Product Description: Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities...read more

Product Description: Drawing on feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies, 'Treading the bawds' analyses the collaboration between actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, and traces a line of influence from the time of the first theatres royal to the rebellion that resulted in the creation of a player's co-operative...read more

Product Description: This is a groundbreaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection makes the texts of three much-discussed plays--John Fletcher's "The Wild-Goose Chase," James Shirley's "The Bird in a Cage," and Margaret Cavendish's "The Convent of Pleasure"--available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time...read more

Product Description: Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century—a period when for the first time female actors could perform in public...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged...read more

Women on the Renaissance stage provides a unique reassessment of women's relationship to performance in early modern England. A study of women's participation in the Jacobean court masque, it gives detailed historicised and interdisciplinary readings of the performances of Anna of Denmark (wife of James VI and I) in the Scottish and English Jacobean courts.Clare McManus investigates the staging conditions, practices and gendering of Annas performances, from the ceremonies and festivities of the Scottish court to the English court masques of Jonson, Daniel, Campion and others. Current critical theorisations of race, class, gender, space and performance are brought to bear on the courtly woman's body in dance, staging, scenery, costume and make-up within what might be thought of as female court. In doing this, McManus establishes a tradition of seventeenth-century female performance which provides a trajectory for the emergence of the professional female actors of the Restoration.This innovative study of a hitherto neglected performance tradition will expand the understanding of gender and performance for scholars and students of early modern culture.

Product Description: This volume is an accessible introduction to the work of early women dramatists in the early modern period. It is a course handbook covering not only writing and translation of plays but also female performance in official forms e...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Before the Restoration of Charles II there were no professional actresses on the English stage, and female roles had almost always been played by men. This book describes how and why women were permitted to act on the public stage after 1660, and the consequences of their arrival. Elizabeth Howe opens up a fascinating subject to nonspecialists. Beginning with a general account of the workings of Restoration theater, she explains the treatment received by the actresses and how their sexuality was exploited. The book addresses questions that are relevant to women's issues in every period: how far did the advent of women players alter dramatic portrayals of women? Did this encourage more or less equality between the sexes? Although in one sense merely playthings for a small male elite, the pioneering actresses also represent a new female voice in society and a new place in discourse. (view table of contents)