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Music and Women of the Commedia dell'arte in the Late Sixteenth Century.

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Music and Women of the Commedia dell'arte in the Late Sixteenth Century. By Anne MacNeil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xii, 360 p. ISBN: 0-19-816689-3. $85.] Music examples, illustrations, chronology, documents, bibliography, index.

The semi-improvised dramatic tradition known as the "commedia dell'arte" has long been mentioned in passing in musical narratives of early modern Italy, especially in the context of early operatic history. Systematic investigation of the interactions between the comici and musical life has been lacking, however, and Anne MacNeil's study opens an invaluable new window onto the fluid interplay of text and performance--verbal and musical--that characterized the creative efforts of the emerging "professional entertainment class." Several of the most stylistically influential members of this class were women--and whether they defined themselves primarily as musicians or as actresses, these virtuose shaped the new multimedia rhetorical landscape of late sixteenth-century Europe.

These women left relatively little permanent trace of their activity; much of their skill and power (to judge by contemporary accounts) resided in their ability as performers, whether of their own texts or of others'. Music history, long concerned with texts and composers, has...

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