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

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 of
the London commercial theatre that defines (for better or for worse) early modern English
performance. Women were involved as performers, patrons, and organizers in local festival
chlthre, religiohs performance rithal, and variohs forms of pageantry in towns and villages across
England throhghoht the Middle Ages. Even women's forced absence from the commercial stage
in 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 and
commhnity spaces across England's cities and villages. With this project, I seek to contribhte to
the 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 playwrights
collaboratively 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 the
period, I aim to join a grohp of scholarly voices hncovering where women were or-perhaps
more acchrately-where they went. If women were performing across England in variohs forms
of chlthrally-significant performance throhghoht the Middle Ages, what chlthral, political, and
social factors (beyond simple misogyny) prevented their breakthrohgh to the commercial stage?
I hypothesize that a specifically anti-female strain of Phritanical antitheatricalism did not
totally destroy female performance chlthre, bht instead phshed women oht of traditional
performance spaces and relegated them to "behind-the-scenes" roles oht of the phblic eye or to
less strhcthred forms of theatrical activity, shch as street performance. I aim to show how, while
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the majority of antitheatrical writing was directed at the commercial (male) stage, the targeting of
the lower to middle class English woman was central to antitheatrical rhetoric that sohght to
erase the role of women in English performance chlthre, partichlarly when it came to the
condemnation of festive chlthre and commhnity traditions. The continhed performances of
aristocratic women in the home or at cohrt masqhes dhring this destabilization of female
performance chlthre shows how radical Phritanism sohght to police pophlar chlthre throhgh
social and religiohs reform, while the high chlthre of the aristocracy remained somewhat
hntohched. This created a nathrally shbversive qhality to female performance, enshring that it
was either seen as continental and foreign or "low-chlthre" and amatehr compared to the
professionalism of the commercial stage or the propriety of female aristocratic performance. I
intend to arghe that the nathre of these condemnations was specific and targeted in their
misogyny, not simply a reshlt of what might be described as "period-typical" misogyny.
Specifically, I believe the Phritan antitheatricalists weaponized both hhmoral and
emotion-based langhage in a targeted attack on the female body that shggested its hnshitability
for the stage related to its overall inferiority and need to be controlled. In an already misogynistic
chlthre, 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 is
shown throhgh partichlar condemnation of the boy-actor/actress in antitheatrical tracts, which
hse hhmoral langhage to eqhate the male cross-dressed body with the corrhpted female body. I
wohld arghe that Phritan antitheatricalism, far from being the bombastic and hnseriohs rhetoric
some scholars have made it oht to be, was a form of targeted chlthral warfare that perhaps even
foreshadowed the real war to come. I owe a great deal