Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze, opens in a theater or "playhouse." This setting provides an important context for the interpretation of the plot. Playhouses were houses of play in a number of senses; not only were they sites where paying customers could view an evening's theatrical entertainment on stage, but they were also--and by extension--sites of masquerade and disguise, sites of seeming and appearance and show. Early audiences often patronized the theaters less to enjoy the drama unfolding on stage than to enjoy and participate in the drama unfolding around them. Privileged audience members sat on the stage itself until  William Hogarth's popular print, The Laughing Audience, suggests the many and varied forms of entertainment one would find at an early theatrical event. According to Heather McPherson, "The theater--a phenomenally popular form of entertainment in eighteenth-century London--catered to a large, heterogeneous public ranging from aristocrats to merchants to artisans and servants." The theater itself was therefore a sign of social promiscuity. During times of plague, theaters were closed to stop the spread of disease, though antitheatricality occured at a number of different levels. In a review of Jean Howard's Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Richard Helgerson clarifies:
In the theater, spectators were dangerously displaced. "People at the theater are not," as Howard writes, paraphrasing one of the antitheatrical treatises, "where they should be (i.e. in their parishes, at work or at worship); consequently, they are not who they should be, but are released into a realm of protean shapeshifting with enormous destabilizing consequences for the social order" (p. 27). The large anonymous crowds, mixed in status and gender, that filled the London playhouses to watch boys enact the roles of women and commoners play at being kings and emperors did menace notions of hierarchical stasis, of a fixed relation between appearance and social reality.
Fantomina is intrigued by the drama of the playhouse and its audience, and she wants to try on that world--which, in Love in a Maze, she proceeds to do.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theaters were sometimes criticized as being not only sites of social promiscuity, but also--and therefore--like houses of ill repute, especially where women were concerned. "Orange sellers" (or "orange wenches), women who sold fruit to the audience members, were frequently imagined as prostitutes, and courtesans and prostitutes could frequently be found among the audience. Only in 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne, did women perform the roles of women on stage in theatrical performances; previously, as readers of Shakespeare are aware, men cross-dressed as women in an attempt to render the stage a more "moral" site--the thought was that women on stage would corrupt the morality of the audience by providing a licentious, sexualized spectacle. According to Ruth Nestvold, "The novelty of having women on stage created something of a stir, but for the most part the reaction of the public was positive, especially that of the young men who regularly chose their mistresses from the ranks of the new professionals. Many of the new actresses were women who intentionally used their position to achieve liaisons with titled gentlemen and thus increase their meager income. One of the most famous was of course Nell Gwyn, who became the mistress of Charles II." Female performers themselves would be stigmatized as little more than prostitutes, as indeed were women writers of the time; in The Dunciad, Alexander Pope famously satirized Eliza Haywood as the "cow-like" (or vacuous) prize of a pissing contest amongst hack publishers, and her writings as illegitimate children or "babes of love" (II.164,158). Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living by her pen, was explicitly described as by satirist Robert Gould as a "punk" or prostitute precisely for being a "poetess": "For Punk and Poetess agree so Pat, / You cannot well be this, and not be That."

To learn more about Restoration theaters and drama, visit this very helpful and well-designed site by Rupert Spiers of the University of St Andrews. Be sure to stop at the subordinate page on Restoration audiences!