Women Performers in Shakespeare's Time

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Think there were no women onstage in Shakespeare’s time? Think again. We talk to scholar Clare McManus about where and how women performed in early modern Europe: emerging from mechanical seashells in elaborate court masques, dancing across tightropes, and on the stages of the European Continent. Clare McManus is a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton in London. She is the author of Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590-1619 and is working on a manuscript titled Early Modern Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon. McManus is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 12, 2019. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode, “She Can Spin for Her Living,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical helped from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Gareth Wood at The Sound Company studios in London.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's a truism. There were no women on stage in Shakespeare's time. And now, here's a twist.
0:08.0	There were plenty of women on stage in Shakespeare's time. You just haven't been looking in the right place.
0:26.6	From the Fulcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger's director.
0:29.6	Yes, it's true that in Shakespeare's company and elsewhere on the commercial stage in early modern London, boys played all the female roles.
0:41.2	But that doesn't mean that Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences wouldn't have seen women performing, maybe even at the Globe Theater.
0:50.7	New scholarly research is revealing the work of women who up to now have largely been hidden in plain sight.
0:59.0	Women who danced and sang on civic court and festival stages,
1:04.0	and women who swooped, tumbled, and flew over those stages on tight ropes and trapezes.
1:11.6	One of the principal researchers working in this area is Dr. Claire McManus, a professor of early
1:18.1	modern literature and theater at the University of Roehampton, London.
1:23.2	We invited her into the studio recently to catch us up on her work, which challenges the exclusion of
1:29.2	women from the histories of early modern theater. We call this podcast she can spin for her living.
1:37.0	Claire McManus is interviewed by Barbara Bogay. Claire, I was so happy you were coming on our
1:43.1	podcast because the first thing I thought
1:45.5	when I saw your research is, look, we've all seen Shakespeare in Love. Women did not
1:51.6	appear on the stage in England, at least in Shakespeare plays. So where is this coming from,
1:58.5	this idea and your research.
2:01.4	Yes.
2:03.3	Shakespeare in Love, I think, is a touch point somehow.
2:06.5	It's where I always start.
2:07.5	They say exactly that.
2:08.7	There is no moment when Juliet will reveal herself to have been a woman all along.
	...

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