Nancy Cotton (Essay Date 1998)

SOURCE: Cotton, Nancy. "Women Playwrights in England: Renaissance Noblewomen." In Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594-1998, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, pp. 32-46. London: Routledge, 1998.

In the following essay, Cotton provides a history of England's early women playwrights.

The first recorded woman playwright in England was Katherine of Sutton, abbess of Barking nunnery in the fourteenth century. Between 1363 and 1376 the abbess rewrote the Easter dramatic offices because the people attending the paschal services were becoming increasingly cool in their devotions (' deuocione frigessere '). Wishing to excite devotion at such a crowded, important festival (' desiderans … fidelium deuocionem ad tam celebrem celebracionem magis excitare '), Lady Katherine produced unusually lively adaptations of the traditional liturgical plays.1 Particularly interesting is her elevatio crucis, one of the few surviving liturgical plays that contains a representation of the harrowing of...