Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters Off Newfoundland, 1583–1893 ed. by Rainer K. Baehre (review)

354 letters in canada 1999 Shapiro's `The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensiveness?' Shapiro reviews early modern records of actors and acting companies both in England and on the Continent to suggest that the exclusion of women from the English stage before the Restoration was more to do with factors of class and economics than with the constraints of rigidly patriarchal society. Laurie Osborne addresses the question of class in `Staging the Female Playgoer: Gender in Shakespeare's Onstage Audiences ,' which examines women as members of theatre audiences. She sees such women as uncomfortably situated, being themselves a part of the spectacle; this is a position more easily resisted by women of higher rank, such as Shakespeare's Princess of Navarre or Gertrude, than by those less socially favoured. Essays by Rosemary Kegl and Alison Findlay discuss closet dramas written by women; Findlay's `Playing the ``Scene Self'': Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's The Concealed Fancies' shows how the play's aristocratic authors, members of a royalist literary coterie, develop their text to explore controversial ideas about women's roles in arranged marriages and the instability of gender identities within a system of domination and subordination. Kegl discusses Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, a more familiar text, in order to make the case that it existed in a conscious, if uneasy, relationship with the public stage. The collection is varied, and somewhat uneven; its value lies in the diversity of its approaches, and the range of cultural materials brought to bear on its central topic. (SANDRA CLARK) Rainer K. Baehre, editor. Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters Off Newfoundland, 1583B1893 Carleton University Press/McGill-Queen's University Press. xii, 392. $65.00, $27.95 This is riveting reading. It could scarcely be otherwise. The editor has gathered seventeen mostly first hand accounts of disasters or near disasters in some of the most treacherous waters in the world. None of the accounts is of a grand disaster. These ships were all modest workaday types. The fact that the narrators were in many cases endeavouring to communicate the intensity of their experience to readers in metropolitan centres who would never have heard of the wreck produced searing prose in several instances. `After you have imagined everything that is terrible and superlatively hideous,' wrote a survivor of the vessel Anne, sunk by pack ice in 1704, `you will fall short in your conception of our dread and confusion.' When the crew reached St John's after at least six days in a small open boat in the chill early spring, the writer's legs were so`mortified' they both had to be amputated. A shipmate was `invaded with a dreadness up to his very waste, and his privy members so rotten, that they dropped short off from his body.' Equally brooding, if less horrifying, humanities 355 are the accounts of clean escapes, such as that described by Captain Bob Bartlett in his memoir of `My First Shipwreck,' which took place in 1893: `I reached home several days later. My mother was frankly overjoyed to see me again ... but my father wanted to hear more about the wreck. To my surprise I found I couldn't talk much about it. Since then I have learned that the loss of a ship affects a seafaring man much like the loss of a dear relative; and it pains him greatly to discuss the circumstances of the sorrow.' The editor explains that he has selected accounts of mostly obscure, small-scale incidents for their representative quality, for their ordinariness among the estimated ten thousand wrecks that have taken place in Newfoundland waters since the sixteenth century. His goal is to capture the pervasive awareness in the Atlantic communities of the menace of the sea during the age of sail, when these fragile, wooden-built craft were the only means of communication. This exposure to the most capricious, violent whims of nature, he argues, is a tap root of Canadian culture older than and at least as fundamental as continental challenges, the better-known images of the foreboding forests of Ontario and Quebec, and the relentless vast-ness of the...