Pastoral Tragicomedy and The Tempest

As Richard Andrews argues in this volume, the functional meaning of ‘source’ needs to be redefined for an early modern theatre that, across geolinguistic borders, worked in modular, combinatory and collaborative ways. In the ‘modular’ world of pan-European theatre, the appearance of a ‘theatergram’¹ (formulaic theatrical unit) in print or manuscript should be seen as a terminus ante quem, the tip of an iceberg connected to a rich, antecedent oral and collaborative theatrical practice. In favouring the descriptive phrase ‘Italian improvised theatre’ over the eighteenth-century term ‘commedia dell’arte’, Andrews demonstrates that the improvising of actors and the writing of playwrights all reflect an artisanal, combinatory practice of ‘composition’, a term used to describe both playwriting and the stage improvisations of commedia dell’arte actors. In other words, the relationship between scripts and scenarios was very fluid, and playwrights as well as actors constructed plays from modules of plot, situation, character, character structures, topoi, and speech-forms.