The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre ed. by Deborah Payne Fisk (review)

78 DOREEN ALVAREZ SAAR and MARY ANNE SCHOFIELD. Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Novelists: A Critical Reference Guide. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996. Pp. xxii ⫹ 664. $49.95. In the 1980s, Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel introduced ‘‘100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen.’’ In this annotated bibliography 35 women novelists of the eighteenth century aretreated by the editors and ten other contributors in their aim to make a comprehensive survey of twentieth-century scholarship. While it seems a shame not to include the hugely popular Agnes Maria Bennett, the interesting radical writer Eliza Fenwick, or the light-hearted Mary Hearne, the best-known writers are included and fascinating unknown ones added too. (The omission of Austen herself because she is thoroughly covered elsewhere is sensible .) A useful starting point for research, this critical reference guide is not comprehensive : a check of the entry for Frances Moore Brooke, for example, revealed no entry for Lois Whitney’s Primitivism and the Idea of Progress, which has an early and interesting discussion of Brooke’s relation to Rousseau, or for Robert Donald Spector’s English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion During the Seven Years’ War, which compares Brooke’s Old Maid to other periodicals of the time. A trip to the index in search of Spector proved irritating : three entries are listed (for different works), but none of them appeared on the pagesgiven. Ieventuallyfoundallthereferences to Spector a few pages on from the page numbers given, presumably indicating last-minute pagination changes. This turned out to be a frequent (but not consistent) frustrating occurrence. There could have been more coordination between contributors. Some of them use Philippe Séjourné’s huge work on women novelists; others list it as a work they have not been able to consult. Many of these novelists are of course significant in other fields, and contributors vary in how much notice they take of this: the Highfill, Kalmin, and Burnim Biographical Dictionary of Actors is consulted for some writers but not, oddly, for Inchbald, on whom it is very informative. The pleasure of having this reference guide for these novelists is tempered by the realization that the job could have been more thoroughly and carefully done. Jane Spencer University of Exeter The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2000. Pp. xxvii ⫹ 294. $65; $22 (paper). A short book, these fourteen essays by prominent Restoration scholars expand the canon and amplify its significance. Many of these chapters rely upon traditional studies rather than more fashionably theoretical sources, but Ms. Fisk’s scholarly interest in staging has obviously inculcated a compelling historicism that is evident throughout the book. The first two chapters are about performance . Edward A. Langhans recapitulates the development of the patent theaters and describes innovations in staging and scenery— elements of playhouse production that initially had a clear impact on the content of plays but are now accessible only by imaginative reconstruction . The second chapter is Joseph Roach’s rambling theory of Restoration stage culture as an ‘‘Enchanted Island,’’ closely allied to his study Cities of the Dead (1996) with its focus on memory 79 and forgetting in dramatic performance. This chapter deals with the relationship between theater and state, especially in terms of cultural and political restoration. Jean I. Marsden’s chapter investigating spectacle, horror, and pathos is equally about performance, for she examines the range of sensational effects serially adopted in public performance, from the introduction of stage machinery and its grandiose spectacle to the depiction of horror characteristic in the political turmoil of the late 1670s and early 1680s, and the portrayal of pathos, a stage effect that remained in vogue throughout the eighteenth century. Unaccountably, crucial performance phenomena have not received much play: for example, the emergence of paid actresses, the conventions of costume, and musical accompaniment to theatrical pieces. The next section shows how genre was acknowledged, metamorphosed, and marketed during this period. In ‘‘Adaptations and revivals,’’MichaelDobsonassesses the ramifications of a repertory highly dependent on altered plays. Revivals of old plays served to bridge the gap between pre-Commonwealth and post-Restoration worlds but simultaneously demonstrated the impossibility of this...