What is Commedia dell’Arte Today? A Review Essay

This essay reviews seven recent volumes on the commedia dell'arte: Christopher B. Balme, Piermario Vescovo, and Daniele Vianello's edited volume Commedia dell’Arte in Context (2018); Judith Chaffee and Oliver Crick's edited The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte (2014); Erith Jaffe-Berg's Commedia dell’ Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping ‘Others’ (2016); Andrea Fabiano's La Comédie-Italienne de Paris et Carlo Goldoni: De la commedia dell’arte à l’opéra-comique, une dramaturgie de l'hybridation au XVIIIe siècle (2018); Emily Wilbourne's Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte (2016); Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Befriending the Commedia dell’arte of Flaminio Scala: The Comic Scenarios (2014); and Markus Kupferblum's Die geburt der neugier aus dem geist der revolution. Die commedia dell’arte als politisches volkstheater (2013)