Gossips’ Mirth: Gender, Humor, and Female Spectators in Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626)

Abstract

The theaters in early modern London have long been considered a male bastion: not only were the playwrights who wrote for the commercial stage exclusively male, the playing companies were also all-male, with female roles performed by boys or men. An antitheatrical polemicist even warned women to keep away from the theaters as spectators, since entering a public playhouse would ruin their reputations. All the evidence, and indeed the fact that this writer felt the need to urge women to avoid the theaters, suggests that female spectators made up a considerable part of the audience in London’s commercial playhouses. This was especially the case in the seventeenth-century theater of Blackfriars, an indoor theater located in a former monastery. Several plays performed in this theater cater especially to a female audience, addressing women in their prologues and epilogues. What can a perspective on gender and humor tell us about these women’s playgoing experience? This chapter focuses on a comedy that satirizes the role of newsbooks and gossip in the early modern English public sphere, and which features four female spectators as characters within the play, who return in between the Acts to comment on the action.