Transgressive Duality in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Monteverdi's L'incordonazione

“WHILE I SEE YOU”: TRANSGRESSIVE DUALITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH NIGHT AND MONTEVERDI’S L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA by Ivey Barr APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Mihai Nadin, Chair ___________________________________________ xtine burrough ___________________________________________ Cassini Nazir Copyright 2020 Ivey Barr All Rights Reserved “WHILE I SEE YOU”: TRANSGRESSIVE DUALITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH NIGHT AND MONTEVERDI’S L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA by IVEY BARR, BA THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN ARTS, TECHNOLOGY, AND EMERGING COMMUNICATION THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2020 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my special gratitude for the support of Dr. Mihai Nadin as a fellow outside-the-box ATEC practitioner who allowed and encouraged me to explore music and videography in my graduate studies. His courses on aesthetics, semiotics, and interactivity, and his deep appreciation for the humanities and fine arts, gave me a space to settle and explore the intersection of my own interests in arts and technology. Thanks also to my other committee members, Prof. xtine burrough and Prof. Cassini Nazir, for their expertise in interaction design, their flexibility in joining my committee, and their willingness to observe and judge an unusual ATEC piece. I would also like to thank Dr. Kathryn Evans, who helped me begin my formal study of opera and without whom I would not have even considered graduate school, and Prof. Todd Fechter, who helped arrange my scholarship and TA work to make this degree possible. Lastly, thanks to Teddi Strassburger for her incredible support, listening, proofreading, and time management help; to camera operator Nathan Jensen for filming; and to Avanti Dey for helping me find a venue from which to perform in these uncertain times. March 2020 iv “WHILE I SEE YOU”: TRANSGRESSIVE DUALITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH NIGHT AND MONTEVERDI’S L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA Ivey Barr, MFA The University of Texas at Dallas, 2020 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Mihai Nadin Viola, the principal character of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, presents herself as a “eunuch” or castrato singer to pass as male after surviving a shipwreck. By doing so, she places herself in conversation with the operatic tradition of women in travesti (disguised or crossdressed) male roles, which developed from the popularity of the castrato singer. In this project, I illustrate that Viola represents a transgressive unity of contradictory selves by arranging both castrato and soprano pieces from Claudio Monteverdi’s early opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea as musical settings for three of Viola’s monologues. Further exploring the overlap between binaries, I revisit the doubling practices of early opera, such as Monteverdi’s work, which called for one virtuosic singer to play two or more contrasting roles, by digitally doubling my/Viola’s voice and body to create two-person scenes between her masculine and feminine aspects, representing her feminine onscreen and performing her masculine onstage alongside the filmed performance. This project, created from the liminal overlap of all these categories - live and digital, male and female, music and text, real and constructed - illustrates a cohesive whole that embraces the transgressive duality present within a single entity. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………. iv ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER 2 VIOLA IN TWELFTH NIGHT …………………………………………………. 4 CHAPTER 3 VIOLA’S MUSIC ……………………………………………………………… 11 CHAPTER 4 VIOLA IN PERFORMANCE …………………………………………………. 14 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………….. 17 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………………... 18 CURRICULUM VITAE vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Viola, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, first appears onstage having lost her identical twin brother, Sebastian. Immediately, she creates a male persona for herself - Cesario, a musician and supposed eunuch, who finds work as a page to Duke Orsino and is sent by Orsino to woo the countess Olivia for him. Olivia falls in love with Viola-as-Cesario, Viola herself falls in love with Orsino, and in the end, Viola’s supposedly-dead brother turns up alive to resolve the love triangle. By presenting herself as a eunuch singer, Viola casts herself within a musical tradition that was already well-established by Shakespeare’s time: that of the castrato, a male singer castrated to maintain a high soprano voice. Such singers were common both in the church and in the emerging genre of opera (Feldman 6). In Italy, where Claudio Monteverdi was pioneering the development of opera, castrati were the stars of the stage from the mid-1500s up until the late 1700s, playing heroes, kings, and warriors, and sometimes the secondary roles of young boys and servants. (Feldman 11) Alongside the castrati stars were female singers called travesti (“disguised”, or alternatively, “crossdressed”), occasionally stepping in for the castrati’s heroic roles, but more often singing the secondary roles.1 Monteverdi’s final opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, featured 11 singers playing 28 total roles - among them two leading castrati, as the villainous emperor Nerone and the powerful 1 For a further summary of the history of castrati and travesti roles, see the beginning of Margaret Reynold’s article “Ruggiero’s Deceptions, Cherubino’s Distractions.” 1 Cupid-figure Amore, and two leading sopranos, as Nerone’s mistress Poppea and his despised wife Ottavia. (Schneider 260) As a supposed eunuch, Viola assigns herself the same voice as the men who sang Nerone and Amore, while her role in the narrative structure of the play merges the female roles of the yearning Ottavia and the quick-witted Poppea. With Viola presenting herself in-text as a castrato, I sought to create a musical dimension to her speeches that encompassed both castrato and soprano music of the period. I selected pieces sung by Monteverdi’s primary characters - Nerone, Amore, Poppea, and Ottavia - and set three of Viola’s speeches to the music. Monteverdi’s style of writing is monologue-like, somewhere between song and speech, and Shakespeare’s text is rhythmic in its poetry. As a noble character, Viola speaks almost exclusively in verse, not prose, and follows a consistent iambic rhythm in her lines which lends itself to the recitative accompagnato style of Monteverdi’s music. To further underscore Viola’s simultaneous male/female personae, I framed each speech as a duet, splitting lines as appropriate between Viola’s internal monologue and what might be said by her public-facing, masculine persona Cesario. In presentation, I sang Viola’s side of the duets as a prerecorded video performance, in which I appeared in feminine costume, and Cesario’s side as a live performer in masculine costume in duet with the recording, creating a duality of gendered bodies and voices that still belong to a single actor, just as both of Viola’s personas are aspects of her whole self. This duality also echoes the doubling practice common in operatic performance in Monteverdi’s time, in which a single virtuosic singer would appear in multiple contrasting roles, providing “opportunities for quick-change artistry and virtuoso acting... and could also promote allegorical meanings” (Schneider 255). Rather than appear as two characters via quick- changes offstage, I appear doubled digitally. 2 The performance produced thus brings multiple sets of binaries into a liminal overlap that shows how much they share. Monteverdi’s speechlike music becomes the setting for Shakespeare’s rhythmic text; Viola’s double bodies and voices are identical despite their contrasting guises; the live performance and the recorded video become a single conversation (which, in an unexpected recursiveness Shakespeare would have appreciated, was itself livestreamed due to COVID-19 distancing measures). Creating art from this liminal commonality between binaries illustrates the cohesive whole that comes from the transgressive embracing of duality within the singular entity - male and female, music and theatre, art and reality. 3 CHAPTER 2 VIOLA IN TWELFTH NIGHT Viola is one of three major female characters who crossdress in the Shakespearean canon. The others are Portia in Merchant of Venice, who disguises herself as a male lawyer to win her fiancé’s case, and Rosalind in As You Like It, who courts her love interest Orlando while disguised as a shepherd boy. Portia never comments on her experience of presenting male, seeing it as a useful device for her own ends but not growing as a character by the experience. Rosalind, on the other hand, spends lines and lines of the play exploring the conflict and confluence between her masculine and feminine, slipping deeper into one or the other as the occasion demands, revisiting her feminine through the eyes of her masculine, and only setting aside the disguise when her wedding is in sight. In the epilogue - a speech seldom assigned to female characters, which Rosalind notes - she calls herself “the lady” and then says, “if I were a woman”, existing beyond the scope of the narrative in a liminal, genderfluid state.2 Where Portia finds utility and Rosalind finds freedom, Viola finds mostly conflict. No sooner has she obtained work in her masculine persona than Orsino places his trust in her, creating a bond of vulnerability that leads Viola

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