Theatre Journal

This essay represents an intervention into what has come to be known as the “new stage history.” Much like the new historicism, the new stage history has sought to distance itself from the methodologies of older stage historians, from the positivism of John Payne Collier and Frederick Fleay to the purportedly neutral empiricism of W. W. Greg and E. K. Chambers. In so doing, new stage historians have questioned many of the governing assumptions about Elizabethan stage production that have exerted a powerful influence on criticism of early modern drama. Despite their call to question the methodological assumptions governing the old stage history, however, new stage historians have failed to question one remarkable assumption that has long been accepted as fact by scholars in the field, namely, that women played no part in early modern stage production. Thus, William Ingram, in criticizing older stage historians for failing to consider “the network of social, and . . . economic, interdependencies that formed among [the] men” who “pursued the craft of stage playing . . . those who organized or managed companies of players and those who . . . built playhouses” as “a subject worthy of study on its own terms,” fails to consider the possibility that women may have played a role in these social and economic interdependencies. ¹ In what follows, I will trace the historical erasure of women from an important document of stage history, and propose that women did indeed play a significant role in the social and economic network that supported Elizabethan stage production.

The text in question, Henslowe’s Diary, is generally agreed to be the most important document that has survived relating to Elizabethan stage history. The text provides a detailed account of the day-to-day business transactions between 1592 and 1604 of one of the most influential theatrical entrepreneurs of Shakespeare’s time, Philip Henslowe—owner of several of the period’s most prominent playhouses, and financial backer of several of its leading acting companies. ² The Diary’s “entries of play performances and [of Henslowe’s] payments to authors,” in the words of Frederick Fleay, “make the [End Page 185] document, as a whole, the most valuable relic of all that we possess concerning the Elizabethan stage.” ³ For the most part, however, stage historians have not been concerned with the document “as a whole.” Fleay himself insists that “large portions of th[e] MS. are of no conceivable interest to any one” (95). Indeed, until as recently as 1961, there was no unabridged edition of the Diary—a rather startling fact given the unanimity of opinion as to the text’s importance.⁴

“One of the first things to strike a modern reader” of the complete text of the Diary, a recent commentator points out, “is just how much of the volume is given over to non-theatrical affairs,” such as “memoranda, receipts, recipes and notations on a multitude of subjects from real estate to family business.” ⁵ The accounts I will be examining concern one of several of the “family business[es]” in which Henslowe was engaged during the years covered by the Diary. As such, it belongs to that portion of the Diary that Fleay was convinced could be “of no conceivable interest to any one” due to its purportedly “extra”-theatrical status. Of all Henslowe’s business ventures, those surrounding this particular enterprise seem to have occasioned the greatest degree of resistance on the part of his editors. Thus, even the meticulous Sir Walter Greg simply excises this portion of the manuscript (some thirty pages) from his otherwise complete and highly influential 1904 edition. ⁶

The accounts concern a pawnbroking business Henslowe appears to have managed between the years 1593 and 1596. Greg’s pointed omission may in part be a response to the jarring assertion of his editorial predecessor, John Payne Collier, that Henslowe’s pawnbroking activities were in fact “the commencement of [his] connection with plays and theatres,” insofar as “the players often pledged their [costumes] with him, and afterwards hired them when they were wanted.” ⁷ Greg dismisses this thesis, arguing that “the extant pawn accounts all date from a period subsequent to...