Papers by Pamela Allen Brown
![Research paper thumbnail of “Let all the dukes and all the devils roar!” Mad Skills and Madwomen. [Chapter 7 from The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata.]](https://a.academia-assets.com/images/blank-paper.jpg)
Oxford University Press eBooks., Nov 25, 2021
The wildly popular star scene of female derangement enriched the stock of theatergrams deployed b... more The wildly popular star scene of female derangement enriched the stock of theatergrams deployed by playwrights across the map. Isabella Andreini’s triumph playing La Pazzia (“Madness”), featuring her skills in singing, impersonation, languages, and improvisation, spurred many imitations. On the English stage female madness took several forms. Bereaved madwomen leap from deep mourning to subversive songs and jokes, as with Ophelia in Hamlet and Cornelia in Webster’s The White Devil. Others express furious grief cut off by showy suicides (Isabella in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Zabina in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine). Sapho in Lyly’s Sapho and Phao and Dido in Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage suffer comic and tragic erotomania. Most distinctive are the comic virtuosas: Pandora in Lyly’s The Woman in the Moone and the Jailer’s Daughter in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amuse and astonish with multiple prolonged pazzie and prodigious displays of skill.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 2021
In the 1580s John Lyly and other writers for children’s companies created novel plays featuring a... more In the 1580s John Lyly and other writers for children’s companies created novel plays featuring a keen-witted, hot-blooded, virtuosic innamorata, relying on the beauty and skills of the cross-dressed boy player. Plays aimed at a worldly elite audience exoticize and eroticize the “boy actress,” painting him as extravagantly Italianate in ways that shadow the foreign diva, evidence of her transnational impact on plays and playing. Lyly’s Gallathea, Sapho and Phao, and The Woman in the Moone; Peele’s Arraignment of Paris; and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage show how the English contained the threat of the actress by appropriating and adapting her trademark playing and star scenes, such as solo song and madness. As a result, the skilled labor of both divas and boys left its mark on these innovative works.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 2021
Portia in The Merchant of Venice has all the hallmarks of a great diva, such as Isabella Andreini... more Portia in The Merchant of Venice has all the hallmarks of a great diva, such as Isabella Andreini or Vincenza Armani. She is famous beyond Italy, prodigiously intellectual, versatile, and brilliantly clever at devising plots that show off her acting skills, especially cross-gender disguise. Portia banters, plots, and travels with the confidence of a seasoned professional, while suitors and observers extol her golden virtues in paeans like those lavished on star actresses. Yet the diva of Belmont is too good to be true and too theatrical to be good; audiences might well interpret her artful cunning, sophistication, and duplicity as “dark” Italian qualities. In fact, Portia’s zest for acting, wifely insubordination, casual racism, and notable lack of mercy tend to unsettle her mask of moral perfection, as she relishes her diva-like domination of Morocco, Shylock, Bassanio, and Antonio.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 2021
The bold “woman in love” evolved from trends in commedia erudita and commedia grave that ignited ... more The bold “woman in love” evolved from trends in commedia erudita and commedia grave that ignited when actresses reshaped the role to showcase their stellar skills. This amorous agent was a radical change from the passive virgo of regular comedies that followed classical precedent. The ambitious diva created her own vehicles full of pathos and variety, and played tragedy and tragicomedy as well as comedy. Elizabeth and her court heard glowing reports about Italian players in Paris, and soon brought Italian actors and actresses to England. Several Italian troupes played in London in the 1570s, as more information streamed in from travelers, touring actors, foreign newsletters, and popular pamphlets. When paying theaters opened, audiences clamored for amorous and amusing Italian plots. Playwrights began to feature the imported innamorata, expanding the size and importance of the role, stressing her southern passions, and emulating the diva’s glamour, a strategy that “Italianated” the boy player.
University of Toronto Quarterly, Aug 1, 2017
Timely and fascinating, this study addresses what is arguably the single most important change in... more Timely and fascinating, this study addresses what is arguably the single most important change in western theatre since classical times: the advent of the actress on the male-dominated stage. Kerr’s impressive research is especially valuable for scholars of drama who know little about the Italian popular stage or the history of the actress before the Restoration. Women appeared in force in Italian professional troupes in the mid-sixteenth century and quickly became so popular and attracted such important patrons that the Church itself could not stem the tide, try as some clerical opponents might to denounce actresses as demonic agents worse than prostitutes because they did more lasting damage to men’s souls. Kerr asks how the actresses and troupes managed this feat. Her ingenious argument trains a sharp eye on the mountebank stage, where clowns and actresses performed arte comedies and routines, and where the performing woman became a ‘‘fetish object’’ laden with magical properties associated with the nostrums on sale. These lowly entertainers marketed their own sexual allure without directly prostituting themselves, taking a measure of control over their own representation. Some skilled women entered acting troupes where they took over roles previously acted by males and brought a brand-new form of female subjectivity to the stage. But at all times they were tainted as vulgar and whorish for entering the public sphere as sexualized spectacles ripe for commodification, just as many actresses would be for centuries to come. In provocative fashion, yet with admirable clarity, Kerr deploys the fetish theory of William Pietz, feminist, Freudian, and Marxist writings on erotic commodification, and the work of Christopher Rojek and Joseph Roach on celebrity to analyze the tremendous explosion of popularity, fame, and scandal that surrounded the early actresses. Showing a firm grasp of her wide-ranging Italian materials, from polemics, pamphlets, poems, letters, plays, and visual documents to a variety of arte scenarios, she tracks how the early actresses developed and marketed that magnetic quality of erotic charisma, skill, and glamour that Roach calls, simply, ‘‘It.’’ Using Roach’s framework, Kerr argues that the early diva attracted humanities 143
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 2021
[Chap 4.] Comedy was the mainstay of the Shakespearean stage, which constantly adapted roles, me... more [Chap 4.] Comedy was the mainstay of the Shakespearean stage, which constantly adapted roles, methods, and plot elements from the Italians, who performed and disseminated both scripted and improvised plays. Using Italian sources about the playing and materials of star actresses, this chapter tracks their imprint in the roles of Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Viola in Twelfth Night, and Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well. Each bears a distinctive comic profile with un-English female traits—such as improvisatory wit, Latin learning, violent passions, delight in acting, and showy poeticism—in ways that stress alien theatricality, agency, and glamour. Some aspects satirize racialized traits, for example Catholic deviousness, Sicilian violence, and Italianate “sexual strangeness.”
Shakespeare Quarterly, 2003
decades of Tudor and Stuart theater as it was performed in a variety of venues; and, two, that th... more decades of Tudor and Stuart theater as it was performed in a variety of venues; and, two, that these directions testify to the presence of a shared language of performance enjoyed by playwrights, players, and playgoers. But if these points are proven by the entries that follow, they were also the assumptions that prompted the dictionary’s undertaking; and, as leading scholars in this field, Dessen and Thomson might have been expected to offer more discussion of the surprising or serendipitous discoveries made in the process of the book’s composition, as well as of possible directions for further investigation. Of course, some of this discussion is carried on in their own and others’ monographs and articles, many of which are cited in the select bibliography. But it is impossible not to want to know what they learned in the course of assembling the book, which is, as they point out, the first of its kind. For instance, do they understand metadramatic devices and gestures differently now, having catalogued a host of self-conscious directions to “plots,” “posts,” and “stage”? Do the numerous synonyms and instructions for disguise—what one might consider the mechanics or materials of deception—reveal anything new or unexpected about the omnipresent conceit of Renaissance theatrical “masking”? And although it is the responsibility of the reader to imagine how he or she could capitalize on this rich source, it would have been helpful to hear Dessen and Thomson speculate, from the perspective of having compiled the entries, on openings for future work. Do writers parody other dramatists’ stage directions? Surely the use of “drum and colors” in Knight of the Burning Pestle is different from their use in Macbeth. Or how might some of the dictionary’s findings—such as the recognition that “when one figure drags another,” it is “usually a male who enters with a female” (75)—be used for gendered readings of the drama? Such quibbles, like a request for an index of plays cited in addition to the index of terms, only testify to the accomplishment here, to the way that even single entries can engage the interest of the reader. Indeed, Dessen and Thomson encourage audience participation, welcoming “additions, corrections, and comments from our readers” (xiv).1 Such readers should be grateful for the vast information and insight provided in this essential reference work.
Renaissance and Reformation, 2001
With an eye trained on our iron age, which blames the poor for not being rich, Linda Woodbridge h... more With an eye trained on our iron age, which blames the poor for not being rich, Linda Woodbridge has written a provocative study about the ways in which trivial comic fictions led to colder attitudes and crueler laws about the destitute in early modern England. The homeless who so vexed the guardians of order were subjects and victims of a "discourse of vagrancy" that fueled Reformation debates, preoccupied humanists, and obsessed writers on manners and architects of nationhood. Woodbridge has pulled together a broad and diverse array of writings, most memorably Simon Fish's Supplication for the Beggars, satirizing greedy priests as competitors for beggars' alms; Richard Layton's Boccaccian reports to Thomas Cromwell about naughty English monks; Erasmus's colloquies "Beggar Talk" and Convivium Religiosum; brutal scatological polemics by Luther and More; Thomas Harman's rogue exposé A Caveat for Common Cursetors; a scurrilous jest book, A Merry Jest of a Man That Was Called Howlglas; and a number of conduct books, sermons, statutes, and plays. Texts high and low painted the vagrant as fiendishly clever, theatrical, lazy, promiscuous, double-talking, seditious, filthy, and diseased, in this way "hardening hearts" (a recurring phrase) against the homeless and any consideration of root causes and solutions. Writings like these justified a new distancing between almsgiver and beggar that eventually gave rise to modern attitudes about "welfare cheats" and "fake" panhandlers, and helped form consciences that permit the poor to die of exposure in American cities, just as in early modern London. If Woodbridge had done only this, it would have been a worthy endeavor, but she attempts far more by attacking scholars' use of rogue literature as evidence about actual vagrants (chap. 1), pointing out humanism's failure to extend its educational ideals to the poorest, judged to be uneducable (chap. 3), and showing how writers deployed the language of filth and disease to link incivility, barbarism, and vagrancy (chap. 5). A noted Shakespearean, Woodbridge concludes with a chapter on King Lear, in which she discerns "a few maverick sympathetic voices" (p. 205) about the lives of the poor and the callousness of the comfortable. Central to her thesis is the stunning congruency of seemingly disparate realms of Renaissance thought when the topic was the ragged and rootless vagrant. Catholic or Protestant, magistrate or humanist, everyone in authority apparently agreed that the unhoused poor were dangerous and not to be pitied: "The vagrant poor became such bogeymen not because they were big bogeymen so much as because they were everybody's bogeymen" (p. 13). Unlike "the deserving poor," who managed to keep a roof over their heads, the homeless and therefore "undeserving poor" were forced to move constantly. Their mobility was disorderly by definition, and someone with no fixed abode in search of charity or work was suspicious and probably criminal. Woodbridge ably tracks how the Reformation, and Calvinist doctrine in particular, wrought radical changes in attitudes about almsgiving, intensifying the demonization of the vagrant. (Some people continued to help them anyway, as Woodbridge herself points out, so the assertion that
Renaissance Quarterly, 2012
Shakespeare Quarterly, 2003
... As Bednarz shows, what was at stake in the so-called War of the Theaters, especially for Shak... more ... As Bednarz shows, what was at stake in the so-called War of the Theaters, especially for Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and Dekker, was not simply the name, fame, or reputation of the author but the very question of artistic authority itself, the kind of art the leading play-wrights ...
Shakespeare Quarterly, 2006
sion, where he sees an “evolved historical interpretation of the Wars of the Roses” (42) emerging... more sion, where he sees an “evolved historical interpretation of the Wars of the Roses” (42) emerging from the growth of antiwar attitudes between 1591 and 1596–97, asks us to believe that Shakespeare transformed his earlier extroverted, jingoistic work into a play where the suffering of Henry vI anticipates “the more wrenching divestments and belated humanity of later tragic figures such as Lear” (38). That is a larger sort of difference than those between the 1604 and Folio Hamlet, or the 1608 and Folio King Lear, where the choices are between equally subtle and complex alternatives. Similarly large is the difference between the dignified death of young Clifford in the Folio and the over-the-top gaucherie of The True Tragedie, where the expiring hero delivers his glorious 29-line valediction “with an arrow in his necke” (2.6.0.1n). Although Shakespeare certainly learned much over his career, Martin’s theory makes him a shaky beginner.
Shakespeare Quarterly, 2010
incite the audience’s sympathy (as well as Lear’s). Oddly, Hornback works too hard to force this ... more incite the audience’s sympathy (as well as Lear’s). Oddly, Hornback works too hard to force this unusual Shakespearean character—radical in his very appearance in a tragedy—into a conventional mold, where he becomes one of two strictly defined kinds of fool, the silly “natural” or the satirical wit. Surely most audiences of the play, and readers of Lear in either Folio or quarto, experience the Fool as something that defies such easy categorization. He is both sweet and bitter, a dour satirist whose tenderness is registered in his dangerous, loyal choice to follow and serve Lear. Hornback’s comparatively weak argument concerning the Fool would pass more easily had he spent more of this “bitter fool” chapter examining other witty fools of the early seventeenth-century stage, including other roles played by satirical specialist Robert Armin: As You Like It’s Touchstone and Twelfth Night’s great Feste. A closer examination of Feste might have led Hornback to say more about the link between such witty fools and the satirical wits of Jonson’s and Marston’s comedies, who shared stage-time with Armin’s fools at the turn of the seventeenth century. yet Hornback acknowledges, if not this link, the overlapping ascendancies of the stage “fool by art” and the fool-gulling wit, arguing in a final chapter that the latter ultimately displaced the former in the hearts of audiences, causing the older fools’ “licenses” to be figuratively revoked. Hornback’s epilogue looks forward from the Jacobean period to the decline and disappearance of traditional clowns in Caroline drama, completing the book’s admirable critical sweep of two hundred years’ worth of English stage clowns. Overall, Hornback’s work is entertaining, persuasive, and most valuable to all interested—as who isn’t?—in the antic, buffoonish, or satirical characters of the Renaissance stage. The English Clown Tradition is informed both by Hornback’s perceptive readings of a wide range of plays and documented entertainments and by his “archaeological” unearthing of all manner of records pertaining to these “yoricks.” Of course, many of the Renaissance stage fools he discusses are not, like yorick, moribund but alive and well on their contemporary stages. Thus, we can hope Hornback’s discussions of these antic characters’ original cultural contexts and social meanings will give birth to new performance ideas, as directors continue to send in the clowns.
A modified version of chapter 5 first appeared in English Literary Renaissance, vol. 29 (1999) 20... more A modified version of chapter 5 first appeared in English Literary Renaissance, vol. 29 (1999) 201-24 as" Laughing at the Cony: A Female Rogue and the 'Verdict of the Smock.'" Copyright© 2003 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a ...
Modern Language Review, 2003
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 25, 2021
Shakespeareans stereotype the comici as bawdy masked clowns, not knowing that leading Italian com... more Shakespeareans stereotype the comici as bawdy masked clowns, not knowing that leading Italian companies played prestigious tragedy as well as comedy and pastoral. The unmasked actress capable of stirring pathos and desire enabled them to change their repertory and their fortunes. Most Italian tragedies had female heroines, but they were long and static, so the diva set about cutting and adapting them; they also borrowed tragic stories from romance epics and the novella. They produced showpieces full of extreme passions, plangent laments, and violent words and deeds. This new style reached England and altered tragic playwriting in works by Marlowe, Marston, Webster, and others. Two groundbreaking roles—Bel-imperia in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, worlds apart in most ways—share the profile of the audacious, strong-willed, eloquent, and artful innamorata whose spectacular life and death reflect the unusual autonomy and theatrical brilliance of the tragic diva.
The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage traces the transnational connections between Shakespea... more The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare’s all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress who radically altered female roles and expanded the horizons of drama just as the English were building their first paying theaters. By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, women had been acting professionally in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling across the Continent and acting in all genres, including tragicomedy and tragedy. Isabella Andreini, Vittoria Piissimi, and Barbara Flaminia became the first truly international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers beyond Italy; their artistry enabled mixed companies to expand in foreign markets, especially in France and Spain. Elizabeth and her court caught wind of the Italians’ success, and soon troupes with actres...
The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage, 2021
Not every playwright appreciated the diva’s gifts. When the actress-driven innamorata entered the... more Not every playwright appreciated the diva’s gifts. When the actress-driven innamorata entered the scene, some saw her as a threat that challenged their hold over the stage. The most common countertactic was to equate actresses with whores and common courtesans, as Thomas Nashe does in Pierce Penniless. Others wrote plays that figured amorous Italian women as dangerous Circes, as Anthony Munday does in The Two Italian Gentlemen. When a play directly represents an Italian actress, the authors marginalize and silence her, as did Day, Wilkins, and Rowley with “Harlakin’s Wife” in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers. In Volpone, Ben Jonson turned his satire on Englishwomen like Fine Lady Would-Be, bent on imitating Italian courtesans and actresses. He excised all the resourcefulness from the virtuous Celia, who resembles the virgo as she falls victim to a violently venal husband and cynical lecher who strive to cast her as a flexible player-whore.
Rosemarie Garland Thompson created the term “the extraordinary body” to describe the figure once ... more Rosemarie Garland Thompson created the term “the extraordinary body” to describe the figure once called monstrous and subject to both stigma and “minstrelization,” that is, forced or passive exhibition. Early modern courts minstrelized the dwarf’s extraordinary body in ways that dramatized stigma and vulnerability, casting them in roles troping on the non-human, the soulless, and the powerless: the edible, the animal, the child. Treated as a performing object, or dressup doll, subject to random abuse and derision, made to do stupid pet tricks and even to marry and breed for amusement, the dwarf resembles the slave. Nonetheless, court dwarfs had the potential to capitalize on their status by exhibiting themselves in various ways or by establishing affective bonds with masters and mistresses. In certain settings, at certain fleeting moments, even a doubly abjected female dwarf might act according to reasons and motives that are her own, one criterion of autonomy. In both her specular abjection and her seeming autonomy, the dwarf oddly resembles both the courtier and the monarch who keeps her. This essay explores the phenomenon of mirroring between monarch and dwarf. What does this lopsided form of “dark play” reveal about the fantasies and bad dreams of power? Why do these forms of play so often mirror the crises of gender abjection to which the female monarch was vulnerable? If these acts could raise a dwarf to confidante, they could also configure the royal diva Elizabeth as a spectacle of strangeness. These prodigies inspired a special kind of wonder as lusus naturae, yet both are vulnerable to theatrically enforced abjection.
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2021
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Papers by Pamela Allen Brown
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 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 Corombona, 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.