Plays on women

This anthology of plays, containing two domestic tragedies and two city comedies, is annotated using contemporary and feminist critical approaches and illustrates the ways in which theatrical pleasures and social relations complicate the connection between women and plays in early modern drama. The connection between women and plays of this age aroused a good deal of excited contemporary comment; those who condemned theatre homed in on women as the group in most moral danger, those who defended the theatre deplored the way women's taste undermined its potential as high art, for the playwrights and theatre companies, the presence of women in the theatres offered a marketing opportunity. The dramatic genres of domestic tragedy and city comedy thus turned on relations between men and women. The plays included are "The Roaring Girl" by Middleton and Dekker, "A Woman Killed with Kindness" by Heywood, "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" by Middleton and "Master Arden of Faversham" (Anon).