Restoration Women’s Drama

"This edition of four seventeenth-century plays is an excellent contribution to the ongoing scholarly discourse on women’s contributions to early modern theatre in England, showing the continuities of women’s involvement in dramatic writing through the seventeenth century, and helping to debunk the long-held idea that early modern women didn’t write plays. Each play has been carefully selected for this collection with a clear rationale as to its importance, and when the plays are read sequentially, the generic, thematic, and characterizational connections between them are clear. Moreover, by choosing to foreground plays that were either intended for print and/or professionally staged, the editors show how the involvement of female playwrights in theatre ranged far beyond the seclusion of the “closets” in which scholars long believed them to be sequestered." * Alexandra Bennet, Professor of English, Northern Illinois University *