M Wynne-Davies

Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents.

Plays include: Loves Victory, The Concealed Fancies, The Tragedy of Marion and The Tragedy of Antonie

Here is a sport will well befit this time and place: allusion and delusion in Mary Wroth's Love's Victory

Abstract This article explores the way in which Lady Mary Wroth used multiple levels of literary allusion and familial allegory in her play,Loves Victory. Through a close analysis of the text, the identities of two generations within the Sidney family are disclosed In addition, the diverse indebtedness of Wroths writing is uncovered, from her immediate relatives, to the tradition of pastoral tragi-comedy, which flourished in England in the early sixteenth century. These references suggest a date of composition for the play between 1615 and 1618. However, while Wroths words imply that the “riddles” of identity may be discovered, at the same time she constantly postpones any final or fixed meaning.

'So Much Worth': Autobiographical Narratives in the Work of Lady Mary Wroth

The initial site of this inquiry will be one of the most readily accepted and easily recognised forms of autobiographical writing, that is, a diary, or more specifically. Lady Anne Clifford’s account of her activities in August 1617. In common with other English noblewomen of the early modern period, Clifford paid visits to and was visited by other women of her social group, and during the summer of 1617 she made several calls at Penshurst Place, the home of the Sidney family, which were duly recorded in her diary. For example, on the first of the month she visited ‘Lady Wroth’ and was joined there by ‘Lady Rich’; on the 12th and 13th she ‘spent most of the time in playing Glecko & hearing Moll Neville reading the Arcadia’; and then on the 19th, I went to Penshurst on Horseback to my Lord Lisle where I found Lady Dorothy Sidney, my Lady Manners, with whom I had much talk, & my Lord Norris, she and I being very kind. There was Lady Wroth who told me a great deal of news from beyond the sea, so we came home at night, my Coz. Barbara Sidney bringing me a good part of the way.1 The reason for focusing on these extracts from Anne Clifford’s diary will, I hope, be immediately apparent, for they refer to Lady Mary Wroth whose autobiographical writing is the central concern of this essay.

Early Modern English Women Dramatists (1610–1690): New Perspectives

In 1991 I applied for a lectureship at one of the UK’s leading universities; during the interview I was asked, by a staunch feminist critic, to name the English women dramatists from the early modern period. Before I could reply, she hastily corrected herself, ‘Oh, but of course there aren’t any, are there,’ choosing instead to ask about early modern women poets. Had I thought out an answer, I would have referred to two women, Elizabeth Cary and Mary Sidney, both of whose dramatic works had already been published.1 Still, I was forced to reconsider: the question had been well-intentioned and the questioner’s afterthought arose, not from a lack of commitment to women’s writing, but from the almost total lack of existing printed material — editorial and critical — devoted to early modern women dramatists. It was this casual comment that fueled my own interest and led me to trace plays by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women, culminating in the collection, Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (1996) that I edited with S. P. Cerasano.2 This chapter sets out to follow some of that editorial and critical history, building upon the strengths of previous scholarship in order to suggest possible initiatives for the present and future. The study is divided into four sections: the first offers an overview of who the early modern women dramatists were and what they wrote; the second focuses on the availability of primary material and criticism; and the third looks at the perennial question of performance and performability.

The ‘Anxious Dream’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Gothic Perspective

The ‘anxious dream’ referred to in the title of this essay is taken from the first stanza of Julia Margaret Cameron’s translation of Gottfried August Burger’s Leonora in which the eponymous heroine waits for her lover, William, to return from the wars: Leonora from an anxious dream Starts up at break of day: ‘My William, art thou false or slain? Oh! William, why delay?’ Weaver 1984, 146

‘For Worth, Not Weakness, Makes in Use but One’: Literary Dialogues in an English Renaissance Family

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf created a Renaissance woman dramatist called Judith Shakespeare, but lamented that no real counterpart existed for Judith since it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people … how, then, could it have been born among women whose work began … almost before they were out of the nursery.1 Woolf was fully accurate in identifying a female author’s need for security, both economic and environmental, but the seeming lack of texts led her to assume that women of the early modern period had experienced neither, instead being trapped within a domestic vortex of familial responsibilities. However, while not questioning Woolf’s primary identification of a writer’s essential requirements, it has become increasingly clear that early modern women were able to access a literary voice, even a ‘dramatic’ one. It is the purpose of this essay to explore the ways in which such cultural productivity could be achieved from within a familial environment, one which both liberated and constrained its female members. I will focus specifically upon the writings of Mary Wroth, one of the first English woman dramatists, and the way in which her voice is both freed by its familial Sidneian identity, and muted by her gender in comparison with the free vocalisations of her uncle, Philip Sidney, her father, Robert Sidney, and her cousin/lover, William Herbert.

Review of Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra (directed by Emma Whipday for the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges) at the Great Hall, Goodenough College, London, 3 March 2013

Like most of us who work on Early Modern drama, I teach a number of plays that many students consider impenetrable as texts, let alone performable on a twenty-first century stage. So, it hardly came as a surprise when, this term, one group chose to title their presentation “Performing the Unperformable”, although their focus, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, astonished me because I considered the play eminently stageable. This difference of perspective arose partly from our respective familiarity with the work, but the key distinction was that they had access only to clips from amateur productions downloaded from YouTube, whereas I had a clear memory of the brilliant 1992 RSC version directed by Terry Hands and starring Anthony Sher. What became apparent in the subsequent class discussion was that Early Modern plays often appear to be unperformable because – with the telling exception of some of Shakespeare’s canon – we don’t often see them performed. Reviving plays written by dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is, therefore, more than a scholarly exercise; rather, it demonstrates the imaginative power of previously neglected works in a public arena. And this is exactly what was achieved by Yasmin Arshad (producer) and Emma Whipday (director) in their production of Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra. The play was first published in 1594 as a companion piece in Delia and Rosamond Augmented; Cleopatra and was dedicated to Mary Sidney Herbert since, as Daniel notes, her “well grac’d Anthony ... Requir’d his Cleopatras company” (H5r). This specific pairing with Sidney Herbert’s The Tragedy of Antony, combined with the play’s lengthy monologues, heavy political morality and reported action, has led to the play being classified as a closet drama. Therefore, it has been assumed that the work was meant to be read aloud by a family or coterie group and never intended for performance on the public stage. This assumption has, in turn, led the play to be neglected and often disparaged, as for example with T.S. Eliot’s condemnation of Daniel as one of “the shy recluses of Lady Pembroke’s circle” and Cleopatra as being “in excellent taste” but with “no influence” (79). Indeed, having taken part in a reading of Sidney Herbert’s Antony, I can vouch for the fact that long monologues and no action lead to a virtually unperformable play. However, Daniel was a persistent editor of his own work: in 1599 he republished Cleopatra in The Poetical Essays of Samuel Daniel Newly Corrected and Augmented and undertook far more extensive revisions in 1607 as part of Certaine Small Workes ... &

‘Worthy of their blood and their vocation’: The More/Cresacre Line

While John Donne has become the most brilliantly well known of More’s descendants, More’s actual son, John, has faded into obscurity. The unfortunate combination of physiognomy (that receding chin so clearly depicted in Holbein’s sketches), his contemporary reputation as in Bacon’s acerbic suggestion of imbecility and his father’s overwhelming reputation seem to have driven John More into the shadowy recesses of familial memory.1 Yet, during More’s lifetime, John was encouraged to write and he participated in the same humanist and Catholic interchanges as his sister Margaret. In 1533 his translations of a sermon by Friedrich Nausea and of a treatise by the humanist Damiao de Gois were published, and two books were dedicated to him, Erasmus’s edition of Aristotle’s works (1531) and Simon Grynaeus’s edition of Plato’s works (1534).2 Until the point of his father’s imprisonment, it is possible to perceive John More’s steady movement along the accepted path of a humanist scholar, indebted to his father and teachers alike. In this he parallels Margaret and, while he might not have been as close to his father, his gender would have opened up opportunities that were not accessible to his sister. Again, like Margaret, after More’s execution, John came under suspicion and he was imprisoned with William Daunce and John Heywood in 1543 for conspiring against Cranmer.

Sisters and Brothers: Divided Sibling Identity in the Cary Family

When tracing the familial discourses of the Early Modern period evidence of mutual authorship and influence is most commonly found through allusions and references within the texts, either in printed or manuscript form. In this way, it has been possible to trace the biographical additions of successive generations of the More family, to provide a chronological frame for the new years’ gifts of the Fitzalan children, and to identify the reworkings of her family’s writing by Lady Mary Wroth. However, for the Cary family there is absolute evidence for collaborative production, since five of its members contributed to a single manuscript, their composition and annotation being distinguished by their individual hands. This work is The Lady Falkland: Her Life, a biography of Elizabeth Cary, which was composed by one of her daughters and edited by three further daughters and one son. The manuscript version is in the Archives of the Departement du Nord at Lille, and there are three published versions of the text: The Lady Falkland: Her Life (1861) edited by Richard Simpson, The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland: Her Life (1994) edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, and Life and Letters: Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (2001) edited by Heather Wolfe.

Desire, Chastity and Rape in the Cavendish Familial Discourse

The three quotations that head this chapter represent the remarkable shift in the Cavendish discourse during a decade in which cataclysmic changes were to influence not only individual families, but the whole country. The impact of the English Civil War on communities has been traced exhaustively and numerous biographies have attested to the personal bravery or inadequacies of those involved in the combat. This chapter traces the ways in which a single family, with its own specific literary interests, engaged with these national transformations, developing new methods of constructing identity, and, in particular, female self-representation. The quotations from William Cavendish, Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish, and Margaret Cavendish, while representative of overall authorial approach, have been isolated here because they specifically address the way in which women’s sexual roles were constructed. In 1641 when William Cavendish wrote his play, The Country Captain, Charles I was already encountering political difficulties, but the play offers an assured sense of a stable order in which a maidservant, Dorothy, may wish that her master would have sexual intercourse with her, and must reassure herself that this would not be ‘rape’, just ‘fornication in her own defence’.