professional
actors, descended partly from the mystery and the miracle-playing
artisans of the Middle Ages, partly from the strolling players,
equilibrists, jugglers, and jesters. Professional Italian actors,
players of the _commedia dell'arte_, who in the sixteenth century spread
their gay and varied art all over Europe, also supplied English players
with that touch of professional technique in which their somewhat
vacillating and half-amateurish arts were still wanting.

While, however, as far as France is concerned, the Italian influence
must strike everybody who studies the stage history of the country, the
evidence of a fertilization of English scenic art by the commedia dell'
arte is scanty. Yet I think it is sufficient to deserve more attention
than has hitherto been bestowed upon it.

In any case there is sufficient evidence to prove that Italian
professional actors penetrated into England and exercised their art
there.

In January, 1577, an Italian comedian came to London with his company.
The English called him Drousiano, but his real name was Drousiano
Martinelli, the same who, with his brother Tristano, visited the court
of Philip II, and there is no reason to suppose that he was either the
first or the last of his countrymen who tried to carry off English gold
from merry London. The typical Italian masks are quite well known to the
authors of that period. Thus Thomas Heywood mentions all these doctors,
zanies, pantaloons, and harlequins, in which the French, and still more
the Italians, distinguished themselves. In Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_, and
in Ben Jonson's _The Case is Altered_, mention is made of the Italian
improvised comedy, and a few of the well-known types of character in the
dramatic literature of the time bear distinct traces of having been
influenced by Italian masks, _e.g._, Ralph Roister Doister in Udall's
comedy of that name; as well as the splendid Captain Bobadill and his no
less amusing companion, Captain Tucca, in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his
Humour_ and _The Poetaster_, all of which are reproductions of the
typical _capitano_.

However, it is not these literary testimonies that I consider the most
striking evidence of the influence of Italian professional technique on
English professional actors. It is a remarkable discovery made by the
highly esteemed Shakespearean archaeologist, Edmund Malone, about a
century ago, in Dulwich College, that mine of ancient English dramatic
researc