Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows the importance of women – as audience, actress, and actress-doer – which is an increasingly strong feature of tragicomic discourse in the Jacobean and Caroline periods. Tragicomedy was arguably the single most important dramatic genre of the period 1610–50. The book sets out the ‘inconsistency in the generic descriptions’ applied to the various plays in the period 1610–50 that we now group under the general heading of ‘tragicomedy’. Shakespeare disturbs ‘conventional perceptions of roles of agency and gender’ and develops ‘a notion of action which has more in common with the resistance to absolutism [in] the period than with absolutism itself. It is thus possible to see in an historical feminist reading of the plays a way out of the determinisms of current criticism, a way which allows concerns of class and gender to be treated on an equal footing.