Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage by Natasha Korda (E

Description: FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE Labors Lost by Natasha Korda Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working womens behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeares time. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working womens behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeares time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of womens work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Author Biography Natasha Korda is Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Shakespeares Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England, also available from University of Pennsylvania Press. Table of Contents Note on Spelling and DatesPrologueChapter 1. Labors LostChapter 2. Dame UsuryChapter 3. Froes and RebatosChapter 4. Cries and OysterwivesChapter 5. False WaresEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments Review "This is a very exciting book. Its chief claim, more than amply substantiated, is that women played a much more active role in the production of early modern theater than prior scholarship has asserted. Labors Lost offers a rich and nuanced picture of the many different ways in which women took part in the early modern theatrical world." * Jean E. Howard, Columbia University *"Long before they were regularly seen on stage, women were of crucial importance to the commercial theater behind the scenes. In Labors Lost, Natasha Korda argues that female labor was central to the development of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. . . . Korda evidently relishes the abundance and variety of her subject, using economic and commercial history as a lively and even lyrical approach. . . . Her subtle readings show that womens role in commercial theater was not just an issue behind the scenes, but one which was regularly dramatized by (all-male) casts on stage." * TLS * Promotional Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working womens behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeares time. Long Description Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working womens behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeares time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities. Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of womens work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Review Quote "This is a very exciting book. Its chief claim, more than amply substantiated, is that women played a much more active role in the production of early modern theater than prior scholarship has asserted. Labors Lost offers a rich and nuanced picture of the many different ways in which women took part in the early modern theatrical world."-Jean E. Howard, Columbia University Promotional "Headline" Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working womens behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeares time. Excerpt from Book Prologue Scholars have long sought to explain the anomaly of the all-male stage in Shakespeares time but have failed to consider working womens contributions to theatrical production behind the scenes. Situating the commercial playhouses within the broader economic landscape of early modern London, this book argues that the rise of the professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, properties, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities. Marshaling a broad range of evidence on these and other women who worked in and around Londons public and private playhouses, Labors Lost seeks to recover this lost history by detailing the diverse ways in which women participated in the work of theatrical production in Shakespeares time and the ways in which male playwrights and players in turn helped shape the cultural meanings of womens work. At stake in the representation of working women on the early modern stage was the status and legitimacy of playing itself as profession. The parameters of legitimate trade underwent tremendous pressure in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London due to exponential population growth, an influx of migrant and immigrant labor, and a rapidly expanding informal economy. Women, whose labor was often proscribed or restricted within the formal economy regulated by guilds and civic authorities, predominated in the informal networks of trade that flourished in the suburbs and liberties where the commercial theaters were located. The players relied on such trade, creating new opportunities for working women--who furnished costumes, properties, credit, and a hand in the theaters day-to-day operations--while at the same time excluding women from the visible workspace of the stage itself in an effort to define "playing" as legitimate, manly work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was thus crucial to the rise of the professional theater in England and provides an apt context within which to understand the dramatic tropes, figures, forms, fashions, goods, gestures, and sounds used by male players to depict working women onstage. Womens work was not only represented by male actors on the stage, it was woven into the fabric of players costumes, congealed in the folds of their starched ruffs, set into the curls of their perukes, arranged in the petticoats of boy-actors, calculated on the companies balance sheets, and inscribed in the terms of their bonds. Female "gatherers" collected entrance fees at the doors of theaters, while the cries of female hawkers echoed inside and outside their walls and the wares they sold were consumed in the pit, in the galleries, and on the stage. Understanding the varied roles women played behind the scenes of theatrical production imbues early modern dramatic texts with new significance while offering a new perspective on the textures and textiles of plays in performance. The work of historical recovery that grounds this understanding is of necessity an interdisciplinary endeavor that will lead the reader through multiple forms of evidence, surveying dramatic and other cultural texts, documents of theater history, and womens social and economic history, as well as prints, paintings, and a diverse array of material ephemera associated with womens work in theatrical production and commerce. Dress pins, hooks, buttons, costume wires, cosmetic implements, silk lace, spangles, drinking vessels, money pots, and nut and oyster shells are among the diverse, ephemeral artifacts relating to female crafts and trades unearthed in archaeological excavations of the sites upon which early modern English playhouses once stood. Although traces of womens work were everywhere in the professional theater, as they were within the culture at large, then as now, they often went unnoticed or unacknowledged. A handful of glass beads found at the site of the Rose theater may serve as an illustrative example. Each bead measures an average of just two millimeters in diameter. These "tiny objects," in the words of archaeologists Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller, would ordinarily have escaped the field of vision, being "too small to spot" even by trained eyes. They were discovered only while processing soil samples that were taken to look for other remains. Such minutiae, all too easily disregarded, may seem scant evidence upon which to build a history of womens offstage work. Yet contextualized in relation to theatrical records regarding female "spanglers" of costumes, these tiny, gleaming artifacts help illuminate the offstage work necessary to produce theatrical spectacle, as well as the gendered division of labor behind the scenes of theatrical production. For the work of spangling--or sewing beads and sequins onto costumes to make them appear more lustrous--like that of spinning, silk winding, needlework, lace making, ruff starching, and other occupations relating to luxury cloth and clothing manufacture, often fell to women precisely because they involved minute manipulations best performed by "small" fingers. Of scant interest in and of themselves, these miniscule bits of glass point to a substantial workforce of women who labored in the informal networks of artisanal production and trade that gave rise to the professional stage. The hollow, fragile, and seemingly insignificant glass beads unearthed in the remains of the public theaters serve as an apt metaphor for the scattered traces of womens work that remain in archives and museum collections, and for the sleuthing--and sometimes simple serendipity--that leads to their detection. Deciphering these scattered traces often requires laboriously collecting many shards or fragments of evidence that would remain, when viewed in isolation, indecipherable. Like beads, they take on meaning or value only relationally, when strung or stitched together to form a pattern. The work of scholarship on womens labor history and its cultural meanings in this sense parallels that of early modern women themselves, requiring flexibility, ingenuity, and sometimes simple drudgery. The countless women who stitched, wove, washed, starched, spun, and spangled the fabric of early modern culture, sold its commodities, and financed its commercial ventures, often remain anonymous in historical records, their labor unrecorded. The historical invisibility of womens work in early modern English culture--its relegation behind the scenes of both theatrical and craft production to a "shadow" or informal economy--was produced by innumerable cultural forces and mechanisms of erasure. Womens luxury textile manufacture, for example, was often dismissed as the devils work. Puritan diatribes against the incessant production and consumption of ornament were frequently aimed at women, decrying such attires as false or insubstantial. Similar attacks were mounted by guildsmen who sought to stigmatize female labor in unguilded occupations as shoddy or unskilled. The meager evidence that remains about such work thus often appears in literature and legislation attempting to proscribe it. If early modern womens theatrical labors have been "lost," as the title of this book suggests, it is thus not because they were ever fully present in the past and can therefore simply be "found." Rather, as the discussion of spangling above suggests, such labors were commonly dismissed, devalued, and delegitimized in their own time. Since the early modern period, it has been a cultural commonplace that "womens work is never done." An early seventeenth-century broadside ballad first formulated this familiar refrain in the form of a complaint voiced by a wife, who recounts her domestic drudgery in detail. Her "woful Fate" includes rising before and going to bed after the rest of her family, who are therefore unaware of her toils--giving rise to her need to recount them. Countering this lack of acknowledgment with the repeated refrain, "a Womans work is never done," she insists that this is "a thing to be thought upon." Yet the ballad offers no solution to the dilemma it reveals, concluding where it began: "And thus to end my Song as I began, / You know a Womans work is never done." The knowledge it imparts thus fails to undo the defining conundrum of womens work: unending and ever-present, it is nonetheless placed under cultural erasure, as though it had never been done. Feminist scholars and activists have had varied responses to this ostensibly transhistorical commonplace. Second-wave feminists appropriated the slogan as a form of political critique when Joyce Stevens included it in her Womens Liberation Broadsheet for International Womans Day in 1975 ("Because womans work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and . . . for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the womens liberation movement"). In this form it was reprinted on posters, postcards, and T-shirts and became a rallying cry for civil rights-era working women. In adopting the refrain of a seventeenth-century ballad, these women intimated that "the patriarchy" hadnt changed much since then, at least with respect to gendered restrictions on employment and wage differentials. Grappling with these troubling continuities, feminist historians of the 1980s sought to elaborate a more nuanced account of how womens working lives had changed since the premodern or early modern period. In an influential 1988 review essay on this body of scholarship, entitled "History That Stands Still," Judith Bennett acknowledges th Details ISBN0812243447 Author Natasha Korda Short Title LABORS LOST Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press Language English ISBN-10 0812243447 ISBN-13 9780812243444 Media Book Format Hardcover Year 2011 Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press Subtitle Womens Work and the Early Modern English Stage Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States UK Release Date 2011-07-28 AU Release Date 2011-07-28 NZ Release Date 2011-07-28 US Release Date 2011-07-28 Pages 360 Publication Date 2011-07-28 Alternative 9780812204315 DEWEY 792.0820942 Illustrations 25 illus. Audience Undergraduate We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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