scholarly journals How the Commedia dell’Arte Actress Revolutionized the Early Modern Italian Stage

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Rosalind Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
Technical Mastery ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
European Theatre ◽  
Provided Examples

The first actresses who joined the previously all-male the commedia dell’Arte in the 1560s are credited with making it a commercial and artistic success. This article explores the evidence to document their multi-faceted contribution and influence on the birth of early modern European theatre. My article will use Tommaso Garzoni’s prophetic observations about certain early actresses to frame an inquiry into how their novel female presence changed the nature of theatrical representation to create a new more “realistic” medium. It will interpret the documents to reveal how they achieved celebrity status through the great personal appeal and technical mastery they exhibited. It was through this winning combination that they were empowered to create unforgettable female characters who became part of the western dramatic canon. In addition to showing how successfully the Italian actresses challenged masculine privilege in their famous transvestite performances, I will show how their iconic influence travelled not only across the continent but also to England, even though actresses remained excluded from the professional stage there. Inevitably their presence on the western stage provided examples of female characters negotiating their sex/gender identities and thus modeled such behaviours for women in the larger society.

The Textile Black Body

2016 ◽  
pp. 169-185
Author(s):  
Ian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
Black Man

In addition to cosmetic applications for early modern ‘blackface’ theatrical representation, the essay posits that performers used a variety of racial prostheses, most notably cloth and animal skins. In The Merchant of Venice, Morocco’s description of his own body as ‘shadowed livery’—that is, dyed cloth worn by a servant or apprentice—reveals a complex metatheatrical consciousness indebted to this prosthetic blackface tradition. Morocco’s identification with livery connects specifically to Lancelot, the other liveried character in the play whose servant uniform contextualizes Morocco’s corporal blackness as a sign of membership in a social underclass. The play’s mercantile ethos, reflecting John Wheeler’s assessment from A Treatise of Commerce that pervasive economic interests bring ‘all things into commerce’, creates the conditions for category violations: people are perceived as commodities, and none more insidiously than Morocco, the textile black man, read, in turn, as a powerful antecedent for post-Enlightenment constructions of race.

scholarly journals The Dramaturgy of Female Gender  in Early Modern English Theatre:  An Investigation of the Theatrical Expression of Gender in Selected Jacobean Plays, Their Restoration/Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations, and Their Original and Contemporary Staging

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lori Beth Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Gender Boundaries

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>

scholarly journals Narrating Pregnancy and Childbirth: Infanticide and the Dramatization of Reproductive Knowledge

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Steinway
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
A Site ◽  
Popular Texts

In early modern England, infanticide was a crime overwhelmingly associated with women. Both popular texts and legal records depict women accused of infanticide as mothers acting against nature. These figures, however, do not often appear in the period’s drama. Instead, early modern drama includes fictionalized mothers who kill their children beyond infancy and into adulthood. By eschewing portrayals of neonaticide and the trials associated with it, the drama highlights a dependency upon female characters’ verbal narratives of the reproductive body that reinforces pregnancy’s unstable epistemology. I argue that the flexibility of this epistemology allows women, whether female characters in drama or historical women on trial, to distance themselves from the crime of infanticide by reconstructing narratives of both pregnancy and childbirth. Sharing rhetorical devices with the testimonies of women accused of infanticide, dramatic mothers such as Videna in The Tragedie of Gorboduc and Brunhalt in Thierry and Theodoret linguistically sever the biological ties between mother and child, thus disrupting conventional portrayals of reproduction. These parallel strategies position the reproductive female body as a site of resistance to the legal mechanisms designed to interpret it.

La Virtu et la volupté. Models for the Actress in Early Modern Italy and France

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Scott
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Early Modern Italy

In 1982 Ferdinando Taviani proposed in Il segreto della commedia dell'arte that the earliest known actresses in Italy may have been drawn from the ranks of the courtesans, the oneste meretrici, forced from Rome after the Council of Trent (1545–63) by papal reforming zeal. This hypothesis has been affirmed by several other scholars in Europe and the United States and is becoming widely accepted not just as a feasible theory but as gospel, the exclusive conduit through which women entered the western theatre.

scholarly journals Fighting Eve: Women on the Stage in Early Modern Italy

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
Nicla Riverso
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Catholic Church

The Catholic revival in the sixteenth century coincides with the opening of the commedia dell’arte stage to women, leading to progress for female performers. However, the presence of women in the commedia dell’arte immediately shows contradictions and disagreements with the teaching of the Catholic Church. At this time, women were depicted as an emblem of Catholic morality: they were supposed to be devoted mothers and wives and their life was confined within the domestic household. In my paper, I analyze how difficult it was for women to prevail against religious and cultural prejudices and gain respect and recognition as actresses. My aim is to point out how the presence of women on the stage brought about a revolution for women’s role in Western culture offering a freedom of expression against traditional moral patterns and giving female performers a chance to demonstrate cleverness and professionalism.

Questioning Conventional Gender Roles in William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-38
Author(s):  
Golman Gurung
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Traditional Conception ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles

This article argues that the notion of gender is not a fixed category and doesn’t have any given essence to it. The male and female characters in William Wycherley’s play The Plain Dealer perform roles that tend to challenge our traditional conception of gender roles. Gender identities are complex things and it is not possible to reduce them to simple and unproblematic essences. The Character Manly falls into the trap of a woman’s machinations and succumbs to her power. His lack of manliness and the Widow’s knowledge and alacrity prove that traditional gender roles are open to challenge and can be reversed by different characters in different situations. This article analyses the role of the characters in the light of Foucauldian discourse and Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance.

To Pray, To Work, To Hear, To Speak: Women in Roman Streets c. 1600

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 289-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Street Life ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
Early Modern Rome ◽  
The City ◽  
Demographic Growth

AbstractUsing pictures, city regulations, and judicial records, this essay claims a place for women of varying rank and status in the street life of early modern Rome. It revises the conventional binary of male public realms and female domesticity that, reinforced by scholarly expectations of Mediterranean gendered seclusion, obscures a necessary female presence in the city. In urban spaces outside their homes beggars, prostitutes, servants, working wives, nubile daughters, and even gentlewomen faced risks, but also cadged opportunities. Though excluded from government and corporate decision-making, women routinely ventured into the streets in pursuit of many goals: heavenly salvation, earthly livelihood, neighborly support, vital information, or momentary pleasure. While Rome's patterns of physical and demographic growth distinguished it in important respects from other Italian cities, it is nevertheless likely that, as in Venice, these female uses of urban space had analogues elsewhere.

Dissimulation in the Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios of Flaminio Scala, 1611

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 312-328
Author(s):  
Natalie Crohn Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Considerable Part ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Ways Of Coping ◽  
University Of Toronto

Commedia dell’arte was the most influential and widespread theatre movement in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. A considerable part of its popularity can be accounted for by its comic representations of stressful occurrences within everyday life in early modern Europe, including its representations of the period’s widespread dissimulation. Among other things, the theatricality of commedia dell’arte provided a way for the audience briefly to dissociate itself from and to fantasize about ways of coping with dissimulation. A number of characteristics of commedia dell’arte, including disguise, lying,tricks, spying and gossip, and portrayals of honour, previously seen as separate, cohere in the concept of dissimulation. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theatre and of English, Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago. She recently published Befriending the Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala: the Comic Scenarios (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). In New Theatre Quarterly she has published ‘Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious’ (Vol. II, No. 8); ‘Theorizing about Performance: Why Now’ (Vol. VI, No. 23);‘ “So Many Things Can Go Together”: the Theatricality of John Cage’ (Vol. XI, No. 41); and ‘The Style of Commedia dell’Arte Acting’ (Vol. XXVIII, No. 4).

REPRESENTATIONS OF POVERTY IN THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Henke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Mendicant Orders

This essay explores the socioeconomic resonance of Italian professional theatre in the early modern period by considering a few records of performance by indigent entertainers, and by exploring the persistent theatrical and textual presence of poverty and hunger in texts both central and adjacent to the professional actors. Whether or not a given troupe or actor directly experienced or even cared about poverty, famine, destitution, or other social issues, by the time of the commedia's “golden age” these themes had by dint of theatrical tradition and performance sedimentation become part of the actors' repertoire, much more central to their performance tradition than they were in English and Spanish early modern theatres. Partly because of the medieval legacy of the itinerant mendicant orders in Italy, the commedia dell'arte inherited a culture in which poverty, begging, itinerancy, and a certain disposition to perform degradation were in the air, and this was absorbed into the grammar of their performance. Not only were tropes and gags of hunger and destitution continually deployed in the commedia, but some of the actors assumed, for their own rhetorical purposes, the histrionic pose of destitution. In other words, whatever their professional fortunes, they “played” poverty both onstage and in their offstage personae.

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