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] it was for aristocratic girls, 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.

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]

I. A. Shapiro doubts 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.[8]

References
  1. Women in early modern England, 1500-1700 by Jacqueline Eales
  2. Transatlantic dame school?: Anne Bradstreet’s early poems as pedagogy by Elizabeth Ferszt, Ph.D.
  3. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-14. Retrieved 2010-06-03.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. Drayton's Muses Elizum: A New Way over Parnassus
  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. Review of English Studies, p.472-473, (1970) XXI (84)


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