Anatomy of an Actress: Bel-imperia as Tragic Diva
Bel-imperia is a star player in The Spanish Tragedy, using bravura theatricality as she drives the plot forward and seeks revenge for the deaths of two lovers. With this novel role Kyd invokes the virtuosic performances of professional actresses, who first emerged in the commedia dell’arte in Italy in the 1560s. Their scenes of pathos and passion extended the arte’s reach beyond comedy to tragicomedies and tragedies. Playwrights and actors began to create new female-centered plays to showcase the actress’s presence and skills. This trend eventually affected the all-male stage, nowhere more clearly than in The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd refers explicitly to the Italian troupes, which gained international fame and royal patrons performing both improvised plays based on scenarios and fully scripted and memorized five-act plays. He built an innamorata in the Italian mode, translating her to the English stage with spectacular scenes mingling witty eroticism and tragic violence. Kyd stresses her virtuosity and multi-generic range while spinning a web of allusions to far-flung spheres featuring royal women and courtly politics, mixed-gender players and playing, and dramatic innovations in Italy, France, and Spain. The Spanish Tragedy shows that English playwrights used models forged abroad to fashion Italian-style leading “women” just as the commercial stages were striving to expand the repertory, attract paying audiences, and satisfy courtly tastes. Bel-imperia, played by a boy, is Kyd’s bold attempt to answer Hieronymo’s question: “For what’s a play without a woman in it?”
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe is a collection of papers which originated in a 2005 conference at the University of Miami. The women examined in the essays include queens regnant, consorts and various regents all of whom exercised power either in their own right or through their marital or familial ties. The collection aims to add to the fields of early modern history, gender and queenship studies by bringing ‘a transnational and transcultural perspective on a topic that has until now been studied largely through the lens of a single nation’ (p. 2). The editors acknowledge that several other ‘transnational’ works on female rule in early modern Europe do exist, such as Fradenburg’s Women and Sovereignty or Sharon Jansen’s The Monstrous Regiment of Women; Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe.(1) What this particular collection has to offer, however, is a focus on constructing images of female rule and modes of representation, both in how female rulers represented themselves and in the way female sovereigns are represented in various works from the period. This representation can be both positive and negative; the self-representation of various female sovereigns is shown as a way to justify and strengthen their rule while criticism of female rulers is discussed as a means of political counsel or attempting to dismiss their influence. Accordingly, the book is split into two sections; the first is titled ‘The Rule of Women: Theories and Constructions’ and the second ‘Sovereignty and Representation’.
The Actress and Baroque Aesthetic Effects in Renaissance Drama
Feminist scholarship over the past twenty five years has shed significant light on the cultural, political and social dimensions of women’s performance in the European Renaissance. This essay proposes that, in addition to these perspectives, we bring aesthetic curiosity and responsiveness to the dramatic texts in which female performance is encoded. As part of that enquiry, it focuses attention on periodicity, finding both historical relevance and stylistic resonance for Renaissance drama in the idea of the Baroque. These issues are pursued through analyses of what Rachel Poulsen has termed an “actress effect” in Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.1590-91), Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (c.1610-11) and Lording Barry’s The Family of Love (1604-6). In the first two plays, the suffering figure of the lamenting Ariadne stands as an exemplar of the theatrical woman. In Barry’s parodic comedy, citizen wife and witty heroine are united by their theatricality and sensuality, with the innamorata overtly (and uniquely in drama of the period) acknowledged as an “actress.” In each play, the manipulation of an actress effect contributes vitally to the playwrights’ provision of novelty and theatrical pleasure to their diverse audiences.