Towards a paradigm of the polylingual performance, linguistic and metalinguistic functioning in the Commedia dell'Arte

grantor: University of TorontoThe verbal text of an Italian Commedia dell'Arte performance typically consisted of speeches improvised by the actors in the dialects of the regions of origin of its stock characters. Since the performances were generally aimed at audiences familiar with no more than one or two dialects or languages, commedia troupes had to rely on a non-verbal mechanism for making their "polylingual" theatre intelligible not only to Italian audiences but to the other European audiences for whom they performed. Communication of verbal meaning was achieved by means of an ostensive, gesturally and phonically expressive mode of speaking capable of making itself immediately clear. My purpose in this thesis is to give a systematic account of this mechanism, in so far as it can be gleaned from contemporary manuals and critical accounts of commedia performances, and to develop from that empirical base a formal model for the semantic structure of the multilingual theatrical speech that it sustains. In constructing this paradigm, I plan to refer to the work of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commedia players, the work of the ' Comédiens Italiens' in France, and to the work of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793). In addition, I will draw key analytical concepts from Dario Fo's work on phonic communication in the commedia tradition. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of language and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin's theory of 'dialogism' and 'heteroglossia' will further inform the thesis and provide the theoretical and methodological approach for this work.Ph.D