Staging Women and the Soul–Body Dynamic in Early Modern England by Sarah E. Johnson (review)

Sarah E. Johnson begins with a discussion on the questionable possibility that women have souls. This stands in opposition to Aristotelian doctrine, which moots that seed-producing males pass divine intellect down through the male line allowing males a soul. The more porous and unstable body is categorised as female. Johnson uses theatre as a medium to explore the soul–body dynamic between these two states as ‘theatre necessarily engages the interplay between material and immaterial more broadly, often drawing attention to the fluidity and tensions between the two’ (p. 20). This soul–body dichotomy informs early modern misogynistic representations of women. Johnson seeks to illustrate how disruptions to this binary functioned to collapse established boundaries of the divide. To explore how this dynamic was compromised, Johnson chooses four instances where the soul–body relationship and its gendered nature is represented: the puppeteer and the puppet; the tamer and the tamed; the ghost and the haunted; and the observer and the spectacle.

In Chapter 1, on the puppeteer and the puppet, Johnson focuses on Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. With strong supporting evidence, Johnson shows how the supposed male (puppeteer) dominance over female (puppet) is undermined as, in the former play, ‘not only does Gloriana, as silent material, hold potential to mock Vindice, but, in his arrogant pleasure in manipulating and mastering her remains, Vindice is oblivious to having entered his own dance of death’ (p. 53). In the latter, Johnson argues that the puppets show ‘the absurdity of considering women to be more fleshly than men are’, while demonstrating ‘the impossibility of fully controlling how the material signifies’ (p. 69).

The relationship of the tamer and the tamed is explored through a discussion of John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed or, The Woman’s Prize, and here an interrogation of the soul–body binary first reverses and then renders this relationship unstable. The chapter exploring ghost and haunted through The Lady’s Tragedy, attributed to Middleton, goes further, collapsing the soul–body dynamic and calling into question the political implications of this breakdown. Masques are examined in the relationship of observer and spectacle arguing, again, for a fault line that undermines the soul–body and male–female dichotomies through representations of the body on stage.

Overall, Johnson explores the early modern gendering of the soul–body dynamic while simultaneously showing how the binaries themselves were a site of negotiated disruption. This project is important to the fields of early modern feminist, religious, literature, and theatre studies, and also for the innovative readings that Johnson explores within the framework she has built so excellently.