Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

Women And Playwriting In Nineteenth-century Britain. Edited by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; pp. xvi + 295. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

This impressive collection was inspired by twentieth-century "amnesia" regarding nineteenth-century women's playwriting as a socially significant activity. To relieve this amnesia, this book offers a model of "sociability" synthesized from social theory, which redirects the object of investigation from individual, professional "women of genius" and their presence or absence in literary and theatrical canons to the entire class of women writing in a whole array of spaces, for varied audiences, and for a wide variety of reasons. The opening chapter bases this model on social theorists' debates about the construction of civil society--a society in which women during this period had minimal political representation but (because or in spite of this) forcefully entered the "associative public sphere" (a social space in which marketplace and political interests merged) by writing plays. As a genre, plays involved their writers in the discussion, debate, and collective action that amounted to a form of citizenship. Both because of their popularity and their form, plays provided a mode of "participating in the political act of sociability" (18).

In the introduction and first chapter, Davis and Donkin dismantle the professional/amateur distinction and the public/private distinction, substituting for the latter a "continuum of sociability" and for the former a focus on the significance of playwriting as civic participation rather than as the singular practice of a "genius." Gay Cima's essay covers the gendered nature of theatre reviewing in a century where newspaper publishing shifted from a privately underwritten enterprise to a business supported by advertising which often directly and indirectly kept women out of the profession's inner circles.

As an example of such exclusion, Ellen Donkin's nuanced essay traces the fortunes of professional comedy writer, Mrs. Catherine Gore, at the moment when a National Theatre was being constructed. When her anonymously submitted play won the Haymarket prize of five hundred pounds for the best comedy "illustrative of British manners," her name was revealed and male competitors and critics attacked it as inferior. She quit playwriting as a result, but not before adding a prologue to the printed edition of her play aligning her efforts (perhaps the first ever historical account of such an alignment) with the work of other maligned women playwrights. In doing so, she readjusted the historical frame for her own and other women's efforts.

In Part two, "Wrighting the Play," Jacky Bratton uses the case of Jane Scott's "illegitimate" theatre-making to interrogate the notion of female authorship against the backdrop of high-brow versus low-brow performance. Bratton argues for expanding written, solitary "authorship" to include performance- and script-based "intertheatricality." Jane Moody similarly appropriates the author function for overlooked managers Céline Céleste and Eliza Vestris, whom she examines against the backdrop of male playwrights' insistence in 1833 on a "proprietorial definition of dramatic authorship." At the moment the Dramatic Copyright Act was redefining playmaking as the work of a single (male) author, female actress-managers were adapting and revising scripts penned by male authors aware of the actresses' performing styles and performing histories. This represents a form of collaborative authorship based not upon texts but upon the agency exercised by the actress-manager and later effaced by the historical focus on singular authorship in copyright law. Jim Davis also turns his attention to collaboration on translations and adaptations, noting that performance conditions added extra-textual significance to plays invisible in the script. His test case rests on the career of Sarah Lane, a highly acclaimed East End actress-manager at the Britannia, where she translated (perhaps), adapted (certainly), and otherwise cut and shaped plays to fit her performing talents, the theatre's limits, and her spectators' taste.

Part three turns attention to the potential consequences for women playwrights when they do not...