Labors Lost – Women`s Work and the Early Modern English Stage

"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 women's 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