A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (review)

A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. By Alison Findlay. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999; pp. x + 206. $55.95 cloth, $20.95 paper.

In A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama, Alison Findlay takes the familiar problem of how contemporary scholars might approach the absence of women in the production and performance of drama on the English Renaissance stage in an unusual direction. This author uses period writing by women to "create a doorway through which a historicist feminist perspective on drama can be constructed" (5). Findlay compares the ideas in women's texts on several key topics of the period to the same themes found in plays by mainstream writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, as well as less famous male playwrights. She has also included discussion of two plays by women that were never performed on the public stage: Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam and Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victorie.

The study is divided into five subject areas which Findlay describes as "pressure points . . . in which traditional definitions of woman and her position in Renaissance culture are being challenged" (7) by women writers: biblical authority and the staging of Christian beliefs; the revenge tragedy and the fear of female agency; sexual desire, romance, and the trope of urban liberty; the household space and female confinement; and feminine interventions into masculine history. In each case, she uses the topic to establish broad cultural ideas of the English Renaissance against which she can compare excerpts from the era's plays and a variety of primary documents by men and women. Via this methodology, Findlay extends her analysis to suggest the ways female spectators might have read dramatic texts performed on the playhouse stage. Most of the writings by women in the discussion are not about plays or even about the playhouse itself. They are, instead, about the specific concern of each chapter and thus present a rich variety of genres ranging from private sources such as letters and diaries to published (and therefore public) poems, pamphlets, and other texts.

By placing texts by women alongside those of male playwrights while focusing on key issues of the period, Findlay offers a method to examine the participation of women in a public theatre where they could not write, act, or administer, but where they had agency as consumers. She is, in effect, attempting to overturn the traditional view of the female playhouse spectator as a silent and passive recipient of the event in order to re-envision her as a dynamic force in the production of Renaissance drama.

One of the dangers of such a study is obvious: most, if not all, writing by women that has survived this period was produced by educated women of the middle and upper classes. The few women whose voices are heard discussing Findlay's themes cannot be assumed to represent all women in Renaissance London. A more subtle problem to be negotiated by Findlay is the women's own reluctance to challenge patriarchal authority outright. While men of the period regularly wrote documents dictating women's behavior, women did not often return the favor by offering advice about how men should act. However, since the women writers do tend to focus on their individual responses to patriarchal structures and the male regulation of female behavior, Findlay uncovers documents on both sides rich in details about women's lives and thoughts, which allows her to find much material for comparison with the plays by men.

To give one example of Findlay's arguments, in her first chapter she examines how religion, so central to life in the period, emerges as a discussion point in writing about and by women. Renaissance Christianity presented oppositional figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary as extremes of negative and positive female conduct. Both men and women used these "tropes of chastity and passion" (14) to judge and construct female behavior in the documents Findlay includes. Three plays by men provide...