The Reformation in England brought about massive upheavals that altered the religious landscape of the country, including the dissolution of the country's convents. Either razed or repurposed, convents disappeared from England; only those with the resources and determination to enter convents on the Continent could still become nuns. Yet, at the level of representation, the convent continued to stand as an alternative to marriage. In countless texts, I show, we find a novice poised between these two options. The novice, for the sake of this project, is both a woman about to enter a convent and an ingénue; she has yet to take on an adult identity and can be classified neither as nun nor wife. Neither this nor that, she is both an ambiguous figure and a surprisingly common one in post-reformation texts.

This dissertation examines the afterlives of convents and novices in early modern English dramatic texts, including staged plays, dialogues, and closet dramas. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta, Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious, Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy The Rover, and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both a Catholic treatise promoting women's entrance into European convents and a proto-pornographic exposé of such convents. The texts slide between comedy and tragedy, romance and debate, drama and narrative. Each of these dramatic texts incorporates convent features such as grates, turnstiles, and fortified walls that paradoxically invite and repel outsiders' interest. Simultaneously depicted as fortifications and vulnerabilities, these devices, built into both buildings and plots, structurally enable the novice's agency, which is always measured by her ability to imagine alternatives to marriage. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation. The novice, positioned between the choices of convent and marriage, becomes a figure in whom audience members and readers might have recognized their own ambiguous affiliations and longing for alternatives.