DRAMATIC WRITING WAS a common mode of literary expression for a variety of members of the Cavendish family and literary coterie. Prior to the closure of the commercial theatres in 1642, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle had exerted considerable influence on the London theatrical scene. In addition to acting as patron to a range of influential authors, including Ben Jonson, James Shirley, and William Davenant, Newcastle also contributed to The Varietie and The Country Captaine, two comedies produced by the King's Men. Newcastle also commissioned two of Ben Jonson's masques, Love's Welcome at Bolsover and The King's Entertainment at Welbeck, for performance at his two estates. However, the Cavendish family's innovations in dramatic writing extended beyond the commercial theatres and Newcastle's patronage network. Among the prolific outputs of Newcastle's second wife, Margaret Cavendish, is a group of dramas in a range of genres written during the Civil War and Interregnum periods. Newcastle's eldest daughters, Jane and Elizabeth, also participated in dramatic writing by including a pastoral masque and a courtship comedy among a collection of writings and occasional poems that are collected together in manuscript. Written following the closure of the commercial theatres in 1642, as well as representing relatively rare examples of women's intervention in a male-dominated literary milieu, the dramatic works of the women in the Cavendish family serve to complicate the picture of the development of drama in the early modern period. Because of their distance from popular theatrical culture, the dramatic outputs of the women of the Cavendish family can be identified as closet dramas. In scholarship on early modern literature, the term "closet drama" has come to denote a type of play intended not for the commercial theatres but rather for private performance or recitations from members of elite coteries, as well as for print.

Using the Cavendish sisters' play The Concealed Fancies as my case study, I want to highlight some of the specific strategies employed by the authors in the development of their closet drama.