Includes index.

1. General introduction / Jan Sewell and Clare Smout -- Part I : Ancient Greece and Rome. 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 L. E. Foster -- Part II : Medieval and early modern Europe. 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 -- Part III : Restoration and eighteenth-century England. 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 -- Part IV : Nineteenth-century America, Europe and Japan. 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 / Makiko Yamanashi -- Part V : Early to mid-twentieth-century Greece, England, Russia and America. 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 -- Part VI : Late twentieth-century America and England. 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, February 2018 : gender and disability / Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout -- Part VII : The twenty-first century : around the globe. 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 Elisabeth Schafer -- 30. Theatre inside/outside prison : San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, Milan / Susan Marshall -- 31. Race and the female Star in Australasian Shakespeare / 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.