The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell'Arte: Actor Training, Improvisation, and the Poetics of Survival

Winner, 2007 University & College Designers Association Design AwardNobody says Shakespeare is dead, Antonio Fava tells us, but Commedia, they say, is dead. Why? Because clearly, he goes on, we have Shakespeare's texts, but nobody knows what to do with the improvisation that is the basis of the Commedia dell'Arte, despite massive documentation. This book by Fava, one of the few living master teachers of Commedia dell'Arte, is the first aesthetic and methodological study of the traditional I...