Joyce Green MacDonald – författare

Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

This anthology of four plays written or performed between 1662 and 1677 offers a unique snapshot of the diverse nature of Restoration drama by women. Restoration Women’s Drama collects four Restoration plays by women: the highly acclaimed Katherine Philips, the successful professional Aphra Behn, the confidently original Margaret Cavendish, and the obscure pioneer Frances Boothby. This anthology includes Behn’s only tragedy as well as the first printed edition of Boothby’s Marcelia, the first play by a woman to be professionally staged in London, demonstrating the range of early modern drama produced by women in this period. An excellent introduction, it is poised to stimulate new discussions of women’s authorship, theatrical knowledge, and literary affinities. Each play has been edited afresh, and each has been modernized and annotated to facilitate reading, teaching, and performance possibilities.

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters’ almost complete absence from Shakespeare’s plays.