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

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The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies may be characterized chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing—not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question—traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement; and secondly that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the “documents” upon which historians ground their own texts, called “histories”. 4

Attention to these women’s texts reveals their “social embedment” in Early Modern history and discloses “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history”. 5

Although the prose and poetry written by these women has received wide critical attention, their plays have been neglected. It can be argued that drama is like war in that it constitutes a public event and mediates reality in a way prose and poetry rarely can. John Orr and Dragan Klaic stress the connection between war, terrorism, and drama:

[T]errorism has vital connections to drama for two reasons. The first, as we have reiterated, is the violent and often macabre nature of its theatricality which cannot fail to attract our best dramatists. The second is that, like modernity itself, it has become “our fate”.6

The playwrights considered here—Margaret Cavendish, her two stepdaughters (Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn—were writing in a context in which war had become their “fate”. Thomas Hobbes argued that humans have “a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after Power”, and that this inevitably culminates in civil war.7 The female dramatists who are examined in this study concurred with Hobbes that monarchical rule was preferable to anarchy. They endorsed the Hobbesian view that men had to submit to a “[p]ower to keep them in awe”.8 For these writers, each of whom was a zealous Royalist, this power was embodied in the Stuart regime. Cavendish, who experienced the pain of exile during the Interregnum, would certainly have agreed with Hobbes’ justification of Royal power.