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Marta Straznicky. Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 175 pp. $75.00.
Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700 historicizes and contextualizes early modern women's closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. Marta Straznicky's study reveals that these plays are "permeated with traditions of commercial drama," grounded in an "aristocratic ... private" literary culture (1). Closet drama, an alternative tradition, was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Utilizing texts by Jane Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Finch, Straznicky illuminates their works and authorial positions in relation to concepts of playreading and privacy. Further, she investigates the texts' physical properties, either in print or manuscript, and suggests such detail marks the plays' theatricality. The Introduction notes feminist scholarship's role in collapsing the boundaries between public and private works; Straznickys study foregrounds the "extrinsic circumstances that have either prevented or facilitated" (2) closet play performance. She argues, "understanding the cultural position of closet drama and its accommodation of female authorship" must address the private works and "public" theatre (3).
Straznicky's first chapter, "Privacy, playreading, and performance," establishes that the culture viewed privacy as a "construct rather than a social fact" (7). She examines the playreading tradition at court, in academia, and in religious instruction and suggests this dramatic expression endows the "acts of reading and writing with the force of public action" (14). Playreading is a type of "public engagement"; to that end, closet drama "participates in the construction of such a concept" (18). As Straznicky notes, playreading practices engendered writers reluctant for public exposure but intent on reaching an elite literary and political audience. Their plays "focus on tensions and points of contact between public and private realm in a way that simultaneously involves retreat and engagement in public culture (3).
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