Women at Play: Female Collaboration in Early London Performance 1560-1642

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- To what extent is the female character - written by men and performed by boys - a visible product of invisible women's labour?- How were the women of the textile and apparel industries integral to the stability and popularity of the early theatres?- How was female playgoing regulated by the law and social convention? Does this reflect the way in which female work in the theatre was conceived 'outside' the stage?Early London Theatre is generally depicted as an 'All-Male Stage'; a homocentric industry which chose boys to be women at the exclusion of female endeavour. It is a concept based on two theories: first, that boy players were subversive, erotic quasi-women who titillated their audience with homoerotic desire, and second, that the London Stage which formed around men like Philip Henslowe and James Burbage was completely separate from women's labour (Dusinberre, 1998; Greenblatt, 1988; Howard, 1988; Jardine, 1983). It is a stance reinforced by much of nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship on Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre starting with W. W. Greg's exclusion of the pawn accounts (and thus much of the female presence) from his edition of Henslowe's Diary (1904 and 1908), a decision only reversed in 1961.Recent developments in gender and queer studies (LaFleur et al, 2021; Traub, 2017) offer new frameworks to conceive the nature of femininity and gendered performance. Similarly, this project will focus on evidence of women's work as it existed in collaboration with the men who wrote and performed as female characters. While theatre scholarship has mainly conceived collaboration in terms of authorial and repertory studies (Dustagheer, 2017); early female performance must similarly be viewed as a dialogue between the body of the boy player and a network of women makers and facilitators. This project will contribute to scholarship of the early modern London by highlighting the hidden work of these women with a possibility of further public engagement in the larger theatrical field beyond academia.This work will build on the concept of dress as a social and economic construct (Hayward, 2009; Vincent, 2003; Rublack, 2010) as well as the nature of women's labour as significant though unregulated (Korda, 2011). This will involve analysing record books, inventories and playhouse documents (e.g. Edward Alleyn's papers, Henslowe's Diary, and the Revels Accounts), and the largely unexamined records of women owners, shareholders and leaseholders of early playing spaces. Case studies will include Anne Nockes and Goody Watson, intermediaries for Henslowe's pawnbroking; Alice Mountague, a tirewoman (maker of head attire) who supplied the Revels Office and Elizabeth I. I will trace the women who leased inns used as playing spaces as early as 1560 (seven years before the first record of The Red Lion, a converted inn to playhouse outside the city walls, and sixteen years before the first purpose built playhouse in 1576): Susan Denyse Margaret Craythorne, Alice Layston and Joanna Harrison; as well as the women of the early playhouses, Margaret Brayne, Susan Baskerville and Anne Bedingfeild.I will begin my archival research by investigating women involved in textiles and theatrical apparel through guild records (mostly in Guildhall Library, Drapers' Hall and Goldsmiths' Hall, London); documentary records such as account books and material records (e.g. Philip Henslowe's Diary, the Revels Accounts, The Great Wardrobe, all printed or digitised, and Edward Alleyn's papers in Dulwich College, London). I will research the female landlords, shareholders, hawkers, gatherers and patrons of the playhouses through documentary records such as the Bridewell Court Record Books (in Bridewell and Bethlem Archives, London) as well as legal depositions and wills (in The National Archives and LondonMetropolitan Archives).digital