1. Written by an anonymous chronicler at the Siege of Chester in October 1645. Quoted in Alison Plowden’s Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998) viii.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991) 47. The very fact that the King was executed was even more spectacular because, as Foucault argues, public execution aims “not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength” (48–49).

3. Louis Adrian Montrose, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form”, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 65–87. See esp. p. 87.

4. Louis Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture”, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 777–785. See esp. p. 781.

5. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture” 781.

6. John Orr and Dragan Klaic, ed., Terrorism and Modern Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990) 10.

7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. and intro. C. B. Macpherson (1651; London: Pelican Books, 1968) 161.

8. Ibid., 223.

9. Ibid., 161.

10. Ibid., 223.

11. Ibid., 263–264.

12. See Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England: c 1363–1750 (London: Associated University Presses, 1980); Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women & Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988); Margarete Rubik, Early Women Dramatists: 1500–1800 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998); S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, ed.