Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century By Bre ...

Tylee’s work, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness, also informs the viewpoint of this study. Although she focuses on the First World War, she makes the important point that the war was largely recorded both in fiction and in poetry by male authors. Acknowledging the importance of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory,²⁰ she makes the point that Fussell perpetuates the myth of war as a manly pursuit: “Fussell quite unselfconsciously perpetuated the myth promoted by Homer in the story of Andromache and Hector in The Iliad: that during war women’s best place is at home, for ‘War is men’s business’ ”.²¹ Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, by Margaret R. Higonnet et al., is also a seminal work in this field. This collection of essays provides an important analysis of the two World Wars with respect to gender politics, and reassesses the differences between men and women in relation to war. The book challenges the notion “that the two World Wars were entirely male enterprises”.²² In War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Joshua S. Goldstein looks at the way women have been excluded from military combat over the centuries and concludes that killing in war is not informed by gender but by gender norms.²³ The work of these writers is used to support the argument put forward about the implications of war and gender, and helps to clarify the arguments made here about the representation of women in these Early Modern plays.

Cynthia Cockburn’s essay, “The Gendered Dynamics of Armed Conflict and Political Violence”, provides a useful framework for analysing the context of the Civil War.²⁴ Cockburn divides the conflict into four main chronological stages which include prewar, actual war, peacemaking, and reconstruction. It must be stated that, unlike other wars, the English Civil War does not fall into neat categories. The country came close to civil war again during the Exclusion Crisis and Charles II had a difficult balancing act to perform in his mission to restore harmony. Nevertheless, Cockburn’s methodology is a useful template for explaining an extremely complex period in English history.