This course examines how gender representations are structured in seventeenth-century English drama. The basic methodological premise is that sexual relationships and marriage are the terrain par excellence in which power relationships are registered, hence the drama’s intense preoccupation with these issues. The aim of the course is to demonstrate the ideological and widely cultural shifts which emerge in gender roles and positions in the course of the century. The context is the increasing distinction between the private and public spheres, which prepares the ground for the middle-class privileging of the former over the latter in eighteenth-century England.