Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba

Abstract

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• Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba
• David J. Amelang (bio)

Introduction

Any person taking their first steps into the wide and complex world of early modern comparative theatre history immediately confronts one basic fact: that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was divided into territories that allowed women to act professionally and territories that banned them from doing so. In the commercial theatres of Shakespeare’s England, most famously, adolescent boys were charged with performing all female roles, whereas at exactly the same time in countries such as Italy, France, and Spain actresses were considered the stars of their industries. This division was not sculpted in stone, with some nations wavering back and forth on how to handle what authorities broadly perceived as a choice between the lesser of two evils: having either women or young cross-dressed men commanding attention on the nation’s public stages. Needless to say, depending on which laws and customs were in effect, dramatists had to adapt and adjust the way they wrote plays to the realities—and limitations—of their cultures of performance. It stands to reason that it would have been quite different to create a role for a young boy who was just getting started in the business of playing than for an established celebrity actress who was broadly seen as the main attraction in the eyes of the theatregoing public. [End Page 367]

Unable to shake this thought, I quickly became fixated with trying to identify and trace the different factors that influenced the prominence of female roles in the plays of early modern Europe. Fall 2021 saw the online release of Rolecall (http://www.rolecall.eu), an open-access database which I developed as a way of charting the plays and characters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European theatre. Its original purpose was to encourage scholars and students of Renaissance and Baroque theatre comparatively to explore the constellations of characters in early modern Europe’s dramatic corpora, with a particular focus on their gender dynamics. Did the presence or absence of actresses in one or another country affect the type of female characters their dramatic traditions ended up featuring? Did plays written by female playwrights feature lengthier female roles than those of their male counterparts? Is there a considerable difference between the number of female leads in the plays written for the Globe-like amphitheatres of suburban London, in which all female playgoers had to be accompanied by a male chaperone, as opposed to the elite indoor playhouses of the City that allowed for more women in the audience? These are the initial questions this Digital Humanities project was designed to answer.

The first and current iteration of the online platform offers a breakdown of the characters in each dramatic text, presented as either male or female (according to how the original text identifies them), and organized according to the length of each part. As the first stage of the project comes to a close, and after having analyzed approximately 2,800 plays from seven different countries (England, France, Germany Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain), the intention now is to take another step and broaden Rolecall further into a digital venture with the capability to offer greater nuance and understanding. That is, beyond expanding the corpus to include more dramatists from different countries and periods, there is a plan underway to reframe our theoretical infrastructure so as to allow for a more adequate representation of the broader complexities of the gender spectrum. ¹ Furthermore, the intention is to expand our range of measurements beyond role length to include other possible barometers of protagonism. With this latter purpose in mind, this article offers an early glimpse into the development of a selection of quantitative instruments designed to encapsulate a broader range of ways in which a dramatic [End Page 368] character can be deemed a protagonist in an early modern play. The first half of the study outlines the function and functionality of the indicators of dramatic protagonism being considered; the second presents a case study that surveys eleven plays written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which...