Orality and literacy in the commedia dell'arte and the Shakespearean clown

Improvisation in the Italian commedia dell'arte and in the Shakespearean clown offers an especially interesting and controversial locus of oral-literate interaction, and will be our chief object of scrutiny. I am less interested in compiling a detailed list of oral characteristics in these two areas--so long as the presence of residual orality can be demonstrated--than I am in exploring the cultural valences of orality and literacy. The relationship between orality and literacy offers the most generative point of comparison between the two professional theaters, about which surprisingly few comparative studies have been made.1 If comparative study of Renaissance drama has largely abandoned traditional and positivistic source and influence mapping, the negotiation of orality and literacy in theaters of independent yet parallel development provides an important cultural homology: the most fruitful kind of topic for comparative inquiry.Not