As part of the excellent Ashgate series on early modern drama, this book had a lot to live up to. Pilar Cuder-Domínguez has managed this admirably, which is hardly surprising given that she has already produced some of the most illuminating work on this subject over recent years. It has been structured so as to incorporate the main aspects of women and drama during the Stuart period, starting in 1613 with the first original tragedy by an Englishwoman (Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam) and ending a century later with the folio edition of Anne Finch’s works. This is also roughly designated as covering the Stuart dynasty and a specific period of drama.

The book starts with a chapter on genre, in which the author situates the concept of tragedy within its immediate historical contexts, although it is surprising that there is not a counterpart section on comedy: the concern with tragedy could have been indicated via a different title. Cuder-Domínguez explains how the definition of tragedy at this time came from Aristotle’s Poetics but was also filtered via numerous other sources to become what Rebecca Bushnell has called “a mongrel genre” (3). Nevertheless, tragedy became the most highly regarded genre of the seventeenth century. Moreover, the genre’s privileging of the nobility and the state cast men as the central characters, while women were automatically marginalized. Charting changes in critical thought on tragedy, and the influence of new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and postcolonialism, Cuder-Domínguez opts for a redrawing of early modern tragedy, showing how women were deeply involved in its implementation and even helped to redefine it as a genre. This is particularly true of closet drama, often used by female writers, where the play-reading aspects of a work become paramount, leading to the use of long speeches, choruses, and summaries of the action. However, while there is often an awareness of the connections between different tragic forms, as “between the Senecan tragedy of Elizabeth Cary at the beginning of the century and the Stoic ethos of Catharine Trotter’s towards it end” (9), more perhaps could have been done to explain the fifty-year gap between the work of Cary and that of Margaret Cavendish during the Interregnum.

The section on Elizabeth Cary thoughtfully explores the subtleties of race, class, and gender in The Tragedy of Mariam. The author argues that “Mariam’s Stoic passivity and lack of drive serve … to highlight the agentive power of the other, more deviant women”; it is these latter “‘monsters’ that enforce a combined challenge of the gendered, racialized state of Palestine” (27). The next chapter, on Margaret Cavendish, correctly charts the critical shift between stressing the Duchess of Newcastle’s originality (although this is undoubtedly true) and the way her work intersected with that of her contemporaries. Cuder-Domínguez analyzes three plays —The Unnatural Tragedie, Youths Glory and Deaths Banquet, and Bell in Campo—and concludes that “Cavendish’s plays … challenge generic labels,” often resulting in “come-tragedy” (40) with a comic resolution.

Because of the changes Charles II brought about after his restoration in 1660, the rest of the book mainly turns to the commercial theater, rather than the more “private” writing of the earlier period. Cuder-Domínguez starts, intriguingly, by linking together the lesser-known Frances Boothby (and others) with the much-anthologized Aphra Behn. This has the effect of placing Behn within a longer tradition of women’s writing, while also stressing the innovative quality of women in the professional theater. In their work, Boothby and Behn present the audience with contrasting female characters, as Cary had done in Mariam. However, both face a new challenge: “the contrast now takes on new meaning as deriving from the different demands of tragedy (female passivity) and comedy (female agency)” (58). This Behn does by destabilizing stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, as in late plays like The Widdow Ranter.

Two chapters are given over to the “Female Wits”: “Ariadne,” Mary Pix, Delarivier Manley, and Catherine Trotter. Cuder-Domínguez notes that the latter three writers started their theatrical career by writing about “exotic faraway kingdoms” but eventually moved “towards English history for their source materials” (93). Pix’s Queen Catharine drew on the War of the Roses, importantly deviating from previous conventions of focusing on male figures at the center of history. In this way, “Pix’s ‘heavy English tale’ is imbued with a feminized, Whig perspective that rewrites the history play’s heroic discourse and ‘writes back’ to Shakespeare in his own realm” (98). Manley also blends together the political and the domestic worlds of her female characters in plays like Lucius, the First Christian King of Britain, but she provides a more topical comment on fears of a Jacobite rebellion in 1707, after the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne. Trotter, too, used tragedy to lament the social disempowerment for women, as in Fatal Friendship and, like Cavendish, imagines a moral impregnable female ruler in The Unhappy Penitent.

The book concludes with the last female Stuart writers, Jane Wiseman and Anne Finch. While both are noted for other forms of writing, there is a useful coda here in terms of their plays. Wiseman’s Antiochus the Great and Finch’s The Triumphs of Love and Innocence and Aristomenes; or, the Royal Shepherd engage, like Manley’s work, with the Tory/Whig tensions at the time. In particular, as maid of honor to James II’s second wife, Mary of Modena, Finch’s work expresses her “anxieties concerning the Stuart succession, the exile of James II, and her own—personal and familial—Jacobite sympathies” (124). Apart from the slight quibble about the unsignaled emphasis on tragedy in the title, this is a commendable piece of research, which does much to extend our knowledge of theater under the Stuarts.