ABSTRACT
The presence of a considerable amount of historical drama on the English stage in the last decades of the eighteenth- and first decades of the nineteenth century was a consequence of the need to come to terms with a present characterized by many unprecedented historical events. Women playwrights’ approach to the Anglo-Saxon world is the subject of a recent essay by Jacqueline Pearson that aims to retrace the modernity under the surface of Anglo-Saxon history, thus considering 'the historical setting merely an indirect means for examining urgent contemporary issues'. Women’s historical literature encompassed and mingled mainstream and gendered ideas of history, with the consequence that their idea of tragedy was likewise peculiar and gendered. The contrast between political concern and private desire takes the form, in Romantic historical drama written by women, of a clash between a traditional tyrant and a woman determined to undermine the old patriarchal system.
