Dramatic difference
Subtitle: gender, class, and genre in the early modern closet drama
By: Karen Raber.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Newark; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 338
Subjects: Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of, 1561-1621.; Greville, Fulke, Baron Brooke, 1554-1628.; Cary, Elizabeth, Lady, 1585 or 6-1639.; Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?-1674 -- Dramatic works.; English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism.; Verse drama, English -- History and criticism.; English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism.; Literary form -- History -- 17th century.; Social classes in literature.; Sex role in literature.
Description: "Dramatic Difference explores closet drama's unique and dynamic position in early modern culture. Intellectually, geographically, and ideologically removed from the public spaces of the theater, closet drama achieves critical distance from theater's institutions and practices.

This distance allows authors who adopt the genre to analyze the foundational conditions and circumstances of dramatic form and practice - the construction of political, theatrical, and domestic subjectivity, relationships between public and private modes of writing, the boundaries between the court and the theater, between aristocratic or elite culture and mass culture.

Given the often crucial role of gender in establishing and policing the categories, closet drama provides twentieth-century feminist scholars and critics of the theater a sensitive instrument for examining the difference gender makes when women writers join their male peers in authoring dramatic texts.".

"Dramatic Difference offers an important contribution to the study of early modern women writers, and at the same time invites scholars and critics of the theater to reassess the place of closet drama - and the presence of women dramatists - in the early modern dramatic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-309) and index.