Professor Marion Wynne-Davies

It is possible to conceal oneself either in a cave or under a mantle. This chapter takes as its starting point two such images: the cave in relation to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland, and the mantle with regard to Elizabeth Cary in her own work, The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II [...] written by E.F. in the year 1627 and in the biography written by her daughter, Lucy Cary, The Lady Falkand: Her Life. In each case, the initial trope Is used in order to discuss both the personal and political implications for the writers in terms of race, nationhood, and faith. The following, more detailed analyses of the texts, however, serve to challenge seemingly clear interpretations by uncovering what is concealed under and behind convetional discourse, leading to an understanding of ho gender impacted Spenser's and Cary's engagement with early modern English colonialist policy in Ireland.

This essay explores the changes undertaken by the Dundee Repertory Company on their production of The Winter's Tale, when they performed the play at Fajr International Drama Festival in Tehran. The essay begins with an account of the 2001 presentation in Dundee, focussing upon the way in which the director, Dominic Hill, interpreted the play to emphasise comic exuberance and female autonomy. The second part explores the necessary decisions made by Hill and the cast to ensure that the play could be performed in Tehran, alterations that undercut the earlier focus upon humour and women's roles in society. The paper concludes with an interrogation of how political and artistic discourses are inextricably bound together in twenty-first century theatre.

Traces the History of women's dramatic writing between 1500 and 1610 based upon teh ways in which women accessed unusual spaces in order to evade teh prohibition against writing for the public stage

This book traces Atwood’s development from the publication of The Circle Game in 1966 to her most recent work, The Door (2007) noting that each phase of writing demonstrated both a commitment to, and interrogation of, specific themes. These textual focus points were, however, shown to defy neat classifications in terms of chronology and genre, since Atwood returns to, intertwines and alters perceptions of issues such as, nation, gender, politics, myth, chronology, geographical space, ecological ethics and authorial identity.

This work is a volume of plays and documents, demonstrating the wide range of theatrical activity in which women were involved during the Renaissance period.

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 Englishwomen 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 throwaway comment that fuelled my own interest and led me to trace plays by sixteenth and seventeenth century Englishwomen, culminating in the collection, Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (1996) that I edited with S.P.Cerasano.2 This essay 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 fourth section consists of three ‘case studies’ that focus upon thematic issues raised in the previous sections: Innovation: Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II; Performability: Margaret Cavendish’s The Sociable Companions; and Continuity; Frances Boothby’s Marcelia. Through this discursive process I intend to locate and highlight areas where new perspectives are being, and need to be, generated. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, I didn’t get the job.

Focusing on issues from the contemporary critical reaction to women's drama and the authorship and performance histories of the plays to the longstanding and ...

This essay takes as its starting point the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet directed by Greg Doran in order to explore the ways in which Ophelia’s death and burial might be used to disturb dominant cultural codes. As such, it focuses upon the regulatory discourses framing three female subjects: the legal and religious rules governing suicide, in particular the inquest’s record of the death by drowning of Katherine Hamlet in 1579; the account of Ophelia’s death and her “maimed rites” in the Gravedigger’s scene; and the performance of Mariah Gale in the “mad scene.” In each case the female body is be perceived to breach expected boundaries: the way in which the real girl’s death presents a series of questions about the temporal and spiritual laws; the engagement of the play with those legal and religious discourses by locating the female character as a disturbing absence; and the use of the actress’ body in order to reiterate in performance the sense of threat encountered in the text. In so doing the employs the theories of the abject and the uncanny as discussed by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva in order to locate where the text’s distorted repetitions uncover the tenuousness of the cultural codes used to regulate the Early Modern understanding of female suicide.

This collection of essays presents a variety of new approaches to the oeuvre of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the most influential and ...

The author introduces articles in the symposium "Women and Theater" in "Medieval and Renaissance Drama," describing the primary types of women who attended the theater in early modern England and how they were represented on stage. Orange-women and others sold their wares to audiences. Mary Frith dressed as a man, moved among the audiences, and was represented in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's "The Roaring Girl." Female spectators were represented to be attending to experience illicit sexual encounters, as well as other reasons besides actually seeing the play. The convergence seems to lie in the middle and lower class status of all the women represented.

The process of mapping during the first years of the seventeenth century imagined a vista that superimposed a spiritual road map on to topographical journeys. The English Civil War changed the conception of roads and geographical environments completely, demanding that a hard-edged understanding of the material realities of travel took precedence over the old allegorical passageways. Yet even this is too simplistic. For if men travelled across Europe after the war in terms of expediency and political manoeuvring, for women the necessity of leaving their home and beginning again in a newcountry was fraught with danger. As the Royalists abandoned

This is a new series which has grown out of exciting developments in higher education.

This is a comprehensive account of writing by women from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Groundbreaking collection of specially commissioned essays in which the ethnic literatures of North America are added to the developing postcolonial canon.

Analyses memorialisation in Sidney Herbert's poetry and Wroth's play, 'Love's Victory'

This essay uses the history of the building and garden at Nonsuch in order to argue that Jane Lumley's play was written with performance in mind, even if no such enactment took place.

Wynne-Davies argues that an interdisciplinary engagement with material, locational, and cultural contexts allows us to understand early modern female identity from a different and more challenging perspective through a focus on Elizabeth Cary, best known as the first Englishwoman to write an original tragedy, The Tragedy of Mariam (composed between 1603 and 1606).Here, however, the site of investigation shifts from Cary's writing to her participation in a wider range of early seventeenth-century discursive practices: portraiture, the country house, and masque costume. She analyzes the portrait, A Lady in Masque Dress, Called Lady Tanfield (1615), and proceeds, through a consideration of provenance and style, to suggest why the painting is most probably of Elizabeth Cary. She also examines the location of the portrait at Sir Henry Lee's country house, Ditchley, and, via manuscript investigation, demonstrates that the relationship between Cary and Lee was far closer than has previously been assumed.

These are broad and expansive themes and so what we wish to do is to provide a perhaps dramatic case study example of state engagement with the arts for political and security purposes. Our critical case is that of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engagement with the arts during the Cold War and newly uncovered archival evidence of the CIA involvement with the writers’ organisation which is still thriving today, International PEN. Our argument is that the state security engagement with the arts and literature is an important exemplar of what we term the influence of public education by often covert means, which may derogatively be referred to as propaganda, or what Jameson called the ‘political unconscious’. From the archival evidence arising from CIA engagement with the arts we derive three principles of intellectual framing for analysis of the critical aesthetic of philosophy of education: (1) the political aesthetic of security and literature; (2) cultural citizenship as security; (3) the educational ecosystem of literature as securitisation. In sum, we suggest philosophers of education sharpen their treatments of literature in education with more realistic and informed assessments of the aesthetic in political and security contexts. Methodologically, by implication, we think we also make the case for philosophers of education to make greater and more frequent use of primary documentation, particularly archival sources in order to be able to substantiate such sharpened treatments.

This edition also includes a line-by-line gloss and historical introduction.

Over the last twenty five years, scholarship on Early Modern women writers has produced editions and criticisms, both on various groups and individual authors. The work on Mary Wroth has been particularly impressive at integrating her poetry, prose and drama into the canon. This in turn has led to comparative studies that link Wroth to a number of male and female writers, including of course, William Shakespeare. At the same time no single volume has attempted a comprehensive comparative analysis. This book sets out to explore the ways in which Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation.

Offers ten essays representing various ways of interpreting Shakespeare's plays"Much Ado About Nothing" and "The Taming of the Shrew."

Focusing on issues from the contemporary critical reaction to women's drama and theauthorship and performance histories of the plays to the longstanding and ...

A discussion of how Hero is memorialised in the play with specific reference to the funeral scene and the choice of Delhi as a setting.

This essay sets out to explore the ways in which Margaret Cavendish, in particular, engaged with contemporary legal discourse in order to expose earlier patriarchal prejudices. Initially, however, it is essential to describe briefly the history of rape legislature in order to understand how this double identity – force and theft – developed.

This collection is the first book-length study of the writings and influence ofElizabeth Cary, author of the first original play by a woman to be printed in ...

This book explores the network of social, political and spiritual connections in north west England during Shakespeare's formative years.

Mary Stewart's Arthurian novels are some of the most enjoyed twentieth-century versions of the legends.She is one of the most important women writers to address herself to the stories of Arthur.

Liam Bell, Amanda Finella and Marion Wynne Davies