Naomi J. Miller

Playing with Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wroth: Staging Early Modern Women's Dramatic Romances for Modern Audiences

On March 28, 2014, the New Perspectives Theatre Company presented a staged reading of Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure — as part of their “On Her Shoulders” series — before a select audience at the New School that included early modern scholars attending the Renaissance Society of America conference in New York City. Two months later, on June 8, 2014, the Globe Theatre of London performed a staged reading of Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory — as part of their “READ Not Dead” series — before an audience of scholars attending the conference, “Dramatizing Penshurst: Site, Script, Sidneys,” held at Penshurst Place itself. In both instances, professional acting troupes performed plays by early modern women for modern audiences of scholars familiar with these plays. My essay explores the interpretive possibilities brought to light by these staged readings, as well as the divergences and continuities between live performance and academic scholarship that engage with dramatic romances by early modern women in twenty-first century contexts. In these instances, the productions could be said effectively to highlight “modern” aspects of early modern plays.

Re-Imagining the Subject: Traveling from Scholarship to Fiction with Mary Wroth

To be a novelist is to live and breathe your characters in a more personally intimate fashion than you might consider attempting with your subjects as a scholar. To write a novel after two decades of laboring to produce scholarly books and critical articles, and two decades of classroom engagement with your research topic, is to meet your subject entirely anew. Writing fiction under these circumstances feels like diving off a clifftop into the ocean, trusting the sea currents to carry you even as they as sweep you away. Frankly, it can be terrifying and exhilarating at once—overwhelming and utterly addictive.