Thursday, April 26, 2012

Boys Being Girls

An interesting discussion with Ann Ciccollela recently got me to researching why women weren't on stage until after the Restoration of Charles II.



Curiously, most references on the web just state this fact without explaining it, or falsely claim that it was against the law. There was no law forbidding women onstage that I can find.

I was looking for religious objections (re: acting/disguise = lying = sinning) but instead found that the Puritans, the Christianists of the Culture Wars of their day, were against boy players:
Many Puritan preachers, who hated the theatre in general, were outraged by the use of boy players, which they believed encouraged homosexual lust. In 1583Philip Stubbes complained that plays were full of "such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches...such kissing and bussing" that playgoers would go home together "very friendly...and play the sodomites, or worse."[14] John Rainolds warned of the "filthy sparkles of lust to that vice the putting of women's attire on men may kindle in unclean affections."[15]
In response to such comments, the actor-playwright Thomas Heywood protested that audiences were capable of distancing themselves: "To see our youths attired in the habit of women, who knows not what their intents be? Who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing they are but to represent such a lady, at such a time appointed?"[16]  [wikipedia]
(Can I just say that Rick Santorum may have had a past life? This amuses me to no end.)

One of my favorite books, Marchette Chute's Introduction to Shakespeare, talks about the details of the boy player's lives. [I plan to edit this with a quote, but for now I'll go from memory.] She described how the boys were housed with the actors and their families-- not Shakespeare, because he rented a room, but the actors who lived in London with their wives. The boys were trained in all aspects of the theatre, including swordfighting, acrobatics, voice, and acting. They played girls until their voices broke, and then moved up into the men's roles. There seemed to be far more boys apprenticed to the company than they ever used in shows, and we have evidence that Shakespeare wrote with other playwrights, both as apprentice and master, so it seems likely that the boys were also apprenticing as writers, stagehands and crew, and in all aspects of the theatre.

This means that being in a theatre company was a job, not an art. And women didn't work outside the home. A woman was expected to get married and run a home, and women who did not-- serving women, primarily-- were disdained or pitied. There was simply no way that girls would be apprenticed as these boys were, any more than a girl would be apprenticed to a weaver or tailor.

And so it seems that the Elizabethan audience was willing-- the Puritans excepted, but they were looking for an excuse to shut down the theatre altogether-- to accept a boy playing a girl because who else were they going to use? It's not like any women were going to work there, they thought, so why not?

On top of this, the boy players were themselves quite popular. Whole companies of them regularly performed. The Wikipedia page on the boy players has a whole section on this.

Ann said to me that at the core, the root of the lack of female players was clearly anti-women. I think she's right, but perhaps not for the reasons she thinks. Certainly this attitude that women shouldn't work outside the home is anti-women, and the whole society suffered from that rot. But the lack of women onstage was an unremarkable-- to them-- byproduct of the way their whole society functioned. Rather than decrying the lack of women, the Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences reveled in the talents of the boys. And that was just how things were.

(It reminds me of Monty Python's famous cross-dressing, which was simply the result of having no women in the group. When the female character needed to be sexy, they added Carol Cleveland. Until then, it seemed simplest-- and of course, hilarious-- to just play the women themselves. No one found this shocking, audiences just went along with it.)

The one thing I still want to learn about is why everything changed at the Restoration of Charles II. It seemed to be a time when the monarchy and the people came to a new understanding of how things were going to be, and the Culture Wars were part of that agreement. Somewhere in there having actual women onstage became part of that agreement, but I haven't been able to track that down yet. Perhaps women were given more working rights at that time, and the theatre was coincidentally part of that? Or was there a specific allowance made for theatrical work? I will follow up when I find out the answer.

2 comments:

  1. I had always assumed that, after the theatres were shut down for years, there was no generation of boys trained to play the women's roles. Therefore, for theatre to survive, women were necessary. Is that true?


    Edward Kynaston seems to have played women as an adult; were there other actors who did so? I can see Benny Hill or Jonathan Winters as the Nurse.

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  2. This was exactly the thought I was coming around to, though I haven't dug up any actual research that says so. But when I think about the hordes of apprentices LCM seems to have had, I conclude this must have looked like a really good job track to a lot of boys and their fathers. After the theatres closed, fathers of 13 year olds are forced to think of other job tracks for their sons, and when they reopen, who wants to trust that that profession will continue? They would have been hard-pressed to find any boys after that.

    My partner Daniel Wilson, formerly president of Austin Shakespeare, posited that the first actresses might have been wives of the actors, familiar with the trade and ready to step in. I need to research those women and find out what inspired them to get onstage.

    Wikipedia has a nice list of Famous Boy Players here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_players#Famous_boy_players and most of them did continue acting as adults, although I haven't followed all the links to see if they played female roles.

    Thanks for commenting, Max!

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