"I loved well to see plays"women on and off stage in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Italy, and Spain

Resumen

This work investigates women’s role as patron-spectators in the theatre of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Italy, and Spain. The aim of such an excursion into the little researched theme of early modern women’s theatregoing is to prove that, even though women, according to traditional periodization, cannot be said to have had a Renaissance, the theatrical event, be it the popular phenomenon that took place in the English and the Spanish public playhouses, or the exclusive happening patronised by the Italian aristocrats, allowed women to temporarily shake off the cultural and social shackles imposed on their sex. It was found that by letting them infringe their homeboundness in order to attend the theatre, and watch the enactment of plays that some feared might change their worldview and encourage them to re-act, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama gave women the opportunity to experience autonomy, agency, and empowerment. Chapter 1 starts with an overview of the Renaissance from a perspective that is both chronological and geographical, and proceeds by taking into account one of the most distinguishing features of the period, that is, imitation – of the past, as far as the temporal axis is concerned; of Italy with respect to the spatial level. Examples taken from the theatre of Renaissance Italy, England, and Spain are provided in order to show how imitation worked from both perspectives. After a concise exploration of elements regarding Renaissance history, geography, politics and society, Chapter 1 continues with a theoretical section devoted to theatre semiotics and to investigating the role of the actor and the spectator within the pragmatic situation of the performance. This is done in light of the fact that a play is made up of words that are to be spoken and heard, and of the fact that what makes the theatrical event possible are indeed the moments of its production and reception. In particular, attention is directed to the actor’s body and to the spectator’s function as both dramatic object and dramatic subject. The second part of Chapter 1 tries to delineate, in a comparative way, the theatrical traditions of England, Italy, and Spain through, first, a study of the material motivations that led to the construction of the first commercial playhouses in the second half of the sixteenth century, and, second, by means of some socio-cultural and historical considerations of the conditions of actors and spectators in the three countries. At the outset of Chapter 2 the term ‘Renaissance’ is resumed and compared to the now more widely used expression ‘early modern’ in the attempt to see how traditional periodization and the very idea of Renaissance have undergone a process of reevaluation in the last decades. Awareness that the period at hand was dominated by the male subject, and that women were excluded from the picture, has prompted scholars in the field of women’s history to a gender-inflected rethinking of the Renaissance based on the unearthing of women’s hidden histories. One of such histories saw early modern women leave their homes to attend dramatic performances at the public or the private theatres, and defy, in so doing, the conventions of the society they lived in. Probing different sources that bear witness to women’s presence at the theatre – the anti-theatrical polemic; women’s ego documents; various plays’ prologues and epilogues – Chapter 2 offers a gender-based study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theatre audience aimed at demonstrating how women’s participation as spectators in the performances of plays allowed them to enjoy a space of freedom. The analysis of three plays that Chapter 3 presents – William Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Alessandro Piccolomini’s L’Alessandro; Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre – is meant to show a woman’s character gradual shift from a situation in which she acts as an object of exchange between men, to a situation where that position is called into question by the expression of a non-normative desire, to, finally, the representation of a subjectivity that deconstructs all the conventions and convictions concerning women.