Commedia Dell'Arte

About the Book

This is an Authors Guild/BIP title. Please use Authors Guild/BIP specs. Author's Bio: Use author's bio. Description: The Commedia dell'arte, which arose in the 16th century, was a form of professional improvised theatre. It gave the world such comic figures (masks) as Harlequin, Pulcinella, Pierrot, Dottore, and other stock characters. Its only remaining textual sources are plot outlines, called scenarios. This book summarizes, in English, virtually all the literature on the commedia dell'arte through 1987.

"This is a work of exceptional value, which can certainly be read for pleasure in addition to being used for study or reference, given its precision, its breadth of coverage, an the smooth flow of its abstracts."

—Letters dell'Italia

About the Author

Thomas F. Heck (Ph.D., Yale, 1970) is a humanist-scholar of broad interests, encompassing music (the guitar), theatre (the present book on the Commedia Dell'Arte), and the visual arts. His latest book, Picturing Performance, leads the reader into new realms of iconographic research.