Natasha Korda. <em>Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage</em>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

In Labors Lost, Natasha Korda's bold thesis is that the early modern stage could not have existed without women's work.From moneylenders to tiring women and from oyster wives to the 'gathering' women who collected entrance fees, the theatre depended on and was shaped by women's efforts to survive and even prosper in the early modern economy.By 'economy' Korda means especially the informal, less regulated economy outside the structures of the livery companies: an economy in which women flourished but which has proved -until now -extremely difficult to track down.As a result of impressive archival work, readings of plays and ballads, and reinterpretations of familiar documents, Korda shows us that the theatre relied on the work of 'spanglers' to provide the necessary glitz for costumes as well as on the work with linen of the Huguenot family, the Mountjoys, with whom Shakespeare lodged and who may well have provided Globe actors with the requisite ruffs and fashionable head-attires that helped to draw their audience.Korda also highlights evidence of women who kept actors afloat with loans or readied their costumes, as well as women who owned or leased inns that served as playhouses.As fascinating as these revelations are, here as in Shakespeare's Domestic Economies (Philadelphia, 2002) Korda goes beyond reconstructing women's economic lives in everyday London.She shows how the theatre reacted to working women's activities with representations of labouring women that featured versions of their vocabularies and voices as well as the material objects that they produced.In demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between women's work and performance, including theatrical genres beyond the urban comedy, Korda is arguing for the importance of women's labour to the theatre as a means to question the paradigm of the all-male stage.Korda begins chapter one, 'Labors Lost', with an incisive analysis of the existing scholarship on women as entertainers, actors, playwrights, producers, and patrons outside commercial theatre, juxtaposed with a consideration of scholarly work on the absence of women from the stage.Her goal, which she attains in due course, is to steer somewhere between these two poles in order to show how women's economic activities and production appear on stage in the early modern period.Even if women were not allowed to be commercial actors, neither they nor audience members could have ignored the steady presence of women like Philip Henslowe's niece, Mary, who was

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