WOMEN ON STAGE:
THE EVENTUAL APPEARANCE OF THE FEMALE ACTRESS

Women were not seen on stage until the very end of Renaissance, pushing into the Restoration. Great steps to advance the female actor's place were taken by Queen Anna of Denmark and by Henrietta Maria of the royal court, in the masques that they both commissioned and performed in. The masque was originally more acceptable both because it was being performed in the private space of the court rather than on the public stage of the theater and because the women performing were noble and therefore out of the purview of the Puritan protestors; even the law enforcers didn't want to go arrest the consorts of the King, being the law himself. The masques were mostly parades, much akin to the more well known masques in theater, such as the Iris/Ceres/Juno descent in The Tempest (Shakespeare) or the Seven Deadly Sins in Doctor Faustus (Marlowe). The court masques, however, would have been performed almost solely by the Queen Consort and her ladies-in-waiting, except for the occasional professional male hire, and would have mostly been set to music. The first (known) of these was Queen Anna's The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses by Samuel Daniel in 1604.1 It was these performances that opened the way for women like Moll Davis and Nell Gwynne, among the first females allowed on the public stage, both of whom were, incidentally, mistresses to Charles II.

Nell Gwynne rose from quite humble beginnings to become Charles' mistress and a renowned (even in her own time) actress. Born in 1650, she worked in an alehouse and a brothel as a child. When the King's Company formed for Charles II, she would sell oranges to the patrons of the theater, as well as prostituting herself to the company and crowds. It was she who pulled herself out of the pit, not a wealthy patron (not even one as wealthy as the King); it was not until she had already established herself on the stage when Charles II took her as his courtesan – supposedly after seeing through his disguise and laughing at his inability to pay his tavern bill, due to a lack of cash on hand.2 When she was taken into the palace, she left the theater, just as Moll Davis had done. However, she returned to the stage after Charles refused to recognize their son and treat her (financially) like his other mistresses. After much finagling, she wrangled her way into a townhouse and her son received a dukedom.3 

There were rumors of a rivalry between Gwynne and Davis, culminating, supposedly, in Gwynne's serving Davis a laxative in her dinner, a morbidly comic situation well befitting these two women, who specialized in comedy and who were, as women, pioneers in the field. It is said that the role of Clarabell in Powhele's The Frolicks was written for Gwynne.4

These women, and the playwrights, theater-owners, and playgoers who allowed them their place, capitalized on their own femininity and sexuality as well as the spectacle of seeing a woman on stage. As sometime whores, Moll Davis and Nell Gwynne knew what the public wanted and they loved playing it up.

Portrait of Nell Gwynne

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