Women Players in England, 1500–1660

Pamela Allen Brown is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, USA . Peter Parolin is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wyoming, USA.

Contents: Introduction, Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin. Part I Beyond London: Women and performance: evidences of universal cultural suffrage in medieval and early modern Lincolnshire, James Stokes; Payments, permits and punishments: women performers and the politics of place, Gweno Williams, Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright. Part II Beyond Elites: The case of Moll Frith: women's work and the 'all-male stage', Natasha Korda; 'Quacking Delilah's': female Mountebanks in early modern England and Italy, Bella Mirabella. Part III Beyond the Channel: Reading the actress in Commedia imagery, M.A. Katritzky; 'Merry, nimble, stirring spirit[s]': academic, salon and Commedia dell'arte influence on the Innamorate in Love's Labour's Lost, Julie D. Campbell; Women performing homoerotic desire in English and Italian comedy: La Calandria, Gl'Ingannati and Twelfth Night, Rachel Poulsen; Courtly comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and amateur women's stage plays in France and England, Melinda J. Gough. Part IV Beyond the Stage: The Venetian theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel, Peter Parolin; 'Pleaders, atturneys, petitioners and the like': Margaret Cavendish and the dramatic petition, Julie Crawford. Part V Beyond the 'All-Male': Staging the absent woman: the theatrical evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I, Jean E. Howard; Female impersonation in early modern ballads, Bruce R. Smith; Jesting rights: women players in the manuscript jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange, Pamela Allen Brown. Afterword, Phyllis Rackin; Index.