UC Irvine

When the theaters in England were closed by the Puritans at the leading of Oliver Cromwell, the plays, playwrights, and actors were put away in metaphorical – literal, in the case of the plays – storage. Theatre and its immorality, as portrayed by antitheatricalists, was to be illegal until the end of the Interregnum period. When the Commonwealth had been done away with, and Charles II had returned to England, he granted charters for the (re)opening of two Theatres Royal: Drury Lane with the King’s Men company of actors under Thomas Killigrew and the Duke's Company, in Lisle's Tennis Court in Lincoln's Inn Fields under William Davenant. Rather than returning to men playing women’s role, Charles II decreed that all women’s role must be played by women. New to the Restoration would be the roles that prologues, epilogues, and various other paratextual texts would play in the theatrical world. The addresses coming directly to the present audience from the actors talking to them from the stage edge felt inclusive and exclusive: including those present in a very tangible way and excluding those present who would only read the prologues and epilogues from broadsheets (until they, too, came to the play to be part of the exclusive set). Additionally, low literacy rates of the period meant that the news, the gossip, the military and commercial updates, and opinions meant that the presentations of this information were better disseminated than the information being spread via print, making the theatre a source of mass media and the women introduced to the Restoration stage, the first women in English-speaking Western mass media. With them comes fame and the concept of celebrity; the title of first celebrity being conferred on playwright, philosopher, poet, scientist, and author, Margaret Cavendish. Through historical records and current scholarship applied to such works as Margaret Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Mary Pix’s The Spanish Wives and their contemporary paratextual material, this dissertation explores the emerging roles of women playwrights and actresses.