soggetti/spettacolo/Glasgow 1992/9
 

Many of the attacks against the acting profession based their legal arguments on the dubious status of actors under Roman law, which accounted them as infamous, and in need of special dispensations if they were to enjoy normal citizen's privileges.

1614: Francisco Ortiz: Apologia en difensa de las comedias
The sacraments should be given to actors, because the prohibitory canons refer to Roman actors, not to modern ones ...

The seventeenth century saw the theatre become a focus for much religious dissension. The issues became bound up with those of the Reformation and counter-reformation, and with the allied political problems. In England for example, the theatres were identified with Royalist and Catholic practices, and were closed down during Cromwell's Protectorate. In France the Protestants, and the reforming anti-papal Catholics such as the Jansenists, tended to see in the theatre a den of vice and a terrible waste of money, but mostly a fatal distraction from the serious things in life; every minute of our life must eventually be accounted for before God; we are deprived of that state of Christian vigilance which is necessary for the resistance of temptation. There was another argument, used also to attack any other works of the imagination, which stated that since what was depicted on stage could not possibly be literally true, then it was necessarily a lie and therefore damned.

1620: Dialogas de las Comedias:
An actress appears to represent a Magdalen or Mother of God, an actor the Saviour, and the first thing you see is that the greater part of the audience recognises the woman as a prostitute and the man as a bully ... Actors are the filth and scum of the world ... wicked people with an aversion to work.

In Spain, numerous statutes attempted to regulate the theatre, and particularly the women in it. Spain and Italy differed strongly from the rest of Europe in that women played women on their stages from a relatively early period, and were well established by the seventeenth century. (Except of course in Rome - Rospigliosi's women were all sung by castrati, though, as with Shakespeare's boys, this did not hinder him from writing female roles with great insight). Throughout the century, however, there were repeated attempts to remove women from the stage altogether; when these failed there were statutes requiring all actresses over the age of 12 to be married and be accompanied by their husbands; there were also many laws forbidding women to dress as men (and occassionally vice versa). For the Spanish stage had a type of actress found nowhere else at the time: the 'mujer varonil' or manly woman, who dressed and even fought as a man onstage, and sometimes off. This is precisely what Baltasara is, as her portrayal of Clorinda shows (very astute of Rospigliosi to find precisely the right Italian equivalent), and incidentally, is what Beatrice clearly longs to be. So Baltasara is twice damned, first for being a woman onstage at all, and secondly for wearing trousers. She can fall no further.

Postscript
3 June 1668: the young girl who ran away from the house of Signora Donna Caterina has been found in Castelnuovo, alone, dressed as a man, and possessed with the idea of becoming a hermit, in imitation of the 'Santa Baldassara' which was given several times this Carnival, in the Casa Rospigliosi.

Kate Brown     
 

            

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