Rope-Dancing and Female Performance

Early modern women’s rope-dancing and the editing of Shakespearean drama: Cicely Peadle and The Two Noble Kinsmen

Prof Clare McManus (Northumbria)

Critical editions of early modern drama shape the canon in seminar rooms, theatres and in scholarship, establishing or challenging implicit hierarchies of what can be read, taught or produced, and guiding and directing that engagement. This paper will bring together my exploration of early modern feminine rope-dancing with my edition-in-progress of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen to investigate how editors might engage with emerging gendered and transnational performance histories. What strategies might an editor use to foreground the points of contact between canonical English drama and the transnational raced and gendered histories of aerialism and tumbling?

Voltigeuses: Female Rope-dancers in Seventeenth-century Paris

Prof Thibaut Maus de Rolley (UCL)

Based on my ongoing research in the Parisian notarial archives held in the Archives Nationales in Paris, this paper will examine what these archival materials – together with iconographic and civic sources – teaches us about the lives and careers of female tumblers and rope-dancers performing in seventeenth-century Parisian fairs. What traces did they leave in the archives? What role – performative, managerial, or else – did they play in rope-dancing troupes? Where did they come from, and what were their itineraries across Europe? How were they trained? How were they regarded by fairground audiences and society at large? To what extent did their performances and careers challenge or subvert expected gender roles?

Followed by a small drinks reception. All welcome but please register: https://eme-rope-dancing.eventbrite.co.uk

This event has been organised by the Centre for Early Modern Exchanges (EME). The Centre is dedicated to the study of the diverse cultural, economic and social exchanges between early modern states in the Old World and beyond in the period 1450-1800. Our work focuses on how complex intercultural interactions from translation to trade began to create borders and frontiers between countries, vernacular literatures and identities in this period.

Image credit: A painting of 'The famous Dutch tightrope dancer' 1690, nr. 64, Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons