scenari

— There exist one printed and eight manuscript collections of scenari, or soggetti, compiled between 1611 and 1734, and from these and a few separate extant examples we have more than six hundred of the play-plots that were used for improvisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though we can often trace the sources of the scenari, we rarely come upon the names of the authors, and many were the result of collaboration. As stage documents the scenari are circumstantial and businesslike, they make no pretensions towards literary style.