The Italian Mountebank and the Commedia dell'Arte
The Italian mountebank of the early modern period was a figure of great power and fascination, both to Italians themselves and to English audiences via Thomas Coryate's documentary account and Ben Jonson's fictional portrayal of Scoto of Mantua in Volpone. Italian and Spanish antitheatrical clerics, prompted by San Carlo Borromeo to extend Counter-Reformation cultural critiques to the increasingly successful commedia dell'arte, were quick to identify the mountebank—an itinerant doctor/pharmacist who typically enticed potential patrons with an array of musical and theatrical entertainments—with the professional actor, who also performed for money in Italian piazzas. Without the moral animus of the post-Tridentine critics, late twentieth-century theatre historians have reassociated the mountebank and the actor, seeing in the former's capacity to sell theatrical entertainment anywhere and anytime (independent of the religious or civic festival) a harbinger of the professional commedia dell'arte, which had to develop means of economic self-support that were independent of traditional courtly patronage. Arte actors seem to have been aware of their perceived kinship with itinerant quacks; at the turn of the century, Giovanni Gabrielli performed a routine involving trunks and vases of the kind used by mountebanks, his own sons turning out to be the “vases.” But culturally ambitious actor-writers, who in the early seventeenth century began to counter antitheatrical attacks with apologies for the moral integrity and the technical sophistication of the new theatre, sharply differentiated themselves from the charlatans. If the conventionality of their moral defenses often hindered them from saying what comedy was, they could at least say what it was not, and it was not quackery.