ABSTRACT
Traditional wisdom has held that English women were generally excluded from the public stage.1 There has therefore been a tendency to assume that they were prohibited from taking part in all theatrical activity with the exception of the court masque. However, Stephen Orgel raises an important distinction:
The central question of Orgel's essay concerns the reasons as to why the English popular stage was an all-male preserve when women actors didn't seem to be a point of contention for other European societies; however, his suggestion that many female spectators attended the public playhouses reminds us that women had a genuine influence on the English Renaissance theatre. In many ways, both the public and private theatre need to be reevaluated as a place of freedom for women. Women actually held a proprietary interest in the theatre both as influential spectators and, as will be discussed later, as financial investors.3
