Early Women Dramatists, 1550-1800 (English Dramatists)

This book offers a comprehensive survey of women's drama between the Renaissance and the end of the eighteenth century, assessing the plays' characteristic features and the ruptures in the text indicating the writers' precarious social and artistic position and ambiguous stances to their own creativity and sex. The book devotes chapters to individual writers as well as general developments in specific periods, each section being introduced by a brief historical survey of the position of women in the theatre and society. The most significant plays are analyzed in detail and related to the male literary canon of the time in order to stress both their originality and the existence of an--albeit tentative--female literary tradition.