Music and Women of the Commedia dell'Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century

Renaissance Quarterly, Fall, 2004 by Nina Treadwell

Anne MacNeil. Music and Women of the Commedia dell'Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century.

Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. viii 360 pp. index. illus. chron. bibl. $85. ISBN: 0-19-816689-3.

MacNeil's study is an important contribution to the literature on music and theater in the late Renaissance and provides a thought-provoking assessment of women's involvement. The author weaves an abundance of information regarding the interdependencies and negotiations that characterize the relationships of members of the early commedia dell'arte troupes, their patrons, and their musical associates. Although the rich context that provides the background for MacNeil's study at times takes her far afield from her ostensible subject matter--that is, the music and women of the commedia dell'arte--the book is essential reading for scholars interested in the relationship of early modern women to musical and theatrical practice.

The author divides her study into five chapters that constitute roughly half of the book. The remaining portions of the study consist of an extensive chronology (which goes well beyond the activities of the major commedia troupes to include significant events in the lives of their patrons, for example), followed by sixty pages of documents. The documentary material is firmly focused on the commedia, although the reader is only sporadically directed to these documents in the text proper. In addition, MacNeil's prose is, at times, an uneasy alliance of chronological and descriptive narrative (which takes various twists and seemingly undirected forays) and a case-study approach. In the latter mode, however, MacNeil is at her finest. Her readings of several well-known texts and/or performances by commedia actresses--Virginia Andreini's rendering of Arianna's lament, Isabella Andreini's performance of La pazzia d'Isabella, and Isabella's pastoral play La Mirtilla, found in chapters 4, 2, and 3, respectively--are the most insightful and compelling portions of the book, not least because of their strongly directed and argumentative style.

MacNeil's readings also raise interesting questions about interpretative stance and methodology, and in this regard contribute to ongoing and important debates about the significance and status of early modern women. MacNeil's tendency is to stress the "exceptional woman" for whom an argument can certainly be made for Isabella Andreini, who provides a focus for several of the chapters. But the title of MacNeil's book--stressing women and music--would seem to promise a more general expose and assessment of women's position in the early commedia. It is curious, then, that MacNeil overlooks some of the more recent work in performance and theater studies that helps contribute to our understanding of the performative strategies developed by actresses as a group (see, for example, Eric Nicholson's "Romance as Role Model: Early Female Performances of Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata," in Renaissance Transactions, ed. Finucci, 1999, and articles by Jane Tylus and Kathleen McGill).

In light of the above, MacNeil's insightful analysis of La Mirtilla--in which she demonstrates how Isabella parodies Tasso's Aminta for protofeminist ends--might have been fruitfully compared to Flaminia Romana's revisionist performances of portions of Ariosto's Orlando furioso, for example (see Nicholson, 260ff.). Flaminia's intertextual maneuvers demonstrate that women had been actively selecting, arranging, and "rewriting" the dramatic repertories of their troupes for decades. It seems important to connect the dots here, given the relative paucity of information on early actresses in general. This approach would have also been in line with the emphasis MacNeil places on women's collectivity in chapter 1, where she draws together an array of evidence for the importance of actresses in the prologues of intermedi. MacNeil's interpretation of this material is nuanced and insightful, and despite lack of surviving musical sources she performs an admirable "archaeology of musical performance" (12-16).

One of the book's greatest strengths is the way it "fleshes out," in multifaceted fashion, the commedia's "invocation of classical reasoning," (2) especially with regard to justifying the presence and expression of women on the stage. For MacNeil, this is "the central precept of the commedia dell'arte" (2). The classicizing themes that she details go well beyond the more commonly cited invocations of Aristotelian virtu or Neoplatonic divine madness. Whether or not one might like MacNeil to delve further into why the classicizing impulse was pursued with such vehemence, her study stands as the most comprehensive to date documenting the numerous ways in which women's presence on the stage found justification through recourse to classical reasoning.

NINA TREADWELL

University of California, Santa Cruz