Gayle Austin draws attention to many of the factors that are involved in assessing the place of women within any period of dramatic production. Her strategies have evolved in order to combat several methodological problems that exist when studying women’s place in dramatic history. The largest of these is of course that theatre is a temporal form. Although surviving texts make mention of female characters, it is difficult to ascertain how active women were within medieval culture. Fragments of records show that they were present on the medieval ‘stage’, though these appearances are commonly in folk plays, local festive customs,...

Simone de Beauvoir famously stated that one was not born a woman but became one. In privileging the importance of social and cultural influences over biological ones, de Beauvoir highlights issues which are pertinent to the stage representation of gender. One might argue, and Judith Butler is one of the most notable proponents of this idea, that any performance by women is merely the portrayal of a set of learned gestures: a fictitious act. In other words, women are never present upon the stage, instead the spectator views a representation of womanhood. Other contemporary feminist theory has complicated the study...

The Norwich Grocers’ inventory from their 1563 production of The Fall of Man lists ‘A Rybbe colleryd Red’.¹ This record reveals something of the significance of the semiotics of medieval drama. On the most simplistic level the bone indicates Eve’s construction from Adam’s ‘spare rib’. However, it is possible that the red rib served a number of complex symbolic functions. This piece of bone prefigures the fragmented body of Christ at the crucifixion. Salvation history is emphasised through reminding the audience of the resurrection. There are also a number of gender-specific signs embedded within this red rib. Eve’s creation from...

In the Chester Cappers’ Corpus Christi pageant Balaack, fearing resurgence by the Israelites, orders that the townswomen be placed in front of their enemy to provide a distraction. Balaack instructs that these sirens be selected from the most beautiful women available:

Spare thou neyther ryche ne poore,

wyddowe, mayde, ne ylke whoore;

yf shee bee fresh of coloure,

bringe her with thee, I saye.¹

The Doctor interrupts the action and, in a direct narration to the ‘Lordes and ladyes’ in the audience, explains that the women successfully tempted their enemies and, by later rejecting their love, confused God’s people.² Such...

The previous chapter spent much time analysing the impact of the ‘holy’ women of medieval drama. But as Coletti observes, many of the women within the cycle dramas are ‘vulgar’, they are the worldly helpers and servers. Coletti’s observation on the role that women play raises the difficulty of how to interpret these women as their roles barely seem more than secondary. I have discussed some of the reasons that women characters seem so resistant to a ‘feminist’ reading: namely that they are frequently influenced by their biblical antecedents. In order to counter this tradition I want to foreground various...