Italianating the Boy
In the 1580s John Lyly and other writers for children’s companies created novel plays featuring a keen-witted, hot-blooded, virtuosic innamorata, relying on the beauty and skills of the cross-dressed boy player. Plays aimed at a worldly elite audience exoticize and eroticize the “boy actress,” painting him as extravagantly Italianate in ways that shadow the foreign diva, evidence of her transnational impact on plays and playing. Lyly’s Gallathea, Sapho and Phao, and The Woman in the Moone; Peele’s Arraignment of Paris; and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage show how the English contained the threat of the actress by appropriating and adapting her trademark playing and star scenes, such as solo song and madness. As a result, the skilled labor of both divas and boys left its mark on these innovative works.