ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the profound influence that European traditions of professional female performance exerted in England both in aristocratic court circles and on the public stage. In the popular film Shakespeare in Love, women are prohibited by law from performing on Shakespeare’s stage. Scholars know that this belief is erroneous, but they assume that the exclusion of women from the London professional stage was based on a longstanding tradition of all-male performance. The reason the English professional companies excluded women from the stage has never been satisfactorily explained, but Stokes has suggested that it was produced in part by a “poisonous mixture of reform, evangelical extremism, and other factors, both practical and economic.” Women may not have acted in the earliest public, commercial performances of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, in a multitude of ways that are only beginning to be discovered.
