Women felt the effects of the Civil War every bit as keenly as the men did, and their lives were equally altered by the cataclysmic events which were to follow the King’s beheading. As in every war, gender differences were thrown into sharp relief. Women found themselves having to protect their property and were, in many ways, the protectors of the home front when their fathers or husbands went off to fight in the war. This anomalous situation produced a number of notable women dramatists, who reflected on the many changes that the conflict precipitated and produced dramas that engaged with the war. Although their role in the war was limited, their work reveals the diverse ways women experience war; consequently, the plays they produced constitute an important contribution to the Early Modern genre of the literature of war. Although these female dramatists experienced a great deal of hardship during the conflict, ironically, the war acted as a catalyst to their literary creativity. Their plays commemorate not only the hardships and uncertainties of the period, but they invoke new worlds that could be created from the old.
This book examines representations of women and war in female-authored drama composed in seventeenth-century England between the years 1645 and 1689. It argues that women’s writing was influenced by the war, and that at the same time women were creating a discourse of war. The way that texts are fashioned by history and, at the same time, actually fashion history has been expounded by Louis Adrian Montrose who, when writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, commented, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, then, in a double sense, a creation of Elizabethan culture: for it also creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten”.3 Montrose explains the theory behind this confluence of history and texts: