Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution by Teresa Feroli (review)

55 while characters must seem to be people like ourselves, having inner emotions and hidden motives. Ms. Murray is quite good in describing the final punishment of Aron and in ascribing his spectacular, fiery end to the technological advances made in staging during the Restoration. As she observes, Ravenscroft’s purpose is to appeal to the eye rather than the mind: ‘‘From the beginning . . . his purpose was illustrative, and it is clear from his bold use of all aspects of the stage’s visual potential that he knew what he was doing. From grand scenes for solemn ritual at the beginning, to the anarchic and destructive discoveries at the end, it is the eyes and visual imagination of the audience that are engaged as plots are steadily hatched or suddenly improvised .’’ Throughout her Introduction, Ms. Murray’s commentaries provide useful insight into stage and theater history and are much more interesting than her attempts to link current political events with the matter of the adaptations. One glaring error I feel obliged to correct. Ms. Murray says: ‘‘Nowadays we automatically think of Shakespeare as a writer for the stage, but in the earlier years of the seventeenth century he had clearly been prized as a poet—a writer of poems—rather more than as a playwright.’’ This is simply wrong. Shakespeare was always valued as a playwright. Murray offers the line ‘‘Warbl ’ing his wood-notes wild’’ as evidence that Shakespeare was valued as a writer of poems. The line refers to Milton ’s L’Allegro’s frequenting the theater where he might hear Shakespeare’s woodnotes wild. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher were considered to be the great triumvirate of the theater in the earlier seventeenth century just as they were the playwright ‘‘Giants before the Flood’’ in the Restoration. The word ‘‘poet’’ until the late eighteenth century referred to playwrights as well as writers of verse. My only reservation in recommending this important book is that I find it too short on literary critical thought and analysis, and I would have liked footnote commentary accompanying the texts. Rose A. Zimbardo University of San Francisco TERESA FEROLI. Political Speaking Justified : Women Prophets and the English Revolution. Newark: Delaware, 2006. Pp. 270. $49.50. A valuable feature of this book is its six-page checklist of women’s prophetic publications from 1625 to 1667; would that the text gave us reason to want to use it. Having uncovered these lively religious zealots active in the seventeenth century, Ms. Feroli finds nothing better to do than thrust them into a lineage of feminist discourse to which they do not belong, but to the prehistory of which they are indispensable. Her subjects are fascinating, but the treatment disappoints . Lady Eleanor Davies, widow of Sir John Davies (Orchestra), prolific if incoherent authoress, predicted Buckingham ’s assassination, ‘‘declared herself primate and metropolitan’’ in the Cathedral at Lichfield, and defaced its tapestries . A fervent admirer of James I, she was imprisoned twice in the 1630s under his son Charles I, first in ‘‘the Gatehouse’’ for prophetic writings published in Amsterdam, and then in Bedlam for the Lichfield episode. Under Cromwell, she spent time in the Fleet. 56 Sister to the notorious Earl of Castlehaven (hanged in 1631 for sodomy with servants whom he also assisted in raping his wife and twelve-year-old daughterin -law), she attacked Charles I in 1633 as an Ahab murdering her innocent brother Naboth for his vineyard. Her struggle over her first husband’s property with her daughter’s mother-in-law probably suggested the imagery. Although winning the case, Lady Eleanor lost the property for another decade when she was imprisoned. One would have liked to learn more of how this ‘‘feminist’’ defended her rapist brother, but instead, we are invited to regard him as a ‘‘visionary’’ hanged for showing patriarchy its true face, and Lady Eleanor as a ‘‘bricoleur.’’ With no rational account of Lady Eleanor, the reader can only acquiesce in the cleric’s anagram at her trial: ‘‘Dame Eleanor Davies, Never so mad a ladie,’’ wonder at her daughter ’s efforts to release her from prison, and gasp incredulously at her daughter’s admiring epitaph of 1652: ‘‘In...