The title of Robert Henke's latest book accurately reflects its innovative contents. The close study of manuscript and printed texts of various kinds—contracts, letters, poems, memorializations, scenarios, treatises, and diaries—sits alongside examination of actors, actresses, the character system, and individual roles to provide the first study devoted to the interaction, indeed cross-fertilization, between the oral and the literary aspects of commedia dell'arte, contrasting yet complementing each other as did binary pairs of arte figures.