ABSTRACT
Recalling the dismal fate of Virginia Woolf s fictional playwright, Judith Shakespeare, we might be prompted to ask why Early Modern women such as Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters dared to write a play at all? It has long been common knowledge that no women acted on the English stage during the Renaissance and, it has long been assumed, that no women wrote plays in that period either; indeed, even after the post-1970s incursion of Early Modern female authors into the canon, their contributions were seen to be either in poetry or prose. But female dramatists did exist. Some women translated plays written by men: Joanna/Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis (Lumley herself used both ‘Jane’ and ‘Joanna’ and these names have been used by different critics; in general, ‘Jane’ seems to be preferred, Elizabeth I’s Hercules Oetaeus and Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antonie. Others wrote original dramas: Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam is the first tragedy written by an Englishwoman, Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory (c.1620) is the first comedy, while the two plays of Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish, together with the dramatic compositions of Margaret Cavendish, serve as a transition to the productions of the first professional woman dramatist, Aphra Behn. However, perhaps the most surprising facet of this late-twentieth-century ‘discovery’ of the Early Modern woman dramatist is that they were perfectly well known in their own period and were the subject of numerous panegyric commentaries. Examples of these, such as the poems written by Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford, are included in the Early Commentaries (Part I of this book). Indeed, even in 1752 when George Ballard wrote his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain he includes chapters on all the women mentioned in this collection, with the exception of Jane Cavendish. It is from the mid-eighteenth century therefore that the Early Modern woman dramatist completes her descent into obscurity, and she remained a dim and forgotten figure until the resurgence of interest in women writers that accompanied the growth in female consciousness at the start of the twentieth century. This renewed interest uncovered the neglected texts and several of the plays, Antonie, Iphigenia at Aulis, Mariam and The Concealed Fancies, were published for the first time in modern editions. Critical attention remained lacking, however, the most well-known commentary from this period being T.S.Eliot’s somewhat reductive analysis of Mary Sidney’s oeuvre and influence. Finally, in the 1980s, as the influence of feminist criticism permeated successive periods and genres, Early Modern women playwrights began to be recognised once again and their work has been the focus of an increasing number of scholarly editions and critical re-evaluations. What this brief history of drama by Early Modern women makes clear is that the late twentieth century did not discover Sidney, Cary, Wroth and the others, but rediscovered them. Moreover, without the
contemporary panegyric verse, Ballard’s comprehensive list and the initial excavations by early-twentieth-century scholars, the present critical pieces would not, and could not, have been written. As such, the Early Commentaries part of this book demonstrates a broad continuity of interest, with a few chronological lacunae, from the sixteenth century to the present day.
