About the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, and about the role of gender in the influence of this on later dramatists

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Brings the voices of Roman slaves in early comedy to the history of theater and the history of slavery.

The first full-length study of Shakespeare's Roman plays offers fresh, detailed readings and identifies new sources which are analyzed from a historical feminist perspective.

Explores how cultural memory theory intersects with the literature, politics, history, and archaeology of Republican and Augustan Rome.