Mirtilla, A Pastoral by Isabella Andreini (review)

Born into a Venetian family of modest means in 1562, Isabella Andreini, née Canali, would become the greatest commedia dell'arte actress of her age and a highly respected writer whose lyric poems, eclogues, and letters would enjoy multiple editions. Her intellectual circle was expansive. Fellow Italian poets Torquato Tasso, Gabriello Chiabrera, and Giovan Battista Marino sang her praises; the humanist Erycius Puteanus corresponded with her and composers such as Claudio Monteverdi recognized her worth. As a member of the Gelosi company, a commedia dell'arte troupe she eventually co-directed with her husband Francesco, Andreini performed to great acclaim at courts across Italy and in France. Her abilities were so admired that the French king Henry IV gave Andreini a state funeral after she died from complications of a miscarriage in Lyon while traveling back to Italy in 1604. Thanks in great part to Maria Luisa Doglio's modern Italian edition (1995) and Julie D. Campbell's edited English translation (2002), in recent years Andreini's pastoral drama Mirtilla, which reconsiders from a female perspective many of the genre's key tropes, has figured prominently in both research agendas and courses concerned with the pastoral genre, early modern women writers, and Renaissance theater.

Now Valeria Finucci and Julia Kisacky have collaborated to create the first complete bilingual edition of Mirtilla. This publication is the pair's third editorial collaboration for the Other Voice series, following their editions of Moderata Fonte's epic poem, Floridoro, A Chivalric Romance (2006), and Valeria Maiani's Celinda, A Tragedy (2010). Along with Finucci's translation and edition of Giulia Bigolina's Urania, A Romance (2005), Finucci and Kisacky consider Mirtilla to be "Part IV of what through the years has become a tetralogy of sorts and a scholarly obsession: the recovery of the first works of Italian Renaissance women writers in different literary genres" (xiii). Despite this preoccupation with "firsts," Finucci's extensively researched introduction shines precisely because she does not solely emphasize Andreini's importance as a "first" or "only." Instead, Finucci's introduction is commendable because she consistently depicts her subject in a richly contextualized landscape, populated not only by Andreini's male interlocutors mentioned above, but also by many women writers and actresses whose lives and work have been uncovered and illuminated through the feminist research and textual recovery of the past fifteen years. Building on this work, Finucci creates a fresh, highly detailed account of Andreini's life and a nuanced analysis of Mirtilla. Indeed, we immediately observe how this recent research shapes our view of Andreini on the cover of this handsome paperback. The cover features Paolo Veronese's painting of an elegantly dressed woman with book in hand that Maria Ines Alverti identified in 2008 as a portrait of Andreini (14). Certainly, Andreini "published the first play written in Italian by a woman" when she sent Mirtilla to press in 1588 (1), but Finucci notes that the same year also saw the publication of Maddalena Campiglia's pastoral Flori, and that Barbara Torrelli's Partenia, unpublished during her lifetime, is datable to 1586. Andreini was also in the vanguard on stage. She perfected the role of the innamorata, the ingénue who succumbs to love madness, although she did so in a way that avoided "a tragic Ophelia-like death" for her character (18). Andreini's performance became a "fully measured scene of theatrical buffoonery" that "resolved into comic brilliance" (18), as she assumed the voices and mannerisms of other characters on stage and spoke nonsensically in foreign tongues during her descent into madness. In order to "better situate the phenomenon of Andreini as prima donna," Finucci "retrace[s] chronologically the early presence of women performing on the Italian stage" through concise, well-documented discussions of the lives of a number of actresses (18), including Vicenza Armani, fellow Gelosi member Vittoria Piissimi, Diana Ponti, and Andreini's daughter...