This groundbreaking book shows how female performers - one of the first groups of professional women - used and still use autobiography and performance as both a means of expression and control of their private and public selves, the 'face and the mask'. In eleven essays it looks at how a range of women in the theatre - actors, managers, writers and live artists - have done this on the page and on the stage from the late eighteenth-century to the present day, from Emma Robinson to Tilly Wedekind, and from Lena Ashwell to Tracy Emin, testing the boundaries between gender, theatre and...

Treading the bawds challenges the traditional boundaries that have separated the histories of the first actresses and the early female playwright. It brings the approaches of new histories and historiography to bear on old stories to make alternative connections between women working in the business of theatre. Drawing from feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies, Bush-Bailey analyses the collaboration between the actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, tracing a line of influence from the time of the first...