Full citation:Campbell, Julie D. 2005. “’Merry, nimble, stirring spirit[s]’: Academic, Salon and Commedia dell’arte Influence on the Innamorate in Love’s Labour’s Lost” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7
Although this collection does have one paper addressing female homoeroticism on stage, I have covered it primarily as background reading for exploring role-playing and stage theatrics as a context for romance tropes involving female couples.
Campbell - ’Merry, nimble, stirring spirit[s]’: Academic, Salon and Commedia dell’arte Influence on the Innamorate in Love’s Labour’s Lost
* * *
The premise of this article is that Shakespeare’s Loves Labors Lost is inspired by, and reflects, the prominence of women in Italian theater and in French salons who—as in the play—treated serious philosophical questions via banter and wit. Thus, even with no actual women on stage, Loves Labors Lost creates a strong female presence in English theater. The “French salon culture” of this era refers to the courts of Marguerite de Valois and Catherine de Medici, and predates the era most closely associated with the term “salon” beginning in the later 17th century.
The importance of Italian commedia actresses, participating fully in the improvisational bantering humor of that genre, can be seen in the introduction of Shakespearean characters such as Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola, but is less commonly acknowledged to be present in Loves Labors Lost. In Loves Labors Lost the philosophical interests of the court ladies and the disorderly assertive nature of female commedia roles are combined in a comedy that declines to resolve in tidy marriages.
The body of the article expands on these points, and on the reception of both continental theater, and what was perceived as the more risque behavior of French and Italian court women that supported the plausibility of the play’s plot.
Add new comment