Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage uses the work of social historians and a small number of early modern English plays in which women's work is represented on stage to claim that “disciplinary parameters” have prevented our recognition of the many ways in which women's work was significant to the professional stage in London. She examines their work as tirewomen and seamstresses (chapter 1), moneylenders and creditors (chapter 2), starchers and vendors of many sorts (chapters 3 and 5), and their activities in the streets as cries—as oysterwives and the like—where women offered an acoustic idiom the professional players both appropriated and denigrated in their attempts to professionalize the stage (chapter 4). Certainly this is the case—women participated in both the formal and the informal economies of London in myriad ways, and scholars in both history and literary studies have written and argued about women's work in early modern London for decades. Korda's copious evidence from the historical literature will come as no surprise to the many historians whose work she cites, but readers in literary studies may be perplexed at the short shrift given to work in our field, particularly in her readings of Hamlet, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Bartholomew Fair.

In an effort to make her claims more compelling, Korda overstates the claims of others, particularly those of feminist scholarship. Dympna Callaghan's Shakespeare without Women is called upon to represent the view that “the professional stage simply excluded women” (16), despite the fact that Callaghan's book is explicitly concerned with the professional companies’ exclusion of women and with the practice of “all male mimesis” (Callaghan, 7). She notes the exceptions but insists there was a “systematic prohibition against female mimesis” on the London stage. Callaghan's book, in fact, exposes the limits of the very work Korda's litany of examples performs. Korda “represents” working women for us in sometimes dulling detail, whereas Callaghan begins from a “certain philosophical skepticism about the mechanisms of dramatic representation as well as a specifically political skepticism about the benefits of representation” itself (Callaghan, 7).

In his exhaustive four-volume compendium, The Elizabethan Stage, first published in 1923, and recently reprinted in 2010, E. K. Chambers observes that “although it would be going rather too far to say that a woman never appeared upon an Elizabethan stage, women were not included in the ordinary companies” (Chambers, I:371). Korda's most compelling claim in the book under review is that the exclusion of women from the playing companies was part of the process of the professionalization of acting. Players and entrepreneurs like Henslowe worked in a variety of ways to legitimize the stage and to establish playing as a “‘manly discipline’ and ‘honest’ profession” (52). Chambers documents some of the varied ways in which women participated mimetically in early modern theatrical culture—in masques and as members of visiting troupes from the continent. Fisherwives, market wives, and fruit women, he notes, were represented in sixteenth-century masques, but he also observes that the exceptions prove the rule. Since Chambers's The Elizabeth Stage, a number of recent books and articles Korda cites have begun to expand our understanding of women's participation in early modern theatrical culture—not only in the masque, but in commedia del arte visiting troupes on stage; in popular entertainments and itinerant performances; in country houses, alehouses, and market squares; in the “uncontested” example of Mary Frith who is known to have performed on the commercial stage; and, of course, in audiences both urban and rural. Broadening our parameters does require that we reassess what Korda polemically, in scare quotes, terms the “all male theatre” (212), but she offers no new evidence to change Chambers's statement that “women were not included in the ordinary companies” (I:371).

For those unacquainted with the burgeoning literature on women's work in early modern England, this book brings together much of the evidence, and the claim that women worked behind the scenes in various capacities is amply demonstrated. But Labors Lost does not change our understanding either of women's work in the period or of their exclusion from the commercial stage itself.