Commedia dell’arte continues to attract the attention of anglophone scholars, building on the considerable research in Italy starting in the late 1960s and the groundbreaking insights concerning the representation of gender and sexuality on the early modern English stage. Robert Henke has approached professional, itinerant, improvisational troupes from the standpoint of orality and in the context of poverty; M. A. Katritzki has shed light on the visual documentation concerning commedia dell’arte and on its connections to medicine peddling; Richard Andrews and Natalie Crohn Schmitt have analyzed Flamino Scala’s texts; Erith Jaffe-Berg has expanded our horizon beyond Western Europe into the Mediterranean Basin. Within this context, Rosalind Kerr’s monograph achieves several notable goals: it makes available many documents thus far only available in Italian, and, more importantly, she utilizes this very solid textual basis as a springboard for nuanced psychoanalytic and sociosemiotic analyses that incorporate her background in performance studies.
Her study follows a clear arc that starts from the general (women performing on stage) and reaches the particular (the example of Isabella Andreini). She makes it possible to see the latter as the best documented example among many, whose memory is far less well known. In chapter 1, “The Early Female Performer as Marketplace Fetish,” Kerr brings to bear the negative opinions of those, mostly prelates, writing against male and especially female actors in post-Council of Trent times. Women’s bodies displayed on stage became the focal point of their attacks precisely because, Kerr argues, they were so popular among their contemporaries. She focuses her attention first on the character of the maidservant, “an embodied site of sexual desire, functioning not only as a panderer but also as an available sex object who circulates among all the male characters” (40). She offers insightful readings of several scenarios from Flaminio Scala’s 1611 collection, a speech from his 1618 play Il finto marito, and images from the Recueil Fossard. The prima donnas analyzed in chapter 3 are qualitatively different from the maidservant roles as they focus on “selling their images rather than themselves” (67), and displaying their emotions, not merely their bodies. Here Kerr builds on the connection between cortigiane oneste and actresses in constructive, rather than moralizing or exculpatory, ways. The prima donnas’ questioning of social and gender structures and attendant biases comes to the forefront in chapter 4, “Transvestite Heroines.” Within the horizon of scholarship concentrating on the mostly male stage in England, Kerr’s contribution here is particularly valuable: she remarks that “actresses taking the transvestite roles might well have evoked complex discourses that reflected the intersection of many different cultural anxieties across a range of categories” (86), utilizing and expanding theoretical contributions by Carole-Anne Tyler and Valerie Traub. Connecting her analyses of three Scala scenarios to scripted erudita plays, Kerr demonstrates in detail how situations on stage are connected with audiences’ interpretations and reactions. The final, and longest, chapter is devoted to “Isabella Andreini: The Making of a Diva” and follows her trajectory from birth to stage debut to celebrity in life and to posthumous fame. Kerr analyzes passages from Andreini’s poetry, her pastoral play Mirtilla, and her letters and Fragmenti di alcune scritture, using her as a case study because, thanks to the power of writing, she is far better documented than any of her contemporary female actors.
Kerr’s work is commendable for several reasons. It is theoretically grounded in unusual ways vis-à-vis more philologically minded readings of commedia dell’arte. Yet it resolutely eschews anachronism, as it reflects her deep knowledge of the then prevailing social and cultural constructs of status and gender. The one generalization that rankled this reader, which Kerr presumably derives from Roberto Tessari’s interpretation, is her insistence on the separation of theater from the sacred (evident at several points early in the book: 4, 9, 15, 16, and 19): rather than the juxtaposition of “orthodox Christian values” and “those of the new, secular marketplace” (19), historical scholarship has brought to the fore a more nuanced series of beliefs, including, as Kerr herself acknowledges in her analysis of Isabella Andreini’s La pazzia, the one in “magic” (127). This aspect of the argument wanes soon, and thus does not mar the bulk of the volume. Kerr’s study enriches and complicates our knowledge of this seminal performance type by utilizing several theoretical tools to enhance her refined readings of arte texts.
