The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage

1. General Introduction; Jan Sewell and Clare Smout.- 2. Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction; Anne Duncan.- 3. The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome; Anne Duncan.- 4. Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality; Clare Foster.- 5. Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives; Sue Niebrzydowski.- 6. The First Italian Actresses, Isabella Andreini and the Commedia dell'Arte; Margaret Rose.- 7. Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens: Female Agency and Subjectivity in Early Modern English Court Drama; Catherine Clifford.- 8. Margaret Cavendish's Female Fairground Performers; M. A. Katritzky.- 9. Women Performers on English Stages 1660-1740; Jane Milling.- 10. Eighteenth-Century English Actresses: From Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication; Laura J. Rosenthal.- 11. Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture; Laura Engel.- 12. Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination; Pam Cobrin.- 13. Death and the Working Woman: Actresses, Illness, and Labour from Rachel to Bernhardt; Roberta Barker.- 14. Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star; Lezlie C. Cross.- 15. Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity; Yamanashi Makiko.- 16. Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage: Personal and Political Rivalries from Paraskevopoulou and Veroni to Kotopouli, Kyveli and Papadaki; Xenia Georgopoulou.- 17. British Actresses, 1900-1950: Professional Transformations; Maggie B. Gale.- 18. Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: 'Second Wave' Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky's System and the Moscow Art Theatre; Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman.- 19. Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem

Jan Sewell teaches Humanities at the Open University, UK. She was Assistant Editor of the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare (2007) as well as the individual editions of Shakespeare's Plays (2008-2012); she is co-editor of William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013) and Plays of Shakespeare's Company (forthcoming).



Clare Smout is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her current teaching portfolio also includes work on Shakespeare for Staffordshire University, the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, and i-Learner in Hong Kong. She previously spent twenty years as a theatre practitioner specialising in new writing.

"I would have looked forward to articles which evaluate the impact of [the] contemporary female theatre practitioners' work (which is often therapeutic in aim). Nonetheless, these personal narratives contribute richly to the wealth of knowledge in this tome accessible to the general reader, theatre practitioner, or researcher. They extend the discourse so that it interweaves the subject of women in theatre and performance with human rights." (Dana Rufolo, Plays International & Europe, Vol. 36 (1-3), 2021)