Long overlooked and underrated, women’s contributions to European Renaissance theater have only recently been acknowledged and valued by scholars. European women of the fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries participated in both public and private theatrical activities not only as audience members, but also as playwrights, translators, actresses, patrons, shareholders, employees of theaters, and leaders of acting troupes. Monarchs such as Elizabeth I, Anne of Denmark, Catherine de Medicis, and Marie de Medicis were instrumental in cultivating a theatrical culture at their courts. These and other noblewomen commissioned dramatic works, sponsored acting troupes, and functioned as honored spectators, all of which lent social legitimacy to theater as a private enterprise. The professional or public theater, however, was perceived as morally compromising, especially for women. Yet Renaissance women of all classes defied social conventions and moral restrictions not only by attending theatrical productions, but also by pursuing professional writing and acting opportunities.
During the English Renaissance, women were banned from public and university stages, yet, like their aristocratic female counterparts throughout Europe, they played significant roles behind the scenes at court and in aristocratic households as patrons, writers, and masque performers. Queen Elizabeth I was the most prominent English patron of playing companies; the Queen’s Men gained great popularity in the 1580s, playing at court and in English public playhouses. Following the queen’s lead, other aristocratic women gave patents and lent their names to companies. Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke, was one of the most influential female patrons of the arts. Not only was she at the center of a productive artistic circle, Sidney also sponsored a small acting troupe, Pembroke’s Men, and translated Robert Garnier’s drama, The Tragedy of Antonie (1595, original 1578), which was most likely intended for household performance. Other Englishwomen produced translations of dramatic texts, the first known one being Lady Jane Lumley’s version (ca. 1553) of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. A fragment from a translation of Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus has been attributed to Queen Elizabeth. Mary Wroth and Elizabeth Cary have both been recognized by recent scholars as dramatists in their own right, Wroth for Love’s Victory (ca. 1621) and Cary for The Tragedy of Miriam (1613).
While Englishwomen were not licensed to perform with theater troupes, women of the Stuart court (early seventeenth century) had occasion to play silent, yet physically expressive, roles in masques commissioned by Queen Anne of Denmark (James I’s wife). Female courtiers and in some cases the queen herself danced in no fewer than eight masques alongside professional male actors. Just as significant as a female presence on an English stage was Anne’s deep involvement in the production of some of these masques and her working relationship with Ben Jonson, her favored playwright. She was the
Engraving showing Shakespeare performing before Queen Elizabeth I and her court. (Library of Congress)
Visionary force behind the masquing culture at the early Stuart court, which fostered noblewomen’s access to the Renaissance stage. Not until 1660 were women allowed by patent to pursue acting as a profession, and, with the rise of female playwrights such as Aphra Behn, Englishwomen finally became theater professionals in their own right.
In Italy, Antonia Pulci was the earliest vernacular playwright, the author of three sacre rappresentazioni on the lives of saints and the possible author of at least four other plays. Her plays were most likely performed in convents for Florentine nuns, with the possibility that the nuns performed the parts. Her works were printed in the 1490s and reprinted throughout the sixteenth century. Later female dramatists include the Roman courtesan, Margherita Costa, who produced songs, operas, and dramas, the most famous of them the comedia ridi-cola, Li buffoni (1641).
More visible than female dramatists, who were primarily nonprofessionals during this period, were actresses who rose to fame (and some degree of infamy) in the Italian professional troupes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early Renaissance, Italian female courtesans were private entertainers who sang and danced in spectacles and intermezzi; in the religious community, nuns performed in cloistered dramatic rituals. Early professional actresses were most likely courtesans who were skilled in performance arts. By 1565, a shift from women’s functioning in private entertainments to public theatrical activity can be noted with the first record, which appeared in Rome, of a professional actress (a woman named Lucrezia fTom Siena). From this time on, Italian women began to achieve a degree of professional prominence as members of acting troupes, which played not only in Italy but also across the continent. Italian actresses were acclaimed in Paris and made their mark on the French court as well as in the emerging acting troupes in Italian cities, which began to include women only later in the century. Furthermore, records demonstrate that in 1567 two women, known asVincenza and “the Roman Flaminia,” led companies of commedia players. Other entrepreneurial women directed troupes in later years.
A handful of actresses, such as Vittoria Piis-simi and Isabella Andreini, became famous as brilliant, versatile performers of commedia del-I’arte. Their trademark, or most notable innovation, was improvisation, which had not been associated with the earlier male troupes. Pi-isimi was the leader of the Confidenti troupe, and Andreini was the female lead of the Gelosi traveling players, who received patronage from the duke of Mantua for a time. She wrote a pastoral play, La Mirtilla (1588), stage dialogues, lyrics, and letters, and she was elected to the Pavian academy, the Intendi.
Records of professional French actresses began to appear at the end of the sixteenth century in conjunction with the famous actor Valleran le Conte and his acting troupe. Not until the 1630s, however, did Frenchwomen gain a degree of social acceptance and centrality in public performances. Marie Champmesle became the reigning actress of the seventeenth century. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, Frenchwomen performed regularly both at court and in the public theaters. They also served as theater professionals of another kind: as costumers, ushers, and box office managers. More important, talented actresses earned a share or quarter share in companies and therefore gained a voice and a percentage of the profit. French female dramatists emerged later than their English and Italian counterparts with the works of Marie-Catherine Desjardins (known also as Mme. deVilledieu) and Catherine Bernard in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. According to recent scholarship, approximately thirty-three plays were written by Frenchwomen before 1700; some of these works have been lost, and some were never performed.
Women of the European Renaissance clearly influenced and participated in the theatrical culture of their time, whether they were showcasing new acting techniques onstage, as were the Italian commedia actresses, or writing, commissioning, and patronizing dramatic activity, as were the aristocratic and noblewomen of the great houses and families of Europe. Despite moral censure, women frequented the public theaters throughout Europe and were considered by playwrights to be a critical audience mass to which they needed to appeal. Even though traditional scholarship is accurate in its assumption that European Renaissance theater was dominated by male artists and businessmen, the contributions of women were far too numerous and significant to be overlooked.
Marguerite A. Tassi
See also Andreini, Isabella; Behn, Aphra; Cary, Elizabeth Tanfield; Literary Culture and Women; Lumley, Jane; Pulci, Antonia Tanini; Scala, Alessandra; Sidney, Mary Herbert;
Wroth, Mary.
Bibliography
Bryce, Judith.“Adjusting the Canon for Later Fifteenth-Century Florence:The Case of Antonia Pulci.” In The Renaissance Theatre:Texts Performance, Design. Vol. 1. Edited by Christopher Cairns, 133-145.Aldershot, UK:Ashgate, 1999.
Cerasano, S. P., and Marion Wynne-Davies. Renaissance Drama by Women:Texts and Documents. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
McGill, Kathleen.“Women and Performance:The Development of Improvisation by the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell-Arte.” Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 59-69.
McManus, Clare. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590—1619). Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Woodrough, Elizabeth, ed. Women in European Theatre. Oxford, UK: Intellect Books, 1995.
World History
