ABSTRACT
This chapter examines English girls on stage in the early modern period. Besides dancing in court masques, participating in local festivals, and performing in household entertainments, girls also acted in plays put on in the continental convent schools established by the 'Jesuitess' English woman Mary Ward in the early part of the seventeenth century. The case of Ward's girl-actors especially challenges traditional conceptions of early modern English girlhood as a space of passive, pre-sexual containment a holding area of sorts for wives-to-be. Girlhood, then, became an especially scrutinized stage in early modern England, one in which girls were meant to stay pure and protected in order to become marriageable women. Letters and journals of Protestant Englishmen traveling abroad and visiting English convents offer similarly provocative descriptions of English girls performing in less traditional theatrical venues: in processionals, religious rituals, and at the grates of their convents.
