Women Writers and the Dutch Stage: Public Femininity in the Plays of Verwers and Questiers

Abstract

In the seventeenth century the plays performed at the Amsterdam Schouwburg, the only public theater in the city, were overwhelmingly written by men. Dutch theater shared with English theater a long-standing prohibition on female acting in institutionalized theatrical spaces, which was not lifted until 1655, when the first actress played a leading role in the Schouwburg. By then two women playwrights, Catharina Verwers and Catharina Questiers, had seen their plays produced for the stage. Verwers’s only play was performed in 1644, over ten years before Ariana Nozeman made her debut, while Questiers’s plays were written and performed between 1655 and 1665. Given the vexed position of women in the public sphere and in particular their complex relationship to the public theater, this essay explores these playwrights’ representations of women in public and private. Both Verwers and Questiers present women in public as lacking in power; they must submit to conventional versions of public femininity and empty themselves of private desires and motivations in order to occupy a public space. An effective public femininity that is coherent, strong, and independently articulated is not yet possible without sacrifice in these plays. Still, by presenting a range of female public presences and conflicted attitudes towards them, Verwers and Questiers allowed their audiences to reflect on and consider the nature of the public sphere itself and its relationship to gender. Before we turn to the plays, some historical context for the relationship of Dutch women to the public-private divide is necessary. As extensive study has shown, those terms were unstable and in flux in the seventeenth century. Traditional understandings of the public and private realms were influenced by absolutist political systems, which presented the two as mutually constitutive and parallel spheres of being, as the familiar tendency to treat the home as the microcosm of the commonwealth suggests.1 Yet, Jürgen Habermas has argued,