ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf’s well-known concept of a ‘room of one’s own’ is not totally inappropriate for the Early Modern period.1 However, rather than the individual rooms envisaged by the earlytwentieth-century reader, the secure spaces which enabled Renaissance women to nurture their creative talents were located for the most part in the large castles and houses scattered across the British Isles. It is important to remember, however, that such environments were accessible only to rich and/or noble women and, in addition, that these possible ‘havens’ were mostly controlled by men. Indeed, it was precisely this combination of a secure space, wealth and male complicity that allowed a few Renaissance women dramatists to evade the lonely suicides visualised by Woolf, and to experience an environment suited to literary productivity. In this essay I intend to focus on two specific locations which served as sites for women’s dramatic writing: Penshurst Place and Welbeck Abbey. Penshurst was the family home of the Sidneys, while Welbeck was the main residence of the Cavendishes, and both houses functioned not only as a secure situation for female authorship, but also as projected ‘sets’ for the plays themselves. This particular combination of a protected space and an imaginative arena is clearly evident in Mary Wroth/Sidney’s pastoral comedy and in the plays of the two Cavendish sisters, Jane and Elizabeth Brackley. As such, it is through their works that I intend to explore how the English country house proved to be a benign inspiration for Early Modern women dramatists.
