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?”
Shakespeare among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1600
Shakespeare among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1600, by Duncan Salkeld. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 206 + xiv. Hardback $99.95.Courtesans have long exerted a powerful hold on the imagination. Associated with glamor and wit, they evoke a charged aesthetic power; as Duncan Salkeld writes, "The myth of the courtesan is that she transforms sex into art" (6). To many, their associations with autonomy, wealth, and influence over powerful men also suggest possible alternative models for female agency. Yet as Salkeld demonstrates in this richly researched monograph, historical realities fell far from these exalted visions: "the Renaissance was no golden age for courtesans" (20). Rarely fully distinct from either struggling prostitutes or passive victims of sexual exploitation, courtesans led contingent and unstable lives, and often tumbled quickly from the top of Fortune's wheel to its lowest rungs.Salkeld resists framing his book as a broader cultural history of the Renaissance courtesan, undertaking instead "a series of studies-combining close reading with micro-historical enquiry-that seeks to identify shifting, often very ambivalent literary and social attitudes towards such women, and to locate aspects of Shakespeare's work within that context" (20). These studies have roots in a wide array of sources, from Italy as well as England, historical archives as well as imaginative fiction, drama as well as prose. After an opening exploration of the myth of the courtesan, drawn from classical cultural and literary figures, the book includes chapters on the identification of lechery with syphilis in early English plays; sexual commerce and its consequences in London and Italy; English and Italian pornographic writings; dramatic representations of courtesans; and particular London courtesans who may have been personally known to Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights. Throughout the book, Salkeld focuses on developing local insights from specific sources, while linking their stories to his broader claim that "the prevailing literary myth of the dramatic courtesan by and large departed from the historical reality of women's lives at the time" (158).This book will be of considerable interest, to students as well as specialists. Much of Salkeld's terrain is uncharted, and his impressive array of archival findings produces compelling glimpses into untold London lives, as well as some intriguing readings of familiar works. Exploring records that suggest Shakespeare's probable familiarity with a Clerkenwell prostitute known as "Lucy Negro" or "Black Luce" leads Salkeld into a fascinating account of the charged light and dark imagery linked with Shakespeare's depictions of characters named Luciana, Luce, and Courtesan in Comedy of Errors; it also fosters a renewed argument for Black Luce's identity as the Dark Lady of the sonnets. In a discussion of Bellamira, in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Ithamore's offhand reference to knowing a courtesan by her attire give rise to a wealth of archival documentation attesting to the affinity between courtesans and taffeta, including the colorful case of a "Taffety Meg" prosecuted for lewd behavior (111). As Salkeld demonstrates, onstage references to taffeta take on rich meanings in light of this association.Salkeld has a good eye for these mutually illuminating conversations between dramatic and historic texts, and the resulting insights support his fervent defense of an '"archival turn' in early modern studies" (158), which he defends against skepticism towards "historical facts . …
Political Science Fiction
This text examines the close relationship between politics and science fiction and shows how much of the former is grounded in the latter. It is both an exploration of futuristic literature and a spectrum of ideas, from libertarianism to feminism.