15

THEATR E AND PE R F O R M A N CE

Daisy Black

This chapter gives an overview of the diverse ways in which women engaged with European
performance cultures, with a particular focus on how women’s performance labour inter-
linked across national borders. While it examines evidence of European women perform-
ing or contributing to performances for monetary gain, it will also underline the ways in
which women’s engagement with performance was a transaction in other forms of capital.
It begins by reviewing the current surge in historiography on women’s involvement with
European performance, including the transnational scope of their roles as playwrights, per-
formers, producers and patrons. This will provide a critique of some of the terminologies
which have both limited a gendered critique of medieval and early-modern performance
cultures, and inhibited a cross-period and transnational focus. The development of per-
formance roles for women in Italy is the focus of the first section, which covers early roles
for female performers, from mountebank cultures to commedia, including Italian women’s
growing influence over both their playing materials and their own troupes.
The chapter then considers the central roles played by women in medieval French reli-
gious theatre, with an example from Metz showing how female performers in religious drama
could also derive material, economic and social benefits from their performances. While the
roles of French female actors developed, but never achieved the levels of reputation awarded
to their Italian counterparts, this section identifies a rich network of collaborations between
female patrons, playwrights and performers, which saw the plays of noblewomen performed
both at court and on the commercial stage. The influence of legislation in Spain is shown
to have regulated both the spaces in which women could perform, as well as the roles they
performed. This section shows that legislation was not always a disadvantage to women’s
theatrical labour, as other laws made it beneficial for women to work in theatre finances,
contracting and marketing, as well as in making artistic decisions. This gave women theatre
managers an advantage within their troupes. A different form of engagement of women in
performance management and finance is the focus of a section on England, where early
performances were facilitated by the production, management, financing and costuming of
the female guild members who sponsored the plays. While the Reformation limited Eng-
lishwomen’s appearances as dancers and performers in public commercial spaces, it finds
that the social and political currency of women’s patronage and performance in court and
household drama remained strong. The final section attests to the importance of engaged

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female spectatorship, noting how plays were shaped, and performances directed, by wom-
en’s vocal, physical and commercial influence over the plays they watched.
The performance labour of women across Europe was highly influenced by changes in
the political and religious contexts of the countries they worked in. In England, the pro-
cesses of Reformation resulted in the increased suppression of performance forms which
had traditionally featured women.1 The Civil War saw the closure of the London theatres in
1642, followed by their restoration in 1660 along with the subsequent appearance of women
in acting roles. During the same period, a growth of Protestantism in the Low Countries and
parts of Germany resulted in other countries excluding women from the public stage.2 In
Italy, the growth of the commedia and the emergence of women performers coincided with
a period of Catholic religious reform. Michael Zampelli notes that the Council of Trent
(1545–1563) ‘generated an atmosphere of internal reform that also established favourable
conditions for the renewal of antitheatrical prejudices’.3 This resulted in a Papal ban in
1588 preventing women from performing in Rome and the Papal states. While mixed-sex
Italian troupes travelled widely around Europe from the 1560s, they also had to navigate
frequently hostile legal and religious environments. In Spain, the Inquisition led to a climate
in which women were initially banned from the stage, and Italian and Spanish mixed-sex
troupes had to perform a series of legal negotiations in order to continue their work.4 Mean-
while, although the French royal family proved to be early supporters of the Italian commedia,
and several Italian women actors gained fame both in the French royal courts and in the
theatres of Paris, the same acceptance was not wholly extended to French female actors.
The sixteenth-century Huguenot wars produced their own challenges, especially for French
itinerant performance troupes, and in several cities under Huguenot influence all theatrical
performance was banned.5 Where today critics and popular historians alike are inclined to
take antitheatrical writings lightly, they had a material impact on the livelihoods of women
performers and their performing cultures. Performing women throughout Europe were vul-
nerable to attacks which equated the ‘selling’ of a woman’s skills as a performer with the
selling of her body; most flamboyantly in Prynne’s 1632 Histriomastix:

Women actors, notorious whores […] And dare then any Christian women be so
more than whorishly impudent, as to act, to speak publickly on a Stage (perchance
in mans apparall, and cut haire, here proved sinful and abominable) in the pres-
ence of sundry men and women?6

By diminishing the performers’ status to that of ‘whore’, these writers implied that acting
was neither the women’s main nor their preferred means of earning a living. Such attacks
aimed to make the women’s work as performers less legitimate than that of their male
counterparts. In ‘amateuring’ the female actor, they sought to control or curtail the social,
political and economic influence of their performance labour.7
In Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre, Philip Butterworth takes to task the cate-
gorisation of late medieval English players as being either ‘amateur’ or ‘professional’. While
neither of these terms were contemporary with the performances of the late fourteenth to
sixteenth centuries, they are frequently used in discussions of them.8 Carolyn Dinshaw has
similarly questioned the concept of ‘amateurism’ in her exploration of the queerness of
time, in which the ‘amateur’ is one who offers their time (for example, as reader, researcher,
teacher or performer) for free.9 While they take very different approaches, Dinshaw and
Butterworth both note that work is very rarely given for free, and that, in most cases, such

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performances participate in social, as well as pecuniary, transactions. Early theatre criticism

has likewise sought to differentiate ‘commercial’ theatre from a range of other performance
forms.10 This has challenged earlier assumptions that women, and women’s work, were not
present in medieval and early-modern European performance forms, demonstrating how
the diverse labour of women from all social levels facilitated and influenced performance.11
Work on this has also called for a re-evaluation of the other terminologies we use when dis-
cussing pre-eighteenth century performance. Alongside ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’, terms
such as ‘commercial’, ‘folk’, ‘traditional’ and ‘closet’ (as opposed to ‘public’) have also been
found to limit or downplay women’s work.12
The anglocentric focus in the literature has also tended to obscure transnational rela-
tionships between performing women and the differences in performance style across
different countries in Europe. Melinda J. Gough and Clare McManus have identified a
number of critical biases which exclude women’s performance from consideration. For-
mal or generic exclusions, they claim, read certain forms of drama in isolation from other
performance forms – therefore overlooking any links between, for example, civic, court
and convent drama. Not only does this obscure the work done by women in these areas,
it also underplays the ability of dramatic form to travel between playing contexts and
countries.13 Temporal elements of exclusion – taking too narrow a focus on a sub-period
– have long been the concern of medieval theatre scholars, whose work crosses the uneasy
‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ categories of periodisation.14 Geographical exclusions over-
look the intersections of performance cultures with the traditions of other countries. A
surge of work on the women actors of Italy, France and Spain has noted not only the
diversity of roles performed by these women – who often acted as company managers as
well as writers of performance material – but also their influence on female roles in com-
mercial theatres across Europe. McManus and Munro have therefore argued that there
was ‘a pan-European theatrical culture [supporting] networks of exchange that cut across
national boundaries’.15 This chapter’s main focus on Italy, France, Spain and England
comes chiefly from the wealth of materials made available by the recent surge in archive
and transmission work in these countries; however, this does not mean that there are not
equally valid examples waiting to be found elsewhere. In providing a survey of women’s
engagement with performance in Europe, it calls for a further geographical and temporal
expansion of the ways in which we view performance cultures and their political, social
and economic benefits.

Historiography and sources

If performance is often under-represented in European histories in comparison with other
art forms, then women’s roles in performance suffer even more.16 This is partly because most
English-language histories present sections on performance via an English bias where, in
actuality, English performance cultures were often seen as being on the periphery in conti-
nental Europe. Where women’s performance does appear in broad cultural histories, works
rarely focus on how European performance cultures influenced one another.17 Histories
scarcely have enough space to mention some of the key players in the established canon,
and a perennial problem is that very few women tend to be represented in the canon as it is.
This is even more of a problem with medieval performance forms, which frequently did not
record the names of writers and participants or whose records have been lost. Although new
evidence of women’s performance is being recovered through research into performance

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records, it will be some time before they establish a secure footing within broader cultural
histories.18
The relative invisibility of women in histories dealing with European performance cul-
tures has been addressed by some recent scholarship.19 In English theatre studies, a range
of research has emerged identifying the diversity of women’s engagement at every level
of performance.20 The parameters of performance studies have been expanded beyond
the wooden ‘O’ of the sixteenth-century London theatre to include spaces such as royal
courts, houses, gardens, halls and convents – all of which provide rich examples of wom-
en’s engagement.21 Projects such as the Records of Early English Drama (REED) have had
a key role in discovering and disseminating information about early performance prac-
tices, making it far easier to find evidence of women participating in what James Stokes
says have too-often been dismissed as ‘traditional’ culture forms.22 As a result of work
making edited editions of plays more readily available, playwrights such as Mary Wroth,
Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish and Elizabeth Cary are now studied and taught more
widely.23 The role of women as patrons, sponsors and producers of performance has also
been given attention; in particular through the development of household drama and the
sixteenth-century court masque.24 Studies of women’s playwriting and edited editions of
female-authored plays, such as the recent publication of plays by the Spanish playwrights
Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, Ana Caro Mallén and Sor Marcela de San Félix, are
gradually making women’s creative work more accessible to research and teaching across
Europe.25 The role of women as producers of theatre has formed a focus in studies of
the Italian commedia troupes, which were often led, and had their materials selected, by
their prima donna, while theatre historians in Spain have found numerous examples of
Spanish women acting as theatre managers.26 While there is evidence of girls performing
as dancers, acrobats and participants in guild and religious drama in Germany and the
Low Countries, German touring companies did not feature women until the late 1660s,
while the earliest record of a woman being officially appointed to act on a Dutch stage was
Ariana van den Bergh in 1655.27
Women’s contributions towards the ‘backstage’ work of costuming, set dressing and design
has also been a focus, and this area of performance labour has recently been reviewed in a
number of publications.28 While the geography of European theatre has been broadened
considerably through the focus on itinerant troupes and methods of cultural exchange, dis-
cussions of women doing things other than being on stage are also beginning to move from
localised to globalised approaches. For example, Natasha Korda’s work has done a great
deal to expose the economies and mechanisms of women’s work for London theatres, while
noting that many of the women working in the public theatres as scenery painters and
costumers originated from the Netherlands.29 Meg Twycross has also recently drawn links
between the use of costume across diverse European practices such as the Leuven ommegang
and the York cycle. Katie Normington’s work on the effect of the international cloth trade
and textile markets in supplying London’s theatrical costuming underlines the transnational
nature of early-modern material performance cultures.30 Meanwhile a surge in spectator-
ship studies has brought attention to the role of the woman in the medieval and early-mod-
ern audience.31 The power of the female spectator to influence the representation of female
characters in performance and shape performance action has been the subject of a number
of studies, and has provided insights into the gendered power-dynamics operating in Euro-
pean performance cultures.32 This is part of a larger historical focus on studies of women as
cultural producers and consumers.

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Transnational approaches have identified wide European performance cultures whose

exchange networks and patterns of influence and emulation crossed national boundaries.
Jody Enders and Lynette Muir have moved beyond close studies of single communities and
locales by taking comparative, transnational approaches to medieval performance forms
including liturgical drama, civic and community plays and feast-days.33 In early-modern
studies a number of works have examined the movement of the Italian commedia dell’arte
troupes throughout Europe, arguing that their female performers provided inspiration for
performance-makers in the countries they visited.34 Examples of this kind have been iden-
tified in performances at all social levels, with works examining the movement of female
mountebanks featuring in the same collections as works discussing court performances facil-
itated by the marital movement of queens between countries.35 These have called for a
reconsideration of channels of cultural dissemination and dialogue, as well as a nuancing
of well-established canonical texts. Clare McManus has revealed the influence of the Italian
female actor on Shakespeare’s presentation of his female characters, while Virginia Scott has
examined the influence of the commedia on the development of roles for French female actors
in the works of playwrights such as Molière.36 Through this, the performance cultures of the
fifteenth to seventeenth centuries are being reassessed as forming spaces in which women
had opportunities to establish their own identities. The combination of the increased availa-
bility of primary sources, a widening of terminology and critical parameters, and a growth
in interdisciplinary and transnational research practices means it is becoming less possible
to consider any aspect of the medieval or early-modern European stage devoid of women’s
participation.

Italy: divine metamorphosis

While early-modern Italian theatre is well known for its star prima donnas, Italy had long
maintained traditions of women’s performance. Pamela Allen Brown has noted that, long
before appearing in the commedia, women were performing as singers, dancers, musicians,
composers and writers, while noblewomen devised plays and court masques.37 The 1514
Bolzano Passion Play, performed on Palm Sunday and directed by Vigil Raber, assigned
nearly all its female roles to local women.38 Women also participated in mountebank
troupes, which used dancing, acrobatics, music, gesture and mimicry to sell medical rem-
edies and that travelled all over Europe.39 Bella Mirabella notes that mountebank women
could be a major draw, both for their spectacular qualities and for their knowledge of
female medicine, although their combination of performance, knowledge and sales made
mountebank women vulnerable to critical attacks, usually aimed at their sexuality.40 Accus-
ing these women of prostitution implicitly disavowed the possibility that a woman might
earn her living through performance skills and medical knowledge alone. The female
mountebank’s selling of knowledge of the body was, therefore, aligned with the selling of
carnal knowledge.
While mountebanks were a well-recognised, emulated and often-ridiculed part of Euro-
pean performance culture, it was with the introduction of women to the travelling commedia
dell’arte troupes that the female Italian performer was to gain European-wide acknowledge-
ment and fame. The earliest commedia did not initially include female actors. Men played all
the roles, and the female love object was kept offstage. As the form’s multilingual elements
and use of masque made it particularly adjustable to transnational travel, it is perhaps not
surprising that the earliest record we have of an Italian woman performing in commedia was

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at the request of a French king. In 1548, Henry II and Catherine de’Medici were conduct-
ing their grand tour, and at Lyons the king requested to see an Italian comedy. Domenico
Barlacchi of Florence brought his mixed-sex troupe to the city. They played alongside sev-
eral other pageants containing local women during the royal visit; however, it was this troupe
that was awarded the greatest praise.41
Women began to appear in full membership roles in commedia troupes from 1564, and
from then on travelling troupes tended to be mixed. The inclusion of women made the
transnational movement of these troupes not only viable but potentially lucrative, as
female players could offer their foreign audiences something different. In several cases,
leading female actors directed and managed troupes and performance materials.42 Even
where they did not, the inclusion of women had the effect of diversifying repertoire
beyond the earlier performance styles of farce and tumbling. Their skills in singing, danc-
ing, multilingualism, and performing tragic laments and madness scenes moved repertoire
towards pastoral drama and more complex love plots.43 Throughout the 1570s, troupes
toured this repertoire across the continent, including visits to Linz, Vienna, Prague, Paris,
Antwerp, Madrid and London.44 In 1577, Drusiano Marinelli’s troupe crossed the Alps
to play a nine-month season in Antwerp before moving on to Paris and England. Later
documents show mixed-sex troupes making Spanish and Flemish tours.45 Several of these
touring women were key to the positive reception of their troupes in each country. Bar-
bara Flaminia travelled to Linz, Vienna and Prague before settling for a ten-year stay in
Spain from 1474. She was widely praised for her versatile performance skills, particularly
in tragic laments, comic acting and dance.46 In 1574, Henri III asked to see Vittoria
Piisimi perform – a female actor famed for her ability to play in tragedy, comedy and
pastoral plays. Her troupe, the Gelosi, travelled from Milan to Vienna to accommodate
him.47 This proved a good investment, as Henri III later invited the troupe to entertain
him at Blois, and they went on to set up residency in Paris. Piisimi was so well-known
that tragic roles were written especially for her. Tomaso Garzoni lauded her in La piazza
universale (1685) as:

the divine Vittoria who metamorphoses herself on the stage: a beautiful sorceress
of love, she entices the hearts of a thousand lovers with her words; a sweet siren,
she enchants with smooth incantations the souls of her devout spectators.48

Isabella Andreini, Piisimi’s co-performer, produced a similarly remarkable performance at

the Medici court in 1589. Staged for the wedding of Ferdinand de’Medici and Christine
of Lorraine, La Pazzia d’Isabella called upon Andreini’s full range. One account stressed her
variation of register and language during this performance of madness:

Speaking now in Spanish, now in Greek, now in Italian and in many other lan-
guages, but always irrationally […] to imitate the ways of speaking […] of Pan-
talone, Gratiano, Zanni, […] in such a natural manner, and with so many fine
emphases, that no words can express the quality and skill of this woman.49

The report remarked on her skill by emphasising the difference between the grief and pas-
sion being portrayed and the strong intellect, learning and ‘sound health’ of the woman
portraying it. Andreini was particularly careful to cultivate such an image around her

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performances; fashioning her own reputation as being not merely a performer for hire but,
as Jane Tylus notes, ‘a member of an elite group of artistic contemporaries, whose praises
were sung by kings and whose verses rivalled those of Tasso’.50 Both Andreini and Piisimi
were poets and playwrights, and wrote for publication as well as to expand their onstage
roles.51 Such was the international regard for Andreini that she was publicly mourned in
Paris when she died from a miscarriage on her way back to Italy.
Andreini’s self-fashioning was particularly important in light of the kinds of attack female
actors were exposed to. The Young Christian (1611), a tract by Father Cesare Franciotti, char-
acterised Italian female performers as able to transmit evil: ‘If it were nothing else but the
filthy display that these most lecherous women make of themselves, their actions, words and
songs would be enough to infect the world’.52 This attack reconceived the skill and labour
associated with her profession – the ‘actions, words and songs’ – as an advertisement for
quite another profession entirely. This made the craft that performers like Andreini were so
careful to promote a mere publicity stunt in the service of their ‘true’ profession of prosti-
tution. These attacks posed a real threat to the traveling troupes of the sixteenth century.
Religious hostility threatened the ability of the troupe to move between countries in search
of performance work. In 1577, the Gelosi were kidnapped by Huguenots on their way to the
French court, and Henri III had to pay their ransom. In the same year, their Paris residency
was temporarily interrupted when Parlement forbade them to perform, claiming that ‘all
these comedies teach nothing but bawdiness and adulteries and serve only as a school of
debauchery’.53 Accusations of whoredom therefore threatened not only to have a financial
impact on troupes with performing women in them, they also threatened their international
movement.

France: confusing life with art

While touring Italian troupes undoubtedly influenced the emergence of women performers
on the early-modern French stage, France already had its own distinct traditions of women
and girls performing in religious drama. Frenchwomen performed a diverse range of roles
in convent, liturgical and civic dramas. Lynette Muir has found evidence of girls perform-
ing in the Latin Presentation of the Virgin play by Philippe de Mézières; in a 1506 production
of St Barbe before the Duke of Burgundy; and in a 1547 Passion play in Valenciennes.54
Women also wrote devotional plays and, in 1572, Catherine de Parthenay saw her biblical
tragedy staged at La Rochelle.55 French convents cast women in roles as demanding as the
Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen and the female saints. Several of these were performed for
secular civic audiences.56 While religious performances were not what modern theatre critics
would term ‘commercial’ theatre, they did command social and economic capital. In 1468,
Catherine de Baudoiche paid for a play of St Catherine of Siena to be performed at the
Dominican monastery in Metz. The 18-year-old daughter of a local glazier played the title
role so impressively that a nobleman, Henry de la Tour, made her an offer of marriage.57
Phillippe de Vigneulles noted:

[S]he acquitted herself marvellously well in her role, to the taste and pleasure of
everyone there. Moreover, this said girl had 2300 lines of dialogue; and neverthe-
less, she had every line at the tip of her tongue. And the girl spoke so spiritedly
and piteously that she prompted many people to weep; and she was pleasing to

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everybody. And on account of this, the girl was very well married to a gentleman,
mercenary of Metz, by the name of Henry de la Tour, who fell in love with her on
account of the great pleasure he had taken there.58

This account indicates several things. First, that the young woman’s appearance in a saint’s
play is not marked out as anything particularly unusual or uncommon. What the account
does record as remarkable is the performance’s quality and its consequence: an advantageous
marriage. Second, the fact that the woman managed to secure this marriage suggests that,
at this time, the religious female performer was free from the accusations of whoredom
that later came to be associated with the women who made careers out of acting. Finally,
although performing was not the main occupation of the glazier’s daughter, and although
we do not have a record of her being paid for her work, the marriage her performance
resulted in demonstrates a clear social and economic gain. The fact that this successful event
was commissioned by a local noblewoman suggests that the event also partook of social and,
given the play’s venue and subject matter, spiritual capital for the organiser, Catherine de
Baudoiche.
Despite the popular reception of Italian female actors, it was some time before France
developed its own mixed-sex commercial troupes. This was chiefly due to the economic
problems associated with the religious wars, which impacted on the finances of acting
companies and on their ability to travel.59 When women did begin to appear in provincial
troupes, they first appeared as wives of troupe members, and the earliest surviving contracts
made their participation dependent upon the permission of their husbands. In 1545, an
actor and acrobat named Marie Ferré joined Antoine de L’Esperonnière’s troupe, ‘with
the stipulation that if her husband did not approve, the contract would be void’.60 This
subjugation of women to their husbands’ governance reflected the civil status of all married
women, in that they were not usually permitted to sign legal documents. Just as the young
woman who played St Catherine at Metz is recorded only by her father’s name and occu-
pation, so too are several of the early female troupe performers referred to in documents
recorded, not by their names, but by their marital status as ‘wife’. In employing only married
women, contracts sought to neutralise accusations of immoral behaviour from their female
troupe members.61
From the seventeenth century an increasing number of female performers began to be
named in records. A few, such as Rachel Trépeau, also appear to have evaded the conven-
tion that they were to be the wife of one of the other troupe members. Trépeau held shares
in a troupe led by Valleran and signed several legal documents under her own name.62
Others, such as Marie Vernier, continued working in the La-Porte troupe after their hus-
bands had left it. Once established with a share in a troupe, they often had long, if not
always lucrative, careers. Troupes took great pains to hold onto their star actors, so women
tended to hold onto their roles until they retired.63 By the end of the seventeenth century,
a number of well-known female actors, including Mlle du Parc, Mlle Champmeslé, Mlle
Ducos and Mlle Molière had attained levels of fame among the public and inspired new
roles to be written for them. This, however, came with drawbacks. Just as the woman player
at Metz found herself the object of a male spectator’s desires, so women in French troupes
also found they had to navigate the attentions of male spectators. In 1592, a married actor
in Valleran Le Conte’s theatrical troupe found several men of Bordeaux tried to woo her
with words and gifts. While obliged to entertain them, she told them, ‘that off the stage she
was not an actress’.64 This propensity of audiences to confuse the roles played by women

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on stage for real life was roundly mocked in George de Scudéry’s 1630s play La Comédie des
comédiens, which featured an actor complaining that:

[A]lmost everyone makes an error regarding women of our profession, for they
think that farce is the image of our life, and that we only perform what we oth-
erwise practice. They think that the wife of one of you is indubitably the wife of
all the Troupe; and imagining that we are common property, like the Sun or the
Elements, to a man they think they have the right to inflict on us the importunity
of their demands, and it’s from that especially that proceeds the most distressing
aspect of our condition in life.65

This imagined complaint refers to several aspects of the French female actor’s life, includ-
ing her lack of privacy and a sense of public ownership over her reputation. It also notes
that one of the chief sources of her grievance arose from the fact that audience members
assumed that the players’ personal morality was shaped by the materials they played.66
This led to a shift in playing material. The classically inspired farce, a staple of early
French comedy, was increasingly seen as less reputable as companies employed female per-
formers. Virginia Scott has found French female performers were praised for their refusal
to take roles in farces. This was due to the subject matter of the farce, which perpetuated
the kind of stereotype that Frenchwomen, like their Italian contemporaries, were keen to
reject. Farces, which focussed on domestic discord, tended to feature female character types
who were old and aggressive, or middle-aged and sexually voracious.67 While such roles
were initially played by men en travesti, women playing such roles risked their audiences
conflating their morality with that of their characters. The roles therefore often tended
to continue to be taken by male players, who could perform them without risking their
reputations. Perry Gethner and Melinda J. Gough note that from 1600 French companies
diversified their repertoire into female character-led tragedy, tragicomedy, pastoral genres
and comedies of manners.68 As these forms became popular, working collaborations devel-
oped between female performers and playwrights in writing and rehearsing these roles.69
As a consequence, some of the early stock female roles were replaced with more complex
roles which enabled companies’ female performers to showcase their versatility. The older
woman nourrice (nurse) character was replaced by a range of roles, including the soubrette (the
clever female servant).70 From the 1630s, an increase in women players making up troupes
from two leading performers to double figures led to more roles being written for women.71
Unlike the Italian women, who had a greater hand in managing their troupes, it was
comparatively rare for French women actors to write plays. Women were, however, writing
performance materials for the court. Queen Marguerite de Navarre was prolific during the
1530s and 40s, and wrote a number of farces and comedies, often with women as leading
heroines, which dealt with subjects ranging from conjugal life to attacks on religious abuses
and the Inquisition.72 Towards the end of the seventeenth century an increasing number
of women succeeded in having their plays performed by commercial companies. Françoise
Pascal wrote a number of plays, often based around the literary salons, and aimed to sup-
port herself by her writing. Mme de Villedieu’s tragi-comedy Le Favori (1665) parodied the
politics of court society, and was performed by Molière’s troupe at the Palais-Royal theatre
in front of Louis XIV.73 Catherine Bernard saw her tragedies Laodamie Reine d’Épire and Bru-
tus published and restaged by the Comédie-Français multiple times in Paris.74 The women
of the court were also involved in playwriting as hosts of private literary salons. These

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gatherings became well-known for their intellectual discourse, as well as for their contribu-
tion to court entertainments.75 They provided female-led spaces which offered women an
opportunity to write and develop each other’s plays as well as to hear and develop works-
in-progress from leading male playwrights.76 For example, the Duchess de Nemours and
Mademoiselle de Beaulieu exchanged letters and poems, as well as patronage, with Isa-
bella Andreini.77 These networks of transnational exchange complemented the adoption of
commedia performance forms in the playhouses.

Spain: wearing the breeches

While in France female actors navigated their way between the competing powers of royal
patronage and condemnation from religious authorities, Spain saw a series of legislative
moves aimed at initially banning, and later defining and controlling, women’s participation
in theatrical performance. Much of this was brought to a head with the visits of Italian
troupes. As with the other European countries, Spain had its own early traditions of wom-
en’s participation in religious and civic theatre, with women appearing at public festivals and
as dancers and singers.78 However, Spain’s journey to mixed commercial theatre was rather
different from those of other European countries due to a series of legal challenges between
church and state. Through these, a debate took place, resulting in a series of proclamations
aimed at changing how performances staged gender.79
Early on, men and boys played female roles in Spanish troupes. As with the Italian and
French plays, these roles played by men en travesti were often bawdy, comic characters. While
performing women did occasionally appear from the 1530s, it was not until the 1580s that
they became fully established and roles began to be written specifically for them. This, Don-
nell claims, was due to a broader cultural environment that excluded all women from hold-
ing roles as professionals:

Although women were permitted to sing and dance in public spectacles, they were
also considered little better than whores. Public, secular theater was a relatively
new phenomenon in the mid-1500s, and women were mostly excluded from acting
because thespians were starting to become professionals, and only men could profess
a career.80

While several of the examples in this chapter note the propensity for slippage between
‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ forms of performance, the recognition of performance as a
professional career brought with it a new set of exclusions for Spanish women. This specif-
ically applied to the spaces of the public theatres. While women were allowed to perform
as entertainers in the enclosed, private spaces of the royal court or in the households of
aristocratic patrons, and while women of the noble classes performed in masques and plays,
women who performed in public spaces were seen as morally dubious because they did not
perform under the patronage of a man.81 This limited the performance work women could
do. For example, while actor-director Lope de Rueda was celebrated for performing on the
public stage in the character role of the negra (black woman), his partner Mariana initially
served as a private dancer in the house of the Duke of Medinaceli.82
Towards the second half of the sixteenth century, the female spouses of company mem-
bers appeared more frequently on the public stage. This was in part because their partic-
ipation made troupes more secure during the period of economic fragility following the

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cripplingly expensive wars in the Low Countries. At the same time, moralista literature, crit-
icising the morality of the theatre, emerged. In 1586, the Junta de reformación de costumbres
(Conduct Reform Board) banned women from the theatres, threatening a punishment of
five years exile and a fine to companies who had woman players.83 When this ban came into
force, the Italian company Los Confidentes had just arrived in Spain. This troupe was well
known for its female actors, and had performed in London (1578) and Paris (1584). Given
one of their main assets was their female performers, the troupe sent a letter to the Council
of Castille arguing that ‘the comedies that they were to perform could not be done without
the women of the company who play the parts’.84 When their license was granted, this set
a precedent for Spanish companies to make the same argument. In 1587 a formal chal-
lenge to the ban was issued in the form of a Memorial (Memorandum) by 14 famous female
performers, including Mariana Vaca and María de la O. This played upon the spectre of
homosexuality and gender confusion by cleverly making the argument that to have women
performing female roles was far safer than using boys in these roles:

they [the actresses] are suffering much need, and their consciences and those of
their husbands are in danger because they are absent, and it has happened that to
cover their absence from the stage, the said husbands have brought many boys of
graceful gestures and they dress them and caress them as if they were women with
greater indecency and scandal than they themselves caused.85

While the Memorial did lead to Philip II making women’s performance in theatres lawful,
various conditions were imposed. Female performers needed to be married, and could only
perform in gender-appropriate roles. Following the 1590s closure of the theatres and sub-
sequent reopening in 1600, more restrictions were applied to female actors, specifying that
they must wear long skirts.86 This seems to have been an attempt to eradicate the popular
‘breeches’ role of the mujer varonil (manly woman). Lead female performers in Spain were
often paid more than men due to their greater skill levels, and cross-dressing breeches roles
not only gave these women the scope to demonstrate the skills and plot possibilities open
to the roles of both sexes, it also allowed them to command an agency ‘usually reserved
for men’.87
While these laws were designed to control women’s participation in theatrical perfor-
mance, they also inadvertently made it advantageous for some Spanish women to work as
theatre managers. As María M. Carrión has argued, ‘their theatrical knowledge equipped
them with tools to both perform onstage and to begin working backstage’.88 Like the Italian
commedia performers, female members of Spanish troupes were highly skilled in speech,
movement, music and language, and they diversified their theatrical skills still further to
work in costume and stage design, contracting, transportation, budgeting and marketing.
Women became playwrights and theatrical managers and, from 1540 to 1710, female direc-
tors and managers made up 11 per cent of those working commercially in such roles.89
Carmen Sanz Ayán argues that female theatrical entrepreneurship developed in three
stages. Between the 1550s and the ban of 1586, a lack of any regulation gave women the
freedom to perform and to develop new roles. Among these were the wives of company
managers, who shared the burden of their husbands’ work. From 1587 to 1670, women
became troupe managers through assuming their husbands’ contractual obligations, but
they had to be married to enjoy these rights. From the 1670s, women used their experience
to become independent managers, making financial, contractual and artistic decisions for

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their companies.90 Managers such as Juana Bautista de León, Juana Manzano, Catalana
Hernández de Verdeseca, Jusepa Vaca and, later, Margarita de Zuazo and Jerónima de
Sandoval assumed a number of financial roles during their careers. These included paying
employees, lending money and collecting debts, signing for performances, collecting money
and sponsors, organising tours, investing in the company through purchases of wardrobe
items, and securing facilities for performances and rehearsals.91
Women’s success in these roles was determined by a number of factors linked to their
performance roles and to their legal status. The popularity of well-known female actors was
an important factor in negotiating for their companies. Towards the end of the seventeenth
century Antonia Manuela Servillano and María Álverez found their work in high demand,
especially among the court theatres. The famous name of a leading actress-manager made
theatres more amenable to troupe residencies, while companies managed by women could
save money on the wages of female performers. Finally, wives were protected from financial
problems by the laws preventing the confiscation of property from one spouse to pay for
the debts of the other.92 Sanz Anyán notes that these legal powers were, however, entirely
dependent upon the manager’s reputation, and might be stripped if she were proven to be
‘fallen’.93 As Andreini had astutely anticipated – and Mlle Molière found to her cost – a
female performer was only able to assume more social and legal agency than that normally
granted to sixteenth-century women if her reputation was spotless.94 Again, attacks on a
woman’s credibility were closely linked to her status as professional, and threatened her
ability to function within the theatre economy.

England: worshipful wives and disguised gallants

Along with its continental counterparts, England had a strong early tradition of women’s
engagement with performance in a number of forms. The Digby Candlemas and Killing of the
Innocents pageant had a cast of Virgins file by with lighted candles and, in Lincolnshire, the
girls of the guild of Saint John the Baptist danced Salome’s dance before King Herod.95
There are also numerous examples of women performing as dancers in Corpus Christi
processions and pageants.96 Most strikingly, the mid-1460s morality play Wisdom contained
an example of women dancing, some of whom were cross-dressed: ‘Here entreth [enter] six
women in sut, thre dysgysyde [disguised/dressed] as galontys [gallants] and thre as matrons,
wyth wondyrfull vysurs congruent [masks]; here mynstrell, a hornepype’.97 The fact that
these six women were ‘dysgysyde’ suggests that, as well as being costumed, the dancers were
also physically imitating the roles.98
Englishwomen took part in local performance cultures in an astonishing variety of ways,
and at all levels of society, including performing as musicians and dancers, as players in
Robin Hood pageants and May games, and in royal processions, Corpus Christi proces-
sions, tournaments and masques.99 Women were also involved in aspects of production
management, including costuming, financing, maintenance and organising.100 This kind of
performance labour was often linked to women’s membership of guilds, which, during the
fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, were cross-gender and also cross-class. Women could join
guilds with their husbands, independently or without male sponsors.101 Religious guilds were
an important source of funding for pageants and processions. York records show women
guild members regularly contributing money to the pageants; the mixed-sex members
of guilds in Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds were ordered to maintain their local Corpus
Christi processions and plays; and Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano recently

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demonstrated the importance of women’s craft and financial contributions to the Chester
pageants.102 In Chester, the play of the Assumption of the Virgin was recorded in 1499 as
having been performed by ‘the wives of this town’.103 The 1539–1540 banns elaborate:

The wurshipfful wyffs of this towne

ffynd of our lady the assumpcion
It to bring forth thy bebowne
And mytere with all thyre might.104

While this is not evidence that women performed in the pageant, it does provide an
indication that these wives were financially and practically responsible for the pageant’s
management.
It is telling, however, that the Chester Wives’ pageant of the Assumption is one of those
missing from the extant Chester text.105 James Stokes finds that opportunities for women’s
engagement with performance culture reduced as religious reformers targeted the kinds
of community and guild-affiliated performances that women engaged in.106 Many of these
suffered under the reformist legislation of the sixteenth century. Dianne Williams also notes
that this affected the kinds of roles performed: ‘the opportunity for girls to play the rich
dramatic roles represented by the saints, virgin martyrs, and the Virgin Mary evaporated
with the suppression of religious drama’.107 As a consequence, roles performed by girls and
women in masques, royal entries and pageants shifted from religious figures such as saints
and virgins to classical figures such as nymphs, virtues and goddesses. This development
occurred in tandem with a move towards Classical subject matter in London’s newly estab-
lished commercial theatres – including the development of tragedies which had proved so
successful on the continent.108
Despite the fact women did not appear on stage in London’s commercial theatres,
theatregoers in the capital would have been highly familiar with the idea of performing
women. The theatres were, as McManus recently argued, ‘islands of single-sex perfor-
mance in a sea of mixed sex theatricals and entertainments’.109 Ambassadors brought
back reports of women’s performances from abroad, and mixed-sex Italian and French
companies visited London and the royal court throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.110 Elizabeth I hosted Italian players, including a group who visited her court at
Windsor in 1574 and Martinelli’s troupe in 1579.111 Stephen Orgel has argued that, while
it was considered inappropriate for Englishwomen to perform on the commercial stage,
foreign women posed less of a problem.112 Xenophobia certainly informed Thomas Nor-
ton’s 1574 complaint against ‘the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tomblinges of the
Italion Woemen’ and Thomas Nashe’s 1592 tract, Pierce Penilesse, where he called foreign
players ‘a sort of squirting bawdy comedians, that have whores and common courtesans
to play women’s parts’.113 As with the early decades of the continental troupes, there was
an important distinction between commercial performances, in which acting could be said
to be a woman’s profession, and performances by women for whom this was not a main
source of income.
There were plenty of Englishwomen, however, for whom performance yielded other
benefits. Just as urban women acted as funders and economic supports of their commu-
nity’s theatre, so aristocratic and royal women also worked as patrons of and investors
in theatre. This patronage frequently served more complex ends than merely household
entertainment. For example, in 1583 Elizabeth I formed the Queen’s Players. This served

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multiple functions. It poached twelve of the country’s leading actors from the troupes of
other aristocrats, forming a star troupe which would be granted performance privileges
at court, play in the best playhouses in London and tour the kingdom. This removal of
some of the most celebrated players from the troupes of the Earls of Leicester, Sussex,
Oxford and Derby served both to curb years of rivalry between their patrons and to
express Elizabeth’s royal authority both in her court and in the arts.114 The Queen’s Men
toured the cities and provinces, acting as an extension of the Queen’s royal authority.
This proved such a successful exercise in navigating court politics and forging links with
the country’s major cities that Anna of Denmark supported a similar troupe when she
became queen.115
Other high-ranking women also found that patronage of musicians and performers and
the retaining of a house company projected social identity at both a local and a national
level. The Duchess of Lincolnshire’s troupe performed several times with the Queen’s
­Players and, Stokes argues:

As the highest-ranking person in Lincolnshire, the Duchess appears to have pro-

jected her presence into the county via her own company of players – this display
being a political performance of sorts.116

When aristocratic women took a role in a performance themselves, they may not have been
acting in a commercial capacity, but their performances nevertheless engaged in acts of
social and political capital. It is in the area of court performance that some of the most
intriguing intersections between commercial and non-commercial theatre can be found.
While Elizabeth I famously used dance as a political tool, Henrietta Maria of France and
England and Anna of Denmark used production, direction and performance in plays and
masques to consolidate their positions in international politics.117 Melinda J. Gough argues
that Henrietta Maria would have learnt about the social importance of a well-executed
court play when her elder sister Elizabeth directed and performed in a 1611 production of
Bradamante for the French court. Elizabeth modelled her production on those of the Italian
commedia’s female performers – notably, the performances of Andreini.118 Later, Henrietta
Maria used her experience of French court theatre to strengthen her role in the English
royal household. She took these productions seriously, once delaying a show to give more
rehearsal time and, in 1632, employing Joseph Taylor, principal actor at the Globe, to coach
her female performers. Through this court play, Gough claims, ‘she arguably deployed
French traditions of women’s courtly self-display both as a means of capturing the king’s
attention and as a vehicle for social, religious, and political defiance’.119 The political capital
of such performances was similarly adopted by other Englishwomen to construct their own
social powers and project their identities.120
The fact that even the court performances of Henrietta Maria came under anti-the-
atrical attack attests to the fact that the political currency of women’s performance was
well-recognised.121 Women’s creative role in shaping complex productions such as masques
and pastorals, together with their participation as writers, actors and directors, suggests
a culture in which female performance held important social capital. All of this meant
that the appearance of women in the English commercial theatres from 1660 was not a
sudden, unprecedented move, but the latest development in a series of cultural power-ne-
gotiating processes that had been operating since the community dramas of the fourteenth
century.122

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Spectatorship: the active gaze

Performance is, of course, barely one half of the story. While this chapter has encoun-
tered women at all levels of performance construction, some of the most powerful women
involved in performance were those engaged in the act of spectatorship. Considering specta-
torship brings its own problems – chiefly because, as John McGavin and Greg Walker note,
spectators are not a homogenous group, but bring to a performance their own attitudes,
social, cultural and religious affiliations and emotional states.123 Two individuals watching a
play will not experience it in the same way, and their understanding and interpretation will
also be influenced by elements as diverse as their proximity to the actors, their position in
relation to the stage, the noise of audience members closest to them, the power structures
present among the audience (such as whether the monarch is watching), whether they are
standing or sitting, and their own gender. These details tend to be obscured in historical
sources, which, if an audience response is recorded, tend to refer to the audience as a single,
homogenous group. Spectatorship is therefore notoriously difficult to gauge – especially for
female audience members, whose responses to performances were largely recorded by male
writers.124
Occasionally, however, a single female spectator’s engagement with performance comes
into prominence. Phillipe de Vigneulles’ Chronique de Metz reports that, in 1485, a young
German barber’s apprentice played St Barbara in the Vie et Passion de madame saincte Barbe.
Lyonard ‘was a passing beautiful lad resembling a young maiden’, and ‘he did it so well and
so honourably that he made over six thousand people cry’.125 While this account collectively
groups the responses of six thousand spectators, we later hear of two individual responses,
one from a canon of the cathedral and one from a rich widow:

And so much was the lad in the good graces of everyone that there was no one
among the nobility, clergy or laity who did not desire to take charge of this boy
to nourish and raise him; among whom there was a rich widow of Saulnière who
wanted to have him for her heir.126

While the canon eventually succeeded in his patronage, the rich widow’s material interest
in this young German performer set her spectatorial response apart from the six thousand
other spectators. This evidence suggests that, as with the soldier watching a woman perform
in Metz, Lyonard’s cross-dressed performance had the ability to evoke a significant emo-
tional and potentially erotic response, as well as serious social and economic commitment
from the widow.127
Women’s spectatorship also performed more complex social, economic and political
functions. The records of the English civic pageants at York show women hiring pageant
stations, renting out spaces for performance and hosting parties from which to watch.128
The pageants’ performance in front of the mayoress appears to have become increasingly
important. While the first list to mention the mayoress dates from 1475, when Lady Wil-
liam Lamb took the Pavement station, records throughout the first half of the sixteenth
century show mayoresses taking stations or holding parties at houses along the route for
female friends and relations. These records of communal female spectatorship suggest
that, not only was the mayoress considered an important spectator of the pageants, she
also encouraged other female spectators.129 Women’s ability to shape authority through
spectatorship was not exclusive to public pageants. Clare Sponsler has reassessed the

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influence of Catherine de Valois’s engaged spectatorship on John Lydgate’s entertainments

in the 1420s; Bella Mirabella has examined the importance of Elizabeth I’s role as specta-
tor, participant and rewarder of court dance; while Richard Levin notes the influence of
Queen Henrietta Maria and upper-class women as arbiters of good taste in the 1639 play
The Court Beggar.130
Importance was not just attached to spectators of status. Female spectators of all classes
appear as dramatic tools in play scripts from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. For
example, in the Towneley Noah and the Ark pageant, Noah and his wife play female and
male audience members against one another.131 This tradition of assuming gender loyalty
by placing men and women in a mixed audience in opposition to one another continued
into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – particularly where a play’s subject matter
involved a ‘battle of the sexes’.132 These moments of engaged spectatorship acknowledge
that women in the audience contributed to the meaning of what they were watching.
Moreover, the fact that women from all sections of society attended the playhouses also
had an influence over the performance material, and Jean Howard and Alison Findlay
have called to attention the economic power of women as consumers.133 Moreover, as
Marion Wynne-Davies has noted regarding ‘orange women’ and female sellers of tobacco,
foodstuffs and printed texts during performances in London theatres, women’s economic
engagement with performance was not restricted to merely paying for admission.134 The
boundaries between vendors and performers were sometimes permeable, and Nell Gwyn’s
entry to her profession reportedly came through her work as an orange vender. As well
as selling food, her work involved carrying messages between audience members and the
performers, and brought her to the attention of actor Charles Hart, who introduced her
to acting.135
While food vending was a ubiquitous part of performance cultures across Europe, there
were other ways of representing and engaging with the female spectator. In the Italian
commedia, the female spectator was not just appealed to in the performance; she also began
to appear as a device in plays’ staging mechanics as a woman at a window.136 Elsewhere,
theatre scholars have argued that the manipulative powers of female spectators worked
across spaces designed to contain them. Amy L. Tigner proposes that the segregation of
Spanish women theatregoers from the rest of the audience, ‘enabled a powerful female
voice, distinct from that of the general audience’.137 Unlike the London theatres, which were
designed around the principle of seeing whilst being seen, Spanish theatres, or corrales, exer-
cised a more rigid compartmentalisation of bodies, sight, and visibility. Spectator areas were
divided into general seating, private boxes and two separate spaces – one for clerics and one
for women. While upper-class men and women would sit in the boxes, non-noble women
would sit in the upper and lower cazeulas (‘stewpot’). These were hidden from the rest of the
audience by a grill. This shielding of the Spanish female audience members from the pub-
lic gaze suggests an attempt to disconnect the spectator from the spectated – a distinction
that, in other European theatre forms, was blurred. However, it also placed the women in
a position of spectatorial privilege – assigning to them the same level of segregated privacy
as the clerics. In the Italian, French and English theatres, women were both active gazers
and objects of the gaze – and, while wielding certain levels of power, they were also aware
that their visible spectatorship might make them vulnerable.138 In the segregated spaces of
the Spanish theatre, however, women who spectated whilst remaining invisible enjoyed a
different power dynamic with the stage. This, Tigner claims, was often expressed through
interruptive noise:

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Women in the cazuela were free from the men of the audience and therefore were
able to demand entertainment that suited them. The women in the cazuela had a
great deal of power over the performers, as they would rattle keys against the rail-
ing or blow whistles if they disapproved of the performance.139

This meant that the female spectators’ desires could be expressed during a play – perhaps
even changing its course.
Anti-theatrical literature did not fail to notice the power dynamics inherent in female
spectatorship. Performance spaces were figured as dangerous areas in which the woman
spectator, like the woman performer, might be vulnerable to being categorised as ‘whore’.140
As the narrative of the widow of Metz suggests, female spectators were characterised as
particularly susceptible to the narratives enacted onstage and apt to carry elements of those
performances into their everyday lives. In 1577, Pierre de L’Estoile complained that French-
women were modelling their fashions on the Italian female actors, even to the point of
showing off their breasts.141 This concern was also raised in Spain in 1659, when Don Luis
de Ulloa noted that female spectators were starting to dress like the Italian and Spanish
divas.142 Similar arguments appeared in pro-theatrical literature. Richard Levin has identi-
fied reports claiming female spectators were edified as a result of lessons in plays – including
Henry Hartington’s poem about prostitutes who came to a theatre to solicit customers but
were converted away from their trade by the play being performed there.143 This performs a
neat inversion of the actress-as-whore trope, suggesting that, through watching the perfor-
mance, the prostitutes unwittingly found themselves moving from the role of performer, or
seller, and into the more respectable role of attentive spectator.

Conclusion
The pervasive, all-male model of European theatre not only skews broader views of the
value of women in the past, it also creates ideas which are replicated in today’s popular
culture. When, on 16 July 2017, the BBC announced the casting of a woman in the role of
the 13th doctor in their series Dr Who, it was not difficult to find people (mainly men) on
social media complaining about the choice. A number of medievalist Twitter users leapt to
the BBC’s defence with pithy responses, with one claiming ‘Dr Who should never be per-
formed by a woman because when Shakespeare originally wrote the part he wrote it for a
male company’.144 While this response wittily played with the theme of time travel, aligning
the complainants with an imagined primitive, misogynist past, it also drew attention to the
fact that the lazy historical assumptions that for too long supported the fiction of an ‘all-
male’ stage are still prevalent in popular culture. The acknowledgement of women’s roles
in medieval and early-modern European drama is therefore crucial because the myth of
an all-male performance past still informs expectations of a male lead character in theatre
and medieval performance. This is also reflected in the similarly crucial need to recog-
nise the trans-geographical influence of European performance cultures. As recent debates
in medieval studies concerning the appropriation of mythologies of an ‘all-white’ past by
white nationalists have demonstrated, assumptions of racial or gender monoculture have
far-reaching consequences – especially when they are used to bolster politics of modern
cultural exclusion.145
This survey of women in medieval and early-modern performance cultures has empha-
sised the need to continually interrogate the terminology used to describe early theatre.

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While this chapter has largely questioned the categories of ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’,
other scholars are also working to clarify and contextualise important theatre studies’ terms
and categories of periodisation that have for too long gone unquestioned.146 The scope of our
studies is continuing to widen to include categories and forms of performance that attracted
women as participants, performers, labourers and audience-goers, all actively engaged in
shaping performance. Furthermore, it has demonstrated the importance of rethinking what
we consider to be the economies of performance in our criticism. Economic capital, which
has previously been used to assess which of women’s diverse performance labours might be
treated as ‘professional’ (and hence, taken seriously), was only one part of a wide range of
social, political and material benefits towards which women’s performance cultures worked.
Indeed, it is likely that it is precisely because women’s presence as performers often came
under the kinds of attacks intended to devalue it (through accusations of whoredom, civic
disobedience, or frivolity), that women were more likely to also invest in non-monetary
forms of performance output. While some women, such as Andreini, achieved trans-Euro-
pean fame through performing on the public stage, women across Europe, from queens and
noblewomen to guildswomen and the lower classes, participated in performance to make
political statements, bolster their influence, make the best of restrictive laws, find a platform
for their writing and to practice their labour.

Notes
1 James Stokes, ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance in Early Modern Eng-
land’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33 (2015), 9–31.
2 See Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996), 10–11.
3 Michael A. Zampelli, ‘The “Most Honest and Most Devoted of Women”: An Early Modern
Defence of the Professional Actress’, Theatre Survey, 42 (2001), 1.
4 See María M. Carrión, ‘Legally Bound: Women and Performance in Early Modern Spain’,
Renaissance Drama, 44 (2016), 235.
5 See Virginia Scott, Women on the Stage in Early Modern France: 1540–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2010), 56–7.
6 William Prynne, Histriomastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London: 1632).
7 Sophie Tomlinson’s work on Stuart drama has identified that the term ‘actress’ in the sense of
‘a female player on the stage’ did not come into use until 1626 – and then, it is used in a letter
referring to Queen Henrietta Maria, rather than a professional performer. I therefore refer to
performing women in plays as ‘female actors’ throughout this chapter, although ‘actress’ remains
the principal term used in critical works to refer to female players. Sophie Tomlinson, Women on
Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4.
8 Amateur was coined in the nineteenth century and professional in the fifteenth, though here ‘profes-
sional’ was used solely in relation to the Law, Church, medicine and the military – not in relation
to player and theatrical activity. See Philip Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English The-
atre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 16–17.
9 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke UP, 2012).
10 James Stokes, ‘Women and Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Suffolk’, Early Theatre,
15 (2012), 28.
11 Peter Parolin, ‘Access and Contestation: Women’s Performance in Early Modern England, Italy,
France, and Spain’, Early Theatre, 15 (2012), 15–25.
12 See Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin ‘Introduction’, in Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin
(eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), 1–21.
13 Melinda J. Gough & Clare McManus, ‘Introduction: Gender, Cultural Mobility, and Theater
History Inquiry’, Renaissance Drama, 44 (2016), 188–90.

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14 Work on Shakespeare’s medievalism has stressed that ‘medieval’ performance forms throughout
Europe continued well-beyond their periodised and, often, legally decreed ‘endings’. See Ruth
Morse, Helen Cooper & Peter Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2013); Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Bloomsbury,
2010).
15 See Clare McManus & Lucy Munro, ‘Renaissance Women’s Performance and the Dramatic
Canon: Theatre History, Evidence, and Narratives’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33 (2015), 1–7.
16 For example, the brief section ‘Vernacular Literature and Drama’ in Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
(ed.), Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 144–9 gives the impres-
sion of a sixteenth-century European performance tradition that was entirely English and exclu-
sively male. Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) does
a little better. Although its section on the transmission of popular culture covers a range of
often-overlooked traditions including singing, puppetry, clowning, nomadic musicians and moun-
tebanks, the only mentions it makes of women refer to ballad singers in Vienna (138) and a show-
woman at Bartholomew Fair who employed male ballad writers (139). While Judith M. Bennett
& Ruth Mazo Karras (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2013) does contain an excellent chapter by Roberta L. Krueger on women’s textual
communities, it does not include a corresponding chapter on women’s performance forms.
17 See how Eric A. Nicholson’s deals with the reception of the actress in sixteenth-century European
theatre in Nicholson, ‘The Theater’, in Natalie Zemon Davis & Arlette Farge (eds), A History of
Women in the West: Vol. 3, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1994), 295–314.
18 Early theatre studies has, however, for some time engaged in comparative criticism between dif-
ferent forms of European drama. See Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).
19 The importance of this topic is evidenced through recent special editions of Early Theatre, 15
(2012), Shakespeare Bulletin, 33 (2015) and Renaissance Drama, 44 (2016) on women in performance.
20 See Elizabeth Schafer, ‘Early Modern Women as Theatre Makers’, Early Theatre, 17 (2014), 125:
‘[women who] wrote, translated, published, commissioned and, in all probability, produced and
performed [  …  ] have been corseted and closeted by critics’. See also Natasha Korda, Wom-
en’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2011); Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005); Orgel, Impersonations; S.
P. Cerasano & Marion Wynne-Davies (eds), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History,
and Performance 1594–1998 (London: Routledge, 1998); and Alison Findlay & Stephanie Hodg-
son-Wright with Gweno Williams, Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (Singapore: Pearson
Education, 2000).
21 See, for example, Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2006).
22 James Stokes, ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance’, 23–4: ‘When used to
define women’s performance, the term “traditional” becomes even more confusing and mislead-
ing, tending to marginalize that performance within the larger culture. [ … ] The effect [ … ]
has been to ghettoize performance by women, consigning it to a remote and folky corner of the
English dramatic tradition’.
23 However, in pedagogy this too-often occurs under the auspices of modules dedicated to ‘Wom-
en’s Literature’ rather than placing female playwrights in dialogue with their male contempo-
raries. See Julie Campbell, ‘Cross-Channel Connections: Early Modern English Noblewomen’s
Familiarity with Continental Women’s Literary and Performance Practices’, Literature Compass, 4
(2007), 751–65.
24 See Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the
Stuart Court (1590–1619) (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002); Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart
Drama.
25 See Nieves Romero-Diaz & Lisa Vollendorf (eds), Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, Ana Caro Mallén, and
Sor Marcela de San Félix: Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain (Tucson, AZ: Iter/Arizona Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016); and the multiple volumes of plays by French
women, Aurore Evain, Perry Gethner & Henriette Goldwyn (eds), Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien
Régime (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 5 vols, 2014). See also Cerasano & Wynne-Davies (eds), Readings

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in Renaissance Women’s Drama; Margarete Rubik, Early Women Dramatists 1550–1800 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1998); and Perry Gethner & Melinda J. Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players and
Playwrights in Early Modern France’, Renaissance Drama, 44 (2016), 217–32.
26 See Melinda J. Gough, ‘Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Plays
in France and England’, in Brown & Parolin (eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 193–215;
and Carmen Sanz Ayán, ‘More Than Faded Beauties: Women Theater Managers of Early Mod-
ern Spain’, Early Modern Women, 10 (2015), 114–21.
27 See M. A. Katritzky, ‘English Troupes in Early Modern Germany: The Women’, in Robert
Henke & Eric Nicholson (eds), Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate,
2008), 35–48.
28 See Korda, Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage; Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘Orange-
Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls: Women and Theater in Early Modern England’,
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 22 (2009), 19–26; Gweno Williams, Alison Findlay &
Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, ‘Payments, Permits and Punishments: Women Performers and the
Politics of Place’ in Brown & Parolin (eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 45–67; Natasha
Korda, ‘The Case of Moll Frith: Women’s Work and the ‘All-Male Stage’, in Brown & Parolin
(eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 71–88.
29 See Korda, Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage. Women’s work behind the scenes
on the early Dutch stage is also part of an important new book project by Martine van Elk:
https://martinevanelk.wordpress.com/20189/05/07/printers-cleaners-and-brewers-early-
modern-dutch-women-behind-the-stage/ (accessed 21 February 2019) for some of her early
findings.
30 See Meg Twycross, The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images and Performance (Abingdon: Rout-
ledge, 2018); Katie Normington, ‘Player Transformation: The Role of Clothing and Disguise’, in
Philip Butterworth & Katie Normington (eds), Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata
and Their Audiences (Cambridge: Brewer, 2017), 76–93.
31 On the development of audience reception theory see Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences (Abing-
don: Routledge, 1990), 36–59; John McGavin & Greg Walker, Imagining Spectatorship: From the
Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016).
32 See Katie Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 44–8; Jean
E. Howard, ‘Women as Spectators, Spectacles, and Paying Customers’, in Cerasano & Wynne-
Davies (eds), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, 81–86; Richard Levin, ‘Women in the Renais-
sance Theatre Audience’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 165–74; Edward W. Muir, ‘The Eye of
the Procession: Ritual Ways of Seeing in the Renaissance’, in Nicholas Howe (ed.), Ceremonial Cul-
ture in Pre-Modern Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 129–53; Amy
L. Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s Art: Improvisation, Transvestism, and Disruption in Tirso’s
El vergonzoso en palacio’, Early Theatre, 15 (2012), 167–88. Most recently, Clare Sponsler examined
the political implications of female spectatorship in her discussions of court entertainments in
The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
33 See Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe; Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rheto-
ric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999); Jody Enders, Death by Drama and Other Medieval
Urban Legends (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
34 See, for example, Pamela Allen Brown, ‘The Traveling Diva and Generic Innovation’, Renaissance
Drama, 44 (2016), 249–66; Clare McManus & Lucy Munro, ‘Renaissance Women’s Performance
and the Dramatic Canon’, 1–7; Gough & McManus, ‘Gender, Cultural Mobility and Theater
History Inquiry’, 187–200.
35 See, for example, the chapters by Bella Mirabella and Melinda J. Gough, in Brown & Parolin
(eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 89–105 & 193–215.
36 See Clare McManus, ‘“Sing it Like Poor Barbary”: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Perfor-
mance’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33 (2015), 99–120; Virginia Scott, ‘Conniving Women and Super-
annuated Coquettes: Travestis and Caractères in Early Modern French Theatre’, Early Theatre, 15
(2012), 191–212.
37 Brown, ‘The Traveling Diva’, 250. See also Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008); Nina Treadwell, Music and Wonder at the Medici Court:
The 1589 Interludes for ‘la pellegrina’ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2008).

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38 See M. A. Katritzky, ‘What Did Vigil Raber’s Stage Really Look Like? Questions of Authenticity
and Integrity in Medieval Theater Iconography’, in Michael Gebhardt & Max Siller (eds), Vigil
Raber: zur 450. Wiederkehr seines Todesjahres (Wagner: Schlern-Schrifter, 2004), 85–116.
39 See Bella Mirabella, ‘“Quacking Delilahs”: Female Mountebanks in Early Modern England
and Italy’, in Brown & Parolin (eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 89–105; and M. A.
Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500–1750 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 89–105.
40 Peter Parolin, ‘Access and Contestation’, 18.
41 Brown, ‘The Traveling Diva’, 255.
42 See Eric Nicholson, ‘Romance as Role Model: Early Female Performances of Orlando Furioso and
Gerusalemme liberate’, in Valeria Finucci (ed.), Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso (Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 1996), 246–69.
43 See Peter Parolin, ‘“A Strange Fury Entered My House”: Italian Actresses and Female Perfor-
mance in Volpone’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 107–35.
44 Brown provides a useful map of the routes taken by Italian travelling troupes and their dates in
‘The Traveling Diva’, 252.
45 See M. A. Katritzky, ‘Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery’, in Brown & Parolin (eds),
Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 127.
46 See Siro Ferrone, La commedia dell’arte: Attrici e attori in Europa (XVI–XVIII secolo) (Turin: Piccola
Biblioteca Einaudi, 2014), 264–5.
47 Brown, ‘The Travelling Diva’, 259–60.
48 Quoted from translation in Kenneth Richards & Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte: A Docu-
mentary History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 221–2.
49 Giuseppe Pavoni’s diary record for 1589, translated in Richards & Richards, The Commedia
dell’Arte, 74–5. For more on the Medici performance, see Amy L. Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s
Art’, 167–90.
50 Jane Tylus, ‘Women at the Windows: Commedia dell’arte and Theatrical Practice in Early Modern
Italy’, Theatre Journal, 49 (1997), 332.
51 Andreini published poems and letters, a pastoral play, La Mirtilla (1588), and was awarded mem-
bership of Pavia’s Accademia degli Intenti. See Peter Parolin, ‘Access and Contestation’, 18.
52 Trans. in Zampelli, ‘The “Most Honest and Most Devoted of Women”’, 5.
53 See Scott, Women on the Stage in Early Modern France, 76–7.
54 See Lynette R. Muir, ‘Women on the Medieval Stage: The Evidence from France’, Medieval Eng-
lish Theatre, 7 (1985), 107–19; Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe, 55–6.
55 J. S. Street, French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 52.
56 A list of young women performing in French convent and liturgical drama appears in Meg Twy-
cross, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, Medieval English Theatre, 5 (1983), 133–4. See also
Deanne Williams, ‘Shakespeare and the Girl Masquer’, in Shakespeare Studies, 44 (2016), 203–29.
Occasionally, the skills of female performers were praised. In 1535 Francoise Bautier played the
Virgin Mary at Grenoble and charmed her audience with ‘les gestes, la voix, la pronunciation, le
debit’. See Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 2 vols, 1880), II: 127.
57 For further discussion of this event see Clifford Davidson, ‘Women and the Medieval Stage’,
Women’s Studies, 11 (1984), 99–113; Lynette Muir, ‘Women on the Medieval Stage’, 114; Robert
L. A. Clark & Clare Sponsler, ‘Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval
Drama’, New Literary History, 28 (1997), 321–2.
58 Translated in Enders, Death by Drama and other Medieval Urban Legends, 17. For the French account,
see de Julleville, Les Mysteres, 32.
59 Gethner & Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players’, 218.
60 Scott, Women on the Stage in Early Modern France, 59.
61 See Rosalind Kerr, ‘The Italian Actress and the Foundations of Early Modern European The-
atre: Performing Female Sexual Identities on the Commedia dell’Arte Stage’, Early Theatre, 11
(2008), 181–97.
62 This troupe eventually took up residency in the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris. See Scott, Women on
the Stage, 89.
63 See, for example, the complex and convoluted legal battles fought between Fleury Jacob and his
troupe for custody of his wife, Colombe, after he had been thrown out of the troupe. Scott, Women
on the Stage, 120 & 92.

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64 See Scott, Women on the Stage, 78–9, for the full account.
65 Georges de Scudéry, La Comédie des comédiens, ed. by Joan Crow (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1975), 5, translation in Scott, Women on the Stage, 131.
66 See Scott, ‘Conniving Women’, 193: ‘Audiences – who evidently had a hard time distinguishing
between onstage and offstage behaviour – can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that theatrical
women were somewhat louche’.
67 See Scott, ‘Conniving Women’, 192–4.
68 Gethner & Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players’, 217–32.
69 Company playwrights tended to write roles directly for their leading actresses. Racine wrote
highly challenging female roles for Marie Desmares, star of the Hôtel de Bourgogne troupe, and
coached her extensively. See Gethner & Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players’, 224.
70 Gethner & Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players’, 225–6.
71 Molière and Racine were at the forefront of this drive to create new, more socially acceptable
comic roles for women than had featured in the earlier farces.
72 See Aurore Evain, Perry Gethner & Henriette Goldwyn (eds), Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime,
vol. 1. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014).
73 See Evain, Gethner, & Goldwyn (eds), Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime, vol. 2. (Paris: Classiques
Garnier, 2014).
74 Women playwrights were not often treated fairly by the French troupes. See Gethner & Gough,
‘The Advent of Women Players’, 227.
75 See Julie D. Campbell, ‘“Merry, Nimble, Stirring Spirit[s]”: Academic, Salon and Commedia
dell’arte Influence on the Innamorate of Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Brown and Parolin (eds), Women
Players in England, 1500–1660, 145–6.
76 Gethner & Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players’, 228–32.
77 See Campbell, ‘“Merry, Nimble, Stirring Spirits”’, 148–9; Jaqueline Boucher, Société et mentalités
autour de Henri III, Vol. 3 (Paris: Champion, 1981).
78 Hugo Albert Rennert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (New York, NY: Hispanic Society
of America, 1909), 136–8.
79 See Sidney Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Mascu-
linity (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2003), 34.
80 Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy, 57.
81 On Spanish court drama and its role in diplomacy see Mark Hutchings & Berta Cano-Echevar-
ría, ‘Between Courts: Female Masquers and Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1603–5’, Early Theatre, 15
(2012), 91–108.
82 It was not until later that she joined de Rueda’s public troupe. See Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy,
57, 59 & 63.
83 See Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) Consejos, lib.1197, fol. 175r.
84 See Amy L. Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s Art’, 169.
85 Translated in Carrión, ‘Legally Bound’, 241. See also Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy, 67.
86 Enjoinders in 1608 and 1615 also stipulated against boys wearing make-up and performing as
women. See N. D. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage: From the Medieval Times to the End of the
Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 518–31.
87 This may be why, although the leading female role was taken by a skilled woman, troupes often
filled secondary and tertiary female roles with male actors. See Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy, 64;
Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s Art’, 168.
88 Carrión provides a useful summary of the extraordinary range of mujer varonil characters in
‘Legally Bound’, 243–4.
89 See Mimma de Salvo, ‘Sobre el reparto de El tirano castigado de Lope de Vega’, Criticón, 87–89
(2003), 215–26; and Carmen Sanz Ayán, ‘Las autoras de comedias en el siglo XVII: empresarias
teatrales en tiempos de Calderón’, in José Alcalá-Zamora & Ernesto Berenhuer (eds), Calderón de
la Barca y la Espan̄a del Barroco (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales, Sociedad
Estatal Espan̄a Nuevo Milenio, 2001), 543–79. On women writing for theatre see, for example,
the playwright Ana Caro, whose work included religious plays, and interludes, some of which
dealt with international politics and the marital problems of noblewomen. See María M. Car-
rión, ‘Portrait of a Lady: Marriage, Postponement, and Representation in Ana Caro’s El Conde
Partinuples’, MLN, 114 (1999), 241–68.

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  90 See Maite Pascual Bonis, ‘Women as Actresses and Theatre Managers in Early Modern Pam-
plona’, in Rina Walthus & Marguérite Corporal (eds), Heroines of the Gold Stage: Women and Drama
in Spain and England 1500–1700 (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2008), 69–87.
  91 See Carmen Sanz Ayán, ‘Women Theater Managers’, 115–7; Carrión, ‘Legally Bound’, 247.
  92 Sanz Ayán, ‘Women Theater Managers’, 120–1.
  93 Sanz Ayán, ‘Women Theater Managers’, 120: ‘women could only be imprisoned for debts arising
from a direct or serious crime, or if they were proven to be “fallen” [ … ] if rumours of loose
sexual behaviour could be verified, actresses were automatically stripped of their legal rights and
their persons and assets could be seized’.
  94 Mlle Molière was the victim of a book accusing her of prostitution, which damaged her rep-
utation. See Scott, Women on Stage, 143. On the stigmatization of Spanish actresses, see Mary
Elizabeth Perry, No espada rota ni mujer que trota (Barcelona: Critica, 1993), 189.
  95 See Williams, ‘Shakespeare and the Girl Masquer’, 205–7; Twycross, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mys-
tery Plays’, 130–1; Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society
in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 99; Catherine Sanok,
‘Performing Feminine Sanctity in late Medieval England: Parish Guilds, Saints’ Plays, and the
Second Nun’s Tale’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32 (2002), 269–303.
 96 Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, 49–50.
  97 Mark Eccles (ed.), ‘Wisdom’, in Eccles (ed.), The Macro Plays, EETS (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), 139.
  98 In suggesting that their dance is a basse dance, John Marshall has suggested that Wisdom has an
intercontinental link, as there are strong similarities between it and the basse dance performed
in the contemporary Spanish play, Fulgens and Lucres. John Marshall, ‘“Her Virgynes, as Many as
a Man Wylle”: Dance and Provenance in Three Late Medieval Plays, Wisdom/The Killing of the
Children/The Conversion of St Paul’, Leeds Studies in English, 25 (1994), 117.
  99 See Stokes, ‘Women and Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Suffolk’; Stokes, ‘The
Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance’; Stokes, ‘Women and Performance: Evi-
dences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire’, in Brown &
Parolin (eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1660, 25–44.
100 See Katie Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, 41–4.
101 Sanok, ‘Performing Female Sanctity’, 280–2.
102 See Stokes, ‘Women and Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Suffolk’, 32; Katherine
French, ‘Maidens’ Lights and Wives’ Stores: Women’s Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), 399–425; Nicole R. Rice & Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic
Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2015), 161–207.
103 R. M. Lumiansky & David Mills (eds), The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 171.
104 Chester: REED, 22. 1499–1500 List of Guilds, f. 4.
105 See Denise Ryan, ‘Women, Sponsorship and the Early Civic Stage: Chester’s Worshipful Wives
and the Lost Assumption Play’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 40 (2001), 149–75.
106 See Stokes, ‘Women and Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Suffolk’, 35; Stokes, ‘The
Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance’, 9.
107 Williams, ‘Shakespeare and the Girl Masquer’, 206.
108 John Florio’s library also provided a resource for writings about Italian performance practices
and descriptions of leading Italian actors and actresses.
109 Clare McManus, ‘Women and English Renaissance Drama: Making and Unmaking “The All-
Male Stage”’, Literature Compass, 4 (2007), 785.
110 See Orgel, Impersonations, 6–7, for Thomas Coryat’s report of ‘seeing a woman act’ in the thea-
tres of Venice. Orgel also unpacks the 1629 account of a French touring company containing
actresses being ‘pippin pelted’ at Blackfriars, noting that mixed-sex troupes from France were
welcomed elsewhere without incident and that their alleged rejection may have had more to do
with the fact they were French than the fact they were women. See also McManus, ‘Women and
English Renaissance Drama’, 792: ‘The figure of the foreign actress conflates ideas of nation and
gender in a single threatening image of non-English femininity’.
111 The troupe may also have appeared at Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch. See Pamela Allen
Brown, ‘“Cattle of this Colour”: Boying the Diva in As You Like It’, Early Theatre, 15 (2012), 147.

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112 Orgel, Impersonations, 12.

113 See Katritzky, ‘Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery’, 128; Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse:
His Supplication to the Diwell (1592), ed. G. B. Harrison, (New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 90.
114 Scott McMillin & Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1998), 1–17.
115 See McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage.
116 Stokes, ‘Women and Performance’, 39.
117 See Bella Mirabella, ‘“In the Sight of All”: Queen Elizabeth and the Dance of Diplomacy’,
Early Theatre, 15 (2012), 65–90. For Anna of Denmark’s use of court masque and plays as a polit-
ical device, see also Hutchings & Cano-Echievarría, ‘Between Courts’, 92: ‘Through the court
masque, the queen secured for herself a specific role and by extension an important political
space for the ladies of the court’.
118 Gough, ‘Courtly Comédiantes’, 194.
119 See Gough, ‘Courtly Comédiantes’, 208–9.
120 For example, the French Huguenot Charlotte de la Tremouille married into the Stanley family,
where she set up a rival ‘court’ in Lancashire and staged female masques to compete with those
of Henrietta Maria. See Williams, Findlay & Hodgson-Wright, ‘Payments, Permits and Punish-
ments’, 57.
121 In 1632, William Prynne published his infamous Histriomastix – indictment of theatre which
named ‘women actors – notorious whores’. See Brown & Parolin, Women Players in England, 1500–
1600, 3.
122 See Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 3.
123 McGavin & Walker, Imagining Spectatorship, 20; Clare Sponsler, ‘The Culture of the Spectator:
Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances’, Theater Journal, 44 (1992), 15–29.
124 See Levin, ‘Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience’, 167.
125 Translated in Twycross, Death by Drama, 30.
126 Twycross, Death by Drama.
127 For a discussion of the queer implications of the offers of the widow and canon, see Clark &
Sponsler, ‘Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama’, 322–3.
128 See Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, 46–8; Meg Twycross, ‘“Places to Hear the Play”:
Pageant Stations in York, 1398–1572’, REED Newsletter, 3 (1978), 10–33.
129 Twycross, ‘“Places to Hear the Play”’, 23–4.
130 See Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows, 167–90; Levin, ‘Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audi-
ence’, 169; and Mirabella, ‘In the Sight of All’, 65–89.
131 George England & Alfred W. Pollard (eds), ‘Noah and the Ark’, in The Towneley Plays, EETS, e.s.
LXXI (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1897; reprinted 1966), 23–40, ll. 388–403.
132 Levin, ‘Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience’, 171.
133 See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 55–63;
Alison Findlay, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 2–3; and Jean
Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 79.
134 Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘Orange-Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls’, 22: ‘early mod-
ern women went to the theatre for a variety of reasons, only one of which seems to have been to
watch the play’.
135 Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992), 67.
136 Tylus, ‘Women at the Windows’, 337.
137 Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s Art’, 168.
138 See Wynne-Davies, ‘Orange-Women’, 22–3.
139 Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s Art’, 184.
140 See Tylus, ‘Women at the Windows’, 336–7.
141 Gethner & Gough, ‘The Advent of Women Players’, 222.
142 Carrión, ‘Legally Bound’, 238. Other works have suggested that women were self-consciously
using the methods and tropes they had witnessed as spectators of performances to further their
own causes. See Williams, Findlay & Hodgson-Wright, ‘Payments, Permits and Punishments’,
52–3.
143 Levin, ‘Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience’, 169–70.

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144 @eoin_price, 8.17pm, 16 July 2017: https://twitter.com/eoin_price/status/886666228215017472

(accessed 21 February 2019).
145 See ‘On Race and Medieval Studies’: www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/on-race-and-
medieval-studies.html (accessed 21 February 2019); J. Clara Chan, ‘Medievalists, Recoiling
from White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field’, The Chronicle of Higher Education (2017): www.
chronicle.com/article/Medievalists-Recoiling-From/240666 (accessed 21 February 2019); Mary
J. Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’, JSTOR Daily: https://daily.jstor.
org/old-english-serious-image-problem (accessed 21 February 2019); Dorothy Kim, ‘Antifemi-
nism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies’, In the Middle: www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/
antifeminism-whiteness-and-medieval.html (accessed 21 February 2019). A plenary session was
held on ‘The Color of Membership’ at the Shakespeare Association of America Meeting in
April 2017 and a workshop on ‘Whiteness in Medieval Studies’ was held at the International
Congress of Medieval Studies: http://medievalistsofcolor.com/medievalists-of-color-/index
(accessed 21 February 2019). See also Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Shakespeare, Race and Performance:
The Diverse Bard (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) and the recent edition of Shakespeare Quarterly, 67
(2016) focussing on race.
146 See, for example, Sarah Brazil, ‘Forms of Pretence in Pre-Modern Drama: From the Visitatio
Sepulchri to Hamlet’, European Medieval Drama, 20 (2017), 181–201.

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