Early Women Dramatists, 1550-1800 (review)

Early Women Dramatists, 1550-1800. By Margarete Rubik. English Dramatists Series. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998; pp. viii + 225. $45.00.

Margarete Rubik's useful overview of women playwrights is part of a series aimed at a student and general audience. The editor's preface states a need to introduce each generation "to the culture and great works of the past" and to reexamine "the important English dramatists of earlier centuries in light of new information, new interests and new attitudes" (vi). Certainly anyone whose formal education in dramatic literature did not regularly include works by women will find a convenient remedy in this volume, but readers already knowledgeable about the topic are likely to be disappointed. There is little information here which is not already covered by other works, such as Nancy Cotton's Women Playwrights in England, c. 1363-1750 (Associated University Presses, 1980), Jacqueline Pearson's The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642-1737 (St. Martin's Press, 1988), and Ellen Donkin's Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829 (Routledge, 1994).

While most of the other titles in the English Dramatists Series treat only one or two playwrights per volume, the women dramatists are examined as a group. The book, nevertheless, serves a function of keeping the contributions of women to the dramatic tradition visible and accessible. Rubik highlights achievements by individual women in the theatre, while suggesting some of the social restrictions that may have influenced women's public writing careers. With a focus on dramatic literature, rather than theatre history, Early Women Dramatists offers a survey of some two hundred plays by more than fifty women in a single concise volume.

Rubik offers brief plot synopses and readings of individual texts with an eye toward identifying a female tradition. She notes examples of women dramatists foregrounding women as active subjects rather than as passive objects, subverting traditional gender roles, and focusing attention on female friendship and solidarity as well as female desire. A reinterpretation of female stereotypes, including more sympathetic treatment of the "fallen" woman is also observed. She does not force her thesis, however, acknowledging the conservatism and even misogyny apparent in some of the texts. Much of this tendency can be explained by women's efforts to conform to a tradition established by male writers, and to reaffirm popular, contemporary attitudes in order to achieve commercial success in the public theatre.

The overall organization of the book is clear. There are four parts, the first three dealing respectively with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the restoration and turn of the century, and the eighteenth century. Each of these parts begins with a short discussion of women's social situation during that time period, as well as a brief reminder of theatrical conditions. The rest of each section focuses on women playwrights and their plays. Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre are granted their own chapters, while Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald share a chapter. Other writers are grouped and discussed chronologically. Within individual chapters the plays are discussed by genre.

The final section of the book is labeled "Performance and Tradition." The brief opening discussion of original productions and performance circumstances is not especially illuminating. This is followed by a review of recent London revivals of plays by Behn and Centlivre. Two productions in Vienna, where Rubik works, were also noted, but no North American productions are mentioned. Finally, Rubik gathers evidence from her discussion of individual plays throughout the text to make her case for "the existence of an--albeit muted--female tradition in English theatre" (viii).

Overall, the book offers a fairly thorough, though not absolutely exhaustive, survey of English drama written by women in the covered period, including dramas that were printed but not given a public performance. Serving as a good introduction to the topic, it is also interesting in its coherent attempt to discuss the work of women writing under a variety of personal circumstances...