Discuss the dramatic challenges inherent in the feminist playwrights attempts to reclaim forgotten voices in womens history

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8. Discuss the dramatic challenges inherent in the feminist playwright's attempts to 'reclaim forgotten voices in women's history'.

When considering the challenges faced by feminist playwrights in their attempts to revive the forgotten voices in women's history, one play, Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale, stands out as an obvious choice for study. Given that the play deals literally with the subject of the female voice, the loss of this voice, and the challenge of regaining it, it is arguably the perfect starting point from which to examine the subject of the female voice in theatre.

The fact that the play also deals with an historical female voice makes it an even more appropriate piece to consider. Commissioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company and first published in 1989, the play is an adaptation of Sophocles' lost tragedy Tereus, in which Tereus, king of Thrace, rapes his sister-in-law Philomela, and then cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone. Philomela manages to tell her sister, and Tereus' wife, Procne what happened and they then take a gruesome revenge on him, and the play takes a feminist view of the tragedy.

However, to describe