SOURCE: Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. “‘She Never Recovered Her Senses’: Roxana and Dramatic Representations of Women at Oxbridge in the Elizabethan Age.” In Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, edited by Barbara K. Gold, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, pp. 223-46. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Richmond-Garza highlights the thematic treatment of the woman and the Oriental in Elizabethan academic plays such as Alabaster's Roxana.

Neoclassical theories of tragedy privilege the plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their careful observations of neo-Aristotelian decorum in language, characterization, and staging. Certainly the praise accorded to John Dryden's experiments in the forms of classical tragedy has been quite substantial, and yet the earlier plays on the same theme often suffer from a scholarly love of restraint and measured heroic elegance. Even, as in the case of the Neo-Latin...