The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

Developed from a conference on women and performance at Duquesne University, this collection displays the strengths and weaknesses of such projects. Varied, its essays do not always cohere into a solid publication. Penny Gay’s highly competent and insightful discussion of strong and eloquent female roles, especially those associated with Hannah Pritchard and Kitty Clive, stands out in terms of interest and relevance to the collection’s topic of women and performance. Rita Allison Kondrath discusses the role of servants in Behn’s The Rover and Pix’s The Beau Defeated. Drawing parallels between Moretta (in Behn’s play) and Betty (in Pix’s), she claims that “the inclusion of servants on the Restoration stage infuses the rigid class hierarchy with a degree of fluidity.” However, Moretta, Angelica Bianca’s bawd, and Betty, Mrs. Rich’s sensible maid, are remarkably different. Liberty Smith clarifies ways in which castrati and “female husbands” disturbed normative masculinity.

Reasonably enough though not surprisingly, Ms. Smith finds in Fielding’s The Historical Register of 1736 a concern with high fashion, luxury, and effeminacy, the result of “female economic agency and sexual desire.”

Helen M. Brooks’s essay on women in theater management notes the many women who ran theatrical booths at the Southwark and Bartholomew fairs and managed strolling companies. Brooks claims there was a “symbiotic relationship” between strolling and fairground booths and “mainstream playhouses.” Many actors, including Jo Haynes, Macklin, and Garrick, started their careers with strollers; Hannah Pritchard and Mary Porter were first discovered during their appearances at the London fairs. Ms. Brooks goes on to show that although leading actresses, such as Anne Oldfield and Susannah Cibber, failed in their attempts to join management, they nonetheless received salaries and benefit performances. Amy Scott-Douglass discusses the Covent Garden Drollery of 1672, which, she argues, was compiled by Behn following the destruction of the King’s Company playhouse in Bridges Street in January 1672. In her selection of prologues and epilogues from plays performed by the company, Behn privileged those spoken by women to “reimagine” a Restoration theater in which women had a founding role. Arguing that Behn advocated “a separate theatre managed and staffed entirely by women,” Ms. Scott-Douglass believes Behn “had every reason” at this moment “to think that one of the two Restoration theatres could become an all-female playhouse.” This essay oddly follows Ms. Brooks’s piece, which demonstrates convincingly that no matter how talented women were they were unable to move into managerial positions in the mainstream playhouses.

Carol Howard’s essay discusses Eliza Haywood’s biography and literary career, noting her habitual love of gossip and secrecy. Much of the essay deals with Haywood’s participation as actress and writer in a lost sketch from a satire performed at Fielding’s Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1737 titled “The Female Free Mason.” Since the scene is lost, discussion of this is naturally speculative. Although the information about London freemasons is informative, the essay lacks focus. Mary Trull discusses Behn’s use in Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister of ideas drawn from Creech’s translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. The author seeks to relate Lucretius’s ideas of simulacra, arguing that while his simulacra connect the outside world to the human consciousness, for Behn these simulacra are not externally derived, but reflect “the desires of the self-pleasing audience.”

Nadia Bishai examines the always present and often uneasy relationship between stage and scaffold. Although the Restoration stage looked increasingly less like a scaffold, there was a “penchant for increasingly realistic gory productions” from the 1660s to the 1680s. The appearance of women on stage, often as villains or victims, took place even as women made less frequent appearances on the scaffold. Her conclusion—that the stage and scaffold are very different—is an anti-climax. The varied plenty...