SOURCE: An introduction to Dario Fo Plays: One, Methuen Drama, 1992, pp. ix-xv.

In the essay below, Hood provides a broad survey of Fo's career.

Dario Fo represents a tradition in Italian theatre that gave the world comic figures like Pulcinella and Arlecchino. The lineage of his writing and performance can be traced back to the Commedia dell'Arte of the Renaissance which established the cast of cunning servants, swaggering swordsmen, lecherous old men and star-crossed lovers with their masks and conventional costumes that held the stage for more than two hundred years and from which Punch and Judy derive. But further back still he draws on the older tradition of the giullari, the wandering performers of the Middle Ages with their tradition of disrespect for the authorities and the church, and on the slapstick of clowns like Zanni, which is the Venetian version of Giovanni and the name from...