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

Theoretical Perspectives

The book is written from a feminist historicist position. The term “feminist” has become an umbrella term for the many feminisms that have emerged since the beginning of the twentieth century; it includes Marxist, psychoanalytic, liberal, radical, ecofeminism, multicultural, global, existential, and postmodern feminism. For the purposes of this dissertation, “feminist” indicates that women’s drama will be examined from a female perspective. The assumption that war is man’s business is interrogated. The study will reveal that as the war progressed, women were able to access more public arenas, and as a result they were able to become more involved with theatre and ultimately with theatrical production. War was, and to a great extent still is, seen as primarily a male activity and so the proposition that women are writing for a public audience about the subject of war is doubly subversive. However, as argued here, in this period women began to write plays and become involved in their production while simultaneously representing the theme of war in their work. Thus women were encroaching on the public space of the theatre and also engaging with themes that would have previously been considered “men’s business”.

The research pays attention to the emergence of women’s theatrical voices in this period and argues that the war gave an impetus to the realisation of “feminist theatre”. Michelene Wandor writes that even in contemporary theatre the idea of a “feminist theatre” can be seen as subversive: “Nevertheless the sense of threat which hovers round the potential subversiveness of theatre has remained with us. What is significant is the nature of the public and collective voice of theatre, and women have rarely been seen overtly in charge of any kind of public voice”.¹⁵ For an Early Modern playwright, the situation was even more difficult and access to public space was limited. That is why the dramas of the Cavendish women were never staged in a public theatre. Wandor explains why theatre is potentially revolutionary for women: