Jan Sewell teaches Humanities at the Open University, UK. She was Assistant Editor of the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare (2007) as well as the individual editions of Shakespeare's Plays (2008-2012); she is co-editor of William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013) and Plays of Shakespeare's Company (forthcoming).

Clare Smout is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her current teaching portfolio also includes work on Shakespeare for Staffordshire University, the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, and i-Learner in Hong Kong. She previously spent twenty years as a theatre practitioner specialising in new writing.

Draws together a diverse array of academics and practitioners to chronicle the history of women performers

Offers insight into women on stage across an eclectic range of geographies and contexts

Calls into question how we define and understand 'history', 'the stage', and 'women'

Includes a contribution from Booker Prize winning author Bernardine Evaristo.

1. General Introduction; Jan Sewell and Clare Smout.- 2. Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction; Anne Duncan.- 3. The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome; Anne Duncan.- 4. Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality; Clare Foster.- 5. Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives; Sue Niebrzydowski.- 6. The First Italian Actresses, Isabella Andreini and the Commedia dell'Arte; Margaret Rose.- 7. Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens: Female Agency and Subjectivity in Early Modern English Court Drama; Catherine Clifford.- 8. Margaret Cavendish's Female Fairground Performers; M. A. Katritzky.- 9. Women Performers on English Stages 1660-1740; Jane Milling.- 10. Eighteenth-Century English Actresses: From Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication; Laura J. Rosenthal.- 11. Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture; Laura Engel.- 12. Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination; Pam Cobrin.- 13. Death and the Working Woman: Actresses, Illness, and Labour from Rachel to Bernhardt; Roberta Barker.- 14. Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star; Lezlie C. Cross.- 15. Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity; Yamanashi Makiko.- 16. Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage: Personal and Political Rivalries from Paraskevopoulou and Veroni to Kotopouli, Kyveli and Papadaki; Xenia Georgopoulou.- 17. British Actresses, 1900-1950: Professional Transformations; Maggie B. Gale.- 18. Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: 'Second Wave' Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky's System and the Moscow Art Theatre; Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman.- 19. Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era: Anita Bush, Abbie Mitchell, Rose McClendon, Mercedes Gilbert, Venzella Jones; Cheryl Black.- 20. 'Bad Girls' of 1960s-1990s American Performance: Adrian Piper, Karen Finley and Carolee Schneemann; Dorothy Chansky.- 21. Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre and Performance Practice across Four Decades; Anna Furse.- 22. Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage; Sue Parrish.- 23. Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account; Bernardine Evaristo.- 24. Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984-1994); Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly.- 25. Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation with Clare Smout, February 2018: Gender and Disability; Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout.- 26. Women on the Classical Kerala Stage: The Kutiyattam and Kathakali Traditions; Diane Daugherty.- 27. Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women in Post-Apartheid South African Performance; Amy Jephta.- 28. Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and their Negotiation of Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century; Mary Luckhurst.- 29. Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: Lazarus Theatre Company's Staging of Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam; Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer.- 30. Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, Milan; Susan Marshall.- 31. Australasian Shakespeare: Race and the Female Star; Anna Kamaralli.- 32. Women Playing Shakespeare's Men: Achieving Equality on the Twenty-First Century British Stage; Jami Rogers.- 33. Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition: Young Women in a Changing World; Tracy Irish.- 34. Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate; Emma Frankland.