Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque

similarities between these stylistic and technical phenomena might simply be accidental or casual. Not so, however, with the Italian commedia dell'arte

, a theatrical tradition often identified as the origin of the minstrel stage.

2 Although the grotesque features and qualities present in the commedia were mostly borrowings from classical plays and times (such as the stock characters: the parasite, the servant, lovers, the braggart soldier it imported from antiquity, or the exaggerated style it borrowed from medieval and ancient farce [Barasch 563]), yet the commedia also brought in novel elements to be mixed into the idea of the grotesque, which later would be of major import in the minstrel grotesque as well. These were the introduction of regional dialect in an exaggerated manner to denote rural character types (a method later applied in the construction of the minstrel dialect), the emergence of comic and grotesque props (to be discussed separately)

, and grotesque dance numbers, as well as novel grotesque commedia scenarios. The next, and probably final, stage in the cultural history of the grotesque

, echoes of which are going to be found in the minstrel grotesque

, was the rise of the gothic-grotesque in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe and later in America (see Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne). In this distinct type of the grotesque (applied in Europe chiefly by German and English masters such as Blichner, Klinger, Blake, Coleridge) comedic techniques were put to tragic purpose, "and the old carnival fun [relevant in previous grotesque representations] ... [was] replaced by the threatening quality of the grotesque" (Barasch 566). This latter, gloomier aspect of the ascertained at this point, one, that from the 17th century on several European plays and novels reached America, and were either adopted to the American stage or circulated in book form; and, two, that there are certain universals in the development of human ideas (thoughts, styles, ways of expression) which occur simultaneously throughout the world because of the similarities in human or social formation, history and cultural development. For a more detailed analysis of "universalism" see George Rehin's "Harlequin..." 682—701. 2 For more on the commedia dell'arte origins of blackface minstrelsy see Rehin's "Harlequin," and Richard Moody's "Negro Minstrelsy." 90