Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (review)

Reviews 153 early fifth centuries (nos. 29, 32, 33), and a number of sixth-century weights of glass, stamped with busts or monograms (nos. 82, 84, 87, 89), one depicting the Emperor Justinian. Four marble capitals, brought back by Dr E. H. Freshfield, an indefatigable traveller in the later nineteenth century, from Ephesos and Constantinople (nos. 42, 92-3, 211) have been incorporated in the Church of the Wisdom of God, at Lower Kingswood in Surrey. One of these, from thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Constantinople, was said to have come from the church of St Nicholas of the English, the chapel of the English regiment of the Varangian guard, another from the monastery of St. John Studios. The volume is well-arranged, the only anomaly perhaps being that an icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, dated to ca. 1400, is actually the first object in the Middle Byzantine section, doubtless on the grounds that it depicts the restoration of Orthodoxy in 843. The foreword and introduction both state that the exhibits range in date from 317 to 1453 (the document of Mehmet II granting liberties to the Genoese at Galata). In fact thefinalthree objects in the volume (nos. 235-57) postdate this, the Cretan icon of St. George from the Deanery at Windsor Castle and a triptych with the koimesis and saints being from the sixteenth century. The volume concludes with a five page bibliography (a key to abbreviated references), a glossary of terms used, and a coins appendix. There is no general index. Lynda Garland Department of Classics and Ancient History University of N e w England Cerasano, S. P. and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds; Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, London and N e w York, Routledge, 1996; paper; pp. xii, 237; 9 illustrations; R. R. P. US$17.95. Is there any Renaissance drama by women? This landmark anthology enables us to answer in the affirmative, establishing particular contexts for the dramatic writing represented which include women's involvement as patrons, spectators, amateur performers and even part-owners of public theatres. The material ranges from the neo-Senecan tragedies by Mary Sidney and Elizabeth Cary to the Civil War comedy The Concealed Fancies, jointly authored by the sisters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley. In between are the schoolgirl masque Cupid's Banishment (performed 1617), sponsored and initiated by Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Mary Wroth's pastoral 154 Reviews tragicomedy Love's Victory (composed c. 1620). This heterogeneous assembly is presented by the editors as documenting 'a form of history' (p. 4). Yet the criterion governing their selection of material is not always clear. One linking thread is the fact that none of these texts was produced with a view to performance in the public theatre. But if scholarly translation is an important area of Renaissance women's literary production why omit the sixteenth-century manuscript translation of Euripides' Iphigeneia by Joanna Lumley? If lack of coherence defines the textual field represented by this anthology, there are nonetheless compelling connections between individual plays. A preoccupation with feminine duty and virtue resonates in Sidney's Tragedy of Antonie (1595), a translation of Robert Gamier's Marc Antoine, and Cary's The Tragedy ofMariam, the Fair Queen ofJewry (1613), the first original drama by a woman in English. In Sidney's work, Cleopatra justifies her wish to follow Antony to death in terms of a 'beseeming' virtue, declaring of Antony, 'he is m y self (p. 27). Her absorption in Antony's identity foreshadows the Miltonic ideal of marriage, 'she for God in him'; i t is a world apart from the androgynous intermingling of Shakespeare's couple. Yet Cleopatra's 'wifely faithfulness', as the editors term it (p. 17), carries an erotic freight expressed in herfinalembracing of Antony's body: M y body joined with thine, m y mouth with thine, M y mouth, whose moisture-burning sighs have dried To be in one self tomb, and one self chest, And wrapped with thee in one self sheet to rest. (p. 42) Is it because they were conceived as being spoken rather than performed that Sidney's and Cary's plays are so charged with a sense...