ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on women in the Italian Renaissance. It would seem obligatory to offer some research on female theatre performers in Italy. The appearance of actresses on the Italian Renaissance stage has not been explored as much as the importance of the subject would warrant. Isabella Andreini is the first famous example, though probably not the first example, of a woman who helped to establish a conventional family structure within the bounds of a theatrical profession which was still seen by many as a threat to family values. The famous diatribes of the Jesuit writer Giovan Domenico Ottonelli are intolerant of the whole phenomenon of theatre. In Renaissance society, any woman who exhibited herself in public was doing so to sexual effect even if she had no sexual intention. The stage dialogues for lovers, which have the title either of Fragmenti or Ragionamenti, have been used quite properly by theatre historians as evidence for commedia delVarte repertoire.
