This survey of the 205 extant plays written for the adult theatre in England from 1500 to 1614 focuses primarily on the female roles performed by young male actors. While examining several of Shakespeare's dramas in more detail, Mann looks broadly at the cross-dressing tradition in early English theatre and provides numerous examples from both the public stage and the elite entertainments. He takes serious issue with feminist and queer readings of the cross-dressed boy actor, arguing that they read modern-day identity politics into the plays. In his opinion, such approaches ignore the ‘original performance context’ (p. 11), incorrectly map homosexuality onto much of early modern society and its literature (p. 15), and analyse the texts as if the characters were real people instead of dramatic constructs (p. 16). Instead, he contends, we should understand female performance by adolescent males simply and literally as a dramatic device to forward men's ideas about women's place in society.

Mann rehearses the reasons why the theatre was, in fact, all-male, and he inquires about how the female role would have been performed and interpreted by players and audiences alike: ‘Playing a series of easily recognizable generic roles, the Tudor actor did not “identify” in the modern sense with the character he was playing, but drew it in a series of broad strokes for a generally unlettered audience’ (p. 30). In later chapters, he uses this idea to outline various dramatic representations of women, such as ‘servant and companion’, ‘the Roman matron’ and ‘the She-wolf.’ His study also traverses other issues that cross-dressed performance invokes: the construction of same-sex desire, costuming choices, moral identification with the characters, and the significance of violence against women in the plays.

The study is strongest where it discusses dramatic history and performative technique. The chapter on stage costuming, with its fascinating illustrations, provides the best evidence for the commonplace nature of certain dramatic choices that Mann contends have been overinterpreted, such as the bared breasts of female masquers. His appendix, which catalogues the 205 plays examined, helpfully lists the percentages of lines spoken by women and the number of female parts for each. Yet the book suffers from being too much of a survey in that the topics are discussed selectively without full recognition of their critical history, particularly in the fields of literature and social history. As a result, several of the pointed critiques reflect incomplete assessments of current ideas in early modern research and pedagogy. Still, the broad treatment offers interesting challenges and useful materials towards our thinking about the cross-dressed boy actor on the early modern stage.