Women players in England, 1500-1660: beyond the all-male stage

Abstract

Players in England, 1500-1660: All-Male Stage, Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, edited by Helen Ostavich. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xvii + 329. Cloth $99.95. Reviewer: SHEILA T. CAVANAUGH Players in England, 1500-1660: All-Male Stage offers a number of valuable essays concerned with role of in performance during years noted. Unfortunately, title of collection is misleading. Only a few of essays in question actually address what title suggests is central issue: female in early modern England. The other pieces in collection discuss related topics, including drama produced on Continent during this period. While many of these essays serve as eloquent and erudite contributions project, discontinuity with purported topic of collection is disconcerting. Readers are advised, therefore, that this series of essays is well worth perusal despite unfortunate title that promises something different than volume actually provides. The previous caveat notwithstanding, Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin have gathered essays from an impressive range of scholars, who help illuminate role of in performative events during this period. As they judiciously note, they are focused on female rather than actresses since this term acknowledges that for both male and female performers, their art encompassed many mimetic forms, such as singing songs and ballads, dancing jigs, cross-dressing, miming, jesting, and masking (4). They also offer an appropriately capacious understanding of calling it any act of embodied display or representation intended for an authence (5). Although justification for including continental players is less convincing namely, to assess ways that [Italian and French] performances intersected with, and affected, English scene (5) they rightly seek open up our conceptualization of numerous early modern performative activities thriving outside professional stage. They also highlight many avenues of research that will be supported by Records of Early English Drama (REED) project. This collection, moreover, helps identify fruitful areas for future research by these scholars and others. The first section, Beyond London contains essays that best exemplify ways that REED and other archival sources can invigorate our understanding of activities of early modern female performers. James Stokes, for instance, in Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire, details how REED documents make visible in ways that much twentieth-century theater history did not. As Stokes acknowledges, this essay marks only beginning of work that can be done on socioreligious guilds in this period, but he convincingly demonstrates that women participated as players, sponsors, producers, and audiences in revels; in customary mimetic games, processions, and enactments blending worship and play; in mimetically conceived ceremonies publicly enacting rituals of power, authority, and life's passages (41). Similarly, Gweno Williams, Alison Findlay, and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright offer a jointly authored essay entitled Payments, Permits and Punishments: Performers and Politics of Place that considers evidence about female offered by REED for York, Lancashire, and Gloucestershire. This essay also highlights importance of religious ceremonies in history of female performance, but concurrently urges scholars look more closely at the importance of women's role as producers rather than performers (64). …