Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century by Fiona Ritchie (review)

The past twenty-five years have seen an explosion of interest in Shakespeare’s status during the course of the long eighteenth century. Dozens of books, articles, and even conferences have been dedicated to Shakespearean adaptations, criticism, performance, and other forms of Shakespeareana. Fiona Ritchie, however, argues that despite this fascination with all things Shakespearean, one group has been overlooked: namely women, in their roles as performers, critics, and audience members. Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century addresses this gap in coverage and argues that women’s interest in Shakespeare was important in shaping his reputation in the eighteenth century. This careful focus on women specifically in terms of their connection to Shakespeare constitutes both the book’s greatest strength as well as an inherent weakness.

While Ritchie looks briefly at a sampling of Restoration figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Elizabeth Pepys in her introduction, Women and Shakespeare is largely dedicated to a study of women writers and performers in the years following the Licensing Act of 1737. The book is designed around two sets of paired chapters: chapters 1 and 4 examine two different generations of actresses and their representations of Shakespearean roles, and chapters 2 and 3 explore the works of two sets of female critics. The book concludes with a discussion of women playgoers and how they influenced the Shakespearean repertoire over the course of the eighteenth century.

Women and Shakespeare opens by examining actresses in the age of David Garrick, specifically Susannah Cibber and Hannah Pritchard. Ritchie argues that these women, like Garrick, “were not only influential in shaping Shakespeare’s status but also used Shakespeare’s burgeoning significance to establish their own positions in society” (26). This is a useful observation, as we tend today to be so blinded by Garrick’s carefully nurtured image as the revitalizer of Shakespeare that we forget that he was not alone on the stage and that his female co-stars were, in the eighteenth century, recognized as geniuses in their own right. Ritchie progresses from this point to argue that Cibber and Pritchard were responsible for innovations in the theatrical repertoire. While frequently valid, Ritchie’s enthusiasm for her argument at times leads her to make tenuous or even inaccurate claims (such as attributing the popularity of Charles Macklin’s 1741 revival of The Merchant of Venice to Catherine Clive’s portrayal of Portia rather than to Macklin’s return to Shakespeare’s text and to his charismatic and terrifying representation of Shylock). But perhaps the most troubling aspect of this discussion of Cibber and Pritchard is Ritchie’s repeated emphasis on their status as specifically Shakespearean performers. Shakespeare’s works made up a significant percentage of the theatrical repertoire, and any great actress would need to excel in Shakespearean roles, but using these roles to determine a performer’s merit runs the risk of limiting our understanding of her talents. This problem is significantly mitigated in chapter 4, which examines the careers of Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan in terms of our vision of Siddons as the preeminent Shakespearean actor, male or female, of her generation, while Jordan’s roles are largely forgotten. Jordan specialized in comic and pathetic roles, such as Viola and Ophelia, and Ritchie speculates that history has overlooked her accomplishments because of our equation of high tragedy with greatness, to the exclusion of comedy and pathos. This valid observation remains implicit in the end as Ritchie turns again to designating these actresses as specifically Shakespearean performers, an emphasis that raises the broader question of why we need to attach the label “Shakespearean” to actors in order to calibrate their merit.

Turning to female critics in her second chapter, Ritchie encounters a problem faced by many scholars who focus on works by women, namely the tendency to sequester these writers as women rather than as talented writers within the broader context of their peers of both sexes. When discussing Charlotte Lennox...