Touring, Women, and the English Professional Stage

Although they have not been widely recognized as such, the significant number of surviving records which document the careers of itinerant women performers in England reveal nothing less than a tradition of female participation in the professional theatre before 1660. 1 Despite the exclusion of women from the commercial stages of London, the records indicate that touring women performers were acknowledged as professional entertainers, licensed by the state to perform, and paid for their performances in cities, towns, and households across the country. Recent criticism has begun to address the omission from scholarship of women’s engagement in England’s professional performance culture; yet the records, the primary source of itinerant women’s performances, present considerable interpretive and methodological challenges which remain to be addressed. 2 This article does participate in ongoing efforts to recover evidence of professional women’s theatrical labour before 1660, a project which is, by necessity, positivist. Because we cannot quantify the performances of itinerants, because the remaining records cannot be taken as a representative sample of what occurred, and because the records themselves are slippery, biased, and grounded in the time and place of a single instance, I question strictly positivist approaches to reading the archives. The existing records are important because they document a tradition which would otherwise be lost, but they cannot be assembled into an uncomplicated, straightforward history. While a strictly quantitative analysis cannot possibly recover the full scope of itinerant practice, I argue that the records provide an opportunity for qualitative analysis. Indeed, a method of reading the records which pairs a positivist approach with one that acknowledges the ambiguous, site-specific, and temporal nature of each individual dramatic record both recovers the labour of women theatre professionals and has the potential to reveal the politics of individual performances. By examining some of the extant records of itinerancy using a positivist methodology, then outlining the limitations of using this approach alone to understand

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