Ladies Hall

Ladies Hall in Deptford, London is thought to have been the first girls' school in England.[1] Founded in approximately 1615 by Robert White,[2][3] the school was for aristocratic girls connected with the royal court, and they performed before Queen Anne in May 1617.[4][5] The school taught basic reading and writing in English, and it is likely they covered other skills a lady was encouraged to acquire, in music, dance, and needlework. Archival evidence for the school and its pupils beyond the published text of Robert White's masque is sparse.

One of the young women who danced in Robert White's Masque of Cupid's Banishment at Deptford in May 1617 was Anne Sandilands, thought to be a daughter of the Scottish courtier Sir James Sandilands of Slamannan Mure.[6] The masque was performed while James VI and I was in Scotland, and it has been suggested that it was subversive of the king's authority, after he refused to make Anna of Denmark regent in his absence.[7]

One of Anne Newdigate's daughters, Lettice Newdigate (1604-1625), attended the Ladies Hall or a school in Deptford in July 1617.[8] Her portrait, aged 2, at Arbury Hall, is one of the earliest depictions of an English knot garden.[9]

I. A. Shapiro doubted the existence of Ladies' Hall as a school, believing that it may simply have been where the young gentlewomen attending Anne of Denmark's ladies-in-waiting were housed, and that the ladies there had joined together to perform a play.[10]

References
  1. Jacqueline Eales, Women in early modern England, 1500-1700.
  2. Elizabeth Ferszt, Transatlantic dame school?: Anne Bradstreet’s early poems as pedagogy.
  3. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 June 2011. Retrieved 3 June 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. Eva Griffith, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen's Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (Cambridge, 2013), p. 159.
  5. Hiller, Geoffrey G. (1970). "Drayton's Muses Elizium: 'A New Way over Parnassus'". The Review of English Studies. 21 (81): 1–13. doi:10.1093/res/XXI.81.1. JSTOR 513709.
  6. John Nichols, Progresses of James I, iii, (London, 1828), p. 284.
  7. Anna Whitelock, 'Reconsidering the Political Role of Anna of Denmark', Helen Matheson-Pollock, Joanne Paul, Catherine Fletcher, Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 249.
  8. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The 17th-Century Newdigates of Arbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), p. 120.
  9. Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1999), p. 137: Roy Strong, The British Portrait, 1660-1960 (1999), p. 43.
  10. Review of English Studies, (1970) XXI (84), pp. 472-473.


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