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• The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata by Pamela Allen Brown
• David J. Amelang

“‘FOR WHAT Is A PLAY WITHOUT A WOMAN IN IT?’” The epigraph that launches Pamela Allen Brown’s book is the startling rhetorical question posed by Hieronimo, the protagonist of Thomas Kyd’s blockbuster The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1580s), as he is casting his climactic play-within-a-play that will serve as the revenge tragedy’s grand finale (qtd. 1). He proclaims this in order to justify placing Bel-Imperia, the play’s heroine and one of the most prominent female leads of the Elizabethan stage, at the center of his plot to avenge the murder of his son (who was also her lover). Bel-Imperia’s own thirst for vengeance and her fiair for the dramatic makes her the perfect choice for the part, a vehicle specifically designed to showcase her unquestionable stardom. The irony of Hieronimo’s question is that at the time Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy, women were not allowed to perform in the country’s main public theaters; that is, Bel-Imperia and all other female roles in Kyd’s and Shakespeare’s England were played by cross-dressed boys, young performers more akin to apprentices than to stars. Thus, the answer to “what is a play without a woman in it?” is, at least on one basic level, any Shakespeare-era play.

But of course, that is actually not the case: the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporary English dramatists are rich in captivating female roles. In fact, many of the heroines of the Shakespearean stage are remarkably similar to the ones found in plays written in countries that allowed women to perform professionally, such as Italy, Spain, or France. This common ground is noteworthy not only because of the absence or presence of professional actresses in one and another countries, but also because Elizabethan and Jacobean England’s theatrical culture is often discussed as if it were on the margins of continental Europe’s playmaking ways—on the outside looking in. Here is where Brown’s new book comes into play: by outlining the many tropes, themes, and conventions English dramatists adopted from the Italian theater-makers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage reinserts the plays of Shakespearean England, so often analyzed and discussed as a literary island, into the broader dramatic tradition of early modern Europe. The author’s particular aim is to establish connections between the celebrity actresses of [End Page 131] the Italian commedia dell’arte and the types of roles they originated with the heroines of the commercial theater of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Juliet, Viola, Portia, Cleopatra, the aforementioned Bel-Imperia, and many other female characters in the Shakespearean canon often display traits and tendencies that clearly resemble the stage creations of the Italian divas, even if this debt has been historically played down or even neglected thanks to the lack of tangible and direct connections between the Bard and the Transalpine comici. As a much-needed corrective, this comprehensive study analyzes the nonlinear dynamics of infiuence and adaptation that explain how the figure of the innamorata—an “elegant young woman, refined in manners and speech but volcanic in her passions” (29)—crossed geographical, linguistic, and cultural borders from the scenarios of the commedia dell’arte into London’s commercial playhouses during Shakespeare’s time.

The Diva’s Gift immediately comes across as a formidable achievement both in terms of scope as well as of interdisciplinarity. As Brown herself explains, this monograph “crosses many kinds of borders—generic, linguistic, national, racial, temporal” (22) to which I would add methodological, as it combines theater history and literary interpretation based on meticulous close analysis in its exploration of the ties between the Italian divas and Shakespearean heroines. The first two chapters, “The Innamorata Ignites” and “Italianating the Boy,” provide the study with a solid foundation of historical background on the dynamics of the Italian itinerant troupes...

 审阅者：

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  《女主角给莎士比亚舞台的礼物：能动性、戏剧性和激情》作者：帕梅拉·艾伦·布朗
•  大卫·J·阿梅朗

“‘没有女人的戏剧是为了什么？’”帕梅拉·艾伦·布朗这本书的开头铭文是托马斯·基德大片《西班牙悲剧》（约 1580 年代）的主人公希罗尼莫提出的令人震惊的反问句。铸造他的高潮剧中剧，这将成为复仇悲剧的大结局（第一季）。他宣称这一点是为了证明将剧中的女主角、伊丽莎白时代舞台上最著名的女主角之一贝尔-因佩里亚置于他为儿子（也是她的情人）被谋杀的复仇计划的中心。贝尔-因佩里亚对复仇的渴望和她对戏剧性的天赋使她成为这个角色的完美选择，这是一个专门为展示她无可争议的明星地位而设计的车辆。赫罗尼莫的问题具有讽刺意味的是，在基德撰写《西班牙悲剧》时，女性不被允许在该国的主要公共剧院表演；也就是说，贝尔因佩里亚以及基德和莎士比亚笔下的英国的所有其他女性角色都是由异装男孩扮演的，这些年轻演员更像是学徒而不是明星。因此，“什么是没有女人的戏剧？”的答案。至少在一个基本层面上，它是任何莎士比亚时代的戏剧。

但当然，事实并非如此：莎士比亚及其当代英国剧作家的喜剧和悲剧中充满了迷人的女性角色。事实上，莎士比亚舞台上的许多女主角与意大利、西班牙或法国等允许女性从事职业表演的国家所写的戏剧中的女主角非常相似。这一共同点值得注意，不仅因为在一个或另一个国家存在或缺席职业女演员，还因为伊丽莎白一世和詹姆士一世时期的英国戏剧文化经常被讨论为好像它处于欧洲大陆戏剧制作方式的边缘——从外部看这就是布朗的新书发挥作用的地方：通过概述英国戏剧家从十六世纪和十七世纪的意大利戏剧制作人那里采用的许多比喻、主题和惯例， 《女主角给莎士比亚舞台的礼物》重新插入了莎士比亚的戏剧。莎士比亚笔下的英国经常被当作文学岛屿来分析和讨论，但现在却融入了早期现代欧洲更广泛的戏剧传统中。作者的具体目的是在意大利即兴喜剧[完第131页]的名人女演员与她们起源于伊丽莎白一世和詹姆士一世时期英国商业剧院的女主角的角色类型之间建立联系。 朱丽叶、维奥拉、鲍西娅、克利奥帕特拉、前面提到的贝尔-因佩里亚以及莎士比亚经典中的许多其他女性角色经常表现出与意大利女主角的舞台创作明显相似的特征和倾向，即使这种债务在历史上被淡化甚至被淡化了。由于吟游诗人和跨阿尔卑斯漫画之间缺乏有形和直接的联系，该书被忽视了。作为一项急需的纠正措施，这项综合研究分析了影响和适应的非线性动态，解释了innamorata的形象——一位“优雅的年轻女子，举止和言语优雅，但热情如火山”（29）——如何跨越地域莎士比亚时代，从即兴喜剧的场景到伦敦的商业剧场，都存在着语言和文化的边界。

《天后的礼物》在范围和跨学科方面立即给人留下了令人畏惧的成就。正如布朗本人所解释的那样，这本专着“跨越了多种边界——通用的、语言的、民族的、种族的、时间的”（22），我将在其中添加方法论，因为它在探索中基于细致的密切分析，结合了戏剧史和文学解释。意大利女主角和莎士比亚女主角之间的联系。前两章“点燃激情”和“意大利男孩”为研究意大利巡回剧团的动态提供了坚实的历史背景基础……