The Romantic Resurrection of Callot and the Commedia dell'arte

Two books have played an important role in communicating commedia dell’arte history and tradition through text and image: Masques et bouffons (comédie italienne) (1860) by Maurice Sand and La comédie italienne: l’improvisation, les canevas, vies, caractères, portraits, masques des illustres personnages de la commedia dell’arte (1924) by Pierre-Louis Duchartre. Both also utilized historiography influenced by Jules Michelet, where writing history involved exhuming, reanimating, and restoring the past by integrating expressive personal narrative and commentary about the encounter. I demonstrate the distortion of information put forth by these amateur collectors qua historians, and show how other modern figures such as Edward Gordon Craig raised the stakes of reviving Callot and the commedia dell’arte tradition for the theatre for the twentieth century.