"Dramatic Difference explores closet drama's unique and dynamic position in early modern culture. Intellectually, geographically, and ideologically removed from the public spaces of the theater, closet drama achieves critical distance from theater's institutions and practices.

This distance allows authors who adopt the genre to analyze the foundational conditions and circumstances of dramatic form and practice - the construction of political, theatrical, and domestic subjectivity, relationships between public and private modes of writing, the boundaries between the court and the theater, between aristocratic or elite culture and mass culture.

Given the often crucial role of gender in establishing and policing the categories, closet drama provides twentieth-century feminist scholars and critics of the theater a sensitive instrument for examining the difference gender makes when women writers join their male peers in authoring dramatic texts.".

"Dramatic Difference offers an important contribution to the study of early modern women writers, and at the same time invites scholars and critics of the theater to reassess the place of closet drama - and the presence of women dramatists - in the early modern dramatic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.