This paper analyses the threshold between the mask and the theatre persona’s character in Italian comedy between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The threshold, doesn’t have to be seen as the final closure, but as the friction between two different types of characters and the circulation of traits between the those two types. It is the relationship between the mask’s universality and the character’s uniqueness. The purpose of this paper is to question the transition, generally misinterpreted as an evolution by scholars, from the comedy of masks to the comedy of characters. The critics usually stigmatise the former for its lack of psychological depth, while they appreciate the latter for their character’s fluidity within a poetic framework governed by verisimilitude. The corpus analysed is mainly focused on the Italians actors of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris.