Comédie Italienne
Name given by the French to the institutionalized presence of an Italian theatre company in Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin with the title had methodological implications—of performing in Italian, and improvising rather than learning a script—and stylistic ones associated with liveliness, physicality, and populist subversive mockery. By the end of its history, however, the Comédie Italienne had merged, in most respects, with native French theatre. Italian actors began visiting France as early as the 1570s, Paris being a more metropolitan venue than their own divided peninsula could provide. The most prestigious were the object of royal invitations, stemming partly from successive Florentine queens of France, ... ...
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