A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (review)

A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. By Alison Findlay. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Pp. vi + 206. £55.00/$58.95 cloth, £15.99/$22.95 paper.

Alison Findlay has chosen the most challenging viewpoint from which to establish a feminist perspective on Renaissance drama. Acknowledging that the early modern professional theater involved women only marginally, she takes the historical female audience as her starting point, identifying in women's writing the "imagined female audience . . . whose situations, opinions and tastes male dramatists probably responded to" (6). Behind that "probably" lies a complex skein of theoretical and historical questions—about the relations between dramatists and their customers, about the accessibility of historical experience, and about the extent to which the themes of the drama intersect with other early modern discourses on Findlay's chosen subjects. Findlay draws on earlier discussion, noting reservations about the scanty and tendentious nature of the evidence of women's attendance at the theater and the difficulties of locating an authentic voice in written testimony. She refuses, nonetheless, to be daunted by these impediments, confident that she can produce "new readings of plays" from "mainstream writers like Shakespeare, Jonson and Middleton" (6 and 7). Her method, as she explains, "is to appropriate extracts from women's texts in order to place the analysis of gender politics centre stage" (6).

This method allows Findlay to make telling connections between the situation of dramatized women and their counterparts in early modern England. Mary Wroth's poetic version of female passion is used to endorse a feminist sympathy for beleaguered women lovers, and Isabella Whitney's Letter . . . to her unconstant lover (1567) "suggests that women of the middling sort could have easily sympathized with Helen's sense of helplessness in winning Bertram's love" in All's Well (92). Women who, in Virginia Woolf's phrase,were "locked up and beaten and flung about the room" are called up to remind Findlay's readersthat the narratives of women, oppressed and resistant, reproduced real social struggles on the early modern stage. Social documents such as the Thynne sisters' correspondence or the spiritual meditations of Lady Grace Mildmay reveal the darker, oppressive aspects of idealized domesticity, and the passionate, sensuous religious writing of Amelia Lanyer or Lady Elizabeth Melville echo Annabella's baroque sexualized religiosity in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. None of these writers, of course, were directly commenting on or informing the plays, and the plays themselves are chosen to exemplify particular themes. As a result, there is little sense of differentiation—chronological, generic, or theatrical—in the relationship between women's writing and male-authored drama. Findlay's purpose in citing women's writing on the themes of the plays is less to illuminate early modern theater than "'to complete . . . the conversation'" (5), to hear from the women. These women may or may not have been speaking or listening to the dramatists, but they do suggest that the defiant and pathetic, eloquent and witty women in the plays did not spring fully armed from the dramatic imagination alone.

These women's conversations have now been heard for some decades, thanks to the archival and editorial endeavors of women scholars. That work puts us in a position to correct not only the patriarchal but also the Protestant bias of earlier criticism. Findlay's method of assimilating recent work on women is interestingly illustrated in her treatment of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Women's religious significance in recusant households and the establishment of convents in Europe offer a tantalizing analogue to Isabella's position in the play, a reminder of an alternative to heterosexual monogamy which was still available in post-Reformation Europe. The defiant feminism found in the nun Mary Ward's writing about her conflict with the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy provides a rousing additional chorus to Isabella's own lines in the play. Mary Ward's defiant move from the cloistered Poor Clares to found a public missionary order...