What (if any) are the differences in status/class between actors, opera performers, and dancers in the late 1600s in Europe?

by FranceAccount
caffarelli

Well it's interesting you say late 1600s, because that is after the start of commercial opera in Italy, so the social status of these people is closer than it was in the early 1600s!

Loosely, loosely the opera singers would have the highest prestige, followed by opera dancers/ballet dancers, and bottom would be spoken actors. However, there was a great deal of shuffling inside each of these levels, and solo and lead dancers had a lot of status (and high pay) inside the opera system, often exercised a lot of agency in the productions, and in some places the lead man and woman dancer would be directly behind only the lead male and female singers, and out rank the rest. All of these people would have been tainted by "the stigma of the stage," in a wealthy house they would be classed as servants, and their status also would have affected their ability to marry outside of this world.

For your particular time period, there's a very nice book Inventing the Business of Opera, which will cover the life of singers and dancers in Venice. I don't remember right now if it talks much about actors, but it does show how commercial opera was born out of the existing theater industry and not created from scratch, so you can see how the social class got passed down to the singers and dancers along with the buildings. :)