Contents

• Pt. 1. Early commentaries. Mary Sidney is praised to Elizabeth I (1594). ; Samuel Daniel to Mary Sidney (1594). ; John Davies of Hereford commends Mary Sidney and Elizabeth Cary (1612). ; William Sheares to Elizabeth Cary (1633). ; Jonson and Wroth (1640). ; Elizabeth Cary’s Biography (1643-9). ; Celebrating several ladies (1752). ; The Cavalier’s Lady and her plays (1872). ; The first scholarly edition of Mary Sidney’s Antonie (1897). ; Lumley’s play first published (1909). ; The first modern edition of Mariam (1914). ; Early critical recognition of Elizabeth Cary and Margaret Cavendish (1920). ; Woolf on Margaret Cavendish (1925). ; T. S. Eliot on Senecan Drama (1927). ; Virginia Woolf on ‘Judith Shakespeare’ (1929). ; The first edition of The Concealed Fancies (1931). ; Cary and ‘A Woman’s Duty’ (1940). ; Mary Sidney: Philip’s Sister (1957).
• Pt. II. Contexts and issues. Women playwrights in England: Renaissance noblewomen / Nancy Cotton. ; The Arts at the English Court of Anna of Denmark / Leeds Barroll. ; ‘My seeled chamber and dark parlour room’: the English country house and Renaissance women dramatists / Marion Wynne-Davies. ; Women as patrons of English Renaissance drama / David M. Bergeron. ; Women as spectators, spectacles, and paying customers / Jean E. Howard. ; Women as theatrical investors: three shareholders and the second Fortune Playhouse / S. P. Gerasano. ; ‘Why may not a lady write a good play?’: plays by Early Modern women reassessed as performance texts / Gweno Williams.
• Pt. III. Early Modern women dramatists. ‘We princes, I tell you, are set on stages’: Elizabeth I and dramatic self-representation / Carole Levin. ; Joanna Lumley (1537?-1576/77) / Elaine V. Beilin. ; Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis: multum in parvo, or, less is more / Stephanie Hodgson-Wright. ; ‘Patronesse of the Muses’ / Margaret P. Hannay. ; Mary Herbert: Englishing a purified Cleopatra / Tina Krontiris. ; Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639) / Elaine V. Beilin. ; The spectre of resistance: The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) / Margaret W. Ferguson. ; Resisting tyrants: Elizabeth Cary’s tragedy / Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. ; An unknown continent: Lady Mary Wroth’s forgotten pastoral drama, ‘Loves Victorie’ / Margaret Anne McLaren. ; ‘Like one in a gay masque’: the Sidney cousins in the theaters of court and country / Gary Waller. ; ‘To be your daughter in your pen’: the social functions of literature in the writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish / Margaret J. M. Ezell. ; ‘She gave you the civility of the house’: household performance in The Concealed Fancies / Alison Findlay. ; ‘My brain the stage’: Margaret Cavendish and the fantasy of female performance / Sophie Tomlinson. ; ‘A woman write a play!’: Jonsonian strategies and the dramatic writings of Margaret Cavendish; or, did the duchess feel the anxiety of influence? / Julie Sanders