Gunnar Manchester ’15 is Valentine Crambagge in the 17th-century comedy, performed at Bates March 21-24. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

An uproarious 17th-century comedy that explores issues of marriage and gender while satirizing theatrical conventions of its time, The Swaggering Damsel appears in Bates College performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 21-23, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 24, in Gannett Theater, 305 College St.

Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

A play marked by “cross-dressing, sexual shenanigans, uppity servants and witty women,” in the words of one scholar, English playwright Robert Chamberlain’s 1640 The Swaggering Damsel reflects the preoccupations of a nation transitioning from a royal to a mercantile society.

Plotlines explore the financial, moral and social conditions that encumbered romance and marriage in Chamberlain’s time. The primary plot concerns a pair of lovers, Sabina and Valentine, whose affair encounters a series of roadblocks that they can overcome only after each has spent some time in the other’s shoes.

Portraying Valentine is Gunnar Manchester, a sophomore from Rehoboth, Mass. Sabina is played by Sarah Weinshal, a first-year student from Westport, Conn. All told, 10 Bates students are performing in the piece and one serves as stage manager.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Matteo Pangallo ’03 directs “The Swaggering Damsel.” Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

The play has been performed rarely, if at all, since the 17th century, says director Matteo Pangallo, a visiting assistant professor of English and member of the Bates class of 2003. “This is a rediscovery” akin to a world premiere, he says.

Chamberlain was an amateur playwright, so Swaggering Damsel has always been a play peripheral to the theatrical and scholarly canon, Pangallo explains. “Chamberlain’s profession was joke-book writing, and Swaggering Damsel is a joke in five acts.”

He continues, “If we look at other romantic comedies from that period, we’ll get a sense of what the professional theater industry thought the audience wanted.” But Swaggering Damsel, instead, directly reflects the interests and perspective of an audience member.

“It’s not a conventional English Renaissance comedy,” Pangallo says. “Instead, it seems to lampoon and mock all the character types and clichéd plot twists that the theater of that era was churning out en masse.”

The Bates production jacks that tendency up a notch, reveling in an over-the-top theatricality. “We place a great deal of emphasis on the fact that these are actors taking on roles, and their roles are exaggerated,” says Pangallo.

Valentine is a parody of traditional romantic heroes (to the extent that he shares a name, as well as some plot points, with a character in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona — produced at Bates just weeks before Damsel).

“Valentine’s speeches are way overblown, he spouts really bad poetry that he thinks is good poetry, he threatens to kill himself because he can’t have the woman of his dreams. All the characters on stage know that he is ridiculous, and the audience knows too.”

For the student performers and audiences alike, Pangallo says, The Swaggering Damsel offers a fresh take on a theatrical era dominated by Shakespeare — who, he points out, was in many ways atypical of English Renaissance playwrights.

“When you’re playing Hamlet, and you get to the ‘to be or not to be’ speech, you look out into the audience and see all the mouths flapping because everybody is saying it along with you. And the degree of pressure that creates to do something new can sometimes have negative effects on actors, because they start pursuing novelty for the sake of novelty.

“You don’t have that when you do a production of The Swaggering Damsel because it is novel. Its freshness, I think, is a virtue.”

With help from a group of staff and faculty advisers at Bates, biology major Kelton McMahon recently won a National Science Foundation fellowship to study ecological geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

But what may be surprising about McMahon’s good fortune is that he hasn’t been a Bates student for a while. He graduated last year. Still, even well after graduation, he was eligible for grant-application assistance from the Bates Graduate Fellowships Committee.

“Having a committee like the BGFC at your disposal makes a tremendous difference” in the quest for support, McMahon says. “These fellowships are extremely competitive and nearly everyone applying has excellent grades, recommendations and so forth.” It was the BGFC’s guidance in polishing his application essay, he says, that made the crucial difference.

In fact, the committee works with students as early as their sophomore year and with alums as late as five years after graduation. Its assistance includes matching prospective awards to a student’s circumstances, coordinating grant applications, working with candidates on their application essays, coaching for interviews, and even helping with travel costs for grant finalists. And the committee is the college’s official intermediary between students and fellowship programs.

“The committee was extremely helpful in all aspects of the application process, from critiquing my fellowship proposal to helping me compile the application materials,” says McMahon, who is working toward his Ph.D. in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Biological Oceanography.

Matteo Pangallo, an English major who graduated from Bates in 2003 and is building a career in theater, was accepted into a graduate program at King’s College London for 2005-06. But the acceptance came too late for most graduate scholarships and fellowships.

“The committee directed me toward the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship,” he says. “They knew that it was still available for the upcoming academic year, and that I would probably be a good fit for it.” As indeed he was, winning the scholarship in April 2005.

Pangallo calls the committee “instrumental” in his receiving the Cooke scholarship, a generous award that has enabled him to stay focused on his educational goals. “Without it, I would have had to spend my entire savings, take out a substantial loan and find part-time work,” he says.

“By not having to pick up a part-time job,” he adds, “I have been able to secure an unpaid internship in the research department at the Globe Theatre,” the modern recreation of Shakespeare’s home theater. “That’s been one of the highlights of my time in London.”

Pangallo is now working on his dissertation, which involves preparing the first-ever modern critical edition of a rare manuscript play from 1632.

One of the most important aspects of the BGFC’s work is simply making students aware that financial aid for further study awaits them after graduation from Bates. Statistics show that students who succeed in winning graduate support “are the ones who start early and work steadily over an extended period of time to develop truly outstanding applications,” says Robert Allison, professor of religion, a seven-year member of the BGFC and its acting chair during the sabbatical of anthropologist Elizabeth Eames.

“Events like the sophomore dinner and the fairs that we run to raise awareness and interest early in students’ careers at Bates are critical to the program,” he says.

Fulbright, Ford Foundation and Mellon are a few of the better-known grant programs in the committee’s arsenal. Perhaps as important as the money itself is the cachet borne by certain programs. His NSF fellowship, says McMahon, “is one of the most prestigious awards given to an entering graduate student. It’ll be really helpful as I apply for future grants and a faculty position in academia.”

Many of the top fellowship programs require that the baccalaureate institution nominate the candidate or submit an application for her or him. In Bates’ case, that’s the job of the BGFC. And some programs are invitation-only.

“We’ve worked proactively to get Bates on the invitation lists of several of these programs,” says Allison. “But for the most part, Bates’ own prestige as an excellent undergraduate college has won us those invitations.”