The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance

Lizbeth Goodman, Jane de Gay, Lizbeth Goodman, Jane de Gay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134707591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance presents the most influential and widely-known, critical work on gender and performing arts, together with exciting and provocative new writings. It provides systematically arranged articles to guide the reader from topic to topic, and specially linked articles by scholars and teachers to explain key issues and put the extracts in context. This comprehensive volume:
* reviews women's contributions to theatre history
* includes contributions from many of the top academics in this discipline
* examines how theatre has represented women over the centuries
* introduces readers to major theoretical approaches and more complex questions about gender, the body and cross-dressing
* offers an international perspective, including material from post-apartheid South Africa and post-communist Russia.

PART ONE

The history of women in theatre

Chapter 1

Katharine Cockin

INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

PART ONE OPENS WITH AN EXPLORATION OF the history of women in theatre 1500–1660, a period in England which spans the reign of Elizabeth I and Charles I, through the age of Shakespeare, civil war and the closure of the theatres during the Commonwealth (1642–60), to the post-Republican stage and restoration of the monarchy in Charles II. In this period, women seem to be absent or obliterated, eclipsed as dramatists by Shakespeare and as performers on stage by boy actors. Any investigation of women in theatre must negotiate silence, an impression of women’s absence.

The narrative of women’s absence from theatre has been challenged by the notion of women ‘hidden from history’. Alternative narratives of women in world theatre have identified early dramatists, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (c. 930–c. 990) and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651–95) and early performers, Marie Fairet in France (fl. 1545), and Flaminia in Italy (fl. 1565). Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) achieved fame for her work as performer and organizer of commedia dell’arte in Italy and France. A sense of continuity, of women’s (albeit uneven) presence in the theatrical past, is not wishful thinking. It arises from challenging the androcentric terms of theatre histories. Later in Part One, Jane de Gay’s survey of women as actors, managers and playwrights, demonstrates the presence of women in the field of performance throughout the period. The search for historical origins reveals that women have had a longer history as performers in theatres of low status and informal organization and as travelling players performing often without script on makeshift stages in the open street, than in the high status theatres equipped with permanent buildings and royal patronage. Women have therefore performed in a number of spaces and in a number of ways which have been invisible to theatre historians and literary critics.

Those theatre histories which narrate a past devoid of women do so as a result of their conceptualization of both the theatre and the past. Women have been ‘hidden from’ theatre history in the sense that they could not be seen. If ‘theatre’ is taken to mean officially sponsored institutions patronized by the monarch and aristocracy where performance from written scripts was staged, then the absence of women from the narrative is guaranteed. Such a definition of theatre routinely excludes, or at best marginalizes, the spaces and forms in which women have performed. It also exemplifies an unself-consciously selective perspective on the past, privileging the values and interests of a number of overlapping dominant groups.

Consequently, the absence of women from histories has been identified by some feminists as a matter of political urgency. Conflicts have arisen over omissions and exclusions. What constitutes historical evidence, or even a significant event in the past, produces intense disagreement. Women have not been absent from his-story, but have often been elided with the private and domestic, with child-rearing, marriage and the family. Authorship and ownership, representation and presence, have become crucial issues in the new her-stories.

Any history of women in theatre is, therefore, not synonymous with women’s theatre history. The distinction – one of ownership and subjectivity – is generalizable to other groups for whom a re-writing of history has been identified as an urgent political intervention. The contingency of historical narratives was explored through ‘people’s history’, exemplified by the work of radical social historian, Raphael Samuel (1981), within which some space was made by and for feminists. In Britain, women’s history also developed through the women’s movement(s), through enduring projects in community and ‘local’ history, mapping networks of social relationships denied by the national-public nexus. Contiguity rather than distance characterizes women’s history, foregrounding the relationship between researcher and field of research.

A history of their own

Women in theatre have made some significant interventions in writing their own history, prioritizing the ‘female tradition’ and challenging the canon of androcentric theatre history discussed below by Elaine Aston. Two significant firsts in women’s theatre history were publicized by two women involved in both theatre and the British women’s suffrage movement. In May 1911 the play The First Actress, written by Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall, d. 1960) and directed by her partner, Edith Craig (1869–1947) for the Pioneer Players society, claimed for Margaret Hughes the title of first actress on an English stage after the restoration of the monarchy. Explicit comparisons were made in the play, and in a different spirit by hostile reviewers in national newspapers, between the pioneering Margaret Hughes in Thomas Killigrew’s company and contemporary women campaigning for enfranchisement and equal opportunities at work. In a similar context, Edith Craig directed for the Pioneer Players in 1914, Christopher St John’s translation from the Latin, of Paphnutius by Hrotsvit. As Elaine Aston suggests below, Hrotsvit has been identified as a ‘primary role model’ for a female tradition in theatre history. Rosamund Gilder’s study (1931) of the actress from ancient Greece to the eighteenth century included Margaret Hughes and Hrotsvit, but omitted the circumstances of Craig’s productions for the Pioneer Players in the context of the British women’s suffrage movement. These circumstances were rediscovered by feminist critics Julie Holledge (1981) and Sue-Ellen Case (1988).

Such examples of loss and recovery serve to warn against complacency, emphasize the dynamics of history-making and -forgetting and demonstrate the risks of what Lisa Jardine (in Chapter 3), calls ‘incremental history’. The accretion of information about women may be accommodated or ignored by existing androcentric narratives of history, whereas ‘rupturing history’ produces new perspectives which force an entire re-vision of the past. The contexts in which women worked in theatre are most disruptive, as Susan Bassnett (1989a) and Elaine Aston (Chapter 4) suggest. The moment for a ‘rupturing history’ which these events promised, had been missed. The women’s suffrage movement in Britain was a flourishing period for women’s writing, especially drama, yet the urgency of the political effects of performance took precedence over history-writing. Suffragists such as Christopher St John began to write women’s theatre history on the hoof, with little time to consolidate their significant cultural interventions. By 1931 Rosamund Gilder’s ‘incremental history’ of the actress was sufficiently distant from the urgency of women’s enfranchisement politics to discuss Margaret Hughes’ sexual relationship with Prince Rupert, their ‘illegitimate’ child, and Hughes’ reputed gambling habit. Salacious interest in the ‘private’ life of the actress prompted a number of studies in which any deviation from ‘femininity’ was used as evidence to exempt her from theatre history. The function of ‘professional’ status in masculine–critical gate-keeping may therefore need to be addressed urgently in women’s theatre history. The history of the female performer looks very different when the emphasis on script-based performances and permanent theatre buildings is removed, since women appear to have flourished in what has become known as the ‘illegitimate’ theatres, in unregulated performances.

The actress as professional

The emphasis in theatre histories on ‘professional’ performers therefore places women in an androcentric context. Margaret Hughes’ patron, in turn enjoyed the king’s patronage. Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant ran the two patent or ‘legitimate’ theatres which were to dominate London. The rise of the first professional actresses on these male-dominated stages implicated these women, ascribing problematic roles to them by male and female playwrights alike, as they contended with the common expectation that performance on stage was advertisement for sexual availability. The actress was invariably objectified and sexualized, while women writing for the stage worked within a restrictive and alien, masculine literary tradition. Elaine Hobby (1988) notes that theatre flourished after the restoration of the monarchy, becoming ‘an important Royalist cultural symbol’ and that women, such as Margaret Cavendish, Frances Boothby, Elizabeth Polwhele and Aphra Behn, variously wrote plays for the commercial stage, for performance in private houses and perhaps with no intention of performance. Women were also involved in devising performances for travelling players performing in public spaces without scripts. This is the context in which it was possible for female performer Isabella Andreini to become both famous and wealthy.

Performing, preaching and speaking out

Although the Commonwealth in Britain is associated with an anti-theatrical age, women were to be found performing in spaces and in domains often overlooked by theatre historians. The theatres, already closed to women as performers, were closed under pressure from Quakers. However, Quakers and Protestants permitted women the role of public performance as preachers. The rituals of healing by ‘cunning women’ and midwives had a powerful effect on the ‘audiences’ of female preachers, but their ‘roles’ were subjected to control when the wider implications of autonomous women became realized. A woman speaking out of turn in public – an unsanctioned performance – was proscribed and, for a great number of women, could lead to condemnation as a ‘scold’, as Lisa Jardine suggests in the extract below, or even to persecution and execution for witchcraft. However, in other ways the relationship between theatre and religion has been productive for women. Religious orders provided nuns such as Hrotsvit von Gandersheim and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, with the education and opportunities to write, albeit within the limits of religious convention.

Images of women through cross-dressing

Women’s theatre history will produce new categories and new periodizations relating to the changing circumstances of women. It may respond, as Olwen Hufton (1995) suggests, to the change in acceptable marriageable age of women between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing life expectancy of women, as well as to the popular–cultural spaces and forms in which women were performing. An alternative narrative framework would not be circumscribed by competition with the Age of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s ‘genius’, used as proof of women’s literary inferiority, has dogged feminist critics. Hence Virginia Woolf’s imaginative speculation on the inequalities facing women as writers produced the putative figure of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ who, deprived of education and patronage, would have withered and died at her own hand (1977 [1928]: 46–7). Shakespeare’s female contemporaries seem to have had a tenuous place in theatre as writers or practitioners, yet women were widely represented on stage by cross-dressing male performers for a predominantly male audience. The notion of a woman performing on a public stage in the role of a female character was widely unthinkable and undesirable. Misogynist fears about women as naturally deceitful and manipulative supported arguments that women were unable to represent the ‘real’. As Elaine Aston notes below, analysis of the representation of women in Shakespeare’s drama has often ignored the performance context and the male embodiment of the textual ‘images of women’ in the sixteenth century.

The performance potential for the cross-dressing roles in Shakespeare’s comedies is historically variable. Penny Gay (in Chapter 5) argues that, while critics have considered the inversion of social norms in these plays to be transgressive, the performance by women of cross-dressing roles is as transgressive as the performance context allows. Within a male-dominated theatrical institution and prevailing notions of gender and other identities, the presentation of female transgression may be limited. Nevertheless, the acting out of transgression constitutes an ‘erotics of performance’, fulfilling a fantasy of transgression which is fundamentally liberating. Jean E. Howard (in Chapter 6) is more concerned with the relationship between cross-dressing on- and off-stage in early modern England. The prohibition of cross-dressing in ‘real life’ signifies the policing of gender boundaries. The ‘cross-dressing plays’ engage with ‘gender struggles’ of the period, rather than the topical debates on cross-dressing. Howard contends that contradictions and tensions were produced by the female cross-dressing roles, but more significantly, by the fact that a minority of women attended the public theatre, thus raising questions about the security of women’s place in patriarchy.

The exclusion of women from the stage and the phenomenon of crossdressing are inter-related. The appearance of women on stage was limited to an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Gender in Performance
• Part One The history of women in theatre
• Part Two Women taking the stage: The history of women in theatre 1660–1960
• Part Three The changing status of women in theatre
• Part Four Feminist approaches to gender in performance
• Part Five Gendering the bodies of performance and criticism
• Part Six Comparative perspectives and cultures
• Part Seven Feminisms, sexualities, spaces and forms
• Part Eight Reception and reviewing
• Afterword
• Bibliography and suggested further reading
• Index