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In 1642 an ordinance closed the theatres of England. Critics and historians have assumed that the edict was to be firm and inviolate. Susan Wiseman challenges this assumption and argues that the period 1640 to 1660 was not a gap in the production and performance of drama nor a blank space between 'Renaissance drama' and the 'Restoration stage'. Rather, throughout the period, writers focused instead on a range of dramas with political perspectives, from republican to royalist. This group included the short pamphlet dramas of the 1640s and the texts produced by the writers of the 1650s, such as William Davenant, Margaret Cavendish and James Shirley. In analysing the diverse forms of dramatic production of the 1640s and 1650s, Wiseman reveals the political and generic diversity produced by the changes in dramatic production, and offers insights into the theatre of the Civil War.

Women's theoretical exclusion from the political sphere generated not silence but highly developed linguistic and figurative responses in seventeenth century England. This chapter analyses women's involvement in politics by examining the use of the example in seventeenth century texts. It concentrates on exemplarity because of its pervasive presence in early modern writing, because of the tensions it sometimes generated for readers, and because of the way it shows gender at work in the interpretative acts of readers and writers. Although the seventeenth century is often characterised as a time when exemplarity became synonymous with mere authority, it might be more accurate to say that the seventeenth century had its own debates on exemplarity. Rather than being ‘merely’ ornament, the examples in an early modern text gave the reader a route, but one which, by the seventeenth century at least, not only was uncertain but might be experienced as such.

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