Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550–1700

This study investigates the tradition of closet drama written and read by women in early modern England.

Marta Straznicky (Author)

9780521100113, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 January 2009

200 pages, 7 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.3 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Marta Straznicky's book is an essential read for anyone interested in the period 1550–1700, but particularly in women's history and its relationship to the act of writing. The research is impressive and the writing style eloquent, persuasive and accessible, as we are taken on a fascinating journey into the sensitivities surrounding women and writing in the period …' Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre

Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of early modern women's closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. She reveals that such works were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture, which was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Elizabeth Cary, Jane Lumley, Anne Finch and Margaret Cavendish wrote their plays in this conjunction of the public and the private at a time when male playwrights dominated the theatres. In her astute readings of the texts, their contexts and their physical appearance in print or manuscript, Straznicky has produced many fresh insights into the place of women's closet plays both in the history of women's writing and in the history of English drama.

Introduction
1. Privacy, play reading and performance
2. Jane Lumley: humanist translation and the culture of play reading
3. Elizabeth Cary: 'private' drama and print
4. Margaret Cavendish: the closing of the theatres and the politics of play reading
5. Anne Finch: authorship, privacy and the Restoration stage
Conclusion. 'Closet' drama: Private space, private stage, and gender
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Dance & other performing arts [AS]