ABSTRACT
Before the English theatres officially closed in 1642, women were prohibited from acting in public in Britain. Female as well as male roles were played by allmale casts, of men or boys. Women professional performers were marginalized, as mountebanks’ assistants, gypsy fortune-tellers or vagrants.2 When the London stages reopened in 1660 after the Restoration, women from the start acted alongside men, taking with great acclaim the female roles traditionally played by boys, and from their very first years on the stage, on occasion also male roles. Thus a German visitor to London describes, in October 1664, a performance of Thomas Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding “acted by women, some of whom, wearing men’s clothes, performed the male roles so well that His Majesty let all the money be given to them alone. The clergy have not approved this comedy”.3 This innovation was not entirely unheralded. Already in the 1650s, professional actresses were introduced onto the stages of British troupes acting on the Continent. Troupes of “English comedians” first crossed the Channel to try their luck in Europe in the 1580s. By the start of the Thirty Years War, they had mostly returned to Britain, and by the time peace returned, the European travelling troupes styling themselves “English” were overwhelmingly British, not by virtue of nationality, but only through including actors who had worked with English, or English-trained, actors. Their “music-hall,” clown-centred
1 My thanks to Lois Chaber and the Women’s Studies Group 1500-1832 for inviting and commenting on the initial spoken version of this article, delivered at Senate House, London in 2002. Thanks also to fellow members of “Theater Without Borders,” most especially Rob Henke, Pam Brown, and Susanne Wofford, for encouraging me to pursue these ideas at the May 2005 Istanbul workshop, and to Eric Nicholson for thoughtful comments on the draft. The present article summarizes, from the perspective of transnational exchange, arguments and sources explored in more detail in the first section of my book Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Otherwise unattributed translations are mine.
