Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama ed. by Katherine M. Quinsey (review)

458 LETTERS IN CANADA 1997 on his expectation of the conversion of the Jews as a precondition of the Second Coming, while for Edward Taylor, the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles coincided with Christ's birth, and was the very image of both the Messiah's return for Jews and of the Incarnation enunciated by StJohn, in the union of the two natures, divine and human, in Christ. What are noticeable are the many parallels between Jewish and Christian exegesis, as Christians freely borrowed from the Rabbis, and as both rejoiced in the display of an associative wealth of metaphor and symbol, which take the reader back and forth across the centuries. Despite the Puritans' ferocious No Popery, this is the best sort of ecumenical religion, in which Christians were copyists of the very Jews they despised, and the Puritans were heirs to the very Catholicism which they rejected. In this, Munk's work is like the scholarship on poetry in which the scholar elucidates the poet's saturation in the linguistic waters of an age-old tradition. Thus by a paradox, the book employs modem historical criticism to recover the freshness and vitality of an older method of biblical exegesis which rose above the literat in a quest for ultimate spiritual truths, and so brought the text to life. To anyone who loves words as the echo of the Word, this work of words is a delight. (SHERIDAN GILLEY) Katherine M. Quinsey, editor. Broken Boundaries: Women a11d Feminism in Restoration Drama University Press of Kentucky 1996. x, 2.44· uS$)9·95 cloth, us$17-95 paper Despite the 'recent flowering of interest in gender and sexuality/ Katherine M. Quinsey informs us, hers is the first 'collected study of feminist issues in this drama per se.' This surprising fact perhaps in part explains something of a quality of belatedness to the collection as a whole. The 'main purpose' of the collection 'is to examine} from a comprehensive and fundamentally empirical perspective1 the shifting forms ofspecifically feminist issues as they are enacted within both text and theatrical production in the Restoration period.' What this means in practice is an examination of 'the feminist critique/ that is, of the 'assertions of and resistance to the ideology that devalues women in all its forms.' The resulting volume examines feminism in Restoration drama 'from a holistic and multiple perspective'; it is divided into three parts, focusing respectively on plays by women, plays by men, and plays as they were performed. This collection is no different from most in being of uneven quality. The weakest section is the first, and the greatest disappointment is that none of the three essays on the most important womru1 playwright of the period, Aphra Behn, has much to add to an already impressive and sophisticated body of criticism. Dagny Boebel offers another failed attempt to distinguish Belm by showing that what she did is unlike what was done by male playwrights . Boebellooks to Behn's use of carnival in The Rover, part 1, as a key to ' Behn's deconstruction of patriarchal privilege.' She thinks that Belm was unique among Royalists in feeling disillusioned with the Restoration settlement by the rnid-t67os; she thinks that Belm was unique among playwrights in using a Spanish carnival setting to subvert the patriarchy; and she thinks that Willmore is to be seen as 'nearly identical' to Blw1t in his attitudes towards women, a similarity required by Behn's plan to expose Puritans and Caval1ers 'as upholders of a violent, hierarchical gender ideology.' (On this last point, Jean Marsden offers a helpful corrective later in the volume.) Peggy Thompson's essay suffers from a similar attempt to distinguish Behn as always subversive in ways that male playwrights never share. And Rebecca Merrens, in an essay on the tragedies of Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter, also argues that her authors differed from male playwrights in revealing 'the instability ofmaledoininated social order/ a reality represented by even the most misogynistic of playwrights, for example, Otway. The section on male playwrights is noticeably stronger, particularly the editor's own contribution on Almahide and the feminist critique in Dryden's The Conqt1est of Granada. Quinsey concentrates on...