Dr Semple's seminar for EN3003 is Women in Renaissance Drama: While women did not act in the public theatres in Renaissance England, the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries stage fascinating and memorable female characters. And frequently, early modern plays appealed directly to women theatregoers. This seminar examines the depiction and understanding of women, their lives and deaths, as staged in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies and comedies. In the early modern period, as now, women occupied a multitude of roles, and were labelled and categorised according to sexual status, class, occupation, wealth, religion, and race. This seminar focuses on plays where women take centre-stage as title characters and which pay particular attention to identities such as virgin, wife, daughter, sister, mother, widow, rebel, superior, idol, lover, worker, whore, aggressor, and victim. Using primary sources, the plays’ female figures will be considered in relation to a selection of historical, social, and cultural contexts. Analyses of these characters will also be informed by critical readings, in feminist theory for example, on early modern drama.