International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

The Theatre Collection as a Source of Information

for the English Language Premiere of A Comedy of Betrothal (1550) by Leone de' Sommi, Ebreo

Alfred S. Golding (Columbus, Ohio)

17. Internationaler SIBMAS-Kongreß / 17ème Congrès International de la SIBMAS / 17th International SIBMAS Congress, 1.-9. September 1988, Mannheim

Bericht / Actes / Documentation. Red.: Liselotte Homering. Mannheim : Städtisches Reiß-Museum, 1990. pp. 120-121

As both a theoretician and a practical man of the theatre I have long been aware of the importance of materials found in the theatre collection for the artist as well as the scholar of the theatre. Perhaps the most frequent use of the theatre collection by the dramaturg, the regisseur and the designer is to discover, particularly from verbal, pictorial and sometimes from sound recordings what earlier productions were like. Such knowledge has value to the creative artist because it provides an awareness of earlier production concepts and thereby lays a foundation upon which the artist's own approach can be based. This purpose has recently been enhanced by the technique of videotape recording of the actual stage production. Indeed, so important has the videotaping of the live theatre performance become that sometimes the process of recording is instigated by the collection itself, so that the record of an otherwise ephemeral event may be preserved in its archives.

All of us here are familiar with the other materials that can be put at the disposal of the theatre artist who wishes to create a revival of an earlier production - the critical reviews, the scene and costume sketches, the prompt books, the photographs and the like. But what can the theatre collection contribute to the process of bringing a play to life that has been lost for over three hundred years - moreover, a play whose premiere performance date and circumstances can only be guessed at?

This was the question that I asked myself when I resolved to bring to the stage a hitherto unknown play by the great Italian Renaissance director and theoretician, Leone de' Sommi, Ebreo. All of us know his Quattro Dialoghi in Materia di Rappresentazione Sceniche. But many of us are not aware that he was a playwright of some distinction who wrote in Italian for the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua and in Hebrew for his own Jewish community in that vibrant Renaissance city. Unfortunately, most of his works were lost in the great fire that swept the Turin Library in 1904, where most of his manuscripts had been assembled and catalogued. Of his long plays three only have survived for us: the Irifile, the Tre Sorelle and variant copies of his Hebrew play, Tsahoth B'dihutha d'Kiddushin.

The reconstruction of these variant versions of A Comedy of Betrothal, as its Hebrew title signifies in English, and its attribution to Leone de' Sommi is an interesting story in itself. For brevity let me only state here that this work was done by the late J. Hayyim Schirmann, a German-Jewish scholar and refugee from Naziism, originally as part of a doctoral dissertation at the University of Göttingen, and later continued as a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His "detective work" in recognizing de' Sommi as the play's author and in reconstituting the original play from four manuscripts, I have described at some length in my recently published translation of the play with scholarly introduction and annotations.1 Suffice it to say that Schirmann made extensive use of these literary remnants fortunately housed in other Judaica collections in Italy and the United States. It should also be noted that, based upon evidence both internal and external to the text, he believed it to be an early work of the author, written in 1550 when de' Sommi was about twenty-five years old, and some fifteen years before the Four Dialogues on the Art of Staging Plays was composed.

But in mounting my English translation of this first Hebrew play in the Renaissance style of playmaking upon the boards, what information concerning earlier performance could I derive from a theatre collection when its origins were so murky? The answer to this question lies in our need to understand the genre of A Comedy of Betrothal and its theme. It was, manifestly, in the form of a commedia erudita, with its substance adapted to the function of a Purimspiel - a play in the carnival spirit of the Purim holiday that celebrates the salvation of Persian Jewry from genocide, as narrated in the biblical Book of EstherAs produced by de' Sommi for the Mantuan Jewish community's Purim celebration, the Hebrew play reflected both in its theme and structure the optimistic Renaissance vision, in which Italian Jewry shared, of a society that could know itself and in so doing, under God, then redeem itself. The playwright, therefore, makes use of a comic spirit to criticize gently through laughter those in the community that had allowed greed to displace traditional ethical values concerning the weak and the helpless. For this reason he set his scene in the golden age of the Talmud, in Sidon on the borders of Israel. Yet the play's characters, dress and way of life is of his own time and place: sixteenth century Mantua in the Piedmont of northern Italy (Shakespeare also set his Comedy of Errors, which A Comedy of Betrothal formally resembles, in ancient Ephesus, despite the fact that his dramatis personae wore the clothing and had the manners of Elizabethans). This perception provides a clue for the solution of our problem. I, as regisseur, and with my designer colleagues, was able to comb the theatre collection's archives and to identify documents particularly those of a pictorial kind that could provide information pertaining to the scenery, costume and acting styles of the sixteenth century in northern Italy. The Theatre Research Institute of Ohio State University was particularly well stocked with such materials in microform reproduction, particularly designs for scenery in the manner of Bramante, Peruzzi and Serlio. As with the scenery, costumes typical of the early and mid-sixteenth century were taken from microfilm reproductions of street dress of that time and place, as these have been preserved in hand water-colored Trachtenbücher of the period.

With respect to reconstructing the style of acting and of the stage movement of the period, however; the problem of utilizing the theatre collection as an information source becomes more difficult, but not insurmountable providing that the theatre artist knows what to look for. My earlier research had fortunately turned up important verbal and iconographic documentation in this area, and the results of this research I had published as Classicistic Acting.2 This information about the classicistic acting of the period, together with particular drawings of Italian performers of Leone's time - as these may be found in pictures of the commedia erudita and the commedia dell 'arte - enabled me to recreate the acting manner of Leone for my play. The result of my efforts may be seen in the videotape of the performance of 1 March 1988 at Temple Israel in Columbus, Ohio, whose theatre resembled the great hall of the Teatro Farnese at Parma. From this videotaped record we can recognize the resemblance to the historic scenery, costuming and acting ofthe period of Leone - designs which served as springboard for my own creative impulses.

In itself, therefore, the videotaped performance of this revival of A Comedy of Betrothal performed for the first time in English with attention to the historicity of the acting style as well as of the scene and costume investiture, is both evidence and confirmation of the value of the theatre collection in helping the theatre artist recreate historic drama on stage - even of those plays of whose early performances we have scant information.

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