Excerpt from The Commedia Dell'arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy A small Pennsylvania town turned itself out one breathless summer day not long ago to watch an entertainment given in a large airy barn by a family of wandering geniuses, not gypsies or minstrels, certainly not "agents" as the term is generally understood, but hard-headed Yankee originals with something of their own to sell and apparently a novel way of their own of selling it. The something was a certain soap, guaranteed of the purest; the method of advertisement was to take it as the theme of a simple farce, a theme varied by all manner of songs in its praises and allusions to its perfections, brought as by accident into the pauses of a banal dialog. In the brief play each member of the band had a part. The leader represented himself as a fashionable doctor, the rush of whose city practice had driven him to the country for leisure and fresh air; his brother figured as a wealthy friend of the physician, a millionaire off for a holiday; the doctor's two young sons flirted madly with the millionaire's pretty daughter and quarreled with each other about her behind their parents' backs; the smaller children in the roles of errand-boy, page and petted little housemaid saw to it that the audience was kept smiling at their tricks, their blunders and their comical songs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.