the timboucher experience

Excerpted from the really-fascinating book by John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook, which I borrowed from the Enoch Pratt Free Library today.

Just before this, they’re talking about how the commedia performances arose out of the crowded and noisy market-place. They’re basically talking about the yelling merchant meets the carnival barker meets the quack doctor of traveling medicine shows - which, as a sidenote, were not only popular in the 1800’s of American history, but also in Medieval Europe!

[...] such a figure is a charlatan, otherwise known in English as a mountebank, with Italian cousins known variously as cirumadori and ciarlatani as well as montimbanchi. A banco is a trestle stage, which the charlatan would mount … and on and off which his acrobatic assistants could leap up in their capacity as saltimbanchi (saltimbanques in French). The charlatan himself has antecedents: he is a shaman, an astrologer, almost a magus whose incantation puts the audience into a kind of trance from which only the waving of money can release them.

Antonio Fava in his schools teaches that the charlatan can be of seven kinds:

1. The medicinal quack selling patent cure-alls [...]
2. The mystical pedlar of exotica, supposedly from the Far East
3. The inventor with an amazing patent device
4. The religious fanatic declaring ‘the end of the world is nigh’
5. The sex-monger offering forbidden pleasures
6. The magician and illusionist
7. The pathetic type, a virtual beggar but with a specialism, as in The Beggar’s Opera

All such types wandered from country fair to city Carnival throughout the sixteenth century, setting up wherever they could draw a crowd that might escape the attention of civil or ecclesiastical officers.

From one of my favorite etymology sites comes this nice summation of the term mountebank:

“a doctor that mounts a bench in the market, and boasts his infallible remedies and cures” [Johnson], 1577, from It. montambanco, contraction of monta in banco “quack, juggler,” lit. “mount on bench” (to be seen by crowd), from monta, imperative of montare “to mount” + banco, var. of banca “bench.”

Love to have finally found the connection to the word “samtimbanque” which has been haunting my brain for at least ten years since I first saw Picasso’s paintings in art history class.

I’ve only really leafed through it casually so far, but Rudlin’s book also implies that some of the “masks” or archetypal personas or character-types on the commedia actually come (at least in part) from imitating specific animals. There’s even a direct line he draws by way of quotation of another author, suggesting that humans imitated animals while hunting them. Connects neatly with some of what I wrote about humans following seasonal migration patterns of animal herds, and that a great deal of Medieval European cultural traits can be traced back to those migrators then settling into territorialized pastures… Saxon law seems to be a good way to research elements of that more specifically, especially as compared to something like Bedouin culture and traditions of the arch-nomads so to speak….

Also found a 1927 book I’d like to check out called Hawkers & Walkers in Early America, which seems to be about some American equivalents to the commedia described above:

This volume tells the tale of strolling peddlers, preachers, lawyers, doctors, players and others, from the beginning to the Civil War. Contents: Yankee peddler; rise of the Yankee peddler; Yankee notions; peddlers in little things; peddlers and big business; decline of Yankee peddling; workmen of the road; healing and justice take to the highway; artist as an itinerant; peddlers of the word; terpsichore perambulant; Puritan beings to smile; circus and theater start on tour; queer customers; local vendors and street cries; commercial wanderers of waterways; carriers of good and the mail. Illustrated throughout.

Traveling weirdos - it sounds like they’re saying - are what made America, in no small measure, historically what she is today.

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