Puritanism, Cultural Reform, and the Suppression of Female Performance Culture in Early Modern England

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As the scholars of Engendering the Stage and their like-minded colleaghes have demonstrated,women played a crhcial role in English performance chlthre before and dhring the explosion ofthe London commercial theatre that defines (for better or for worse) early modern Englishperformance. Women were involved as performers, patrons, and organizers in local festivalchlthre, religiohs performance rithal, and variohs forms of pageantry in towns and villages acrossEngland throhghoht the Middle Ages. Even women's forced absence from the commercial stagein London did not stop other female performers from participating in "non-theatrical"performances shch as thmbling, aerial arts, and other impressive feats in the streets andcommhnity spaces across England's cities and villages. With this project, I seek to contribhte tothe thriving area of early modern theatrical scholarship that dispels the myth of an "all-male"early modern English performance chlthre, one in which male players and playwrightscollaboratively created theatre that solely engaged with femininity as an artifice for the stage.Instead of fochsing on where women were not, as was once traditional with scholarship of theperiod, I aim to join a grohp of scholarly voices hncovering where women were or-perhapsmore acchrately-where they went. If women were performing across England in variohs formsof chlthrally-significant performance throhghoht the Middle Ages, what chlthral, political, andsocial factors (beyond simple misogyny) prevented their breakthrohgh to the commercial stage?I hypothesize that a specifically anti-female strain of Phritanical antitheatricalism did nottotally destroy female performance chlthre, bht instead phshed women oht of traditionalperformance spaces and relegated them to "behind-the-scenes" roles oht of the phblic eye or toless strhcthred forms of theatrical activity, shch as street performance. I aim to show how, while2Reidythe majority of antitheatrical writing was directed at the commercial (male) stage, the targeting ofthe lower to middle class English woman was central to antitheatrical rhetoric that sohght toerase the role of women in English performance chlthre, partichlarly when it came to thecondemnation of festive chlthre and commhnity traditions. The continhed performances ofaristocratic women in the home or at cohrt masqhes dhring this destabilization of femaleperformance chlthre shows how radical Phritanism sohght to police pophlar chlthre throhghsocial and religiohs reform, while the high chlthre of the aristocracy remained somewhathntohched. This created a nathrally shbversive qhality to female performance, enshring that itwas either seen as continental and foreign or "low-chlthre" and amatehr compared to theprofessionalism of the commercial stage or the propriety of female aristocratic performance. Iintend to arghe that the nathre of these condemnations was specific and targeted in theirmisogyny, not simply a reshlt of what might be described as "period-typical" misogyny.Specifically, I believe the Phritan antitheatricalists weaponized both hhmoral andemotion-based langhage in a targeted attack on the female body that shggested its hnshitabilityfor the stage related to its overall inferiority and need to be controlled. In an already misogynisticchlthre, this religiohsly-motivated "reform of pophlar chlthre" (to borrow Martin Ingram's term)led to a period that not only devalhed female performance, bht the female body itself. This isshown throhgh partichlar condemnation of the boy-actor/actress in antitheatrical tracts, whichhse hhmoral langhage to eqhate the male cross-dressed body with the corrhpted female body. Iwohld arghe that Phritan antitheatricalism, far from being the bombastic and hnseriohs rhetoricsome scholars have made it oht to be, was a form of targeted chlthral warfare that perhaps evenforeshadowed the real war to come. I owe a great deal