Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 eds. by Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr (review)

Some scholarly topics present themselves as obvious only after someone else publishes on them. This is certainly the case with Stage Mothers. Recent scholarship has emphasized eighteenth-century actresses' celebrity and sexuality, but what about their status as public mothers? Besides royalty, no other group of women has had such attention paid to their pregnant bodies and to their relationships with their children. This collection of essays corrects this omission, exploring how women negotiated both theatrical and maternal cultures in eighteenth-century England as well as how selected dramatic texts depicted maternal relations. While the collection's three-part structure might overstratify elements that contribute to the theater's delivery of "motherhood"—actress, text, children—happily, most chapters complicate these categories via discussion of broader cultural and generic discourses. Those chapters that focus on actual actresses (mainly in the first and third sections) most successfully express these complex relations.

Several scholarly touchstones, especially concepts from Marilyn Francus's book, Monstrous Motherhood (Ms. Francus also contributes to this collection), appear throughout. For instance, Stage Mothers discusses the developing late eighteenth-century "cult of motherhood" that actresses' bodies complicate because of their publicness: they risk being "monstrous" mothers because they live alarmingly outside the private sphere. Ms. Francus's idea of the "spectral mother" describes how absent mothers "haunt" their children, to use Marvin Carlson's language, just as actresses are "ghosted" by their prior roles, performances, and offstage lives. Even the actress's virtuous maternal body is haunted by its necessary prior existence as a sexual one, as numerous contributors note. Actresses present "a different spectacle of motherhood, one in which the sexual and the maternal inhabit the same body." Many chapters discuss how actresses performed domestic ideals to preserve or rehabilitate off-stage roles.

Perhaps the most famous anecdote about actress-mothers is that of the pregnant Anne Oldfield creating the role of Marcia, Cato's virtuous and virginal daughter in Joseph Addison's play. J. D. Phillipson states that, surprisingly, she has not found any public commentary criticizing Oldfield's performance because of the clash between the virginal role and the actress's body. Whether this points to a general acceptance of how pregnancy was overlooked on stage, or whether it was a particular accomplishment of Oldfield herself seems indeterminable. Her rivalry with Ann Bracegirdle forced her into a comparison with the "famous virgin" that could easily have pushed her into the "whore" position, but she countered with on- and off-stage maternal roles. As a widow with a young son, Oldfield drew pathos from the title role in Ambrose Phillips's Distressed Mother, deflecting condemnation for her illicit relationship with the child's father. Similarly, Elaine M. McGirr's chapter argues that Susannah Cibber chose maternal roles that would help with her public image during her trials with her husband, Theophilus. Early in her marriage, Cibber played heroines doomed for their sexual faults, but later, to draw attention away from her continuing affair with William Sloper, she played roles that showcased tragic maternity. She also used maternal roles to enable career moves; her choice "effected her theatrical divorce from the Cibbers and established her professional partnership with Garrick"—a partnership that was especially fruitful.

Actresses had to work with the maternal images supplied by the dramatic texts. Laura Rosenthal's chapter reads the Earl of Orrery's Mustapha against the political backdrop of Charles II's struggles with legitimate succession as well as against English knowledge of the Ottoman Empire. Ms. Rosenthal argues that "The maternal connection is the crucial element added by Orrery," enabling criticism of absolutist fealty to a sovereign and providing a "point of understanding" between eastern and western cultures. However, the article is framed through the legend of the Earl of Rochester training Elizabeth Barry for the stage, a story that first saw print in 1741. Ms. Rosenthal states that the truth status of that anecdote...