1550-1700
From 1994 to 2000 Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright and Gweno Williams co-directed a research project designed to stage drama by ‘Shakespeare’s sisters’, early modern female playwrights whose work was deemed ‘unperformed, not designed for performance’ and therefore ‘unperformable’.
The project produced articles, including:
‘”The Play is Ready to be Acted”: Women and Dramatic Production 1570-1670’, in Women’s Writing, 6 (1), special issue on ‘Women Dramatists of the Early Modern Period’, ed. Marion Wynne-Davies (1999), pp. 129-48.
a book:
Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright with Gweno Williams, Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (Macmillan Press, 2000)
and an award-winning DVD:
Women Dramatists 1550-1670: Plays in Performance, Women and Dramatic Production in association with Lancaster University Television, Lancaster (1999), International Award Winner for Outstanding Collaborative Project, 2000.
Video extracts from the productions
1994 Production of The Concealed Fancies (1645) by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley.
1999 Staged Reading of Mary Sidney Herbert’s The Tragedie of Antonie (1592) staged at Hoghton Tower. Watch extract 1 and extract 2
2000 Extract from A Pastoral (1645) by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackey, filmed at Hoghton Tower.
Alison Findlay went on to write Playing Spaces: venue and setting in early women’s drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), a site-specific study of where early women’s plays were produced.