Music and the life and work of Isabella Andreini: Humanistic attitudes toward music, poetry, and theater during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. (Volumes I-III)

This dissertation explores the ways that music relates to the commedia dell'arte actress Isabella Adreini (1562-1604). Isabella was an actress, poet, playwright, and academician, and so topics discussed include the performance of music in theater, musical settings of lyric poetry, and musical performance as a component of Neoclassical humanistic thought.;Chapter one details the critical reception of Isabella's works from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, her correspondence with patrons and academicians, membership in the Accademia degli Intenti of Pavia, and travel itinerary with the Compagnia dei Gelosi. The second and third chapters elucidate the role of music in her theatrical works. Her improvised comedy, La pazzia d'Isabella (1589), is shown to incorporate Plato's philosophy of the Phaedran ascent in its performance, and Virgilian imitation is seen to inform the composition of her pastoral play, Mirtilla (1588). Chapter four presents a discussion of Isabella's lyric verse, and the succeeding chapters feature analyses of the musical compositions that set her poems.;The concluding chapter synthesizes the findings of the dissertation, calling attention to traits that characterize Isabella Andreini's work as a whole; these are presented as the basis of her self-fashioning. The Neoclassical aesthetic of her prose and poetry, her adoption of the masculine voice, and her academic affiliations all help to form Isabella's literary mask, with which she resolves the imposed social conflict between woman and artist. Her theatrical and personal masks, molded by the cult of virtue, elevate the actress out of the general stratum of commedia dell'arte players and into the position of courtly lady.;Three conclusions are formulated in this dissertation which establish points of commonality among musical, poetic, and theatrical practices at the end of the Renaissance. These stipulate that humanistic emulation of classical authorities forms a central part of the compositional process in all three fields, that performances and compositions in each field rely on a constant exchange between written and oral traditions in the formulation of new works, and that the composition and performance of new genres results from mixing attributes of differing pre-existing genres.