Serena Laiena

Who were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies?

These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in the show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583-ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy.

Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, investigates the deployment of Catholic devotion as a marketing tool, and argues for the importance of the couple system in the history of Commedia dell’Arte, a system that continues to shape celebrity today.

https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/the-theatre-couple-in-early-modern-italy-self-fashioning-and-mutual-marketing/

A cura di Annamaria Azzarone e Serena Laiena

La fortuna critica del «più grande drammaturgo italiano del Seicento»
è stata a lungo compromessa da una pervicace diffidenza nei confronti del
valore letterario dei testi dei comici dell’arte. Nel pantheon del teatro barocco
europeo, il nome di Giovan Battista Andreini non figura accanto a quello
di Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille. Eppure, la sua opera, eccezionalmente
vasta ed eterogenea, mostra nello sperimentalismo delle forme e nell’eclettismo
dei contenuti tendenze in linea con la maggiore produzione europea
del XVII secolo.

Gli scritti prodotti da predicatori e moralisti tra Cinque e Seicento in Italia documentano una frattura apparentemente insanabile tra Chiesa e teatro di professione. Le attrici, in particolare, che recitano in pubblico e godono di una libertà di lavoro, guadagno e movimento senza precedenti per le donne, sono additate come un anti-modello e collocate al di fuori della mappa sociale della perfezione femminile nell’Italia post-tridentina. Il rapporto tra attrici dell’Arte e religione non è tuttavia riducibile ad una dinamica oppositiva.
Il presente studio intende indagare i tentativi delle attrici dell’Arte di colmare il divario che nell’opinione pubblica le separava dai modelli di donna cristiana. Prendendo in esame una varietà di documenti editi e inediti, il contributo analizza diverse modalità di declinazione del rapporto tra le attrici dell’Arte e la religione e ricostruisce alcune pratiche devozionali comuni tra i comici, evidenziando il valore storico-documentario della strumentalizzazione di tali pratiche e la loro influenza sul processo di trasformazione dell’immagine pubblica delle attrici dell’Arte. L’indagine qui condotta consente di determinare l’esistenza di un modello di attrice cristiana che non rifiuta la sua antitesi – l’attrice «anti-cristiana» – ma la ingloba risemantizzandola, operando così una riscrittura dei canoni di donna virtuosa nell’Italia della prima età moderna.

Il contributo suggerisce una rivalutazione della carriera di Giovan Battista Andreini alla luce di alcune testimonianze documentarie relative a sua moglie, Virginia Ramponi. Mediante l'analisi di un campionario di lettere edite e inedite, il saggio dimostra la rilevanza della mediazione di Ramponi in alcuni episodi significativi per la carriera della coppia e traccia un percorso parallelo e coordinato a quello che gli studi storico-critici hanno sin qui delineato per la drammaturgia andreiniana. Evidenziando la progettualità duale che sottende al successo della coppia, il saggio promuove il meccanismo combinatorio a chiave di lettura del loro sodalizio artistico.

Between 1610 and 1652, the professional actor and playwright Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654) published six works on the figure of Mary Magdalene. This essay proposes a reading of this corpus of works as a singular attempt by a professional actor to recast his own image by actively engaging with Counter-Reformation thought. At the same time, it deconstructs Andreini's patent compliance with Tridentine ideals and reveals that a subtle criticism, expediently hidden by the author, lies at the core of these works. In this corpus, Andreini points out the paradox inherent to the oxymoronic perception of professional performers in early modern Italy, especially actresses, who were considered diabolic by some, divine by others. He therefore censures the relativity in assessing their morality.

The present study is the first treatment of the careers of two professional actors as a couple in early modern Italy. It examines the success achieved by Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654) and his wife Virginia Ramponi (1583-ca.1631) as a result of the self-representation and marketing strategies they devised and adopted. Their careers are considered as a unicum; two faces of a single product to be sold on the market: the professional theatre couple. This thesis presents a pair of mirrored images: it looks at specific moments of the careers of Andreini and Ramponi from both his perspective and hers, in order to define their individual contributions to the success they enjoyed together and to show that their achievements were the result of a synergy. Against the historical background of post-Tridentine Italy, this study illustrates their literary, performative, iconographic and epistolary tactics as both a reaction to the opposition to professional performers led by Counter-Reformation clergy and a response to the promotion of professional performers led by academicians. By exploring Andreini and Ramponi's engagement with Counter-Reformation thought, their relation with cultural and political institutions, their power and artistic networks, this study offers a new perspective on the historical and cultural context of early modern Italy. In revealing the leading role of Ramponi in the company of which the Andreinis were part, and the impact of her international prestige in the reception of professional performers, it aims to enrich the scholarly discourse on the agency of women in early modern Italy. By looking at the career of the comici as a couple, it writes a new chapter in the social history of early modern theatre which opens up new avenues of research on professional theatre.

Full article at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2021.1983981

This article examines the reception of professional actresses in Counter-Reformation Italy and explores the causes and phases of their transformation from meretrices to dive. The first part analyses a range of primary sources that report the arguments advanced by their detractors, in particular members of the clergy, for the social exclusion of actresses. It then considers their training as a reason for their inclusion within academies and for their recasting as dive. The second part of the article looks at a selection of published and unpublished encomia composed by different academicians for the actress and singer Virginia Ramponi (1583-c. 1631), and aims to reassess the relationship between actresses and academies in early modern Italy.


L’articolo esamina la ricezione delle attrici dell’arte nel periodo della
Controriforma e considera cause e fasi della loro trasformazione da
meretrices a dive. Lo studio prende in esame, in primo luogo, un
corpus di fonti primarie che documentano le argomentazioni di
detrattori, molti dei quali ecclesiastici, volte a denigrare il ruolo
delle attrici nella società. Considera, quindi, la formazione delle
attrici quale fattore determinante della loro inclusione
accademica e della loro trasformazione in dive. Mediante lo
studio di una selezione di encomi editi e inediti composti da
alcuni accademici per l’attrice e cantante Virginia Ramponi (1583–
c. 1631), l’articolo intende infine proporre una rivalutazione dei
rapporti tra attrici e accademie nell’Italia del Cinque e Seicento.

The UCD Italian Seminar Series is a programme of online and hybrid research seminars featuring scholars working across different areas of Italian Studies and related interdisciplinary fields. Seminars will run each month throughout 2022 and 2023.

This two-day conference, exploring the connections between theatre and music in seventeenth-century Italy, was held on Thursday 20th September and Friday 21st September 2018 at the University of Cambridge.

We welcomed Prof. Richard Andrews (University of Leeds), Prof. Antonio Rostagno (Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’), and Dr Lisa Sampson (University College London) as our keynote speakers.

The conference programme included a Commedia dell’Arte acting workshop with director Ludovico Nolfi and a fully-staged performance of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) in Clare College Chapel. Both events were free and open to the public.

More details on the conference website: www.intersectionsconferencecambridge2018.wordpress.com

This workshop aims to explore the legacy of Commedia dell’Arte in European theatre and specifically in the Italian, English, French and Russian context.

Apart from learning about Commedia dell’Arte and its legacy in European theatre, the participants will have the opportunity to become characters of Commedia dell’Arte onstage.

More details on: https://commediadellarteeurope.wordpress.com/

Panel organised for the Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference

The general lack of interest in the studies of 17th-century Italy has, with rare exceptions, dissuaded scholars from looking properly at even the most significant authors of that century. Nevertheless, in the last decades the Baroque period has been rediscovered and reconsidered as the forefront of ‘modernity’. The innovative spirit of the Seicento is fully embodied in the eclectic and hybrid work of Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654). Son of Isabella Andreini (writer, academician and the first theatre ‘diva’ in Europe) and of Francesco Andreini (actor and leader of the Gelosi, a renowned Commedia dell’Arte company), he followed in the footsteps of his famous parents and went further. He constructed his life around careful strategies of self-representation; he eluded any attempt at classification by pushing the already fluid boundaries of theatrical genres; he carried plurilingualism to the extreme and he manipulated language to obtain comic effects. This panel will address the problem of framing such a complex figure by approaching the study of Giovan Battista Andreini’s works in three different ways.

The first paper will provide a biographical perspective by showing how both the roots of his success and the subjects of his theatrical works are inextricably linked to the women in his life. According to his strategic planning, Andreini turned his mother’s memory and his wife’s career to his own advantage. His wife Virginia Ramponi (1583-c.1630) was indeed not only an actress but also a famous opera singer. He was a master in recasting episodes of his life in his plots and he built Lelio, the character he used to play, to give a particular image of himself. The examples offered will be the first way-in to the analysis of his works.

The second paper will look at Andreini's linguistic experimentalism. Andreini has aroused the interest of philologists and historians of the Italian language as a creator of language other than of plots and characters. His work, in the tradition of plurilingual Italian theater, mixes different Italian dialects and a variety of idioms within a single work; the Tuscan sections of Andreini's texts display an experimental and innovative vocabulary. This presentation will use the example of La turca comedia (1611-1620), the first comedy he published, to show the potential of a systematic linguistic analysis of his production.

The third paper will pay attention to the literary intertwining of different traditions, genres, and sources in Andreini’s production. It will offer a wide field for intertextual research: an example is the potential link with Shakespeare, which emerges from the comparison of Andreini’s Ismenia and The Tempest. This intertextual intricacy is especially evident in his last works, where Andreini resorts to all the skills and materials he had developed throughout his career, in a final attempt to come back to the limelight.

These three complementary approaches will offer an all-round portrait of Giovan Battista Andreini in order to give an account of his complexity, still largely unexplored.

Topic for IT5: Italian Identities: Place, Language, and Culture. This topic will explore the rich theatre production of Renaissance Italy, focusing in particular on some of its most experimental, exuberant, irreverent and successful comedies. It will trace the evolution of the comic genre, starting from the humanist revival of ancient drama, which determined the dominance of classical models in European theatre, to the birth of commedie erudite, which marked a new kind of production, blending Latin and Greek plots with elements of Italian literary tradition. Some of the best-known men of letters of the time devoted their efforts to comic theatre, among them Bernardo Bibbiena, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Pietro Aretino. Their works are rich in stylistic inventions, immoral plots and unforgettable characters, scurrilous language and clever twists, while also bringing to the stage proto-feminist issues and political satire. Meant to delight and entertain, they also reflect and question Italy’s historical context and socio-cultural fabric. While studying some of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance theatre, students will also be able to delve into the fascinating world of Italy’s courts, in Urbino, Florence, Rome, as well as its literary academies, such as the Intronati in Siena.

Topic for IT8: Italian Literature, Thought, and Culture, 1500-1650

This topic considers the heterogeneous theatrical panorama of Early modern Italy, starting from Renaissance tragedy and commedia erudita to more hybrid genres such as melodrama, pastoral play, tragicomedy. It will then focus on Commedia dell’Arte, a form of professional theatre which emerged during the first half of the sixteenth century. It will look at its performative and linguistic features and its development in relation to historical and cultural context. Special attention will be paid to moral and intellectual prejudice actors and actresses had to face in early modern Italy and to the strategies of self-fashioning they set-up consequently. These strategies allowed the transformation of some professional actresses into dive, for the first time in modern Europe. The close analysis of a selected corpus of scenarios and plays will provide an insight on commedia dell’arte techniques and will offer textual evidence for the process of the construction of a new idea of actors.

More details on: https://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/it8