ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that drama by Renaissance women is best understood in relation to significant and politically engaged sub-genres 'closet' drama and pastoral tragi-comedy. Drama is self-evidently performative, whether we come to it as readers or as audiences. The first difficulty when dealing with women's drama is that it cannot be allied with the familiar context of the 'stage-play' world: it was not written to be publicly performed. The author argues that Lady Lumley, the Countess of Pembroke and Elizabeth Gary adapt existing generic forms and historical narratives via translation and imitation in order to mark and interrogate female political agency. Closet drama was viewed in a contradictory way in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The chapter explores the female body is seen as a crucial and symbolically resonant site, traversed by conflicting private and public ethical dilemmas. Greville imagined that his drama might be read as an oblique comment upon Elizabethan government.
