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Reviewed by:
  • Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century by Fiona Ritchie
  • Tara Ghoshal Wallace (bio)
Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. By Fiona Ritchie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Illus. Pp. x + 236. $103.00 cloth.

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century makes a straightforward claim: to show how crucially women engaged in the construction and cultural deployment of Shakespeare and “to demonstrate how women were in fact deeply involved in literary, theatrical and cultural projects that have previously been considered as undertaken primarily or solely by men” (25). Fiona Ritchie mines a commendable range of material, including diaries and letters (standard sources such as Samuel Pepys’s and obscure ones such as Frances Hanbury Williams’s), actresses’ careers, published criticism, and data culled from the still indispensable London Stage. This is indeed a worthy purpose, and Ritchie provides ample evidence to support her thesis. But there is a curiously belated quality to the project. One wonders who, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, overlooks or minimizes the work of women in any field of eighteenth-century culture; indeed, reading this book sent me back to twentieth-century groundbreaking books not cited in Ritchie’s extensive bibliography, such as Paula Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (1993) and Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (1992). Ritchie’s contribution consists of focusing on how women deployed Shakespeare in their conscious intervention in cultural constructs.

Ritchie’s introduction nicely sets up the book’s parameters by considering some Restoration precursors to the material she covers in subsequent chapters. Looking forward to the actresses she discusses in chapters 1 and 4, Ritchie describes the impact of the first female bodies onstage, paying particular attention to the breeches roles popular throughout the long eighteenth century and arguing that “although theatrical conventions like cross-dressing could objectify the female performer, more importantly, by putting herself on stage and in the public eye the actress was also able to challenge gender expectations” and accrue cultural authority (12). Similarly, she points to Margaret Cavendish as an important early critic, whose writings “celebrate[] the dramatist’s particular appeal to women readers and spectators and counter[] the negative associations between theatre and women” (14)—an argument taken up in chapters 2 and 3. As a prologue to chapter 5’s discussion [End Page 388] of women’s influence on the Shakespearean repertory, she points to the playgoing habits of Elizabeth Pepys, speculating that Pepys’s record of his wife’s opinions “demonstrate that she exercised independent critical judgement about what she saw in the theatre” (22).

The two chapters on actresses take up their role in canonizing Shakespeare onstage. Chapter 1 argues that the careers of Hannah Pritchard, Catherine Clive, and Susannah Cibber demonstrate their contribution to Shakespeare’s popularity during the Age of Garrick, evident in performance records as well as contemporary commentary in print and on canvas. Like Garrick, these actresses exploited their success and the growing cult of celebrity to establish their social and economic status, buying country houses and mingling with gentry. But given the enormous range of their theatrical careers, a related claim that their wealth and social acceptance accrued from specifically Shakespearean roles seems less clear. The chapter on Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan effectively modifies two dichotomies: the notion that they represented opposite poles of tragedy and comedy, and the perception that Siddons rather than Jordan was the age’s Shakespearean actress. Ritchie notes the large number of Jordan’s appearances in Shakespeare plays (144 performances) and concludes that her book’s “re-evaluation … makes the case for Jordan as an important Shakespearean performer, building on the careers of earlier cross-dressing actresses” (135). But this reevaluation occludes the sexual anxieties and reassurances invoked in Straub’s study. While the chapter cites contemporary critics’ appreciation of Jordan’s adaptation of male attire (as opposed to Siddons’s disorderly hybridity), it offers no commentary on the aggressively feminine body depicted in the accompanying illustration of Jordan as Rosalind. The discussion of Siddons and Jordan as theorists of the drama expands on Backscheider’s...

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