Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women’s Comedy and the Theatre by Nancy Copeland (review)

319 initiated the development of a new genre, the modern novel. In all four early samples , moral instruction follows the Bible and the narration guides readers back to biblical tales. In each an individual escapes from a corrupt and hostile world to spiritual deliverance, but while Christian sets out voluntarily, the other protagonists are compelled by calamitous circumstances. Grimmelshausen vividly catapults his Simplicissimus from a poor but pious rural childhood in tranquil woodlands into the brutal and brutalizing world of the Thirty Years War, where his innocence is mercilessly destroyed, his attempts to lead a virtuous life constantly frustrated, and he becomes victim and victimizer until he finds peace again in religion and solitude. Crammed with characters, incidents, and adventures, his story spills over into a series of sequels, the most renowned of which are the exploits of Springinsfeld and of Mother Courage—reworked and reintroduced by Brecht. On deserted islands biblical guidelines help Defoe’s and Schnabel’s heroes to rebuild their lives in isolation: Crusoe as conscientious individual, Schnabel’s protagonists as puritan utopians. Robinson Crusoe expressed a longing for selfsufficient freedom and became a huge success in Germany, where it generated a vast number of Robinsonaden. Most of these were eagerly read and quickly forgotten. But Schnabel’s work, Die Insel Felsenburg (The Island Felsenburg), achieved lasting impact and is still in print. Here, as on Crusoe’s island, ‘‘yes means yes and no means no.’’ Simplicius , too, follows this ‘‘literal understanding of how language should operate .’’ The quotation is attributed to Grimmelshausen, but it comes from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:37), thus demonstrating the degree to which common speech was already enriched by the Bible and reinforcing Ms. Bertsch’s arguments concerning the fundamental importance of the Scripture for national languages and literatures. Her volume offers an excellent foundation for a course on the impact of the Bible on literature , thought and aspirations during the formation of modern national identities , a challenging period of intense political , social and intellectual upheaval, stress and exhilaration. Linde Katritzky University of Florida NANCY COPELAND. Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women’s Comedy and the Theatre. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Pp. 208. $69.95. Women playwrights are beginning to receive the kind of attention that is their due. Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre , an important contribution to this emerging body of work, provides us with a careful study of the performance, production , and reception histories of four plays by two of the leading playwrights of the age. Published as part of the Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama series, Ms. Copeland’s study emphasizes intertheatricality, the notion that plays participate actively in a theatrical context. She thus pays much attention not only to the performance but to the relation of plays in the repertoire, to their sources and cognate plays, and to the expectations of the audience. Identifying the heavily gendered conventions of Spanish comedy with which Behn and Centlivre worked, Ms. Copeland traces both how their plays participated in the ‘‘redefinition of concepts of masculine and feminine behaviour’’ and 320 how that history of gender and sexual difference still influences their production and reception today. Ms. Copeland has chapters on The Rover (1677), with a focus on both Killigrew’s Thomaso, from which Behn took much of her material , and Behn’s own reworking of her plot in The Second Part of the Rover, as well as on The Rover’s place in the repertoire across the eighteenth century. Another chapter similarly examines Behn’s The Luckey Chance (1686) in relation to subsequent adaptations of its wifeselling plot in Haywood’s A Wife to be Lett (1723) and Hannah Cowley’s A School for Greybeards (1786). Studying the casting of each play, Ms. Copeland ably demonstrates how, despite the strength of her female characters, Behn’s plays were gradually adapted to conform to an emergent ideology of ‘‘female sexual passivity.’’ Subsequent chapters take on Centlivre ’s The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder (1714). Here, there is a particular emphasis both on the ways that Marplot in the former and Violante in the latter violate male and female gender norms and on how...