Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Transnational Performers: Expanding the Visual Record

This chapter focuses on methodologies for identifying and interpreting images of theatrical interest. Its point of reference is two case studies, considering un(der)researched Netherlandish images relating to English and Italian itinerant performers in early modern Europe. Although specialists studying evidence relating to early modern drama have a wide range of different documents and artefacts at their disposal, overwhelmingly, they focus on textual sources. This approach becomes challenging in the context of early modern itinerant performances associated with the Italian commedia dell’arte in Mediterranean Europe or English comedians in the Baltic and German-speaking regions. Relying heavily on improvisation, brief scenarios, clowning and spectacle, their troupes left few fully recorded dramatic texts. The commedia dell’arte has inspired an immensely rich iconography; despite their sparse visual record, the perceived “iconographical blackout” of the English troupes urgently requires revision. Even so, most secondary literature draws on the same limited pool of images relating to these transnational performers, only exceptionally adding new visual sources or approaches to them. Research into methodologies for identifying and analysing the bulk of the hugely informative iconographic record, and for integrating these findings into mainstream theatre-historical enquiries, remains neglected. Why? • theatre history is a text-based discipline: many specialists have little or no art-historical training or knowledge. • theatre-related images are undervalued and under-researched by an art-historical discipline which promotes artistic prestige, monetary value and portability /ease of resale at the expense of documentary importance • many key images remain unidentified or inaccessible; in private ownership, lost or destroyed. • These images are never photographic “snap shots”(!); developing effective methodologies for interpreting them with respect to performative events is challenging and requires specialist methodologies.