Women Spectators! From Antiquity to the Present Day

Women Spectators! From Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Véronique Lochert, Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Céline Candiard, Fabien Cavaillé, Jeanne-Marie Hostiou, and Mélanie Traversier, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2022.

Presentation:

Women have occupied a continuous place within the audiences of live performance since its very beginnings. Seeking traces of this presence, the contributors gathered here have identified the venues and genres of performances favored by women, their places in auditoriums and galleries, and attempted to recover their emotions, filtered through male commentary.

Female spectators were often considered to be governed by their passions and lacking any critical distance. They were placed either in a subordinate position, reflecting their status in society, or in the front rows—not to offer them a better view, but to allow other spectators to observe them and scrutinize their dresses and hairstyles. Opponents and defenders of the theater debated the presence of these women: the former regretted it, believing that this art encouraged illicit desires, while the latter praised it, with female spectators then becoming guarantors of decency and the usefulness of theatrical art. At the same time, women’s reception of performances played an increasingly important role in the strategies of playwrights and actors. Depending on the period, the place, and their social background, female spectators enjoyed varying degrees of freedom; they also used the theater as a place of emancipation and sometimes took care to leave direct accounts of their experiences.

This large-scale study restores to these women a voice and a presence, a body and gestures, as well as contrasting emotions ranging from exasperation to pleasure.

To read the introduction and the table of contents:

https://www.cnrseditions.fr/catalogue/histoire/spectatrices/