Royalist Women Writers aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalized. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.

Brings together three much-discussed seventeenth-century plays in an accessible and scholarly edition for the first time, allowing for comparative and contextual studies A substantial co-authored introduction addresses questions of elite female culture in the early modern period and the emergence of the professional female actor All three editors have an established reputation in the field of seventeenth-century scholarship, and have produced pioneering work on elite female culture and the stage The volume is innovative in terms of its attention to questions of gender and performance as they are staged and explored in seventeenth-century drama Offers varied examples of theatrical practice and performance while also considering lines of interaction and influence between the writers and plays discussed