Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance

ISBN-13: 9780719063398 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 348 str.

Opis

This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage, and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time. The collection offers varied examples of theatrical practice and performance in the seventeenth century while also considering lines of interaction and influence between the writers and plays discussed. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor at the Restoration.