ABSTRACT
The passages included in Part I represent the way in which the critical history of the Renaissance woman dramatist has developed. Until very recently it was often assumed that English women did not write plays in the Early Modern period, and alongside this primary lack of information ran a concurrent unawareness which suggested that there were no corresponding critical works either. However, in the last decade of the twentieth century it has become increasingly apparent that Renaissance women did write plays and that these works had interest and value as both literary and performance texts. Consequently, this sense of ‘discovery’ generated an assumption that these works had faded into obscurity soon after they were written, and since some of the plays exist only in manuscript form, the apparent lack of critical commentary seemed wholly plausible. This was not the case. The selection of material included here demonstrates that Renaissance women’s plays were known about, and often commended, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. From the panegyrics of their own day, through the historical commentaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the modern editions and growing recognition of women writers in the twentieth century, it must be concluded that the Renaissance woman dramatist has received sustained, and sustainable, critical attention. The following selection of commentaries has been chosen to demonstrate this continuity of interest. As such, the Early Commentaries section of this book provides not only a critical framework for the plays themselves, but also a historicising context for the more recent critical essays contained in Parts II and III.
