California Italian Studies

This essay explores the artistic influence of Isabella Andreini, (1562-1604), arguably the greatest actress of her age, on her son, Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654), the leading Italian playwright of the seventeenth century. I begin by examining Isabella Andreini’s androgynous persona and the dramaturgical innovations in her pastoral play Mirtilla (1588) that humorously foreground the subversion of gender norms, contextualizing Isabella’s “hermaphroditic” art as not only performative and protofeminist, but as part of the Baroque problematization of a mimetic aesthetic. The dynamic female performances Isabella features in Mirtilla showcase her trans-gender and “trans-genre” virtuosity, which, as I argue, inflects Giovan Battista’s sexually ambiguous representation of female subjectivity in his Baroque comedy Amor nello specchio (Love in the Mirror, 1622), specifically as reflected through the androgynous mirroring embodied by the play’s feminized transfigurations of Narcissus and the Hermaphrodite. In both Mirtilla and Amor nello specchio, the virtuosic art of simulation epitomized in the performances of these re-figured and reconfigured female characters, written for and played by women, allows them to re-inhabit the master plots to which they refer, and through modes of mimicry and extended fetishistic play, transform the “mirror” of comedy by elevating theatre’s capacity for illusionistic metamorphosis.