Five kinds mouse-traps

Images, voice and imagination in the mises en abyme of the baroque theatre

Abstract

The essay analyzes the forms of mise en abyme and dumb-show adopted in different culture of European theatre in the course of the first part of the seventeenth century. Discusses the following texts and performances: Hamlet, A midsummer night’s dream, Pericles, Prince of Tyre of Shakespeare; El Retablo de las Maravillas of Cervantes; Li due Covielli and Fontana di Trevi of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Inside of these works, the analysis concerns especially the phenomena of relations between evocative force of the word and artifice of the visual scene.