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

“Historicist” means that, in Montrose’s terms, the historical context is fully taken into account. It is shown here that texts were shaped by the culture and, concurrently, the culture was shaped by the texts. War acted as a catalyst to the women’s literary output and, at the same time, women’s war drama also shaped the discourse of war. This reciprocity was central to the work of these Early Modern female dramatists.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf hypothesised as to what would have become of Shakespeare’s sister if she had existed: “She died young—alas, she never wrote a word”.¹⁷ Since Woolf made that speculation, Shakespeare’s sister has been brought to life through the pioneering work of Early Modern scholarship. As Katherine Cockin argues, “A sense of continuity, of women’s (albeit uneven) presence in the theatrical past, is not wishful thinking”.¹⁸ In order to advance the work of recovery and reevaluation, the book focuses chiefly on the plays that relate directly or indirectly to the Civil War, and which were written by the Cavendish women, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn. Each of their plays has a civil war context, or if it was written after the war, is concerned with a war theme. The study was influenced by Claire M. Tylee, Elaine Turner, and Agnes Cardinal’s book, War Plays by Women: An International Anthology of Women’s War Drama, which brings together a series of war dramas written by women. It is important that particular attention is given to women’s war writing because as Tylee, Turner, and Cardinal point out, most war drama focuses on “male experience at the battlefront”, but women’s plays are more likely “to focus on women’s experience behind the lines, especially on the home front, and on groups opposing war”.¹⁹