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Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Playhouse: Il Teatro Dei Comici, Mantova
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
The third quarter of the seventeenth century brought considerable changes in the social composition of theatre audiences in Italy. Gone was the exclusiveness of the ducal and academy theatres whose audiences of royalty and nobility attended by invitation only. These were replaced by an audience of a growing bourgeoisie with an ability to pay. As soon as this audience appeared entrepreneurs, quick to recognize the possibilities, opened public playhouses. Theatrical activities became a commercial rather than an artistic, intellectual or political enterprise. Although some vestiges of the past, such as the royal box for important dignitaries, were retained, public theatres soon assumed a more democratic aspect, patronized by audiences who had earned the right to attend by means of personal enterprise rather than by accident or privilege of birth. Foremost in this phenomenon was the city of Venice whose theatrical activities soon became the model. Mercantile families like the Tron, Grimani, Giustinian and Vendramini opened the first public playhouses in the 1630s. Audiences of courtiers and courtesans, Dukes and Doges, Princes and panderers, merchants and magistrates soon became involved in a social mix that would have amazed and scandalised the more formal audiences of earlier times.
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References
Notes
1 For the most recent and most comprehensive account of the early theatrical entrepreneurs in Venice see Mangini, Nicola, “II seicento,” I Teatri di Venezia (Milano, 1974), 29–89Google Scholar.
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15 Archivio Gonzaga, Schede Davari, busta 14.
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20 A note in the Schede Davari (busta 14) indicates that Motta at one time paid the “usual 12 pistole” for a box in the public Teatro Fedeli which he had built.
21 Adamei, p. 77.
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25 A version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research, Charleston, S.C., 21 November 1986.