Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550–1700
Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550–1700
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USDMarta 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.
- This study is the first to examine in detail the practices of reading plays in the early modern period, setting out new methodologies for the study of these undervalued texts in their time
- Includes a critical and historical analysis of the prefatory material to published plays, showing how female playwrights presented themselves and their work to their readers
- Investigates the links between the typographic and scribal design of published and manuscript plays
Reviews & endorsements
"This book continues and adds greatly to the reevaluation of women dramatists' place in the early modern period. Highly recommended."
-Choice
"The sophisticated argument of Marta Straznicky's Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700 rings various thought-provoking changes on the relationship of public and private as 'shifting rather than fixed points of reference' (p. 1)."
-SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
"Straznicky successfully shows that female closet drama is important literarily, socially, and politically, and that it is not a weak imitation of performed drama."
Carol Blessing, Renaissance Quarterly
"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..."
-Simon Barker, University of Gloucestershire, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
Product details
January 2009Paperback
9780521100113
200 pages
229 × 152 × 11 mm
0.3kg
7 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- 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.
