Women and English Renaissance Drama: Making and Unmaking ‘The All‐Male Stage’

Abstract

We can no longer refer to 'the all-male stage' of Renaissance drama without a qualifying remark about the many performing women of early modern England. Over the past decade or so the combined efforts of feminism, gender studies and historicised archival work have shown that Shakespearean theatre was by no means an all-male pursuit in which women were represented only by transvestite boy actors. Recent research has uncovered a diverse and energetic range of female performers beyond the single-sex playhouse stages of Shakespearean London and has shown women to have a crucial role in early modern theatre. This article considers how the emergence of the woman player as a subject of study has changed the way that we think and write about Shakespearean drama. In particular, women's performance challenges the central critical paradigms of 'the all-male' and 'the English stage', while the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and other canonical authors are changed by our new understanding of women's theatricality.Early modern theater was never the exclusive property of the male professionals. (Brown and Parolin 4) [B]y this time it is clear that we do not at all know what the rule is. Obviously our evidence does not support any blanket claim that women were excluded from the stages of Renaissance England, but it may certainly indicate that the culture, and the history that descends from it, had an interest in rendering them unnoticeable. It will no longer do to refer to 'the Renaissance all-male stage' without a qualifying remark about the many women who performed in early modern England. Conversely, though, anyone wishing to point out that early modern English theatre was not an all-male pursuit has customarily had to qualify that statement with a definition of Renaissance theatre which extends beyond the stages of the private and public playhouses, the preserves of canonical drama and the male player. And indeed, from recent work on female masquers, female mountebanks, ballad singers and jesters we know that women did not usually perform in those arenas (McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage; Britland; Tomlinson, Women on Stage; Brown; Katritsky). The conventional clarification is no doubt accurate but it hems in women's