Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day

In her ambitious and fruitful exploration of gender portrayal in Italian theater, Maggie Günsberg avails herself of an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on semiotics and psychoanalysis, women studies, dramatic theory and audience-reception theories. Her careful, constant consideration of socioeconomic factors and their effects on theater production and the dramatic representation of women, and the unfailing attention she pays to that common boundary between ideology and culture-between the strategies of male power and the conventions and formal properties of theater-provide continuity and coherence to the study.

The book is comprised of six chapters, an ample and very useful bibliography, and scrupulously compiled indexes. The first two chapters are devoted to the comedy of the Renaissance; the third chapter examines female characters in Carlo Goldoni's plays; the forth and the fifth chapters study, respectively, Gabriele D'Annunzio's and Luigi Pirandello's portrayal of women in their theater, and the last one assesses the impact of Franca Rame's work-as a writer, a performer and a producer-on contemporary Italian theater.

By her own admission, Günsberg concerns herself with a very limited number of Renaissance plays: She takes into consideration only eight erudite comedies from the first thirty-five years of the sixteenth century (La cassaria, I suppositi and La Lena by Ariosto, La mandragola and Clizia by Machiavelli, Gli ingannati by the Sienese academy of the Intronati, Bibbiena's La calandria, and Aretino's La cortigiana). However, the plays of this corpus are widely regarded as being among the most representative of "the vernacular development of the classical Roman tradition" (8), and their contemporary social focus makes them highly relevant to the purpose of Günsberg's study. They are comedies written in a period of expanding market capitalism and committed to the economic realities of their time: The merchant class dominates them, both in terms of characters and through the prevalence of issues related to the accumulation of wealth and the exchange of goods. They feature male-conducted 'transactions' concerning marriage seduction and prostitution which involve female characters as commodities. Günsberg clearly demonstrates that while these Renaissance plays replicate categories of female characters already present in Roman comedy and retain traditional patriarchal definitions of femininity, they construct different variants of them in accordance with the development of early capitalism, as well as in accordance with the development of the modern stage and the implementation of new theatrical devices. Thus, for example, the inclusion of a church in the set for comedy and the use of cross-dressing appear to increase female access to the stage and to enable female characters to partake in onstage action and even indulge in intrigue.

It is precisely in her careful examination of gender-specific cross-dressing in Italian Renaissance comedy, its relation with other forms of disguise, its functions in terms of plot, and its effects on both stage dynamics and the dynamics of spectatorship, that Günsberg scores-in my opinion-many excellent points. Studying the dramatic texts in their performance context, in their socioeconomic context, and in the context of the laws and common attitudes which governed sexuality at the time (first and foremost the tendency of the patriarchal, capitalist system to define women exclusively in terms of their sexuality, and to commodify the female body), Günsberg illustrates how cross-dressing allows, at times, quite a radical critique of the fixity of the boundaries defining gender. On the other hand, by taking into full account the Renaissance practice of casting only male actors in all the roles, she also demonstrates that "all the eroticism in the performance of the comedies, both for the actors and the audience, is ultimately male-focussed" (68). Women and their sexuality still appear defined by men, working within patriarchal traditions.

The eighteen comedies sampled in the chapter on Goldoni (all, to the exception of one, from the 1740s and the 1750s) can scarcely do justice to the vast and varied production of this playwright and the presence and treatment of female characters in his theater. The abundance of such characters in Goldoni's comedies is explained with the "progressively increasing opportunity for actresses by the eighteenth century" (88) and by the representation on stage of indoor scenes, almost unknown to Renaissance theater. The more advanced socioeconomic context-marked by the expansion of urban centers, the rise of a thriving, urban middle class, and more complex social relations-affords eighteenth-century women in general more opportunities. However, Günsberg observes that patriarchal ideology continues to subtend "the materialist ethos of market capitalism and to inform gender relations accordingly" (88). The purpose of the chapter is to take a gender-specific look at "how virtue and vice intersect [in Goldoni's comedies] with categories of class, wealth, age, work and family belonging" (94), thus uncovering the hidden agenda of the moralizing tendency of Goldoni's theater, a tendency which was a key feature of European cultural production during this century, especially with comedies, but is here redefined in the Venetian context. Chastity, modesty and domesticity-trademarks of the 'virtuous' female characters-are discussed in the analysis of the plays centered on Pamela and Bettina (young and single in Pamela fanciulla and La putta onorata, and then married, in Pamela maritata and La buona moglie). Finzione and Machiavellian ingenuity-defining features of 'artful' women-are discussed in the analysis of plays featuring more spirited female characters, from Rosaura (La donna di garbo) to the legendary Mirandolina (La locandiera). One wonders why, among others, Giacinta (La trilogia della villeggiatura)-a character who would have shed such light on, and lent such complexity to, the discussion of Goldoni's ambivalence, his almost subversive gestures and his gestures of recuperation-was not taken into consideration.

The theatrical output of D'Annunzio (from the two Sogni, of 1897, to La Pisanelle, of 1913) and that of Pirandello (from La morsa, of 1898, to I gigantic della montagna, left unfinished at his death in 1934) are examined, almost in their entirety, in the following two chapters. A decadent variant of patriarchal femininity-one that exacerbates the traditional splitting of femininity into opposites-is at work in D'Annunzio's plays, where Madonna-like characters (spiritual, motherly, nurturing and domestic characters, who epitomize the non-sexual yet reproductive idea of womanhood) on one side, and femmes fatales (dangerously sensual creatures, who epitomize the carnal, sexual side of womanhood) on the other, help to define the D'Annunzian superman, with his Nietzschean will for power, his all-consuming desire of domination. Günsberg masterfully and vividly illustrates how femininity is systematically undermined, in D'Annunzio, by insidious processes of idealization and problematization of the woman's body, respectively in its only temporary physical beauty and "fecund embodiment of nature" (149) and its ageing decay and sterility.

The workings of patriarchy are also evident in Pirandello's theater, and Günsberg makes it a point to remind us that this is in spite of, or perhaps in reaction to, the growing women's movement in Italy. The significant development of the tertiary and public sector in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, made it possible for more and more women to join the labor force as office workers; yet this reality is consciously and completely excluded by the playwright from his works. Initially Günsberg focuses "on age as a male issue, as revealed in the dynamics between older and younger male characters, and the socioeconomic context that informs them" (163-4). She then turns to the treatment of female age and ageing to show how it plays itself out-once again-"exclusively in relation to issues of female sexuality and the female body, and in concerns relating to the patriarchal emphasis placed on female reproductive power" (189). Furthermore, she illustrates how prevalent the process of infantilization of women is in Pirandello, and how his female characters have absolutely no access to education and to economic resources which could make them independent. While Pirandello's plays "show a markedly positive interest in older masculinity and its socioeconomic power" (201), the female ageing process is to him the focus for a particularly vicious, misogynist dramatization.

The one-woman satires or stage monologues under scrutiny in the last chapter of the book are indeed, among the works of Franca Rame and her husband Dario Fo, the ones that more clearly express a feminine point of view. The use of direct address and the playing of multiple parts by one actress "is central to Rame's performance politics": it helps to place firmly-once and for all-the female character centre stage; it helps to replace "the notion of the subject in all its deterministic fixity" with that of "subjectivity as a process and a practice" (208), thus constructing female roles "through a wide range of discourses traditionally associated with both femininity and masculinity" (221) and illustrating and comparing multiple, varying standpoints at once. Of particular interest to me was to see how the major characteristics of Italian feminism-identified by Günsberg as the practice of autocoscienza, the prioritizing of relations between women, and the active awareness of the political and economic context-inform Rame's plays and the stage-audience relationship she set up.

Anyone with an interest in Italian theater or, more in general, in theater history, as well as anyone interested in the history of gender relations, should benefit from Günsberg's insightful and provocative study.