Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (review)

This book claims to stand at "a new critical frontier" (9) from which it aims to "develop new critical understandings of early women's drama" (10) by investigating early modern women's playful use of space. Its most promising elements arise from the first of its two facets, its attention to the historical spaces important to performances involving early modern women, including the Great Hall at Penshurst, the "purpose-built" theater at Somerset Hall, and the church at Barking Abbey. This material is, however, greatly outweighed by critical readings of a traditional kind focused on the settings of plays, with the two approaches not brought into conjunction as often or as rigorously as they might be. What keeps this book from meeting the stakes it sets for itself, however, are its unexamined premises about women. Each chapter turns on the claim that various early modern "playing spaces," whether they are homes, gardens, churches, convents, or late seventeenth-century city parks, "legitimate female voice" (144) and allow for the "development of more independent, female-centered subjectivities" (70), without the analysis subjecting its valuation of this voice and the idea of women at the center of these subjectivities to inquiry.

The sentimentalism in regard to women first features in the opening chapter on "Homes," where the chora is shaken free from Kristeva's semiotic matrix and characterized instead as a "ludic space" that "nurtures without requirements of its own" so it may serve as the foundation for the book's idea of drama: "drama is, like the chora, an incubator" and "safe space" for women to remake the world (21). In the book's various safe spaces, there are no bad women: even a female character that orchestrates the death of another woman, Salome in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam (ca. 1605), simply makes the mistake of "walking within the . . . compass of a patriarchal script" (37).

The valorization of women leads Findlay to insist upon the power that arises for James I's and Charles I's respective queens in relation to court masques. For Findlay, not only was Queen Anne "the controlling power" behind Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones's court masques for James I, the masques served to "relocate power from the King's chair of State to the body politic of the Queen's court" (120). No mention is made of the landmark scholarly books that would complicate these claims, Stephen Orgel's The Jonsonian Masque (1965) and The Illusion of Power (1975). Even greater authority is claimed for the court entertainments presided over by Charles I's consort, Henrietta Maria, whose request that the king take a seat in her theater at Somerset Hall is part and parcel of a "radical feminist agenda" (141). Findlay makes glancing reference to specific political matters only to shy away from them again. She notes, for example, theater historian John Orrell's claim that the Somerset Hall theater involved "different prospects" with "horizons at quite different levels" to suggest that the theatre's construction may reflect the "skewed geographical politics" of the play for which it was designed (Shepherds Paradise, 1632), but then retreats to the claim that the play is important because it "validates women's voices" (143). Elsewhere, the book covers a great deal of ground too quickly: chapter 5 makes reference to no fewer than eighteen plays, and gives no one play sufficient attention to permit in-depth analysis, not even Margaret Cavendish's Social Companions (1668), which involves a woman creating a phony courtroom to dupe a rich man into believing that he must, under court order, marry her and take care of her child — a child, moreover, that she would have him believe his "Idea" somehow engendered when he happened to see her in the street. This is an extraordinary missed opportunity in a book ostensibly about early modern women's imaginative use of space.

There are missed opportunities even in the most promising...