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Orange Women , Female Spectators , and Roaring Girls : Women and Theatre . Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 22 : 19-26 2009

At the beginning of Ben Jonson's Epicene (1609) Morose's friends discuss how sensitive he is to noise, in particular, the cries of 'fishwives and orange-women.' 1 In a play that satirises women, and particularly vocal ones, the inclusion of these street criers as abhorrent to Morose hardly comes as a surprise. However, they are also significant in that they problematise the way in which we interpret how women engaged with Early Modern theatre. In this Introduction to the Forum on Women and Theatre, I would like to begin by exploring how and why women went to the theatre, what they expected of it, who they were and how they were represented. Since the 1980s considerable scholarship has been undertaken to uncover plays written by women and to analyse from various feminist perspectives the way women were represented on stage by male authors and by boy actors. This was path-breaking and essential work, but we also need to consider how plays in performance might not always align neatly with critical readings of dramatic texts, and that the performances themselves were very different in the Early Modern period than in our own respectful auditoria. Moreover, while theatre history often offers tantalising snapshots of female participation in court masques and drama, as well as accounts of attendance at publically performed plays, little is known of women's vocal and physical activity during performances. The presence in the theatre of orange-women primarily interested in selling their wares, of female playgoers intent upon a variety of entertainments and of idiosyncratic characters like Mary Frith, the Roaring Girl, suggest that a more complex analysis of the way in which women negotiated their roles as mute viewers within a space dominated by men is necessary.