The Advent of Women Players and Playwrights in Early Modern France

Abstract

women’s theatrical participation in early modern France has attracted increased scholarly attention in recent decades. Nonetheless, intersections between women’s separate roles as performers, playwrights, and cultural arbiters have yet to be explored. Nor has much been written about the ways in which French women’s theatrical activities intersected with or diverged from those of their female counterparts in neighboring countries. To begin filling these gaps and in the hope of prompting further work on such questions, this essay considers both the development of mixed-gender troupes in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century France and women’s contributions to French cultural life as playwrights and as members of salon gatherings. The larger movement toward greater theatrical visibility, agency, and mobility for women that this special section traces in early modern Europe did not develop at the same pace in France, we contend. It was during this period that professional troupes in the provinces and in Paris engaged actresses for the first time, and this was also the era when the first French women are known to have composed for the stage. When compared to other continental locales such as Spain and Italy, however, sixteenth-century France experienced a noticeable delay in the advent of mixed-gender professional troupes. To scholars of early modern drama used to thinking of England’s “all-male stage” as an anomaly, this fact may seem surprising. In seeking to work through this puzzle, though, we have come to the conclusion that this deferral occurred not because the French exhibited more pronounced ideological resistance to theater, to women, or to foreigners than existed in other countries. Rather, the French wars of religion—and related wars of succession—occurred just as humanist drama was