550 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983). The first deals with what may have been the earliest purpose-built theater of the Renaissance (albeit a temporary one) for the induction into Roman citizenship of two members of the Medici family, kinsmen of the recently elected Pope Leo X. The second takes us from the early revivals of Roman drama under the patronage of Cardinal Raffaele Riario, a rare devotee of the theater, to the beginning of pay-as-you-enter theater for commedia dell'arte around 1550.

Venice has been the focus of the work of Nicola Mangini, whose volume, I Teatri di Venezia (Milan: Mursia, 1974), was the first serious attempt to write the very complex history of theaters in Venice. His essays, including the crucial "Alle origini del teatro moderno: lo spettacolo pubblico nel Veneto tra Cinquecento e Seicento," were collected in Alle origini del teatro moderno e altri saggi, (Modena: Mucchi, 1989). Venetian theaters are now much more fully covered in Franco Mancini, Maria Teresa Muraro, and Elena Povoledo, I teatri di Venezia e il suo territorio, 2 vols. (Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1995-96), with ample bibliography. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press is a volume by two musicologists, Jonathan and Beth Glixon, with the working title of Inventing the Business of Opera: The Production of Musical Theater in Seventeenth-Century Venice. The Glixons are well-practiced sleuths in the Venetian archives, and so we can look forward to a richly documented account of how Venetian opera houses functioned in the seventeenth century.

For Florence two works in English are available: A. M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici 1539-1637 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964); and James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). There are several recent works on Renaissance theaters in Florence, many being exhibition catalogs produced by the cooperative efforts of Italian scholars: Il luogo teatrale a Firenze, ex. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1975); Sara Mamone, Il teatro nella Firenze medicea (Milan: Mursia, 1981); Il potere e lo spazio: la scena del principe, ex. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1990); Paolo Lucchesini, I teatri di Firenze (Rome: Newton Compton, 1991); I teatri storici della Toscana, vol. 8, Firenze (Venice: Marsilio, 2000); Teatro e spettacolo nella Firenze dei Medici, ex. cat. (Florence: Olschki, 2001). The theaters of other cities are less well studied, and much of the literature thereon is the work of local antiquarians.

Notes

(1.) Fabrizio Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento. Roma 1450-1550 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983), 219-27. The play was given three times, in three different places: in front of the cardinal's palace near Campo de' Fiori, in the Castel Sant'Angelo for Pope Innocent VIII, and in the courtyard of the cardinal's palace, which was shaded with a curtain for the occasion. The version in front of the palace would have been visible to the public, whereas those given inside were for invited audiences.

(2.) Ibid., 449-69.

(3.) Egidio Scoglio, II teatro alla corte estense (Lodi: Biancardi, 1965), 91-93.

(4.) Ercolano Marani and Chiara Perina, Mantova: Le Arti, vol. 3, part 1 (Mantua: Istituto Carlo D'Arco, 1965), 15; Licisco Magagnato, I teatri italiani del cinquecento, ex. cat. (Mantua: Palazzo Ducale, 1980), 47.

(5.) For the recent translation of Serlio, see Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, 2 vols., trans., intro, and commentary by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996-2001). Serlio's theater has been analyzed to excellent effect by John Orrell, Human Stage: English Theater Design, 1567-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 130-49.

(6.) The standard account in English of Florentine theater under the Medici is A. M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici 1539-1637 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), to which one can add the more specialized James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).

(7.) Vasari's accounts of theatrical activities, sprinkled throughout his Lives, have been collected by Thomas A. Pallen, Vasari on Theater (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).

(8.) Ibid., 83; Cruciani, 620-33.

(9.) Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), fig. 180. Andrea Palladio drew a section (ibid., fig. 179) that shows the interior vaulted and thus usable. The church was much altered in the eighteenth century.

(10.) Siro Ferrone, Attori mercanti corsari La Commedia dell'Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993) is a particularly rich study of the phenomenon, on which there is a considerable bibliography in English. Also see Roberto Tessari, "Il mercato delle Maschere," in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, vol. 1, La nascita del teatro moderno Cinquecento-Seicento, Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, eds. (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 119-91.

(11.) Benedetto Croce, I teatri di Napoli dal rinascimento alia fine del secolo decimottavo, Giuseppe Galasso, ed. (Milan: Adelphi, 1992). Reprint of fourth ed. of 1947.

(12.) Under Philip II two public theaters had opened in Madrid in 1580 and 1581. See Charles Davis and J. E. Varey, Los corrales de comedias y los hospitales de Madrid: 1574-1615. Estudio y documentos (Madrid: Tamesis, 1997).

(13.) Thomas Coryat, Coryat's Crudities, 2 vols. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), 386-87, reprint of edition of 1611.

(14.) What we know about the Baldracca comes from two articles by Annamaria Evangelista: "Il teatro dei comici dell'Arte a Firenze," Biblioteca teatrale 23-24 (1979): 70-86, and "Le compagnie dei Comici dell'Arte nel teatrino di Baldracca a Firenze: notizie dagli epistolari (1576-1653)," Quaderni di Teatro no. 24 (1984): 50-72.

(15.) For an account of these theaters, see Eugene J. Johnson, "The Short, Lascivious Lives of Two Venetian Theaters, 1580-1585," Renaissance Quarterly 50, no 3 (2002): 936-68.

(16.) Recent works on the Teatro Olimpico include: J. Thomas Oosting, Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981); Andreas Beyer, Andrea Palladio Teatro Olimpico: Triumpharchitektur fur eine humanistische Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1987), and Stefano Mazzoni, L'Olimpico di Vicenza: Un teatro e la sua "perpetua memoria" (Florence: Le lettere, 1998). Scamozzi's sets have most recently been treated in Valeria Cafa, "Interventi sul Teatro Olimpico," in Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548-1616, ed. Franco Barbieri and Guido Beltrami (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 251-59.

(17.) For the theater in Sabbioneta see Stefano Mazzoni, Il teatro di Sabbioneta, (Florence: Olschki, 1985), and Kurt W. Forster, "Stagecraft and Statecraft: The Architectural Integration of Public Life and Spectacle in Scamozzi's Theater in Sabbioneta," Oppositions 9 (1977): 63-87. Also Stefano Mazzoni, "Vincenzo Scamozzi architetto-scenografo," in Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548-1616, ed. Franco Barbieri and Guido Beltrami (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 71-87; and Valeria Cafa and Sandra Vendramin, "Il Teatro Ducale a Sabbioneta," in ibid., 176-282.

(18.) There are exceptions to this practice: for instance, the theater in Ferrara set up to celebrate the wedding of Alfonso d'Este to Lucrezia Borgia in 1502. There the audience, seated against one long wall, faced a stage arrayed along the other long wall.

(19.) The most extensive treatment of the history of this theater is in Irving Lavin, "Lettres de Parmes (1618, 1627-28) et debuts du theatre Baroque," Le lieu theatral a la renaissance, Jean Jacquot, ed. (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, 1964), 107-58. The entire text was republished in English in "All the world's a stage ...": Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Witsch and Susan Scott Munshower, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 2: 518-79.

(20.) Illustrated in Howard Burns et al., Andrea Palladio, 1508-1580: The Portico and the Farmyard (London: Arts Council of Great Britain: 1975), cat. 28.

(21.) Allardyce Nicholl, The development of the theatre, 5th rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1967; orig. ed. London: Harrap, 1927). Another general work in English, Margarete Baur-Heinhold, The Baroque Theatre: A Cultural History of the 17th and 18th Centuries, trans. Mary Whitall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967) has nice illustrations but an untrustworthy text.