The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing by Serena Laiena (review)

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• The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing by Serena Laiena
• Erith Jaffe-Berg (bio)

Serena Laiena. The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2023. 264 Pp. 264 + 4 color and 4 b/w figures + 2 tables. $163.00 hardback, $52.95 paperback, $52.95 eBook.

In The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing Serena Laiena focuses on the rise of the power couple of the commedia dell’arte. She contends that the comici used their marital status to their advantage by marketing themselves as couples, tag-teaming in order to advance each other’s agendas. The status of couple increased the actors’ reputations artistically and also appealed to powerful religious and political figures. In this way, Laiena argues, commedia dell’arte created a fame-building machine and laid a foundation for stardom that is still resonant today. In her accessible narration, she draws on multiple disciplines, including theatre history, performance studies, Italian studies, celebrity studies, and gender studies. This interdisciplinary approach builds on scholarship about the Italian diva, in such works as Rosalind Kerr’s The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage and Pamela Allen Brown’s The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata, interweaving an understanding of how the actors navigated Counter-Reformation Catholic resurgence to their advantage by foregrounding their relationships.

In the first chapter, Laiena sets the stage of post-Tridentine Italy, a place in which religious figures such as Cardinal Borromeo and Giovan Domenico Ottonelli waged war on the theatre by casting it as a corrupting influence. Professional actresses were the main target of clerical censure, personifying their detractors’ criticism of licentious presentation and inducing moralistic condemnation. Despite this, the ever-defiant divas flaunted their sexual appeal and resisted censure, thriving on their public’s interest. Nevertheless, the divas were not impervious to condemnation, and the couple identity offered the actresses a means of pushing back on the moralizing admonitions they faced. More than just a safety net, as Laiena argues, the actresses used their status strategically, along with other methods of self-fashioning as artists and intellectuals. The following chapters unfold how they did this.

Laiena’s second chapter offers a bird’s eye view of the phenomenon by chronicling ten theatre couples, mining various sources for details about the ways they individually enhanced each other’s fame as a strategy for mutual benefit. She notes an evolution in the commedia dell’arte’s history, in terms of the function of each couple—from having the woman take on the prima Innamorata role and the man take on the pen to reversing that trend in later periods. Laiena contends that it was up to the actress to not only forge connections with intellectuals and [End Page 489] aristocrats but also facilitate relationships with ecclesiastical authorities. Laiena identifies Alberto Naselli (Zan Ganassa, c. 1540- c.1584) and Barbara Flaminia (c. 1540- c. 1586) as the original power couple who became international purveyors of performance. Others followed this model because, as Laiena puts it, the status offered benefits, including “mutual legitimation” that extended even upon one person’s death, when the surviving partner continued lauding their beloved (51). As talented as the actors may have been as individuals, their opportunities were amplified by the mutual benefit of being part of a couple. Laiena traces many a couple well beyond the turn of the seventeenth century, up to the early eighteenth century. This broad scope provides a very useful corrective to the tendency to emphasize the first and second generations of comici, neglecting their legacy in subsequent decades. Thus, Caterina Biancolelli (1665–1716) and Pierre Lenoir de la Thorillière (1659–1731) surface as an international couple, “crowning the union of two theatrical traditions” (60). Likewise, unknown names such as Bridgida Bianchi (1613–1703) and Marc’Anotonio Bianchi (?-ca.1600) fall into focus and suggest further work still remains to be undertaken by future scholars.

In the next three chapters, Laiena shifts the focus to one stellar couple, Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and...