"This is an edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage, and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time." "The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing, and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture."--BOOK JACKET.