ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies some fourteen women who served as patrons of the drama, as determined by epistles dedicatory. It argues for the richness and importance of their contribution, much of it located in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period. As playwrights sound their voices in the paratexts, they reach out to the potential support of women, all the more remarkable in a highly patriarchal culture. The chapter focuses on the agency of women, documented in textual patronage. Philip Massinger cites the precedent of Italy, where women have granted patronage and protection to writers as justification for sending his first published play The Duke of Milan to Katherine Stanhope. She becomes, as the editors of Massinger observe, "the centre of a small web, which shows how important kinship was in the strategy of a clientpoet." Under these circumstances Massinger has to imagine some other purpose for this epistle dedicatory, possibly reflective commemoration of this patron.
