Full citation:Rackin, Phyllis. 2005. “Afterword” in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown & Peter Parolin. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-0953-7
Although this collection does have one paper addressing female homoeroticism on stage, I have covered it primarily as background reading for exploring role-playing and stage theatrics as a context for romance tropes involving female couples.
Afterword
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The afterword sums up the conclusion of the collection that the “all male stage” is a myth and an aberration, being true only of certain specific times, contexts, and locations. Women are absent from the stage only when “the stage” is very narrowly and carefully defined. The concept holds true in England only for a narrow range of time between the rise of private professional companies (displacing the earlier tradition of guild-sponsored plays) and the entrance of women into those companies at the Restoration. It never applied to amateur theatricals, court masques, or local seasonal theatricals. And while other countries had specific theater genres that specified an all-male cast, the prominence of those contexts was more limited than in England and gave way to a mixed-gender profession earlier.
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