Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700

Marta Straznicky's Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700 is an important study of women's writing in general and of closet drama in particular.It will be important, too, to historians of early modern printed stage plays and of reading practices in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Britain.Elegant in concept and execution, Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama demonstrates that even while (perhaps because) women's and men's social roles differed in many ways in the years between 1550 and 1700, any literary history that ignores early modern women's closet drama is incomplete.In her introductory chapter-indeed throughout the book-Straznicky challenges the idea that there is a radical difference between reading early modern closet dramas and reading plays written for performance on so-called "private" or "public" stages.As closet dramas were published in manuscript or print, familiar "textual cues" such as dramatis personae and stage directions invited readers to imagine them in performance.So, too, texts of early modern stage plays were printed for readers who, even if they had never seen them performed, could, with the aid of similar signals in the printed books, experience those plays in their minds' eyes.As Straznicky also shows, in the early modern period, "writers who [were] either unwilling or unable to speak in a 'public' voice [could] emphasize or exploit the exclusivity of closet drama to restrict their intended readership while at the same time addressing a broad literary and political culture.Webster and Jonson did so by choice; their female counterparts by necessity."She presents Jane Lumley's Iphigenia as the work of a highly educated woman who (unlike translators such as Margaret Roper and Anne Cooke) chooses "an entirely secular theme … [and] manuscript rather than print circulation" for a play best understood "in the tradition of private household entertainment" within a social system that "identif[ies] nobility with pleasure and privacy."Her discussion of Mariam describes Elizabeth Cary's play as printed for "a select and educated readership"-the same people who read Senecan dramas such as Mary Sidney's Antonius, Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra, and Thomas Kyd's Cornelia.With a detailed examination of the printed text of Mariam, Straznicky argues that as with plays by Daniel, Marston, and Webster, the stationers who printed Mariam carefully packaged it as a "literary" text.Its two issues were targeted "to an educated public of play readers" and to "a domestic literary circle."One of many effects of this argument is the revelation that Mariam was in its own time anything but a marginal text by a woman whose gender made "real" participation in literary culture impossible.In sharp contrast to Lumley's manuscript and Cary's printed book are the two volumes of Margaret Cavendish's plays that "deliberately put the author's privacy into public circulation."Seeking a large and diverse audience, Cavendish is here seen as inheriting a system developed in the Civil War years, when plays were (generally) not performed, but printed.Appreciating Cavendish's very real skill, Straznicky

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