Romantic drama has become such a vital force in early nineteenth-century studies that it can no longer be ignored by Romanticists. Studies published during the last decade have opened a number of investigatory avenues for re-thinking the importance of the theatre and drama in the Romantic period. In re-evaluating the importance of drama and through the recovery of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers, recent scholarship has increasingly pointed to the contributions made by women playwrights, particularly those around 1800, as a neglected but significant script to be written into contemporary conceptualizations of Romanticism. Women's various theatre/drama activities complicate the role drama in general has come to occupy in Romanticism. When we "inscript" women playwrights, Romanticism as an historical period, characterized by identifiable literary, conceptual, and ideological patterns, requires substantial revision. While the reconsideration of Romantic drama and the recuperation of women playwrights have not exclusively and independently stimulated conceptual and paradigmatic changes in Romantic-period studies, these new directions of inquiry have complicated and expanded the frameworks of cultural and literary reference in exciting ways. In this essay, I will consider five broadly defined paradigm shifts in our thinking about Romanticism that are occurring due to increased attention to women playwrights: Many claims that we currently make about Romantic drama (or perhaps even Romanticism) would not be nearly as convincing without the addition of the rich and diverse discursive and participatory contributions made by women playwrights: scripts to be performed and read, theatre/dramatic theories, on-stage performances and theatre attendance, drama criticism/theatre reviews, theatre management and script editing, promotions and censorship, influences and literary inscriptions. If, as some have argued, Romanticism's center stage, its cultural and identificatory nucleus, is its drama, women dramatists and women's theatrical activities play a leading role. The inclusion of women playwrights in our scholarship has helped to expose the pervasive theatricality of the Romantic period and has helped to complicate the binary notions of public and private spheres culturally inscripted during the eighteenth century. (See Tracy C. Davis' article in this issue.) With the inclusion of women playwrights, our constructions of theatrical, Romantic, and women's literary histories must necessarily undergo revision; these histories are, we have discovered, dialogical and interdependent. (See Nora Nachumi's article in this issue.) The inclusion of women playwrights has forced us to revise theatre history and reconsider Romantic-period drama. In Closet Stages, Catherine B. Burroughs situates Joanna Baillie, for example, as a central figure in women's theatre history, challenging conventional descriptions of Romantic drama's antitheatricality. Burroughs argues that including women playwrights not only affects how we perceive Romanticism, but also how we reconstruct women's literary history. She demonstrates how vital late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women's theatre contributions are to our revisions of women's literary history. Women playwrights are, Burroughs shows, the foremothers of contemporary performance theory. When our theatrical and women's literary histories include women's performance theory, we are encouraged to rethink the limiting dichotomy assigned by former narratives of theatrical history that has led us to read Romantic drama as written for either "closet" or "stage." (See Tom Crochunis' article in this issue.) Works and activities by female playwrights help to explain the dissolution of a public sphere, especially after 1800, that had been more clearly defined in eighteenth-century discourses about gendered behaviors. Women playwrights' contributions blur dichotomies (closet/stage, public/private, popular/serious drama), opening the performance/closet paradigm to exciting revisionary work on Romantic drama. By reading women playwrights, we have learned to read all Romantic drama differently—a paradigm shift of enormous significance. If women playwrights around 1800 prompt revision of theatre history, their impact has been even more important …