Interesting, but not pertinent to my present purposes.
LHMP
Blog entry
Margaret Cavendish is a fascinating person and even has her own tag in the Project. but this article isn't directly relevant to my interests.
I did warn folks that there are a handful of articles in this collection that both strain the book's premise and aren't pertinent to the background research for the "Stage and Actresses" tropes episode. This is one of them. In fact, I think I'm just going to throw up a handful today and get them out of the way.
This article points out that the position "women didn't act on the English stage until the Restoration" leans heavily on some very specific definitions of "act" and "stage." In particular, it erases non-commercial performances such as masques performed by ladies of the court.
So I picked up Women Players in England for the general background on the history of women in theater, but it does have one article directly touching on female homoeroticism on stage. And how Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is a pale echo of the Italian material that inspired it.
A bit tangential to the reasons I'm blogging this collection -- although not as tangential as some of the later articles will be. Stay with me.
This may have been my favorite article in the whole collection. Not only were actresses hitting it big on stage in Italy in the 16th century, they took the show on the road and influenced the reception of women on stage across western Europe.
This is a fascinating article drawing connections between early modern "traveling medicine show" performers and more commedia traditions, as well as simply recognizing the mountebank tradition as a form of theater. And, of course, we're intersted in the parts women played in this profession.
Some of the articles in this collection are of insufficient relevance to my interests that I probably won't cross-post them on social media. This one comes close, although Moll Cutpurse is always on-brand for the LHMP. Not quite so much on-brand for a collection of articles about theater, in this case, as the occupations being discussed are rather tangential to the topic.
The source material project that this article draws from--Records of Early English Drama--is far more complete now than it was 20 years ago when this was written. It was being produced on a county-by-county basis and I suspect that some priority was given to locations of significant importance in early drama, such as York. Similar information to what is presented here, but for other English counties, would probably yield much of interest regarding women's performance history.
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