NOTE - My curiosity regarding this statement does not come from personal professional investment. I am not a teacher of commedia dell’arte or a practitioner.

NOTE ON THE USE IN THIS PRODUCTION - Apparently, according to a later tweet from Emma Jude Harris, the mask was not a commedia mask.

WIDER USE - My interest here was not, anyway, the specific production. It was the wider statement that commedia is a racist art form (with ‘fucking commedia masks’). I understood from this that the very use of a commedia mask was in itself offensive, in the way that blackface would be offensive. I further assume that this means that the characters of commedia must be understood to represent Jewish people in a derogatory way.

STOCK CHARACTERS - (Master, Servant, Lovers) were by default Christian. No academic or teacher I know has argued otherwise. Note on Pantalone later.

JEWISH AND OTHER ‘OUTSIDERS’ IN COMMEDIA - My brief research has lead me to seeing a picture of a Jewish Commedia mask - which I had never seen or knew to exist, though i’m not massively surprised - most students don’t work with outsiders, except the Strega. (I studied Commedia it practically full time for a month in Italy -1999). The writer of book where this Jewish mask was referenced noted that this was the only picture of a definitively Jewish mask that she knew, and this is her area of expertise. I won’t reproduce it here - you can find it if you want. It’s explicit. But the explicitness of the steretype (plus specific costume - the yellow circle & carrying the Tanakh) does highlight how the Early Modern Christian audience was 100% comfortable with explicit comedic charicatures, and, in the case of Jewish people, offensive anti-semitism. Which does, however, make it harder to imagine that commedia characters are generally representing Jewish people.

THE COMMEDIA NOSE - The nose may appear to a modern audience as an anti-semitic trope. And this should be taken into account. But at the same time, we should be careful not to read the nose as Jewish in a way that might, in itself, be antisemitic. If we look at ancient Roman masks, we can see similar features - 200 years before the Judao-Christian split of around AD70.

Roman masks, circa 200 BC. Such as used in the comedies of Plautus :

GROWTH OF ANTISEMITISM? - It is of course, possible that the noses of the masks could come to be seen / used as Jewish. But I would emphasise that this has never to my knowledge been suggested by any teachers of commedia - most of whom emphasise the Christianess.

OUTSIDER STATUS - As Erith Jaffe-Berg beautifully expounds in Commedia and the Mediterranean, the travelling players of commedia are always foreign, always outsiders. It is easy to look back on these companies and impose our ideas of being actors now - an aspirational profession. Not so in the 16th/17th centuries. They were sometimes beaten out of town (especially if they were politically offensive), they looked for protection when travelling, the lead actor of the famous Gelosi company had been captured and enslaved for 7 years, the women (commedia famously introduces women onto the european stage) would be considered sexually available. The reformation/counter-reformation is raging. In England, Puritanism would label travelling players ‘vagabond’ - technically a crime punishable by death. In such a climate, it’s easy to forget the dangers that all commedia actors were living under. None of this is - of course - to say that the Christian commedia companies would not be comfortably anti-semitic. It is just to note that they are not, themselves, on solid ground. Of course, in travelling to England, they would be at risk of the extreme anti-catholic sentiment there. Especially during the Jacobean period.

POLITICAL SUBVERSION SIDE NOTE - Commedia has a history of political subversion. Dario Fo speaks of this brilliantly - he is probably the most famous modern practitioner (he and his wife/collaborator Franca Rame died in 2016/13 respectively). Fo’s anti-fascist sentiment was explicit enough to elicit bomb threats to performances and a extremely brutal kidnapping and attack on Franca Rame by the Milanese far right police in 1973. None of this is to say that commedia could not be racist and antisemitic (we know that antisemitism is regarded as the achilles heel of leftist morality). But it does make me feel that the form these artists worked from at least warrants some analysis before we dismiss it out of hand.

JEWISH PLAYERS - There is also complexity about where and when the actors played. In Mantua, specifically, there was a significant Jewish Theatre scene - where the Jewish company played alongside the commedia company. It has even been argued that this scene was the birthplace of much Jewish expertise in the Performing Arts. A complex situation but a fascinating one. Jaffe-Berg seems to suggest that the Jewish performers may have collaborated with the Christians in ways that would have been impossible in most other trades. It is undeniable that there are some Jewish artists there who made significant contribution to the development of early modern theatre (particularly Leone de Sommi, who wrote the first practical guide to theatre directing).

PANTALONE - Commedia is made of stock characters - the foolish master, the clever servant, the young lovers - and there is no doubt that they were, by default, Christian (partly because conversion to or from Christianity from or to Islam is often a story point). But the main character who is considered potentially Jewish is the Venetian Capitalist, Pantalone (you can see a typical mask below - the one in black, normally with whiskers).
When I studied character play in Reggio Emilia, there was absolutely no implication in my mind that Pantalone was Jewish. He was of comfortable status (sometimes even termed ‘Magnifico’) and the young lover was often his daughter (there were no stories where she was Jewish - unlike, say, Jessica and Shylock - even though Shakespeare seems to borrow the essential relationship).
Furthermore, i find it tricky to imagine that he would be Jewish because it would be less funny. The stories tended to rely on some level of comfortable status, which would not have been afforded to Jewish characters.
Was he supposed to be read as Jewish? Of course - I don’t know. I really don’t see it. I get the superficial aspect of the money and the nose and the fact that Venice had a sizable Jewish Ghetto. But on the other hand, I understand him to be the merchant of Venice (a piantalone) - not a Jewish banker/middleman.
It is, of course, impossible to tell. But, if he was originally Christian - a Jacob Rees-Mogg, or a Scrooge - then when and how did he turn Jewish. And, if we read Jewishness onto him, are we in danger of doing exactly what the Royal Court did with Hershel Fink? Taking the story of a Christian capitalist and transforming him into a Jew through prejudice?

IT’S NOT OK BECAUSE IT’S HISTORICAL - I think my main discomfort with this dismissal of commedia is the implication that we are better now. Dario Fo and Franca Rame literally risked their lives to perform their commedia-influenced, anti-fascist theatre. Are we seeing more clearly than them? Perhaps. It is true that, due to the obvious and virulent anti-semiticism of the early modern period, then the comedic capitalist character must have been Jewish. Is the big nose enough? Because of the hook? But how does this stand up in the context of all those other fallic stupid Christian noses? My argument is no defence of commedia. I just don’t want to dismiss it through prejudice and assumption about ‘history’.

TEACHING - this matters because Commedia is taught in drama schools. There were many people saying, ‘we aren’t saying we should cancel commedia’. But - if Emma’s tweet is right, then - er - why the hell not? If it’s racist, we should do it. And have trigger warnings when commedia is being used. But if it’s not right, it’s surely important to say so. Otherwise, what are students to think? That it is, kind of, but it’s still taught at RADA? Perhaps not on your course (so you don’t get a real education) but you see it on the syllabus. This racist and antisemitic art form. Surely it’s not OK to simply leave it at that?