We used castrati (castrated male ex-opera singers) to
play women for two main reasons. They could project their voices better
than women which was necessary to fill the large stages, such as the
3,000 seat Globe, which were unique to England. Also, the church could
not complain about risque women on stage.
This is what the wife of a man who plays a female role in the
Bards plays at the Globe Theater in London had to say about boys in the
plays:
Rylance's wife, Claire van Kampen, the company's master of theater
music, says, "I just don't believe it was young boys." Boys of 14 or 15
already have deep voices, she notes, so if voice were the chief
concern, they would have had to use children, who could hardly play
such complex roles. Here
The trophies he
brought with him to England in Apr 1576 included a pair of silk gloves
for the
Queen,
the choirboy, and syphilis. Here
A Castrati's voice only lasted for ten years or so at the very
high quality needed for singing. However, their voices were just fine
for working in the plays and would remain so for another twenty years.
There were always at least 5,000 retired castrati's in Italy from which we could draw for the parts of women in the plays.
The castrati were used to
memorizing long passages of song in languages they could not understand and of
course maintaining perfect timing was easy after singing in groups
so
they all worked out great.
The volume of the voices were only a problem on the large English stages but not on those of the European mainland. Only
England had interesting plays such as the bards. So our audiences were
three thousand or more while only one theater in Europe seated 1200 to watch rehashed
'Christian Passion Plays' but in reality there were rarely as many as
500 in the bored audiences. Hence mainland European theaters never needed voices stronger than a
woman's while English theaters needed the volume that Castrati's alone were able produce.
Also, Castratis were much
more responsible than children ever would have been. Can you imagine
children being involved on a regular basis in major stage productions
to audiences of 3,000 up to three times a day? Forget the
abilities of your own very extraordinary son, I'm talking about the
average boy of 10 or 11. Or think of a boy even trying to fill half of a
large hall with his voice. His vocal chords would be torn apart in less than one play.
Women who had never heard a castrati sing often said things like 'Dare
close your eyes and he sounds like an 80 foot Amazon' or 'with my eyes
closed he reminds me of my mother only much, much bigger'.
This served to reinforce the power of the women roles and made them all
alpha females. It's obvious that they were all alpha females to begin
with as I only wrote into the plays alpha women, who I then empowered with words. It made the audiences accept the fact that woman were
strong and powerful. Using castrati instead of women actually did many
times as much for women's rights than if we had used women. We said
'Leave those mousy sounding women to the French and Spanish stages'.
One of the most famous and last recorded of the 19th century professional castrati singers was
Also, since they were not women the plays could be as
ribald as we wanted and the church could not say much of anything
about it. Many of the rich women had them as lovers since castrati seem to able
to function in every way a man could except for reproduction....which is
one reason why the women liked them so much as lovers.
We needed to keep our hiring of castrati at a very low key so we called
them boys. It was as simple as denying that we were using castrati. The
Pope was ready to declare
war over castrati so we did not want to upset the Catholic Church.
It goes back
to about 1529 and the real cause of the split between England and the
Catholic Church which I cover on this page.
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