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?”
Afterword
Natasha Korda’s Afterword addresses this Special Issue’s contribution to the now considerable body of scholarship documenting female performance at every level of society across early modern England and Europe. In the wake of such scholarship, originating over a century ago, Korda asks why the case for the canonical significance of female performance practices still needs to be made. Tracing the “separate, but not equal” status conferred on female performance by the first wave of scholarship in the field, Korda then turns to the revisionist, second wave of scholarship, emerging in the 1980s and 90s and influenced by feminist and performance studies, which sought to establish that the “all-male stage” was more the exception than the rule in light of the heterogeneous landscape of female performance found outside of London and on the European continent. Building on this recovery and inclusion of a broad range of female performance practices, this volume seeks to make the case for their canonical significance, and in the process defines new lines of inquiry indicative of a third wave of scholarship in the field. The essays collected here not only demonstrate the profound and transformative influence of female performance on both canonical and (hitherto) non-canonical plays and on the performance styles of boy-actors, but illuminate the gendered ideologies underlying the process of canon-formation itself. In so doing they point the way toward a newly conceived canon defined by unexpected lines of influence that range across periods, geographic boundaries, generic divisions, and genders.
The Texts of Othello and Shakespearean Revision
In a groundbreaking piece of scholarly detective work, Professor Honigmann - editor of the forthcoming Arden 3 edition of Othello - uncovers in more detail than any previous study the hidden history of the two early texts of Othello, the Quarto and the Folio. He traces the crucial role played by two men in transforming Shakespeare's almost illegible manuscript to print: Thomas Walkley, the publisher of the Quarto, and Ralph Crane, the scribe who prepared the printer's copy for the Folio. Through careful analysis of particular passages Honigmann exposes the extent to which versions of Othello adopted by editors and widely regarded as fundamentally 'Shakespearean' were profoundly influenced by others than Shakespeare himself. Questioning time-honoured editorial procedures the findings of Texts of Othello have implications for many other of the plays of the Shakespeare canon, and more widely for questions of authorship and the doctrine of the 'better text'.