The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900 by Peter Thomson (review)

52 century fiction from Behn to Burney, Ms. Thompson sees the feminine practice of compliance as a complex negotiation of emergent ideas of gender and selfhood in the eighteenth century. Ingenuous Subjection focuses on the feminist dimensions of the intersection of eighteenth-century political theory and the emergence of the novel as a dominant genre. This territory has not been explored significantly since Carol Kay and Carole Pateman addressed it in the late 1980s. Since then, feminist work on the rise of the novel has been more concerned with the materialist (even sociological) approaches suggested by Marxist or Foucauldian theory. In returning to the relationship between early modern political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume and representations of women and marriage in the novel, Ms. Thompson brings the work of more recent thinkers, such as Judith Butler, to bear on the thorny problem of women’s subjection, advancing the conclusions of Kay and Pateman. If most political theory imagines an unsexed form of political virtue that contractually grants power to a sovereign , how can we account for the double subjection of wives, who must also acknowledge the frequently undeserved yet total power of their husbands— power based on nothing but sexual difference ? Is wifely subjection evidence of brutal patriarchal force or of contractual compliance? In contrast to a brand of feminist criticism that has long focused on acts of resistance, this book reads feminine compliance as a politically invested (indeed, overdetermined) act. Ms. Thompson guides us through the difficult terrain of the gray areas of agency—the space between freely chosen actions and unmistakable coercion —and opens up new directions for feminist scholarship. The eighteenth-century novel reveals that narratives of force (stories of what Ms. Thompson, following Pateman, calls male ‘‘sex-right’’) cannot be assimilated to the modernizing stories of contract the novel often purports to tell; the novel thus suggests the arbitrariness of husbands’ power. The book amasses evidence for this claim from careful readings of political theory, eighteenthcentury conduct books, and fiction by, among others, Behn, Haywood, and Defoe . Explaining why ‘‘Pamela fails entirely to blot the words ‘Command and Obey’ from the domestic novel,’’ Ms. Thompson shows that the issue Astell raised at the beginning of the eighteenth century—the disturbing similarity between a wife and a servant—can only be managed, and shakily managed at that, by the ‘‘ingenuous subjection’’— the willing act of compliance—of wives to undeserving husbands. Charlotte Sussman Duke University PETER THOMSON. The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006. Pp xiv ⫹ 310. $80; $25.99 (paper). This review discusses the theater up to 1737, which comprises the first two parts of this informative guide, and is part of the Cambridge Introductions to Literature series. Overall, Mr. Thomson ’s Introduction to English theater is informative, comprehensive, and accessible to students and experts. Each part of the volume contains three subsections: the material circumstance , the drama, and the actors and acting. The material circumstance subsection grounds the theater historically , contexualizing the political and so- 53 cial system in which the theater grew. In Part One, ‘‘The Theatre Restored: 1660–1700,’’ Mr. Thomson discusses the influence Charles II had over the reopened theaters and the backgrounds of Killigrew and Davenant, the first managers in this new era. Part Two, ‘‘The Theatre Reformed: 1700–1737,’’ is an excellent synthesis of the complicated theatrical history, particularly regarding Christopher and John Rich, the father/ son patent holders. Examining the influence of Addison and Steele, Mr. Thomson in this first subsection in Part Two judiciously explores the debate over sentimental comedy in the period. The drama subsection in Part One introduces the reader to the standard plot lines and character types in Restoration comedy as well as covering the frequently ignored (yet important) genre of Restoration tragedy. In Part Two, Mr. Thomson illustrates the historical progression of all of the genres and subgenres of drama and points to important derivations from formally popular literary styles and tropes such as Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). In actors and acting, Mr. Thomson highlights the impact actresses had on English theater, not only on the text itself...