ABSTRACT
Men playing men dominated the all-male stage, where many of their roles were distinguished by easily recognizable stage costumes. During the course of the sixteenth century, male stock roles rapidly developed stylized stage names, costumes, masks and other distinguishing characteristics that aid their visual and textual identification even where the context is not obviously theatrical. In contrast, early actresses honed their skills in arenas in which costume was often less overtly theatrical, such as the marketplace, oral tradition, carnival celebrations and other festivity. Even in stage contexts, female performers habitually wore less stylized costumes than men. Their costumes were subject to less historicization, and actresses made imaginative use of cross-dressing. The documentation suggests considerable overlap in the names, costumes and social classes of early modern female stock roles, both with each other and with the real-life types they represent. Perhaps because visual recognition is less straightforward for early female players than for actors, female commedia costume has attracted less scholarly attention than that of its male roles. In the fully scripted plays of the amateur Italian stage (commedia erudita), female parts were always played by boys and men. The plays written for these all-male casts generally held to the convention that wives and romantic heroines should appear as little as possible during a performance, with much of their action related at second hand by maids and servants. If they appear on the theatrical stage at all before the mid-sixteenth-century advent of the commedia dell’arte, female characters tend to hover well in the background, preferably framed by a window or door of their own domestic interior. Despite church opposition, commedia actresses turned the same doors and windows that had marked boundaries for their cross-dressing male colleagues into stepping stones onto centre stage.1 By the late sixteenth century, key scenes involving the inamorata were increasingly conducted in full view of the audience. The inamorata herself, played by a woman, became an essential onstage presence. The introduction of actresses was enormously popular, and a major factor in ensuring a rapid expansion of female stage roles.
