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  1. Home
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  3. Invisible but influential: women and the theatre in Shakespeare’s time
  1. Home
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  3. Invisible but influential: women and the theatre in Shakespeare’s time
Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

Invisible but influential: women and the theatre in Shakespeare’s time

Wed, 6th March 2019

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Professor Emma Smith investigates the impact of women in a famously masculine environment.

It may seem to have been a world of ‘male writers, male actors, and perhaps even a largely male audience;’ but as the English Faculty’s Professor Emma Smith revealed in a talk at Oxford Saïd on 27 February 2019, the development of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre owed much to the presence and interest of women.  

Women on the stage

Thanks to Shakespeare in Love and the television comedy Upstart Crow, if there’s one thing we know about female actors in Elizabethan and Jacobean England it is that there weren’t any. Women’s parts were played by boys and young men, which perhaps gave an added comic frisson to the cross-dressing in some of Shakespeare’s early plays.

It was therefore interesting to hear that this was not actually the result of a law. ‘We don’t know exactly why women were not allowed to perform … there is no formal prohibition, there is no legal problem. It seems to be one of those cultural norms that’s so ingrained that nobody needs to tell anyone to do it and nobody needs to challenge it,’ said Smith.

And while perhaps there were some women privately aching to strut on stage, in general the tradition of male actors playing female parts does not seem to have bothered audiences much. In fact, when the delightfully eccentric travel writer Thomas Coryat described seeing women performing on stage in Venice, he said:

For I saw women acte … and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoeuer convenient for a Player, as euer I saw any masculine Actor.

As Smith observed, ‘There is no natural sense for him that for women to play women would be automatically better, more authentic, more sexy … One of the surprising but unavoidable things about the theatre of this period was that is did not seem to feel the lack of women on the stage.’

Women in the plays

This is all the more surprising given the extraordinary parts for women that the playwrights of the period expected to be portrayed convincingly by male actors.

We can see the influence of these actors in Shakespeare’s career. ‘It is clear that in the comic plays of the 1590s he looks at the actors that he has at his disposal and he has a couple of young men who can play young, slightly adolescent-y women, and he writes parts for them. This is why we get Viola and Olivia, and Rosalind and Celia,’ said Smith.

‘It is also clear that by about 1605, Shakespeare’s company has somehow acquired an actor who can carry extraordinarily mature female roles. And for that actor Shakespeare writes Lady Macbeth, Volumnia, the mother of Coriolanus, and Cleopatra – and John Webster wrote probably the Duchess of Malfi and the White Devil for him too.’

So something changes about the representation of women between the 1590s and the first decade of the 17th century. But as Smith concluded, ‘it was as much to do with the capability of the actors as it was to do with contextual factors.’


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Early on in the period it seems to be that the most important thing about going to a play is hearing the words. That quite quickly gets overtaken by an emphasis on visual spectacle.

Women in the business

Although women did not appear on stage, they were not completely absent from the world of the theatre. Historians are uncovering evidence of women playing active roles on the business and ownership side, including Ellen Burbage – wife of the impresario James and mother of the famous actor Richard.

Women also came into their own as the theatre began developing a new emphasis on costume. ‘Early on in the period it seems to be that the most important thing about going to a play is hearing the words,’ said Smith. ‘That quite quickly gets overtaken by an emphasis on visual spectacle, starting with costume ... leading to special effects.’ This meant the development of a very active industry of seamstresses, wig-makers, and theatrical costumiers around the theatre district. And many of those businesses were run and staffed by women.

Women in the audience

Another—perhaps the most important—area in which women were crucial to the development of the theatre was as members of the audience.

Naturally there were plenty of po-faced men who disapproved of female theatre fans, perhaps even more so when the early ensemble pieces started to give way to plays that were designed as vehicles for individual ‘stars’ such as Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn. Writers such as the puritan lawyer William Prynne contributed to a stereotype of women as ‘over-addled consumers and … over-engaged or over-emotional spectators.’

But as the seventeenth century progressed, women were enjoying the theatre in increasing numbers, encouraged by and simultaneously contributing to the shift from outdoor to indoor theatres.

The large, cheap outdoor theatres catered for ‘Quite a broad demographic,’ said Smith. ‘They were rambunctious places… it was a vocal, rough environment.’ So for women spectators, ‘if you went to a playhouse like this there was a sense that you were no better than you should be. That is to say your own virtue was under suspicion.’ Indeed, most references to women as spectators in this environment assume that they were prostitutes looking for customers.

Indoor theatres, however, were a very different proposition. They were within the city, much smaller, and much, much more expensive. As such they were considered a more appropriate place for respectable women to visit, as well as being more comfortable, less potentially damaging to fine clothes, and with a ‘better’ – richer and more aristocratic – clientele.

Almost immediately playwrights started writing different sorts of plays that would take advantage of the atmosphere in these more intimate, candle-lit spaces. Fashions too began to change, with sequins and other iridescent accessories to reflect the light as the theatre became the place to be seen. Women would attend with their husbands or male family members – or even alone, accompanied by a servant.  

But still this remained a problem for some commentators, right up to the Civil War. Was play-going for women a sign of liberation or transgression? Were they enjoying too much ‘physical and intellectual freedom?'

Someone who clearly did not worry about this was Shakespeare himself, as Smith indicated when she concluded her talk with the Epilogue of As You Like It—spoken by a boy pretending to be a woman who has spent much of the play pretending to be a man.

I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you: and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please.

 

The talk by Professor Emma Smith was part of the Engaging with the Humanities series.

Photograph (from the 2012 production of Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London) by Simon Annand. 

Professor Emma Smith: Fandom, women and the Shakespearean theatre

Emma Smith at Oxford Saïd

Emma Smith (L) with Pegram Harrison
Professor Emma Smith
Professor Emma Smith
Audience members
Professor Emma Smith
Professor Emma Smith
Professor Emma Smith
Professor Emma Smith
Professor Emma Smith
Audience members
Audience members
Professor Emma Smith
Professor Emma Smith

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