The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata. By Pamela Allen Brown Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre. By Harry R. Mc Carthy

Abstract

What accounts for the dazzling virtuosity of roles played by boys on the early modern stage? We have new insight into this question thanks to two compelling monographs by Pamela Allen Brown and Harry R. McCarthy. Both are grounded in close attention to the embodied movement of actors, and both build on recent studies of players’ skill and collaborative action by scholars including Evelyn Tribble. But Brown and McCarthy see the magnetic appeal of the English “boy actress” (as Brown puts it, 153) as emergent from very different locales, and the field will need further work to bring their insights together. The Diva’s Gift takes us through the manifold ways in which the Italian professional theater, particularly its prima donna innamorata or “first woman” playing opposite her lover, influenced and animated English drama. Brown authoritatively puts to rest (we might hope) stubbornly persistent misapprehensions that women and girls were absent from the English commercial stage, showing how divas, including the wildly successful Isabella Andreini, made their presence known. Chapter 1 offers an account of the Italian comici and their travels, including the tour of Drusiano Martinelli’s mixed company to England in 1577–78, with the goal of showing how English playwrights, players, and playgoers encountered them. Fashionable in Elizabeth I’s court and renowned for their skill at improvisation, the Italian players worked less from complete, scripted plays than from “theatergrams,” or recyclable role and plot elements.