Afterword

if modern theater historians had told anyone at the Jacobean or Caroline court, or indeed anywhere in the upper reaches of English society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, that English Renaissance theater was a male preserve, they would have found the claim incomprehensible. Troupes that performed publicly employed only male actors, but many court performances, initially of masques, but in the Caroline period of plays too, included women as an essential and often climactic part of the show. In aristocratic venues, women performers were ubiquitous; what were unknown in England until the Caroline era were professional English women performers. Moreover, even at the public theaters, though the actors were male, a large segment of the audience was female. English women went to playhouses alone with only a servant, or with other women, and unmasked, so they were recognizable. For the English, there was nothing surreptitious about women’s participation in theater. To generalize about the early modern stage without taking the audience into account is to ignore reality. By 1629 a French company with actresses could perform publicly in London—this is the visit about which G. E. Bentley claims that they were booed and “pippin-pelted,” but Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman have shown this to be a Collier forgery. In fact, the company played several times at London public theaters without incident; it is only theater history that finds this inconceivable. The essays in this special section offer a European context for the gender tensions of English Renaissance theater. Viewed from this perspective, it is clear that the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and especially the Caroline stage were not at all cut off from the continental theatrical world. Caroline Bicks’s revelatory account of Mary Ward’s “all-female theatricals that were designed to train girls