Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage

Description

Offering evidence of women's extensive contributions to the theatrical landscape, this volume sharply challenges the assumption that the stage was 'all male' in early modern England. The editors and contributors argue that the pervasiveness of female performance affected cultural production, even on the professional London stages that used men and boys for women's parts. English spectators saw women players in professional and amateur contexts, in elite and popular settings, at home and abroad. Women acted in scripted and improvised roles, performed in local festive drama, and took part in dancing, singing, and masquing. English travelers saw professional actresses on the continent and Italian and French actresses visited England. Essays in this volume explore: the impact of women players outside London; the relationship between women's performance on the continent and in England; working women's participation in a performative culture of commerce; the importance of the visual record; the use of theatrical techniques by queens and aristocrats for political ends; and the role of female performance on the imitation of femininity. In short, Women Players in England 1500-1660 shows that women were dynamic cultural players in the early modern world. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Illustrations List of Musical Transcriptions Contributors General Editor's Preface 1: Introduction Part I: Beyond London 2: Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire 3: Payments, Permits and Punishments: Women Performers and the Politics of Place Part II: Beyond Elites 4: The Case of Moll Frith: Women’s Work and the “All-Male Stage” 5: “Quacking Delilahs”: Female Mountebanks in Early Modern England and Italy Part III: Beyond the Channel 6: Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery 7: “Merry, nimble, stirring spirit[s]”: Academic, Salon and Commedia dell’arte Influence on the Innamorate in Love's Labour's Lost 8: Women Performing Homoerotic Desire in English and Italian Comedy: La Calandria, Gl'Ingannati and Twelfth Night 9: Courtly Comediantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Plays in France and England Part IV: Beyond the Stage 10: The Venetian Theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel 11: “Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners and the like”: Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition Part V: Beyond the “All-Male” 12: Staging the Absent Woman: The Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I 13: Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads 14: Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange Afterword Index