Nineteenth-century efforts to trace the origins of Italian early modern professional theater back to ancient Roman improvisatory farce have been discredited. In fact, scholars have largely abandoned the search for the origins of the commedia dell’arte, except to note, with almost talismanic repetition, a kind of origin marked by a 1545 contract signed by the mysterious Ser Maphio and a group of seven other actors from Padua, Treviso, and Venice. One intuitively senses that the 1545 contract was not the only one of its kind, and that in general it was the rich theatrical and performance culture of Venice, which had already seen semiprofessional companies led by Ruzante and others, that was the crucible of the commedia dell’arte.

Peter Jordan is the first scholar to take up the origin challenge in years, and he rises nicely to the challenge in his important, interesting, and persuasive book. Jordan makes a convincing case that the Compagnie delle Calze, groups of young Venetian patrician men given to producing various kinds of entertainments including tournaments, pageants, regattas, feasts, and plays, may be a crucial missing link. The compagnie had vital connections with the Ferrraran and Mantuan courts, important patrons of scripted and improvised theaters, respectively; regularly employed Ruzante himself and famous buffoni, such as Zuan Polo; and produced many plays written by Plautus, thus disseminating the “theatergrams” of ancient new comedy for early modern adaptation. Although by the secondo Cinquecento the prestige of the compagnie had somewhat waned, Jordan cogently links them to the Gelosi troupe in the context of Henry III’s 1574 visit to Venice.

The most powerful argument, however, for the compagnie as a deep historical source for the theater of the quintessentially Venetian Pantalone and Zanni, however, is Jordan’s carefully argued analysis of Venetian society as a “gerontocracy”: a society dominated by old men who carefully controlled the marriage market and created, for many of their sons, extended adolescences that were frustrating even to the point of provoking violence. Whereas English dramatists seemed most interested in the identity confusions and plot complications of ancient Roman comedies such as the Menaechmi (e.g., Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night), it was the generational conflict between senex and iuvens that fired the imagination of the Venetians, because it was close to the bone. The outrageous sexual desire of Pantalone shapes the maschera’s pathos more centrally than mercantile avariciousness — according to Jordan, not a defining trait of Pantalone until the age of Goldoni. (Still, if aged Venetian patricians were carefully counting the dinari of their dowry accounts, miserliness might easily be aligned with Pantalone as “sexual predator.”) The young patricians of the compagnie, excluded from power, formed alliances with dispossessed professional actors and transformed the Venetian magnifico into Pantalone, whose sexual hubris must needs be humiliated by the comic law of youth supremacy. By rightly taking the Venetian social context so seriously, Jordan restores a sense of both power and darkness to the old man, and makes us feel the sense of rage and even violence that could simmer behind the creation of the maschera. Jordan’s argument that Pantalone results from young men imitating old men imitating young men is both brilliant and wonderfully useable on the stage, as he — an accomplished actor — surely knows. If Shakespeare’s Pantalone, in the flaccid and impotent figure of Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew, can be knocked over with the brush of a hand, Venetian old men are a force to be reckoned with: they may even need to be killed, as the young, sex-starved, famished Bilora does to the old man Andronico, who has possessed his wife in Ruzante’s shocking play. Jordan’s detailed social history also prepares us beautifully for his close reading of the single most important (if neglected) Pantalone text of the Renaissance, the Capricci et nuove fantasie alla Venetiana di Pantalone de’Bisognosi (1601).

The early chapter on theories of comedy, some of them flat out contradicting each other, is rushed and not completely satisfying, but is easily detachable from the rest of this important, engaging book, which makes a vital contribution to commedia dell’arte studies.