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Reviewed by:
  • Women on Stage in Stuart Drama
  • Jeanne Willcoxon
Women on Stage in Stuart Drama. By Sophie Tomlinson . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. xiv + 294. $85.00 cloth.

In Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, Sophie Tomlinson combats the dominant view that women as [End Page 537] actors in Stuart England were necessarily vilified and, therefore, eventually dismissible as presences in theatre history (a historiography determined by William Prynne's famous invectives). Instead, she places these performances, along with innovations in how women were written, on a theatrical and literary continuum leading directly to the appearance of the Restoration actress on England's stages. Tomlinson argues that "a poetics of female performance" originated in the Stuart masques and pastoral entertainments, inaugurating "a shift in the conception of female subjectivity" (3) and "accompanied by a new focus on female expressiveness and a woman's articulation of sexual desire" (14). Through the presence of women as patrons and performers in the Stuart masques, Tomlinson writes, a "new sexual realism" emerged and then evolved on the stage of early modern England (14).

Tomlinson's revisionist history joins those of, among others, Clare McManus and Leeds Barroll in reexamining and recovering the body and work of Queen Anna and her court on the masquing stage, but then takes the much-needed step of continuing that analysis through the Caroline court and into the early Restoration. Heeding the call for a new poetics that does not erase or suppress the contributions of women, Tomlinson, primarily through a literary analysis, locates the emerging subjectivity of woman in her presence on the courtly stage and in the often veiled enunciation of desire and independence in the texts of the courtly, private, and public theatres. While I applaud Tomlinson's project, she often ignores the culturally specific construction of those representations. By situating her textual interpretations within the sociopolitical world of early modern England, Tomlinson would temper, complicate, and deepen her argument.

In the first chapter, the author argues that Queen Anna's masques had the potential "to refashion concepts of gender" by placing the female body at the center of the performance (19). Her analysis of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones's innovative production of The Masque of Blackness (1605) seems at first to take the path advocated by Clare McManus by focusing on the nontextual, physical elements of the performance (dance and movement) in which the contributions of women could occur in early modern England. However, Tomlinson engages with the performative through the textual: how Jonson's text envisions or records those movements, which necessarily limits her analysis. For example, she conducts her exploration of the masque dances primarily through the Neoplatonic imagery of Jonson's songs, ignoring Skiles Howard's recent work on the material practice of courtly dancing during the early modern period.

Tomlinson is at her best when minutely dissecting the text, as in the chapter 2 examination of three Caroline pastoral entertainments: Tempe Restored (1632), The Shepherd's Paradise (1632), and A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle [Comus] (1634). She argues that these productions "represent new forms of feminine self-consciousness" (78), citing not only the writers' innovative fashioning of desire and intellect in feminine discourse, but also the presence and newly found voice of the female performers. Chapter 3 continues her focus on how language shifts and forms feminine identity, moving to an analysis of three Caroline comedies: The New Inn (1629), Hyde Park (1632), and The Lady-Errant (1633–1635?). These plays, Tomlinson states, "envision an expansion of women's social and political agency" (113). Although written and performed by men (except, possibly, The Lady-Errant), the female characters' use of language announced an autonomy of thought and desire that would then be reiterated and developed in the witty repartee of the Restoration comedy actress. There are insightful, detailed analyses of the plays, but several intriguing connections that would deepen and contextualize her examination dangle insufficiently explored (for example, women's expanding role in literary culture and the updated 1632 publication of The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights).

Chapter 4 explores the representation of women in Caroline tragedy through the themes of "sexual passion; madness as performance; and...

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