Christina Luckyj is a professor of English, gender, and women’s studies at Dalhousie University. She is the author of “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England and The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide. Niamh J. O’Leary is an associate professor of English at Xavier University.

• AcknowledgmentsEditors’ IntroductionPart 1. The Politics of Women’s “Domestic” Alliances1. Distaff Power: Plebeian Female Alliances in Early Modern EnglandBernard Capp2. Between Women: Slanderous Speech and Neighborly Bonds in Henry Porter’s The Two Angry Women of AbingtonRonda Arab3. The Political Role of the Gossip in Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women Megan Inbody4. Virtual and Actual Female Alliance in The Maid’s Tragedy and The Tamer TamedNiamh J. O’Leary5. Failed Alliances and Miserable Marriages in Katherine Philips’s Letters Elizabeth HodgsonPart 2. Women’s Alliances and the Politics of the Court6. Performing Patronage, Crafting Alliances: Ladies’ Lotteries in English PageantryElizabeth Zeman Kolkovich7. Tyrants, Love, and Ladies’ Eyes: The Politics of Female-Boy Alliance on the Jacobean StageRoberta Barker8. Her Advocate to the Loudest: Arbella Stuart and Female Courtly Alliance in The Winter’s TaleAlicia Tomasian9. Not Sparing Kings: Aemilia Lanyer and the Religious Politics of Female Alliance Christina LuckyjPart 3. The Politics of Female Kinship10. Shakespeare Revises Juliet, the Nurse, and Lady Capulet in Romeo and JulietSteven Urkowitz11. Crossing Generations: Female Alliances and Dynastic Power in Anne Clifford’s Great Books of Record Jessica L. Malay12. Exilic Inspiration and the Captive Life: The Literary / Political Alliances of the Cavendish Sisters Jennifer Higginbotham13. AfterwordSusan Frye and Karen RobertsonContributors Index

“An excellent exploration of the ways that politics-writ large-resonated and were represented in literary and dramatic productions in early modern England. Together the authors make a compelling case that the political dimensions of women’s alliances are deserving of more scholarly attention, as they figured largely in the intellectual and cultural worlds of the period and as they have been, up to this point, underexplored by scholars.”-Amanda Herbert, assistant director at the Folger Institute and author of Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain