This essay explores the first appearance of actresses on the public stage in England
and the Dutch Republic. It considers the cultural climate, the theaters, and the plays
selected for these early performances, particularly from the perspective of public
femininity. In both countries antitheatricalists denounced female acting as a form of
prostitution and evidence of inner corruption. In England, theaters were commercial
institutions with intimate spaces that capitalized on the staging of privacy as theatrical.
By contrast, the Schouwburg, the only public playhouse in Amsterdam, was an institution
with a more civic character, in which the actress could be treated as unequivocally
a public figure. I explain these differences in the light of changing conceptions of
public and private and suggest that the treatment of the actress shows a stronger public-
private division in the Dutch Republic than in England.