Chapter 12 - The first female dramatists

Summary

Then she usurpes upon anothers right,

That seekes to be by publike language grace't:

And though her thoughts reflect with purest light,

Her mind if not peculiar is not chast.

The woman playwright's accession to ‘public language’ is, as this quotation from the first original published play in England by a woman, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam (1613), illustrates, almost inevitably attended by animadversions on her chastity. It is not language itself, but specifically its ‘publicity’ (the refusal to keep the mind ‘peculiar’, that is private or to itself) that is at issue here for women as writers. Yet, despite this consistent equation of public display with public shame, the state and status of women's playwrighting undergoes dramatic transformation between the beginning of our period, the early sixteenth century, and its close, the late seventeenth century. The earliest play discussed, Jane Lumley's Iphigenia in Aulis, is a manuscript translation of Euripides, probably produced as a schoolgirl's exercise around 1550 by an aristocratic daughter and available as part of a manuscript volume of writings, otherwise in Latin, which appear to have been presented to her father, Lord Arundel, through her husband, Baron John Lumley.