Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (review)

As Dr. Tomlinson outlines in her introduction, 'Shifting sisters', Women on Stage in Stuart Drama aims to contest the traditional view that the introduction and 'public acceptance' of professional actresses in the restoration theatre were a consequence of English exposure to actresses on the continent during the interregnum years (p.1). In place of this long-established argument, Tomlinson presents the reader with a nuanced, well-documented investigation of the foundations laid down in England during the Jacobean and Caroline years for the subsequent establishment of professional female performance. This investigation ranges from 'the Stuart masque', and 'the newly significant and signifying role [it] accorded to female theatrical performance' (p. 3), to female dramatic roles in professional theatre, female sponsorship and patronage – particularly, that of the two Stuart queens – and playhouse attendance and readership, as well as the contributions of female authors to English theatrical culture. In her discussion of the roles of Queens Henrietta Maria and Anna as agents of change in the Stuart theatre, Tomlinson stresses their importance, in view of their status and origins, as principal conduits for continental baroque culture.

Arguably, Chapter 3 is the highlight of this study. Titled 'Significant liberty: the actress in Caroline comedy', it includes discussion of a late Jonsonian play, The New Inn, and of James Shirley's Hyde Park, comedies which, despite differences in the treatment of female desire, 'reflect the social ascendancy of women in Caroline culture', and, in the process, 'foreshadow the representation of women in Restoration drama, specifically through their construction of feminine feeling as a dimension of experience which of necessity must be veiled or masked' (pp. 105, 115).

Subsequent discussion of Caroline tragedy in Chapter 4 is not without interest, as far as Tomlinson's reading of specific plays is concerned; this chapter builds a case that the Caroline theatre presents major developments in the representation of female subjectivity and desire. However, I have reservations about Tomlinson's rallying, as evidence of such development, the supposed contrast in attitude toward 'women's sexual transgressions' implied through comparison of such early-Stuart titles as Webster's The White Devil and Middleton's Women Beware Women, on the one hand, and Ford's Caroline tragedy, Tis Pity She's a Whore – described as a title which 'posits women's sexual transgression as a matter of pity, rather than moral abhorrence' – on the other (p. 118). Of course, plays are more than their titles, and the reader might well recall sympathetic portrayals of female desire in well-known, indeed canonical, plays of the Jacobean period. In fact, we need go no further than Webster's best-known work, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), and the heroine's famous assertion that she is a woman of 'flesh, and blood, not a figure cut in alabaster' (I. ii. 369-70); yet, far from being condemned, or demonized, she remains, to the end, 'Duchess of Malfi still' (IV. ii. 139). Similarly, and earlier yet, audiences had witnessed the tragic end that follows Desdemona's assertion of her desire in Shakespeare's Othello (1604-5).

Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to the work of Margaret Cavendish (her 'fancy-stage') and Katherine Philips's translations of Corneille, respectively. Focusing on women writers, and extending into the interregnum and restoration periods, these chapters are very successful in fleshing out the overall thesis of Tomlinson's study, namely the increasing interest in England in female subjectivity and female dramatic characters in the decades leading to the Restoration. These chapters are aptly preceded by an 'interchapter', concerning the years of the Puritan closure of the professional theatres, a prohibition which Tomlinson argues, in fact, 'created new opportunities for women to perform and write drama' (p. 156).

Ultimately, Tomlinson's very significant contribution to our knowledge is not so much the prehistory it provides for the theatre of the Restoration and for the role of actresses within it, as it...