The Commedia dell´arte in the German Lands

The present research centred an the discovery and interpretation of complementary archive material, texts as well as illustrations, regarding the reception of the Commedia dell`arte in the German speaking countries, with a special emphasis an Bavaria, Boemia and Austria. The older research an the Commedia dell`arte, the sources that still await proper documentation and the up to now unexplored text collections has been analyzed by the present project, so as to contribute to a better knowledge of the history of the Commedia dell`arte in general, as well as to give new insight into reception north of the Alps. The awareness of the professional Italian improvisation comedy produced multiple cultural phenomena manifesting themselves in various forms: the documentation of the performances of Commedia dell`arte plays, the documentation of the companies` contracts and - more important still - the influence of its motifs and characters an German literature, the integration of elements of the Commedia dell`arte in the opera and court festivities and in the visual arts from frescoes to china figurines. After the systematic overview of the material and the so-far published results, the project`s most important results lie in the preparation`of a miscellanea with articles by the project leader and specialized colleagues in literary and cultural studies. This volume will be published in Italian in the next months.