Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: No place for Harlequin

For many modern as well as contemporary critics, the ballet d'action is overshadowed by a much greater, more influential, and in the end longer-lasting form of theatre specialising in mime: the Commedia dell'arte. It is often assumed that the Commedia was such an immense phenomenon, prominent all over Europe for most of the early modern period, that other forms of theatre which shared some of its features must, naturally, have been inspired by it. Sometimes the notion of inspiration is much more specific, and what is meant is that the ballet d'action borrowed or ‘quoted’ from the movement vocabulary, the costumes, or the characters of the Commedia. This is a quantitative approach which leaves unanswered the question of qualitative differences. It is quite possible that the ballet d'action was stimulated directly by the Commedia, but that it quickly became a qualitatively different kind of theatre, with wholly different defining principles and objectives. In other words, influence does not necessarily entail similarity. If it were otherwise, there would be no real change.