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This essay argues that the cony-catching pamphlets of the 1590s form a central context for Shakespeare's early comedy. The play and the pamphlets point to an early modern fascination with misidentification as a gauge of the social order. Social exchange itself, fraught with cultural assumptions that inhibit communication, gives rise to misidentification. This allows criminals to insert themselves into social circles at will, while causing general chaos even in the absence of devious intent in Shakespeare's comedy. Both the play and the rogue texts leave us with the impression of a social order that is already destabilized from within.
This essay explores the first appearance of actresses on the public stage in England and the Dutch Republic. It considers the cultural climate, the theaters, and the plays selected for these early performances, particularly from the perspective of public femininity. In both countries antitheatricalists denounced female acting as a form of prostitution and evidence of inner corruption. In England, theaters were commercial institutions with intimate spaces that capitalized on the staging of privacy as theatrical. By contrast, the Schouwburg, the only public playhouse in Amsterdam, was an institution with a more civic character, in which the actress could be treated as unequivocally a public figure. I explain these differences in the light of changing conceptions of public and private and suggest that the treatment of the actress shows a stronger public-private division in the Dutch Republic than in England.
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