ABSTRACT
One of the innovations that commedia dell' arte introduced to the sixteenth-century public, at a time in which Shakespeare’s theatre was a solidly male domain, was the inclusion of women into the performance. A full century before women would be allowed officially onto the Restoration stage in England, already in the 1560s women in Italy were incorporated as equal partners in commedia dell' arte, in which they performed as well as produced plays, functioning as capocomici (company leaders). 1 In fact, recent commedia dell' arte research has emphasized the centrality of women as commercial vehicles, ensuring the success of the fledgling commedia dell' arte in light of competition from traveling performers, mountebanks, male professional actors in Spain and England and amateur male actors performing as part of the literary academies in Italy. 2 Women were a new attraction on stage; a novelty as far as the theatre scene went. They were often titillating in their strategic flashes of real female body parts and in their use of scintillating costumes, attractive to both male and female audiences. Because they served as both actors and producers of their own performances, women inadvertently also contributed to the kinds of subjects broached in performances. Actresses, like their male counterparts, depicted various Mediterranean characters in stories set against the dramatic background of the Mediterranean Sea. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which women functioned on stage, asking whether they used similar performance strategies as their male counterparts or introduced unique aspects in their performances of the Mediterranean.
