Parergon

The Diva’s Gift is a book with a mission: to highlight the artistry of Italy’s commedia dell’arte actresses and to demonstrate their decisive impact on female roles scripted by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Brown begins her study with the transformation wrought on the role of the female lover by women players, who began appearing in commedia dell’arte performances from the mid-1560s. Before this innovation, female roles performed by these professional troupes were lacklustre and acted by men. The repertory which evolved alongside the new presence of women was marked by ‘a radical change’: for the first time the lovers played unmasked (p. 8). Combined with Italian literary sources, the theatrical skills of the new actresses reinvented the woman in love, giving rise to a novel character type: the ardent innamorata. This ‘theatergram of character’ was distinguished by her articulateness, sensuality, and versatility, ‘evok[ing] laughter, pathos, and wonder’ (pp. 10–11). Brown presents this figure, embodied in ‘the itinerant Italian diva’, as having a far-reaching effect on the Shakespearean stage, where she ‘spurr[ed] generic innovation, appropriation, and backlash’ (pp. 20–21).

Border-crossing is a recurrent focus. Chapter 1, ‘The Innamorata Ignites’, maps visually the scope of the comici’s European travels: to Madrid, Vienna, Linz, and Prague, northwards to France and Antwerp, and across the Channel to [End Page 242] England. While mixed-gender troupes gained permanent footholds in Madrid and Paris, they ‘never established a lucrative base in London’, or in the Netherlands (p. 48). The reason was part anti-Catholic prejudice, part the strength of London’s commercial playing companies, but also because ‘the spectacle of women working as paid artisans in the public sphere’ was disturbing to both Protestant nations (p. 22). In addition to the troupes’ extensive touring, English ambassadors and travellers, including Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, the clown Will Kempe, and actor-poet-spy Anthony Munday, acted as conduits for Italian playmaking back home. The Elizabethan and Stuart courts were beacons of Italophilia; Queen Elizabeth I read Tasso in the original, while Anne of Denmark owned a copy of actress Isabella Andreini’s ‘“highly theatricalized” fictional’ Lettere (Venice, 1607), marked with her armorial stamp (p. 99). Such evidence strongly supports Brown’s claim that ‘Shakespeare and his colleagues worked with an eye to a pan-European market’ (p. 16).

Brown’s method juxtaposes English playwrights’ adaptive strategies with analysis of Continental drama in the context of the diva’s ‘combinatory’ craft (p. 11). Chapter 2 argues that John Lyly’s comedies and other works performed by Elizabethan children’s companies exhibit ‘rivalrous emulation’ of charismatic foreign divas (p. 76). The following chapter enlists Bel-Imperia in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Juliet to analyse the hybrid figure of ‘specially talented boy actress’ and ‘tragic virtuosa’ (pp. 95, 92). Brown argues that both innamorate are ‘built on displays of skill’: Juliet and Bel-Imperia ‘flirt[ing] provocatively in dialogues replete with concetti and innuendo […] both […] star in shocking suicide scenes, stabbing themselves quickly and decisively’ (p. 95). We are accustomed to reading for the racial dimension of female characterisation in Antony and Cleopatra and John Webster’s White Devil; less familiar is Brown’s interpretation of theatrical women such as Beatrice, Juliet, and Portia as ‘racialized Italians’ (p. 12). She argues forcefully that in both performance and critical traditions these roles ‘have been purged of their alienness over time’ (p. 15). Her chapter, ‘Acting the Actress in Shakespearean Comedy’, ends with a compelling discussion of All’s Well that Ends Well’s Helena as a ‘traveling player’. Shakespeare’s portrayal of ‘a social-climbing, anal-fistula-curing, pilgrimage-faking, bed-tricking Frenchwoman’ is, she observes, ‘not a profile [his audience] would instantly take to their bosoms’ (pp. 162–63).

Brown’s work is especially valuable in the stress she lays on Renaissance...