This superb monograph reveals the impact professional actresses had on the early modern London stage, an arena famously lacking in them. The English public theater, Pamela Allen Brown demonstrates, was shaped from the first by celebrity Italian divas, whose reputations crossed international borders and whose variegated roles and dazzling playing styles influenced English playwrights from John Lyly to John Webster. The story of influence is multifaceted, and The Diva’s Gift is far more than a source study (though it is that, too). Brown is occupied less with tracing genetic links between plays than with demonstrating the complex interplay of two theatrical cultures: that of the comici—itinerant, mixed-gender Italian troupes working throughout Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—and that of the all-male London stage. Because the comici improvised from scenarios, mixing elements of multiple plays, it is not always possible to trace an English text’s precise verbal or...

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