Theatre and Print Culture in the Manner of Jacques Callot

This book aims to shuffle some long-standing attitudes about the relationship between theatre and print culture. Examining the influential print series Balli di Sfessania di Jacomo Callot, a suite of 24 prints designed and etched by Jacques Callot in 1621–1622, this book highlights the influence of visual culture on commedia dell’arte historiography and its performance traditions since the early seventeenth century. Callot’s ability to captivate viewers through scale, dynamic figures, and innovative spatial schemes has manifested an impassioned gaze by many admirers.Through acts of collecting, adulation, and replication, prints from the Balli di Sfessania have been sourced and re-sourced, excavated and mined, copied and misread, over time as visual records of the past. With a focus on one image group as a case study for the trans-media circulation of images over four hundred years, scholars will find new ways to engage with prints wielding highly impressionable status and reproducibility.

About the Author

Kyna Hamill is the Director of the College of Arts and Sciences Core Curriculum at Boston University. She specializes in Baroque theatricality, theatre and visual culture, and the commedia dell’arte tradition. She has published articles on props, print culture, telescopes, staged violence, and the monstrous in the 17th century. She edited They Fight: Classical to Contemporary Stage Fight Scenes , a collection of stage combat scenes, with special attention paid to diverse weaponry and scenes for women. Hamill’s research on the origins of the song “Jingle Bells” was covered in The Guardian in 2017.