ABSTRACT
This essay is part of a larger project in which I examine 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” Englishwoman Mary Ward in the early part of the seventeenth century. 1 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. 2 In 1622, for example, the Benedictine priest, Robert Sherwood, complained to the Pope that the students of Ward and her followers, “sent to them to be educated, publicly produce immoral plays (publice et non satis verecunde), so that later they may consort with seculars or preach in churches in this bold manner (hoc modo audacis).” 3 Ward’s students (it was feared) would learn the art of opening oneself up through the theatre: once they knew how to perform in public, they would soon be consorting with anyone and everyone, speaking boldly and never becoming good, modest, Christian women.
