Women’s Tragedy in the Romantic Age: Questioning English, Italian and Spanish Theatre and Drama from a Feminist Perspective

This thesis aims at rediscovering Romantic women playwrights in English, Italian and Spanish literature, and their tragedies, analysed through a feminist critical approach. Starting from a comparative study of the Romantic age and Romantic women’s writings, an overview of female writers’ role and contribution to the development of Romantic literature will be presented. This fundamental examination of the socio-cultural context will be followed by an in-depth analysis of the theatrical environments, deepening the issue of women’s various roles. The relationship between women playwrights and the stage will be tackled, investigating how these women managed to appropriate the “high” genre of tragedy. A focus on the changes that tragedy underwent during the Romantic age will be offered so as to explore in which ways women challenged the canons of the genre. The core of the thesis will include an overview of English, Italian and Spanish women dramatists and a brief analysis of some of their most popular tragedies. The tragedies analysed have been chosen according to themes in common, in order to demonstrate if and how these women used playwriting to address specific issues and to affirm their own agency and subjectivity. Among female playwrights’ dramatic production, three tragedies have been selected for a close reading which takes into account a variety of aspects. The three dramatists’ lives and previous literary production will also be examined in order to contextualise their tragedies and the themes they tackled. By doing so, it will be possible to highlight the reasons that led them to enter the male domains of theatre and tragedy. This analysis will be conducted through a feminist critical methodology that includes historical, literary, philosophical and political theories developed in the last decades, adjusted and contextualised so that they could be useful critical tools in the Romantic literary context.