Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (review)

This impressively researched study documents the gradual appearance of women as actors on the early modern stage. Its purview is broadly comparative, ranging through the intertwined histories of the theater in “Shakespeare’s Europe,” though with greater attention to France, Italy, and Germany than to England itself. Within this large frame, the book focuses on “marginalized” but nonetheless vital arenas of female performance. With their access to the professional stage limited by tradition, opposed by men, or (as in England before the Revolution) proscribed by law, women nonetheless played their role in the streets as mountebanks or their assistants, as itinerant fortune-tellers, purveyors of quack nostrums and amulets, female “tooth-drawers,” and as hawkers for animal acts, freak shows, and other carnival attractions. The point was to lure a crowd of potential customers who would be encouraged to loosen their purse strings by colorfully costumed women playing, dancing, and performing in comic skits — whether alone, in husband-wife duos, or in larger mixed-gender troupes. These modes of street performance would not only find their way into the theater (as in Volpone) but would be a means of “initiating women into theatrical activities” in a time before the doors were opened to them officially (18).

Katrizky follows a number of strands within this history. Medieval religious drama — already played out in the secular marketplace — often featured a grotesque comic parody of Christ’s medical miracles, performed by women as well as men in the role of proto-quacks intent on selling their oils and unguents to the three Marys. This “merchant scene” in the mystery plays led, in turn, both to the development of quack rhetoric itself and to the antics of the stock commedia dell’arte trio of master, servant, and inamorata played by a woman. In England, female mountebank street performance has its most notorious representative in the person of the cross-dressing Mary Frith, the inspiration for The Roaring Girl. In 1611, long before women could legitimately act, Frith herself was “invited onto the stage of the Fortune Theatre, to perform the afterpiece” to Middleton and Dekker’s play (256).

A brief review can only suggest the wealth of examples and the depth of research that make this “gendered” history of early modern theatrical practice an indispensable work in the field. As a stage history intent on covering all of Western Europe for 250 years, it cannot pause for long even over its most interesting examples. A chapter devoted to “Female Stage Costume and Cross-dressing” notes that in the commedia dell’arte, cross-dressing by women disguised to play male roles was the “strategy of choice of for escaping the restrictions of theatrical plots that followed the conventions of the all-male stage” (243), but neither here nor in the ensuing glance at The Roaring Girl (curiously regarded as a “docu-drama” of Mary Frith’s life) does the author engage the deeper implications of cross-dressing probed in the critical literature, notably in Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests. Elsewhere Katrizky makes the connection between Narrenliteratur and the fool as a street performer but takes no notice of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, in which, of all Renaissance texts, the two are most brilliantly combined. Nonetheless, the rich cultural context Katritzky provides makes the book a valuable resource for those engaged in more specialized studies.

Its most provocative claim — announced in the title and insistently pressed in the introduction but mentioned only intermittently thereafter — is that although qualified physicians reinforced “male-imposed gender boundaries” by likening female healers to “whores, freaks, monsters or witches” (10), itinerant women performers nonetheless “actively contributed to the healthcare economy by selling medical goods and services” through their theatrical quackery (8), and even functioned as medical social workers avant le lettre by deploying “extensive one-to-one counseling skills” (9...