Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (review)

To a modern theatregoer, one of the most striking differences between Shakespeare's theatre and our own is the lack of actresses on the professional Elizabethan stage. Female roles were played by teenage boys, a fact which has occasioned much provocative commentary over the past couple of decades by critics interested in gender issues in the Elizabethan theatre, such as Dympna Callaghan (Shakespeare Without Women), Stephen Orgel (Impersonations), and Michael Shapiro (Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage). In plays like Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and Philaster, these boys played women who disguised themselves as boys or men, adding another level to the gender-bending.

Though women were prohibited from performing with the leading professional companies, plenty of them were still involved in dramatic activity. Female playwrights such as Elizabeth Cary and Margaret Cavendish have received an avalanche of welcome critical attention in recent years, as have aristocratic women who patronized acting companies and performed in masques at court, such as Anna of Denmark, queen consort of James I. Beyond such elites, though, attention to female performance has been scantier, and mostly focused on a small number of exceptional cases such as Moll Frith. A casual observer might be forgiven for assuming that only wealthy women with lots of leisure time and social status were able to indulge in drama.

Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage aims to remedy this situation by showing that female performers had a much broader and more significant role in early modern England than most people have recognized. For the most part, it succeeds in that goal. In their introduction, editors Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin explain that they have deliberately avoided the word "actress," first popularized after the Restoration when women joined the professional London companies; rather, they use the term "women players," which encompasses a much wider range of mimetic activity. Brown and Parolin define performance broadly as "any act of embodied display or representation intended for an audience" (5), a definition that allows the volume's contributors to travel in some surprising, but often fruitful, directions.

The editors have divided the book's thirteen essays into five sections, each focusing on a different aspect of female performance in venues other than the professional London stage. The two essays in the first section, "Outside London," deal with plays, pageants, and entertainments in the provinces, some of which involved women as "players" in something like the traditional "actress" sense. James Stokes, in "Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire," draws on his research for the forthcoming Lincolnshire volume in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project to argue that women played a much more important role in that county's pre-Reformation dramatic activity than most people have realized. Although women were largely excluded from the craft-guild cycle plays that have been the main focus of earlier scholars, Stokes shows that women participated equally with men in the May Games and other dramatic activities sponsored by religious guilds. Such activities were the main form of dramatic expression in Lincolnshire, and, even as he acknowledges that further research is needed, Stokes suggests that they were at least as important as cycle plays in medieval England as a whole. In "Payments, Permits and Punishments: Women Performers and the Politics of Place," Gweno Williams, Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright draw on the published REED volumes for York, Lancashire, and Gloucestershire to examine the varying degrees of female dramatic activity in those three areas, and how it was affected by the political and religious environments. Such activity ranged from masque performances by elite women in Lancashire, to participation in folk entertainments such as dances and May Games, to nontraditional "performances" such as theatrical behavior by female Catholic martyrs as they were tried, imprisoned, and executed.

Such nontraditional...