ABSTRACT

The chapter refutes that Fulke Greville’s second extant drama is a dramatic failure and an imperceptible play, as has unfairly been argued. It contends that in large measure Alaham is shaped by as well as reflects its author’s precarious political identity and equivocal stance towards early modern gender conventions; and traces its equally ambiguous dramatization of the interrelationship between republicanism and gender. Finally, it demonstrates that Greville’s drama dwells heavily on the precarious making and unmaking of identities as well as on the gains and losses that such a process entails.