THREE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PLAYS ON WOMEN AND PERFORMANCE. 'The Wild-Goose Chase' by John Fletcher (1621); 'The Bird in a Cage' by James Shirley (1633); 'The Convent of Pleasure' by Margaret Cavendish (1668).

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original black cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. With a black and white frontispiece. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, with a touch of bumping to the extremities, the cloth bright and fresh. The contents, with a small pen mark and a finger mark to the bottom edge of the closed text block, are otherwise clean throughout, and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the near fine, lightly rubbed and creased dustwrapper, which is without fading, loss, or tears.

'This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering 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' (publisher's blurb).