An exploration of the portrayal of gender on the Italian stage from the Renaissance to the present, in a social and theoretical context.

In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.

Offering evidence of women's extensive contributions to the theatrical landscape, this volume sharply challenges the assumption that the stage was all male in early modern England. The editors and contributors argue that the pervasiveness of female performance affected cultural production, even on the professional London stages that used men and boys for women's parts. In short, Women Players in England 1500-1660 shows that women were dynamic cultural players in the early modern world.

This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of ‘history’, ‘stage’ and even the definition of ‘women’ itself.

Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D’Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.

Drawing on published collections and also manuscripts from Mantuan archives, Commedia dell' arte and the Mediterranean locates commedia dell' arte as a performance form reflective of its cultural crucible in the Mediterranean. The study provides a broad perspective on commedia dell’ arte as an expression of the various cultural, gender and language communities in Italy during the early-modern period, and explores the ways in which the art form offers a platform for reflection on power and cultural exchange. While highlighting the prevalence of Mediterranean crossings in the scenarios of commedia dell' arte, this book examines the way in which actors embodied characters from across the wider Mediterranean region. The presence of Mediterranean minority groups such as Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Turks within commedia dell' arte is marked on stage and 'backstage' where they were collaborators in the creative process. In addition, gendered performances by the first female actors participated in 'staging' the Mediterranean by using the female body as a canvas for cartographical imaginings. By focusing attention on the various communities involved in the making of theatre, a central preoccupation of the book is to question the dynamics of 'exchange' as it materialized within a spectrum inclusive of both cultural collaboration but also of taxation and coercion.

The Diva's Gift traces the far-reaching impact of the first female stars on the playwrights and players of the all-male stage. When Shakespeare entered the scene, women had been acting in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling in Italy and beyond and performing in all genres, including tragedy. The ambitious actress reinvented the innamorata, making her more charismatic and autonomous, thrilling audiences with her skills. Despite fervent attacks, some actresses became the first international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers in France and Spain. After Elizabeth and her court caught wind of their success in Paris, Italian troupes with actresses crossed the Channel to perform. The Italians' repeat visits and growing fame posed a radical challenge to English professionals just as they were building their first paying theaters. Some writers treated the actress as a whorish threat to their stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new model full of promise. Lyly, Marlowe, and Kyd endowed innamorata parts with hot-blooded, racialized passions, but made them self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster and others followed, ringing changes on the new type in comedy, tragedy, and romance. Like the comici they recycled actress-linked theatergrams and star scenes, such as cross-dressing, the mad scene, and the sung lament. In this way, the diva's prodigious virtuosity and stardom altered the horizons of playmaking even on the womanless stage. Capitalizing on the talents of boy players, the best playwrights created bold new roles endowed with her alien glamour, such as Lyly's Sapho and Pandora, Marlowe's Dido, Kyd's Bel-Imperia, Webster's Vittoria, and Shakespeare's Beatrice, Viola, Portia, Juliet, and Ophelia. Cleopatra is not alone in her superb theatricality and dazzling strangeness. As this book demonstrates, the diva's gifts mark them all.