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?”
“Sing it Like Poor Barbary”: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Performance
This essay examines the Folio version of Othello 4.3 via textual, performance and transnational analytic models in order to contextualize Desdemona’s Willow Song against the sung performances of English female ballad sellers and the Italian actress-singers of commedia and court fame. In this way, the essay argues that modes of female theatricality were contested at the heart of the dramatic and Shakespearean canon. The Folio Willow Song scene reworks the widely circulating trope of the lamenting abandoned woman, a figure whose virtuosic distress captivated audiences of the celebrated Italian commedia and court singers during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One paradigmatic instance of virtuosic song and verbal dexterity, Isabella Andreini’s La Pazzia d’Isabella (1589), is examined to propose Othello 4.3 as a bravura demonstration of the boy player’s practice in opposition to women’s performance, staking a claim for the virtuosity of the English boy in competition with the foreign actress. Further, given the ongoing scholarly debates over the absence of the Willow Song from the 1622 Quarto and its status in relation to the stage, the essay suggests that the virtuosity required of the English boy actor in the song’s performance feeds into casting practice and hence can illuminate the scene’s textual history.
History of Amateurism in Men's Intercollegiate Athletics: The Continuance of a 19th-Century Anachronism in America
Claiming that American intercollegiate athletics are amateur at the end of the 20th century is an anachronism, for colleges in the 19th century took on professional characteristics. The upper-class British concept of amateurism did not work effectively in a more egalitarian and achievement-oriented American society. Hypocrisy resulted when colleges claimed amateurism while accepting such professional practices as hiring professional coaches, allowing athletes to play summer baseball for money, and paying athletes through grants-in-aid. Attempts to preserve amateurism, such as the Graham Plan in the 1930s and the Sanity Code in the 1940s and 1950s, yielded to the professional spirit. Thus, while Americans had generally rejected the upper-class British social hierarchy that fostered amateurism, they retained the name amateur, continuing the hypocrisy that had begun in the previous century.