THE COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE AND ENGLISH DRAMA IN THE SIXTEENTH AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

The development of the theatre on the Continent and in England in the sixteenth century is shrouded in obscurity, with only an occasional ray of light peeping into the shadows from a Court record, a fragment of correspondence, or a play. To complicate matters further, dramatic activities are not always easy to distinguish from religious, social, and courtly entertainments, and the actors themselves seem to have been drawn just as frequently for these entertainments from the ranks of amateurs as they were from troupes of professional actors« Moreover, professional actors seem to have been just as concerned with developing their skills in juggling, tumbling, and dancing as they were with exploiting those skills that pertain more directly to playing, and they perhaps found more frequent occasion to use their athletic than their histrionic prowess. When we then tiy to become more selective in our investigation of sixteenth-century drama by confining our research to a specialized area of Continental drama and attempting to link it with equally obscure developments in England, these shadows grow deeper and the rays of light decrease in number.