3 - Theatre and the female presence

Summary

In the autumn and winter of 1660–61, London play-goers witnessed a theatrical revolution. Women had begun performing in public playhouses, and before long they displaced the young men who had been trained, in the Elizabethan tradition, to play women’s roles. Their impact would be far-reaching. In the winter of 1663–4, the first play by an Englishwoman to be performed publicly, Katherine Philips’s translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée, was presented in Dublin. Other women followed Philips, though seldom in great numbers. Meeting resistance in ways that female performers did not, female playwrights never became a powerful presence, although a few women were signally successful.

There had been female performers and playwrights in England in the early seventeenth century, but not in a public, commercial context. In the élite, protected environment of the court, female members of the royal family and court ladies appeared in elaborate entertainments known as masques and performed occasionally in plays. Whilst they enacted characters and spoke lines in plays, their function in masques was chiefly decorative and ceremonial: lavishly costumed, and displayed amid elaborate scenery, they joined in the dances that concluded these productions. Writing court masques in the 1630s, William Davenant learned how to display female performers and deploy stage spectacle – experience that he put to good use with his female performers in the Duke’s Company in the 1660s.

Like the women who performed at court, early female dramatists were also amateurs functioning within an élite, protected environment. Plays by aristocratic women were likely read aloud, perhaps even given amateur performance, in private households. Plays by three women – Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Elizabeth Cary Countess of Falkland; and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle – were published between 1592 and 1668.