Playwright
The 17 theatrical works that have survived from a total of perhaps 21 or 23 works comprise 14 comedies, one tragicomedy, one tragedy and one liturgical drama.
Although they belong to the lesser-known tradition of the commedia erudita rather than the commedia dell'arte - which means they were written out as entire scripts instead of being improvised from a scenario - della Porta's comedies are eminently performable. While there are obvious similarities between some of the characters in della Porta's comedies and the masks of the commedia dell'arte, it should be borne in mind that the characters of the commedia erudita are uniquely created by the text in which they appear, unlike the masks, which remain constant from one scenario to another. Indeed, the masks of the improvised theatre evolved as stylised versions of recurring character types in the written comedies. By the time Carlo Goldoni started writing new scripts in the 18th century, the "improvised" comedy had become tired and predictable.
Read more about this topic: Giambattista Della Porta
Famous quotes containing the word playwright:
“If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“A playwright ... is ... the litmus paper of the arts. He’s got to be, because if he isn’t working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he’s great.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)