PRIVACY, PLAYREADING, AND WOMEN’S CLOSET DRAMA, 1550–1700

Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of early modern women’s closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. She reveals that such works were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture, which was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Elizabeth Cary, Jane Lumley, Anne Finch, and Margaret Cavendish wrote their plays in this conjunction of the public and the private at a time when male playwrights dominated the theatres. In her astute readings of the texts, their contexts and their physical appearance in print or manuscript, Straznicky has produced many new insights into the place of women’s closet plays both in the history of women’s writing and in the history of English drama.

MARTA STRAZNICKY is Associate Professor of English Literature at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. She has published on Renaissance drama in Shakespeare Studies, English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in English Literature. This is her first book.

PRIVACY, PLAYREADING, AND WOMEN’S CLOSET DRAMA, 1550–1700

MARTA STRAZNICKY

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© Marta Straznicky 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Straznicky, Marta.
Privacy, playreading, and women’s closet drama, 1550–1700 / Marta Straznicky.
p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 159) and index.
ISBN 0 521 84124 0
1. English drama – Women authors – History and criticism.   2. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism.   3. English drama – Restoration, 1660–1700 – History and criticism.   4. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 17th century.   5. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 16th century.   6. English drama – 17th century – History and criticism.   7. Privacy – England – History – 17th century.   8. Privacy – England – History – 16th century.   9. Readers’ theater – History – 17th century.   10. Readers’ theater – History – 16th century.   11. Women dramatists, English – Biography.   I. Title.
PR678.W6S77   2004
822′.3099287 – dc22   2004045830

ISBN 0 521 84124 0 hardback

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

For my parents, Marta and Ivan Straznicky

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to the many people and institutions who have helped me in writing this book. My research would not have been possible without the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Advisory Research Council of Queen’s University. Queen’s has also granted me two research leaves over the course of my work on this book, one of which enabled me to launch the study and the other to complete it. The staffs of the British Library, Bodleian Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Library of Scotland, Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, Newberry Library, Trinity College Cambridge, and the library at Eton College have generously answered queries and assisted me in locating materials. I have been fortunate to have a number of outstanding research assistants who have worked conscientiously and cheerfully in helping me map the field I needed to study – Patricia Brace, Janelle Jenstad, and Leah Knight.

   In its earliest stages, my research benefited from the encouragement of Richard Rowland and John Pitcher, and I am particularly grateful to Richard for his kind hospitality during my stays in Oxford. Elizabeth Sauer has been my chief intellectual companion in the years we began to work on print culture, and she continues to be a source of great personal and professional support. Eric Rasmussen offered good company and modeled a work ethic I could never hope to emulate. His belief in the importance and viability of this study helped set me on the path the work eventually took. Arthur Kinney promoted my research on closet drama at moments that proved crucial to the development of the study. Among scholars who have worked before me on early modern women writers, I am grateful for support and encouragement to Elizabeth Hageman, Margaret Ferguson, Don Foster, Margaret Ezell, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, Karen Raber, and Marion Wynne-Davies: without their collective research, this book simply could not have been written.

   Lena Cowen Orlin and Julie Sanders shared with me their work before its publication, and I am grateful for their generosity. Martin Biddle very kindly provided me with a copy of an unpublished translation of Anthony Watson’s Magnificae, et plane Regiae Domus, quae vulgo vocatur Nonesuch brevis, et vera Descriptio. Catherine Burroughs and Eric Rasmussen have offered the most important kind of encouragement by introducing my work to their students.

   My Renaissance colleagues at Queen’s have been exceptionally supportive of my work, even when the end was far from visible. I want especially to thank Elizabeth Hanson, Paul Stevens, and Lynne Magnusson for the rich intellectual climate in which this project was fostered, and Bert Hamilton and George Logan for having faith in my research from the beginning. Also at Queen’s, I have been fortunate to have as friends and colleagues Mary Carpenter, Cathy Harland, Shelley King, Mark Jones, Les Monkman, John Pierce, Pat Rae, Sylvia Söderlind, and Asha Varadharajan. I can’t imagine a more congenial and talented group of people with whom to work.

   It is impossible to say how deeply grateful I am to my husband, Stephen Scribner, and my children Erik and Anna for their enthusiasm and understanding as I persevered with this work. They gave me the gift of equilibrium as the book was written. I dedicate the book to my parents, Marta and Ivan Straznicky, whose courage in fleeing a Communist state and removing the family to Canada has allowed me to follow my chosen path.

****

An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as “Closet Drama,” in Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Blackwell, 2002); part of Chapter 4 appeared as “Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama,” in Criticism 37 (1995), 355–90; and a briefer version of Chapter 5 as “Restoration Women Playwrights and the Limits of Professionalism,” in English Literary History 64 (1997), 703–26. I am grateful to Blackwell, Wayne State University Press, and Johns Hopkins University Press respectively for permission to reproduce this material in revised form.