Introduction

This book considers the staging of the human body in English professional theatre from 1580 to 1635. It does so from a gender-political perspective, with a particular focus on masculinity. Central to the arguments herein outlined is the proposition that scientic and philosophical conceptions of the body, together with received notions about hierarchies of gender that subordinated women to men, were undergoing signicant epistemic shifts during the period. The advances in experimental anatomy that characterise the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rank amongst the greatest achievements of early modern science; yet, as with other appropriations of ancient culture, the early modern period’s interest in anatomical science was not born from a desire simply to reiterate the theories of the ancients, but from a perceived need to reappraise their ontological and epistemological paradigms. The century from 1540 to 1640 saw the most radical shift ever to affect European corporal philosophy as scholars saw t to explore for the rst time the interior workings of actual human subjects rather than make a priori deductions as a result of the dissection of animals. Simultaneously, developments in protocapitalist structures of commerce and exchange, together with mass migration to a capital city becoming the most signicant and cosmopolitan centre of trade in Europe, led to increasing possibilities for female enfranchisement.1 It is a fundamental assertion of this volume that combinations of cultural, scientic, philosophical and economic factors led to rapid change in conceptions of what it meant to be and to act male or female.