Shakespeare created some of theater’s most famous female roles, from Juliet to Cleopatra. Yet in Shakespeare’s time, while professional actresses were becoming popular across Europe, such challenging female roles were played on England’s traditionally all-male stage not by women, but by boys.
“The question that Shakespeareans, and anybody who has studied Renaissance drama, have always asked is how the English – alone among the nations around them in Europe – kept out the actress. Why and how?” says Pamela Allen Brown, an associate professor of English based at UConn’s Stamford campus and an expert in Shakespearean drama and Renaissance literature.
Brown, an avid theatergoer as well as a poet and playwright, believes that the English managed to keep their stage all-male by creating dynamic new roles that put theatrical foreign “women” at the center of some plots. Shakespeare and his colleagues, Brown says, were pressured to do so by the emergence of the professional actress on the Continent in the mid-16th century, especially in the renowned Italian theatrical troupes called the commedia dell’arte.
“I started thinking about the characters I would call the leading or star players on the English stage and how they related to characters and actresses in Europe,” says Brown, whose work-in-progress, Extravagant Stranger: The Foreign Actress in Shakespearean Drama, recently earned the support of a yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a prestigious award that helps fund individuals pursuing advanced research of value to scholars and general audiences in the humanities. Brown also has won a grant from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, Calif., where she will hold the Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship.
As the international reputations of actresses in Europe flourished, and Italian troupes began to cross the English Channel and appear at Elizabeth’s court, Brown theorizes, playwrights such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare became acutely aware of the need for the all-male commercial stage to compete with dual-gender European rivals, and began to create major new female roles that would be performed by boy actors.
These central female characters, famous for their dramatic scenes of suicide, madness and passion, were unprecedented in their theatricality. Juliet, for instance, delivers an erotically charged soliloquy framed by her window, and performs both faked and real death scenes, while Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet is a tour de force of tragicomic acting and singing. In creating roles that demanded star quality performances from “boy divas,” and stressing their uniqueness and special skills, Brown says, English playwrights effectively kept actresses off the stage for almost a century.
Seeking to understand the dynamics behind these aspects of the English theater’s past, Brown has set out to study historical materials relating to English and Italian actors and troupes along with all plays with major female roles written from the 1560s through 1616 by such greats as Shakespeare, Marlowe and John Webster.
“I’m asking, ‘What was it like before the advent of the actresses? What were the female roles like? Where was the pressure point the greatest to start training and having women on stage in England?'” Brown says. “Somehow the professional companies managed to turn back the threat of the actress … through the means of creating these incredible dramatic roles.”
